Thriller

I remember seeing Thriller back in the mid-1970's when I was about ten. I found it the most terrifying TV series I have seen before or since! It had a memorable creepy theme tune accompanied by fish-eye lens shots of the locations used in that week's story, with a blood red surround. You never knew what to expect from an episode, some being supernatural, others being real world whodunits or Hitchcock style dramas. Some of the mysteries are very intriguing, and the direction is always good. Thriller can be criticised as being of its time in some negative ways, such as being slow moving, having a lot of stock characters, being predictable, and having plot holes. Also, the great clunking fist of Lord Grade appears frequently in the form of many characters being irrelevantly American to please ABC, who reportedly paid $100,000 per episode! But when you look at almost any good TV series many years later you see these sort of faults, and Thriller is inventive, frightening and enjoyable enough to brush its bad points aside. A few years after its first showing, the series was broken up into stand alone TV films with rubbish music/credits replacing the classic theme with the fish-eye lens shots. This made the episodes easier to repeat, as they were no longer officially a series, but it meant subsequent generations of viewers have been less aware of this fine series, and it would have been forgotten were it not for online fan-sites creating demand for the superb 16 disc boxed DVD set of all 43 episodes.

Thriller was a ground breaking TV series broadcast from 1973-1976 in the Uk on Saturday nights where it kept a regular spot through out it's run. I say ground breaking because this series was produced entirely for TV and was just perfect for the early 70's. By 1973 color TV's were were available to rent, so consequently many households had access to a color telly. Although black and white can often help with the atmosphere in a film, by contrast the color in this series at the time gave thriller a more modern and realistic feel which I think added to it's chilling effect. I know that it sounds ridiculous today with 43" widescreen plasma screens and hundreds of channels to choose from but in 1973 a 19" or 22" colour telly took TV viewing to a new and exciting level which was the real deal back then!

In addition the regular appearance of imported American actors added another dimension to it. It was interesting to see an American actor such as Garry Collins who normally played a good guy in US TV movies acting in the eery and claustrophobic atmosphere of thriller.

With what I can recall when it originally aired was that at no time did you ever really feel safe in thriller, well at least not for long until some sinister event occurred, somebody disappeared or a body turned up. Even when things appeared perfectly normal suddenly you would start to feel that something was about to happen. Another interesting feature was that the stories changed from week to week; some being supernatural, witchcraft, a mystery, a simple crime, murder or some times a combination of two or three.

The creepy and loud music score was certainly memorable at the beginning as well as the during the nauseating moments when you were expecting something to happen was ideal for TV. Yes some of the acting was wooden and even back at the time I thought that some of the expressions and menacing body language was over the top. Having said that the oppressive atmosphere, the dialog, music score, body language, slow camera work was all that producers had back in those days to make it a horror/thriller series.

There was no special effects or huge sets and if you wanted fast cars, fights and action well there was the Sweeney. Also no muscle bound 20-30 year old men here nor women wearing the now obligatory tank tops and spandex pants. Note there was no gratuitous violence ( if you don't count being strangled, stabbed, or shot with a pillow over the nozzle!) and profanity.

Thriller is very dated today but that is because over the last 30 odd years TV has changed so much. What we find entertaining on TV is completely different from 1973. Can you imagine back in the 70's people being entertained by reality TV shows – not a chance ! Thriller probably has a following more for nostalgic reasons than anything else. However, that is understandable because there does come a time when you just get sick of modern TV and the different tone of thriller ironically now appears to provide a refreshing change to the monotonous, identical garbage of soaps, reality TV shows, 24 hour news and our 21st century obsession with celebrities, the internet, computer games and lastly amercian junk TV like jerry springer, sex and the city and desperate house wifes.

Now that thriller is available on DVD I'll certainly check them out and – – – try to watch them on Saturday nights with the lights dimmed!

I watched this on television as a kid and it scared the hell out of me. Now that i've seen the whole series i know why. If you have a sense for the macabre and eerie you'll find 90 % gold here. The stories are brilliantly plotted, the acting, though sometimes a little bit stagey is superb and most of all: brian clemens, the creator of this mini-series knew how to trigger an unsettling and creepy atmosphere most big-budgeted movies of the genre never approached.The topics range from assassins raging havoc in an institution for the blind to satanic rites, witchcraft, serial killers and haunted houses. A real gemstone with maybe the best soundtrack since "The fearless vampire killers". Don't you dare to miss it.

Quite campy but enjoyable screenwriting. Unexpected actors from both sides of the pond makes it fun!

At last Brian Clemens' wonderful 1970s anthology series has been released in it's entirety in 16 disk Mega DVD set in the UK. This is a Region 2 release and also contains a number of tantalising extras

43 unrelated - but remarkably consistent - hour long thrillers from the fertile mind of Mr Clemens stand testament to the claustrophobic feel of studio taped television drama where the skill of the actor basically decides the pace of the piece in conjunction with the skill of the director using a multi camera set-up (an art probably destined to disappear altogether in another generation).

So many themes, so what to recommend? Well there is hardly a "dud" in there. One "K is for Killing" is rather incongruously a comedy and should really be treated as separate to the main mood of the remaining stories, which take in supernatural tales (especially in the first series), espionage stories and all variants of general crime from psychopathic scheming to killers on the run. It's is hard to isolate the "cream of the cream", the general standard being very high - however there are some that are classics from first viewing and remain forever so ... to my mind these comprise the following stories: (in chronological order)

The Colour Of Blood, The Eyes Have It, I'm The Girl He Wants To Kill, Death To Sister Mary, In The Steps Of A Deadman, Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are, Nurse Will Make It Better, A Killer In Every Corner, Where The Action Is, The Double Kill, The Crazy Kill and The Next Voice You See