Thriller: The Complete Series

Hosted by the inimitable Boris Karloff, this is one of the most chilling TV shows ever. Creepier than The Twilight Zone, its sterling pedigree boasts an impressive roster of superstars, including William Shatner, Rip Torn, Richard Chamberlain, Stephen King Mary Tyler Moore and Robert Vaughn. All 67 episodes are preserved in eerie black and white. 54 ¾ Hours on 17 DVDs

Season 1

Season 1, Episode 1: The Twisted Image
Original Air Date-13 September 1960
Business executive Alan Patterson's [Leslie Neilsen] life takes a surreal turn when two mentally disturbed people independently wind up with fixations on his life. One wants to marry him, and the other wants to be him.

Season 1, Episode 2: Child's Play
Original Air Date-20 September 1960
A lonely boy becomes perilously lost in fantasy, as his parents spar over raising him, then debate separating. In a mountain cabin for the summer, the mother and son battle boredom, while the father pounds out magazine articles in his room. When the father's too busy to take his son hunting, the boy (Tommy Nolan of "Buckskin", later a magazine writer) sneaks out on his own with a loaded rifle, pursuing the villain of his fantasies - Black Bart. Back in the cabin, the mother reveals that the son was booted from summer camp, for shooting an apple off another camper's head.

Season 1, Episode 3: Worse Than Murder
Original Air Date-27 September 1960
A diary seems to reveal a murder, impelling a blackmail scheme. A wealthy man ravaged by a recurring nightmare dies, without leaving a will, infuriating his widowed daughter-in-law, whose husband squandered everything. The suspicious daughter-in-law grabs one of the elderly man's elaborate diaries before the executor can take control of it. The diary implies the nightmare is the murder of an elderly woman by her son and daughter, via injection. The daughter-in-law (Constance Ford) plans to carve a big chunk of the inheritance through blackmail. Superb performance by Ford (who had to care for her late uncle's robot in the Twilight Zone's "Uncle Simon") as the glamorous, aggressive daughter-in-law.

Season 1, Episode 4: The Mark of the Hand
Original Air Date-4 October 1960
A young girl is accused of murder and refuses to speak to anyone ever again.

Season 1, Episode 5: Rose's Last Summer
Original Air Date-11 October 1960
An aging actress is mysteriously found dead in a family's garden, and they may know more about her death than they will admit.

Season 1, Episode 6: The Guilty Men
Original Air Date-18 October 1960
Syndicate turns almost legit, but debates its don's proposal to cease shipping narcotics, and go above board in 1960. In the Roaring 20's, the leader began by mugging a neighbor to get money to bury his father. Instead, his brother followed their father's advice, becoming a public health physician. Their childhood pal is the mob's lawyer, who struggles to mediate, as his brother's health fails, and the Feds close in.

Season 1, Episode 7: The Purple Room
Original Air Date-25 October 1960
Heir feels smug about a mandatory night in a haunted mansion - armed with .38 & New York attitude. Otherwise his cousins reap the valuable Bayou property they shared with the deceased. Duncan shrugs off the legend of an ancestor who went mad after accidentally killing her husband, when he fought a ghostly intruder. Duncan's smirky superiority immediately riles the country cousins he's never met, but Duncan feels equally prepared for any spooky tricks from them.

Season 1, Episode 8: The Watcher
Original Air Date-1 November 1960
Authorities in a resort community cover up the suspicious death of a teenager so tourism doesn't suffer. As summer fades, a deputy sheriff gains permission to quietly investigate the death. Meanwhile a rigid, controlling teacher visiting for the season, grows increasingly disturbed as he spies on the secret relationship between a young neighbor and a boatyard manager, who are both already squirming under the power of adults in the small town.

Season 1, Episode 9: Girl with a Secret
Original Air Date-15 November 1960
A newlywed bride must hide a secret about her husband's whereabouts. She is blackmailed by an eavesdropping maid and pressured by others to tell her secret.

Season 1, Episode 10: The Prediction
Original Air Date-22 November 1960
A fake mentalist suddenly has visions of people's violent deaths and attempts to stop them from coming true.

