THRILLER Thursday: THE HOLLOW WATCHER

The spider web fills the screen, it's Boris Karloff's THRILLER!

Season: 2, Episode: 20.
Airdate: February 12, 1962


Director: William F. Claxton (NIGHT OF THE LEPUS).
Writer: Jay Simms (THE GIANT GILA MONSTER).
Cast: Warren Oates, Audrey Dalton, Sean McClory, Denver Pyle, Walter Burke, Sandy Kenyon.
Music: Sidney Fine & William Lava.
Cinematography: Benjamin H. Kline.
Producer: William Frye.

Boris Karloff’s Introduction: “I wonder how many of you have had the urge to eliminate one of your tormentors. Oh, come now, chances are it has occurred to you at least once. But after a moment’s thought, you decided against becoming a murderer. Of course, I wouldn’t presume to ask if you made the right decision. But I would, however, be in your reason for refraining. Respect for human life? Fear of the law? Or terror of the unknown. The wrath of a demon such as the Hollow Watcher? For the sightless eyes of a Hollow watcher see more than you might imagine. Even now they can perceive the leading players in tonight’s story. They are: Audrey Dalton, Sean McClory, and Warren Oates. (Laughs) Well, I certainly don’t need the Hollow Watcher to tell me that you’re skeptical. But as sure as my name is Boris Karloff, the people who live in Black Hollow believe in him. The beliefs of simple country folk can create forces that will certainly surprise you. Perhaps even frighten you.... to death.”

Synopsis: The Black Hollow General Store in rural North Carolina at night... as a woman’s screams come from inside, when an older man, Ortho Wheeler (Denver Pyle), tears the blouse off of a woman, Meg O’Danagh Wheeler (Audrey Dalton), and her new husband Hugo Wheeler (Warren Oates) gives her a blanket to cover up. She tells Ortho if he lays his hands on her again she will bite his fingers off. Hugo steps up to protect his wife from her new father in law, and gets socked in the jaw by the old man. She is an Irish mail order bride, married to Hugo against his father’s wishes. Ortho is a bully who basically owns the town of Black Hollow.

The two men go to the barn to duke it out, and new wife Meg tags along to watch. When Ortho begins beating his son Hugo to a pulp, she grabs a log and clobbers him...

When Hugo wakes up, she tells him that his father left in disgrace... and now the store and is his. Hugo is worried that the Hollow Watcher will now come to punish him in the night for whipping his daddy. The Hollow Watcher is a local legend - a scarecrow that gets revenge against those that deserve it. It comes in the night, and... As they walk back to their rooms above the store, Meg looks at the old scarecrow on the hill... it’s creepy looking!

One Month Later: The gang at the general store gossip a bunch of exposition... Town character Croxton (Walter Burke) says: “The Hollow Watcher always leaves a corpse... or part of it” and Mason, the clerk behind the counter (Sandy Kenyon from AIRPLANE!) says the new Mrs. Wheeler got a letter, and everyone is curious - people don’t get letters around here... that requires the ability to read. Can they see what it says through the envelope? That’s when a wagon rolls up and Sean O’Danagh (Sean McClory) gets off with his trunk and comes into the store.

Sean is dressed in a suit amongst rural farmers, and has a thick Irish accent and is charming and chatty... and a burly manly man. He asks for Mrs. Wheeler, and Mason behind the counter says that she and her husband are not in. Sean asks if he might have a drink while waiting, and is served the local moonshine... which he practically spits out. It’s terrible! And he paid 25 cents for 2 and a half glasses of it! A muscular farmer playing checkers (Lane Bradford) says he made the moonshine and doesn’t take to strangers saying it’s terrible - and challenges him to a fight outside. We get a poorly staged fight - no cutting, all a master shot - and the muscular farmer almost wins... but Sean has boxing skills and wins the fight.

We get a little more exposition about the Hollow Watcher, and just when Sean is ordering Mason to open the door to the upstairs apartment, Hugo and Meg pull up in their wagon. Hugo watches his wife affectionately embrace her brother - too affectionately? - and then offers to let Sean sleep in the barn. Meg says that’s not hospitable - why not let him stay upstairs with them? Hugo hints that the marriage has not been consummated, and Sean is just going to get in the way of that. Sean says that he’ll earn his keep - not a problem! But when Mason mentions that one of Hugo’s rental plows needs to be retrieved, Hugo gives that job to Sean... who says he’s tired from his travels and still sad that his wife passed away and a bunch of other excuses... so Hugo leaves to retrieve the plow...

And Meg and brother Sean go upstairs and have wild sex - but we only see them afterwards lounging on a sofa. It seems that Sean and Meg are married - and both are conmen who marry wealthy people, kill them, and inherit. Supposedly Hugo’s father has $5,000 stashed somewhere and as soon as Sean and Meg find the money, Hugo will have some sort of farming accident or something and die. This is why Meg and Hugo haven’t consummated their marriage - she is faithful to her real husband Sean... who killed his last wife Bernice, who didn’t have as much money as she claimed. Meg admits to murdering Hugo’s father Otto and stuffing his corpse in the scarecrow at the top of the hill so that no one could find it.

Meg looks out the window - the scarecrow is looking at them from right outside the window! Sean grabs the shotgun, believing that it’s Hugo dressed as the scarecrow spying on them.

