Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  Wait Until Dark (1967)   This is a remarkably good film considering how remarkably club-footed the story is. It’s a Woman in Peril/Home Invasion Thriller with a seemingly straight-forward conceit: Sam Hendrix has accidentally come into the possession of something that he has no idea what the real value is. He’s Stalked by Villains, Mike Talman, Carlino and Harry Roat, who want it, but when Sam leaves it in his apartment, he mostly exits the plot. Instead, it is his wife Susy, who is blind, that must face the Villains. She should be easy pickings, but as the Villains close in, she is perceptive enough to realize she’s in danger, and proves to be far more resourceful than the Villains could’ve predicted.   This would’ve been a fine 25-minute episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (TV series first aired 1955) but instead was bloated to more than three times that length as a Broadway play (1966) penned by Frederick Knott . Knott also wrote “Dial M for Murder” (first...

  Village of the Damned (1960)   This is a remarkably understated film given that its Themes are Blasphemy, Perversion, Sexual Subjugation to an uncaring Secret Master, and Mass Child Murder. From beginning to end, it’s creepy, but, very deftly, it barely disturbs its own deceptively placid surface.   Novelist John Wyndham, who wrote in multiple genres and under multiple names (each a variant of his given name John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris) was one of the twentieth century’s greatest SF Authors, but didn’t really much like that Genre, or at least the Genre he saw as expressed in the hands of others. He chose to call his work “Logical Fantasy.” His greatest success was the 1951 novel “Day of the Triffids” a slim volume but still a hugely ambitious work that repeatedly overwhelmed Film-makers. The 1963 feature film, a mere 93 minutes long, was entertaining but both unfaithful and shallow. Later TV adaptations, 1981 & 2009, were also troubled, but at le...

  Trilogy of Terror (1975)   This is considered by many the scariest TV movie in history, and it has earned that reputation, but it’s also far-from perfect.   It was Produced and Directed by Dan Curtis, most famous as the Creator of the Gothic Soap Opera “Dark Shadows” (first aired 1966). It’s an Anthology film based on short stories by the Legendary Richard Matherson, famous for novels like “I Am Legend” (1954), screenplays for TV’s “Twilight Zone” (first aired 1959), and “Star Trek” (first aired 1966) and most of Director Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe (first film 1960). Curtis and Matherson had previously collaborated on the enormously successful TV movie “The Night Stalker” (1972). Oddly, Matherson only wrote the script for one of the three segments, and that’s that one that everyone remembers. The other two scripts were penned by William F. Nolan, a Novelist and Screenwriter of no small reputation, but certainly not in Matheson’s league. ...

  The Tomb of Ligeia (1965)   “‘The Tomb of Ligeia’  was vaguely based on an idea that Roger [Corman] and I had once. I had said I had always wanted to do a picture in a ruin, but actually using the ruin as an actual place, with real furniture in it and the ruin around it, which I thought would be very effective. This is sort of what he adapted to ‘ The Tomb of Ligeia ,’ which I think was the best one we ever did."  -- Actor Vincent Price   This was the last of the Roger Corman Directed Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, though not the last of the series from the Production Company AIP. Like most of Corman/Poe films, it was based on a story too short to flesh-out to feature-length with much fidelity to the source (originally published as “Ligeia” (1838)), but I gotta say, this one held onto more of the original story than some of the others and the most important difference outside the additional subplots and the Hero’s second marriage wasn’t loveless, ju...

  The Thing from Another World (1951)   In 1938, when John W. Campbell became editor of “Astounding Science Fiction” magazine, he’d been already been developing ideas in his head for some time about what he thought the future of SF should be. Even before taking the job, he’d penned two stories that shared the theme of a threat from shape-shifting Aliens. Legend has it that he did so to demonstrate the writing style that was most representational of SF at the time, and what he wanted from his Writers in the Future.   These stories appeared three years apart in two different magazines. One, the jokey, Pulp-style, story was, "Brain Stealers of Mars" (1936, in “Thrilling Wonder Stories”) is now forgotten. The other, hard-edged, almost-journalistic in both its verisimilitude and economy of prose, was “Who Goes There?” (1938, in “Astounding” as he was about to take the reins) has become one of the most important stories in the history of the Genre, and the perfect exam...