INSIDE THE DARK & STORMY NIGHTS OF JOE STEFANO

By David J. Schow

People must have said “it’s a dark and stormy night” about a double-dozen times during the course of the evening, thanks to the Friday deluge of LA rain I feared would keep people away from the state-of-the-art Billy Wilder Theater, ‘round the back of the world-famous Hammer Museum in Westwood.  No worries.  We filled the 295-seat house nearly to capacity.

The haus begins to fill up…

Historically, this qualifies as the United States “premiere” of The Haunted for an audience (because another 16mm print has screened at film festivals in Japan since 2005), and very probably a world premiere for The Unknown, as well.

It’s official!  We have a podium!  With Kerry.

(To clarify, The Haunted print was the Archive’s own 16mm copy — a bit splicey at first, with some occasional soundtrack buzz, but nothing that was a dealbreaker.  Rumors have swarmed about a 35mm-fine-grain print, but … nothing has surfaced yet.  Inquiry continues.)

The inimitable Gary Gerani.

Where The Haunted offered rarity, The Unknown offered unexpected quality — the 35mm Archive print of this little-seen pilot version of “The Forms of Things Unknown” was nothing short of luminous in its beauty and clarity, which extended to the soundtrack as well — I wish Larry Rapchak could have seen it (or heard it, rather), because this night I could perceive aspects and subtleties of the score that I had literally never heard before.

DJS with Marc Scott Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion.

The “Forms” music, of course, was also ported into most of The Haunted, but for those hunting Dominic Frontiere rarities, about a quarter of his “original” score remains, including a never-before heard flute-heavy title theme (overall, this was the score that Stefano vetoed in favor of re-using The Unknown’s music).

Evil Wilhelm is in da haus.

Some of the Unknown score was also recycled by Dominic Frontiere into the music for another haunted-house opus, the memorably creepy A Name for Evil (aka The Grove, Penthouse Films, 1973, starring Outer Limits stalwart Robert Culp … naked!), and the music for both is found on a LaLa Land disc released in 2006 — but that’s a re-orchestration performed by the Graunke Symphony Orchestra of Munich, and the instrumentation sounds “off” to my ear.

DJS with Tracy & Robin Torme, and Marilyn.

I suspect we may now anticipate a few critical reactions to The Haunted, now, after 46 years.  It’s probably not “the scariest movie ever made,” to quote the dominant hyperbole, but it is beautifully claustrophobic, jittery and laden with the fear of uncertainty.  “The scream” — that “scream” of the ghost noted by many past viewers as unforgettably creepy, is a three-way combo of a looped scream, the “vacuum cleaner noise” used for “The Galaxy Being,” and the eee-ooo-eee-ooo sound that spotlights most of Aabel’s appearances in “The Children of Spider County.”

Michael Schlesinger, producer of many fine Larry Blamire entertainments.

But as one viewer expressed to me after the screening:  “It WAS too scary for TV!  If I had seen that as a kid, it would have scared the shit out of me, and filled me with night terrors for years!”

The Haunted was the only motion picture that Joe Stefano ever directed.

Both The Haunted and The Unknown are steeped in the classicist mode of Stefano’s most memorable Outer Limits episodes — remote, forsaken locations; an almost absolute absence of daylight; small, tightly-controlled casts with a fine coat of near-Shakespearian polish over all the dialogue.

Black Leather Required:  Marilyn Stefano & DJS.

The Haunted also marks a persistent duality between Joe Stefano and Leslie Stevens.  There are two variants of the Outer Limits pilot — Please Stand By and “The Galaxy Being;” likewise two versions of the first season’s closing show — The Unknown and “The Forms of Things Unknown.”  For the ghost effect in The Haunted, Stefano used the negative-reversal process used for ole Spotty himself (the Galaxy Being).  This makes The Haunted an even stronger “companion pilot” to Please Stand By — showing both men operating in their maximum comfort zones.  Like Daystar’s last feature film, Incubus, The Haunted — done within the year after Stefano parted company with The Outer Limits — was doomed to become “lost” by history.  Well, we found Incubus, and now we’ve found The Haunted!

DJS with Dominic and Britt Stefano.

And I only stumbled upon it because I was looking for yet another “lost” Stevens film — Private Property (1960).  Susan Compo (author of the Warren Oates biography A Wild Life) had told me the film was in the UCLA Archive, and when I inquired about viewing it, Archive director Mark Quigley — a fan of The Outer Limits Companion, as it turns out — slyly sent back a note that read, “oh, we have something ELSE here you may be interested in …”

I was off to UCLA faster than birdshot.  The Haunted had only been in the collection since 2007.  (In fact, I watched it before I watched Private Property, so eager was I.)

The haus fills up even more ...that's Oscar-winning film editor Bob Murawski standing lower left ... and, LOOK!  A stealth shot of curator of the screening, Mark Quigley!  (Seated, lower right.)

Mark Quigley and Paul Malcolm, who organized this event on behalf of the UCLA Film & TV Archives, had stressed to me that attendance was key in convincing UCLA to do similar events.  As with many libraries and archives, the “stars” of the collection are frequently feature films, not unsold TV pilots … aha, but we had the Conrad Hall card left to play!

There to keep me honest was this blog’s very own Gary Gerani (of Fantastic Television), Marc Scott Zicree (of The Twilight Zone Companion), and Evil Wilhelm (well, because … he’s evil!).  Joe Stefano protégés Tracy Torme and Charles Sosa were there, in addition to friends and allies like Michael Sloane, Bob Murawski, Mike Schlesinger, and Perry Shields. Jim Barwise, frequently seen on this blog, showed up doggedly drenched, determined not to miss the screening.

The face of the man behind the name “Jim Barwise” on the blog!

Since Marilyn Stefano is my illegitimate mom, that makes Dominic Stefano my illegitimate brother, another longtime friend who got dragged around the Outer Limits set for “Nightmare” when he was five years old.  Dom’s charming wife Britt, and Tracy’s equally charming wife Robin were also there to pick up where we all last left off.

DJS & Marilyn on a really big stage.

Marilyn and I took the stage for a brief Q&A I’m positive was twice as long as the show hosts had intended, but — miracle of miracles! — everybody stayed in place for the second feature.  (Usually at similar film-retrospective deals, the audience starts walking out after the “star feature” while some of its players are still headed for the stage to talk; another groundless fear, in this case.)  This, despite the fact that Martin Landau couldn’t make it (he never got back to us), and Barbara Rush would have come, had it not been the same night as her beloved sister’s birthday to-do.  There were no representative “stars” in attendance, except of course for Marilyn, who had been right there as every inch of these dramas was being dreamed, written, then made.  (She has always been a fount of surprising intel for the Outer Limits devotee.)

Between shows.  Nobody walked out!

I hope this is just a prelude toward getting some form of The Haunted out into the world for general viewership.

And now Mark and Paul are talking about a Leslie Stevens night …

The throng decamps…