Season 1, Episode 11: The Fatal Impulse
Original Air Date-29 November 1960
A man fleeing from an attempt to assassinate a political candidate puts a small bomb in the bag of a woman in an elevator. The police spend the evening looking for the mystery girl and the bomb. Watch for young Mary Tyler Moore as one of the women in the elevator.

Season 1, Episode 12: The Big Blackout
Original Air Date-6 December 1960
A recovering alcoholic who can not remember his past finds himself confronted by criminals and killers looking for a man who may or may not be him.

Season 1, Episode 13: Knock Three-One-Two
Original Air Date-13 December 1960
A man in need of money enlists the help of a serial killer to get the money from his wife.

Season 1, Episode 14: Man in the Middle
Original Air Date-20 December 1960
A man overhears a plot for kidnapping and murder. At first, he doesn't want to do anything about it, but eventually he gets caught in the middle of the plot.

Season 1, Episode 15: The Cheaters
Original Air Date-27 December 1960
A man invents a pair of glasses that can see the truth in others and oneself. They lead to a series of suicides, murders, and tragedies for the wearers.

Season 1, Episode 16: The Hungry Glass
Original Air Date-3 January 1961
A married couple moves into a house that is haunted by images reflected in glass and mirrors.

Season 1, Episode 17: The Poisoner
Original Air Date-10 January 1961

Season 1, Episode 18: Man in the Cage
Original Air Date-17 January 1961

Season 1, Episode 19: Choose a Victim
Original Air Date-24 January 1961
A beach bum locks onto a wealthy young woman whose sadness is as obvious as her flashy jewels and sports car. At first Ralphie Teal only desires a quick score, but when the comely Ms. Landers forgives his larceny in exchange for his serious attention, the heel sees a much bigger payoff looming, via her only relative, a harsh uncle who's loaded.

Season 1, Episode 20: Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook
Original Air Date-7 February 1961

Season 1, Episode 21: The Merriweather File
Original Air Date-14 February 1961

Season 1, Episode 22: The Fingers of Fear
Original Air Date-21 February 1961

Season 1, Episode 23: Well of Doom
Original Air Date-28 February 1961
Fiendish Moloch and his huge creature Styx kill a chauffeur and kidnap his passengers, who are en route to a bachelor party. The two abductees (a bridegroom, who's heir to an English country estate, and the estate overseer), are forced to slog through foggy moors to an ancient Gothic fortress. As dawn approaches, the diabolic pair push their captives to speed up, because the demonic creatures fear the coming of light.

Season 1, Episode 24: The Ordeal of Dr. Cordell
Original Air Date-7 March 1961

Season 1, Episode 25: Trio for Terror
Original Air Date-14 March 1961
3 stories in this episode. First, a young man kills his uncle, not realizing that his uncle was a warlock. In the second tale, a man breaks the bank at a casino, but may not live through the night. In the third tale, a sculptor/artist shows off his "Chamber of Horrors" of killers, but are they actually sculptures?

Season 1, Episode 26: Papa Benjamin
Original Air Date-21 March 1961
A composer in need of inspiration turns to Voodoo melodies, but finds himself the victim of a Voodoo curse by Papa Benjamin.

Season 1, Episode 27: Late Date
Original Air Date-4 April 1961
A brother helps his brother cover up the murder of his philandering wife by framing her lover.

Season 1, Episode 28: Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper
Original Air Date-11 April 1961
70 years after the Jack the Ripper killings in London, Sir Guy (John Williams) convinces the police that Jack may still be alive, eternally young, and still killing, currently in New York.

Season 1, Episode 29: The Devil's Ticket
Original Air Date-18 April 1961
A artist "pawns" his soul to the devil and must retrieve it by painting a portrait of another person whose soul will be exchanged for his.

Season 1, Episode 30: Parasite Mansion
Original Air Date-25 April 1961
A young woman is held captive in a mansion by a family of recluses hiding a supernatural secret.

Season 1, Episode 31: A Good Imagination
Original Air Date-2 May 1961
A bookworm uses his good imagination and some storylines from Poe to dispose of his cheating wife's paramours.

Season 1, Episode 32: Mr. George
Original Air Date-9 May 1961
Priscilla, a young girl, lives with her scheming relatives who are trying to get hold of her inheritance... and a ghostly protector, Mr. George.

