Late Night Horror: "The Corpse Can't Play"

Imagine a show so terrifying that it was pulled from circulation after only SIX episodes. Apparently, those episodes were destroyed, giving rise to urban folklore about it being a "haunted" or cursed show—so terrifying that it had to be suppressed. Or erased, rather. Ah, but one episode DOES survive, like a kiss from a ghost in the night.

The BBC's lost television programs, many of which were genre-related works from the Sixties and earlier (horror, sci-fi, occult), were often excellent shows. In the case of such works as Late Night Horror, they were exceptionally good. This short film is seemingly all that remains of the lost program (the rest of the episodes having been curiously destroyed, as previously stated, because they were cursed, and to watch them invited madness and, finally, possession by strange interdimensional forces from the Lower Fourth). It is also very good—up to a point. It starts with an annoying level of noise but then picks up steam, ending with a nice denouement at the conclusion of its slim 25-minute runtime.

The film begins with a children’s birthday party in a nice, polite suburban English house, presided over by two typical hausfrauen, Alice and Joanna (Claire Austin, Christine Pollon). They are blithely uninterested in what the children are doing during play, but the insufferable little monsters create a roaring din that is enough at first to make the viewer want to switch channels. The central brat is the bespectacled birthday boy, Ronnie (Frank Barry), an obnoxious little monster with a strong streak of playground sadism.

Soon, another young chap, Simon (Michael Newport), arrives—a curious boy wearing heavy 1960s thick spectacles and sporting the requisite buzzcut. For all that, he seems weird, distant, and obviously disturbed. The other children don’t take to him, and when they begin to play a game about “What Daddy Does” (not the exact name, but you get the idea), the obnoxious birthday boy lies down on the floor with his arms crossed over his chest and pretends to be dead. This is particularly cruel, as the strange new boy’s father has passed away.

This prank is, of course, heartless, but no less cruel is the climax and resolution of this macabre little drama. Soon, the birthday brat’s father Tom (Neil Hallett) comes home, carrying some new gardening tools. One of them is a delightful hatchet.

The children then decide to play a game called “Murder” (pleasant kids), in which “one kid is the detective, and one is the killer.” You get the idea. The strange, quiet, bespectacled boy, seemingly recovering from a traumatic experience, goes upstairs (a transition perhaps symbolic) and hides in a disused, hidden closet. Lurking in the dark, he becomes the representative of that primal rage that will eventually lash out, its coiled, seething anger finally sated.

However, lest you think this is simply the study of a suspenseful situation that turns horribly, killingly bloody, you’re wrong. The story has a supernatural twist—a whisper from another world—that will leave the viewer shuddering by the end.

The series opener features a nice black-and-white montage of arcane and cryptic images. Most prominently, a shaking mannequin head on a spindle looms in the darkness, its masked face a leering grimace of frightened pain. The face is ripped away to reveal what lies beneath: a grinning skull. A close-up of a fly transitions to a pullback shot, revealing a hand. The mannequin head appears again, floating against the black in many miniatures, as if envisioned by the segmented gaze of the fly. The eerie synthesizer score, de rigueur for a television program of this nature, underscores the visual imagery quite well.

On the whole, this is a memorable piece of lost television history—grim and ironic, like an EC comic book story from an even earlier era. The beginning may rankle the nerves (who wouldn’t be annoyed by so many rampaging brats creating chaos in an otherwise polite, pleasant 1968 British household?), but the ending is worth it. This relic can safely and reasonably be termed a good game—whether the corpse can come out and play or not.

Halloween Night Special 'Late Night Horror' The Corpse Can't Play (1968)

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My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1.

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