THRILLER
60 Minutes / black & white
First Telecast: Sept 13, 1960
Last Telecast of a First-run Episode: Apr 30, 1962
Last Telecast of Original Network Run: Jul 9, 1962
67 Episodes
Host: Boris Karloff
Executive Producer: Hubbell Robinson
Producers: Fletcher Markle; William Frye and Maxwell Shane
Music: Jerry Goldsmith, Pete Rugolo, and Morton Stevens
Thriller (aka Boris
Karloff's Thriller) is an hour-long TV horror
anthology series that originally aired on NBC from 1960 to 1962. At the
beginning of each Thriller hour, Hollywood's original master of the
macabre, Boris Karloff, sets the tone and primes
viewers for frightful and chilling dramas based on the works of some of the
greatest writers in the horror genre—writers like Robert E. Howard, Cornell Woolrich,
Richard Matheson, and Robert Bloch, to name just
a few. Each episode—many of which feature guest stars such as William
Shatner, Elizabeth Montgomery, Leslie Nielsen, John Carradine, Tom Poston, Edward Andrews, and Boris Karloff
himself—is shot in eerie black and white and offers
at least one story, with a few episodes dividing the hour between two or three
shorter plays. During the years since its original run, the series has
garnered a huge base of fans from all over the world, some of whom are
themselves big names in the horror subculture. Indeed, in his non-fiction book
on the horror genre, Danse Macabre, even horror-meister Stephen King calls Thriller "the best
horror series ever put on TV."
Like most anthology programs, of course, Thriller has its share of clunker episodes, and some horror fans, including a few high-profile ones, are also put off by the handful of episodes that are crime-based "thrillers" rather than stories of the ghastly or the macabre. Film historian and frequent Fangoria contributor Tom Weaver, for example, has a reputation as a "Thriller killer" because he openly reviles the series as a whole, often pointing to the crime-based episodes as the reason he regards Thriller as "bottom-notch" television. However, detractors like Weaver conveniently ignore the fact that the best episodes of Thriller are often cited by both horror fans and entertainment pundits as some of the most memorably terrifying hours of broadcast television. And in spite of the occasional naysayer, Thriller has stood the test of time and can still give an audience chills, thrills, and goose bumps aplenty.