Late Night Horror was a BBC TV series that had a short run on British TV in 1968. There were only six episodes produced, each of them 25 minutes long. All but one of them has been lost. The series was cancelled after viewers complained about it.
I knew nothing about Late Night Horror until yesterday afternoon, when YouTube presented me with the option of watching the surviving episode. Instead of watching it straight away, I did some research and found several articles that state the series was cancelled because British audiences found it too terrifying. Some of them even claim the producers and technicians found Late Night Horror too scary. One article mentions a cameraman’s legs buckling during filming and mentions an incident with Sean Connery, whose wife, Diane Cilento had a role in the Late Night Horror episode “The Kiss of Blood”.
Based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Kiss of Blood” was the sixth and final episode in the series. The article alleges Connery visited the set to watch his wife at work and found it hard to stomach the things he saw.
The first episode was aired on 11 April 1968. The sixth episode aired 16 May 1968. The series was only repeated once, in 1970, then, due to the shows bad reputation, the BBC decided to destroy the tapes, with some of them being erased and reused, while others were simply destroyed or thrown away.
A black and white copy of the third episode, “The Corpse Can’t Play”, avoided destruction and resurfaced in 2016. It was discovered by Kaleidoscope, a non-profit organization, that has since recolorizedd the footage.
Could this 60s horror show have really been that bad? The things I read made me curious, so I headed back to YouTube to watch “The Corpse Can’t Play”. The version I watched was in black and white, but the quality was pretty good. However, it didn’t live up to the hype. I can only presume the other five episodes were more scary.
“The Corpse Can’t Play” is set in a typical 60s house during a birthday party. The children are rowdy and not altogether likeable, but the show comes across more like an afternoon drama than a horror story. Things become more interesting when a young boy called Simon Potter gatecrashes the part bearing an expensive gift that fails to win over, birthday boy, Ronnie or any of his other classmates. It’s clear from the moment Simon arrives, none of the other children like him, and they go out of their way to make him feel uncomfortable. However, Simon gets his revenge in the end, and I suppose the final scenes may have been pretty shocking back when the series was originally aired, but I still find it hard to see what all the fuss was about.