The scarecrow is no longer on the top of the hill. What? Sean looks at the ground and sees *footprints* leading down the hill to the window - it has to be Hugo! Sean looks around... and the scarecrow attacks! The Hollow Watcher! Sean shoots the Hollow Watcher in the arm - and the Hollow Watcher escapes... leaving behind a scarecrow arm... with a bone and the rotting flesh of Otto inside. WTF? Sean believes that he has shot Hugo, and the Hugo will return with a wounded arm...

Meg has no idea where the $5k might be hidden, so Sean begins his search - beginning with the barn. He pulls up floorboards... and Mason discovers him, and when Sean comes up with a bogus reason for tearing up the floor, Mason shoots it down... he begins to suspect that Sean is up to something.

When Hugo returns with the plow, Sean claps his hand onto Hugo’s arm... but there is no wound there. Hugo is fine. Sean looks up to the top of the hill, where the scarecrow looks down at them... missing an arm.

Sean doesn’t understand how Hugo wasn’t wounded - was the shotgun filled with blanks (????). Meg tells Sean they don’t need the $5k bad enough to deal with that animated scarecrow, they should just leave...

That’s when Otto returns from putting away the plow... and begins arguing with Meg. He would kind of like to consummate the marriage, but Meg says the customs in their country is for the husband and wife to live as brother and sister for 6 months. Otto says they aren’t living in her country, and tonight they are going to become man and wife.

Meg whispers to Sean that they have to kill him tonight.

We get a pile more exposition about the letter than Sean wrote and whether Mason read it and told Hugo about it, and even more exposition about the Hollow Watcher and whether it was just some legend that Hugo’s father made up to keep the town’s people in line, and now Otto is using it to spook Meg and Sean. But tonight, it will all be over...

That Night: Sean is setting a trap for Hugo. Hugo hears a noise in the barn, grabs his shotgun and goes to investigate and...

When Sean sneaks into the barn, Hugo is unconscious on the floor with his shotgun by his side. What? If Hugo isn’t the Hollow Watcher, who is?

That’s when the Hollow Watcher attacks Sean. He stabs it again and again - and nothing happens. The Hollow Watcher isn’t even hurt! The Hollow Watcher tears Sean to pieces!

In The Apartment: Meg waits for Sean to return after killing Hugo... and sees the Hollow Watcher staring at her though the window! The Hollow Watcher crashes through the window. Meg backs up against the wall, “I know it’s you, Hugo.” She grabs a burning log from the fireplace and slams it into the Hollow Watcher - he doesn’t slow down. But he does catch on fire! Talk about your slow burns - she stands there and watches as the Hollow Watcher burns down to a skull and bones. She laughs in hysterics as the skull keeps coming towards her....

Review: Warren Oates was a national treasure that I don’t think we fully appreciated while he was alive. I was always a big fan, because he was the stand out in a bunch of movies like THE WILD BUNCH in a small role, and he frequently stole the show in films like STRIPES as the tough drill sergeant. I think this is his second appearance on THRILLER (KNOCK THREE ONE TWO) and in both he plays a character of limited intelligence trying to navigate a complicated world... and is great at showing a character trying to figure things out. We can see him thinking. What’s strange about both episodes is that he isn’t the star of either, though he would become a star later in films like BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA. For a large chunk of this episode he is offscreen retrieving that tractor...

This is one of the episodes that “remembers well” - the idea of that scarecrow that comes alive and seeks vengeance, like the crawling severed hands in TERROR IN TEAKWOOD, is something that I remember from first seeing these as a kid. But the episode itself isn’t as scary as I remembered it, mostly due to pedestrian direction. That’s a problem that plagues some of these episodes while others have amazing inventive direction... but this is a good example of how it can harm the story. Director Claxton seems to film everything in a master shot with very few close ups - so it’s all kind of bland. The fist fight is boring. In the scene where Sean is first investigating the scarecrow he looks down and sees footprints moving towards the house... but we never get to see those footprints. So they don’t deliver the scares that they should. Since the scarecrow isn’t actually shown moving until the end, those footprints were the “special effects” that tide us over until then... but it’s all done in a master shot.

There’s a scene before this where the wife says she saw the scarecrow peeking through the window... but there is no shot of that. Again, she is in a master that doesn’t include an angle on the window, so it becomes exposition instead of a scare moment.

The episode seems to have reversals and twists in the story that never make it to the screen, and I don’t know how much of that is Claxton and how much is network censors in some instances. The Brother and Sister being Husband and Wife thing is done in the blandest way possible, when that could have been an amazing twist on screen. Instead of showing them in an intimate situation and kissing, which would have been a major shock moment, and then revealed that they were husband and wife; we get them on the sofa in a situation that could easily be brother and sister... and then revealed as husband and wife. Due to the bland direction in other scenes I don’t know whether this is Claxton’s choice or a censorship issue about even hinting at brother and sister incest... but what could have been a twist ends up just a pile of exposition. There's plenty of talk about the marriage not being consumated, and Oates wanting to get to that, which didn't seem to bother the censors... but that's not quite the same as hinting at incest, even if it would not be true.

One of the things that these episodes point out is the how different directors given the same amount of time and probably the same budgets can either do amazing things or make a bland and pedestrian hour of television. Some seem to see this as a job, and others as an opportunity to strut their stuff. This episode could have been so much more frightening with a different visual approach to the story. By the time we get to that scarecrow zooming across the room to attack at the end, it shows what the earlier scenes might have been... but that’s charging scarecrow is still a frightening image that has been imprinted on my memory since I saw this as a kid.

Next up, a dark comedy episode with Edward Andrews...

- Bill