My oh my. How certain paths can lead to unexpected destinations. As many readers of this blog know, I don’t really have that high of an opinion about Light’s Out and Arch Oboler in general. So I thought I’d revisit that opinion by listening to some of the well regarded episodes.
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So far, my experience has been meh. Mind you, I’ve listened to some shows that have raised the bar for me. I truly expected the worse and some of the shows had been entertaining.
But on the whole, I haven’t been really hooked. The episodes, while some are certainly interesting, are somehow forgettable.
But wow … this episode really sucker punched me.
First off, this isn’t an Arch Oboler production. I performed my typical google search, “scariest light’s out episode”, and this was near the top of the returned results. I always assumed that Arch was behind Light’s Out from beginning to end, but this story was written by Willis Cooper.
Cooper wrote the excellent Quiet Please show which has a few doozies of its own, but this episode is truly one of a kind.
Evidently, Light’s Out went off the air and this was an attempt to revive the show. Cooper wrote a bunch of episodes and the producers were horrified by them. They gave him a check and told him to “beat feet”.
Enough reading. Give it a listen, but make sure to turn out the lights and listen on stereo headphones. If you feel brave, make sure to turn of the volume.
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Now some of you may be shrugging after that listen. Some may be wondering, “what’s the big deal?” If do think like that, then chances are you are made of pure granite and probably find a combat zone boring.
This show creeped me out even though I knew exactly where it was going. Two major points.
First, a scientist’s wife declares that she would happily donate her body for her husband’s science. Her goose was cooked before her sentence was finished.
And then the idea of her body losing her soul. I thought it was going to be a strange comeuppance story, providing a morality tale in the guise of a pulp horror show.
But I did not expect the “moral center” of the story to get butchered while the ethically challenged scientist walking away from the whole affair like it was just a bad episode.
“Like many experiments,” he quips. “It just didn’t work out.”
You have to wonder if this guy felt anything at all? I mean, his wife dies three times in this episode. First she gets killed in a car crash. Then memory of her is murdered in her “rebirth”. Finally, she dies a third time from her husband.
This is grim stuff.
I will say, the wife is great, especially how she mocks her husband, parroting his love for her. She does it icy cold and deadly creepy.
And just a little fun fact … the scientist is none other than Boris Karloff. You gotta love a person who is famous for playing a reanimated corpse plays a character who reanimates another corpse, letting the circle of love spin and spin about.
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