Season 1, Episode 33: The Terror in Teakwood
Original Air Date-16 May 1961
A concert pianist, so obsessed by the death of an arch-rival that he desecrates his grave, announces he will play a sonata written especially for the dead man's oversized hands.

Season 1, Episode 34: The Prisoner in the Mirror
Original Air Date-23 May 1961
A professor studying the depraved sorcerer Count Cagliostro, brings to the U.S. the mirror which was instrumental in the Count's murder spree. The looking glass was blacked over to entrap Cagliostro, but Prof. Harry Langton, obsessed with the magician's secrets, scrapes off the paint and installs the mirror in his residence.

Season 1, Episode 35: Dark Legacy
Original Air Date-30 May 1961

Season 1, Episode 36: Pigeons from Hell
Original Air Date-6 June 1961

Season 1, Episode 37: The Grim Reaper
Original Air Date-13 June 1961

Season 2

Season 2, Episode 1: What Beckoning Ghost?
Original Air Date-18 September 1961
When a concert pianist envisions her own coffin in her drawing room, she doubts her sanity. No one else sees it or hears a phantom organ's funeral music in the isolated, haunted mansion. Wealthy, but plain Mildred's been housebound with a weak heart, tended by her sensual sister and ne'er-do-well husband, who Mildred dangles on a short financial leash.

Season 2, Episode 2: Guillotine
Original Air Date-26 September 1961

Season 2, Episode 3: The Premature Burial
Original Air Date-2 October 1961
An aging millionaire survives being buried alive, but his devilish fiancée plans to take advantage of his next cataleptic seizure, by marrying him and then making sure he stays in his grave. Then the gorgeous Victorine will inherit his estate, and run off with her young lover, a painter. But the cataleptic millionaire and his loyal physician Dr. Thorn take every possible measure to allow him to survive another mistaken entombment.

Season 2, Episode 4: The Weird Tailor
Original Air Date-16 October 1961

Season 2, Episode 5: God Grante That She Lye Stille
Original Air Date-23 October 1961

Season 2, Episode 6: Masquerade
Original Air Date-30 October 1961
A family of cannibalistic thieves menace a young couple, but the husband laughs off their scary Southern hotel as a joke. The lovebirds became lost on a second honeymoon and sought shelter in the spooky Baits Hotel, but were quickly locked in by the Carta Family. The gorgeous wife Rosalynn is appalled to find the Cartas have a private jail cell, containing haggard female relative Ruth Carta, who pleads for the young woman to release her.

Season 2, Episode 7: The Last of the Sommervilles
Original Air Date-6 November 1961
Dragging a murder victim to burial is just 1 chore a servant undertakes to become the last Sommerville standing, to win a wealthy old woman's inheritance. As a distant relative, Ursula steps up her elimination contest when a closer, desperate Sommerville arrives to drain off some of his aunt's estate for a business bailout.

Season 2, Episode 8: Letter to a Lover
Original Air Date-13 November 1961

Season 2, Episode 9: A Third for Pinochle
Original Air Date-20 November 1961
Milquetoast plans bumping off his spouse, unaware the nosy sisters across the street just killed one's husband. Layabout Maynard has a cozy love nest for his kept woman Babs, but his stingy wife severely cramps his cheating style, so the would-be bon vivant accelerates his scheme.

Season 2, Episode 10: The Closed Cabinet
Original Air Date-27 November 1961

Season 2, Episode 11: Dialogues with Death
Original Air Date-4 December 1961

Season 2, Episode 12: The Return of Andrew Bentley
Original Air Date-11 December 1961
White magic practitioner Amos Wilder kills himself after securing his nephew's sworn promise to guard his body against evil spirits. The nephew must never leave his uncle's mansion, to protect the shire from the return of black necromancer Bentley, cast back to Hell by Wilder.

Season 2, Episode 13: The Remarkable Mrs. Hawk
Original Air Date-18 December 1961
Cissy Hawk's farm keeps gaining massive blue ribbon hogs, while the passing drifters she hires magically disappear. Well-read grifter Jason Longfellow figures he'll last a lot longer at her Isle of Aiaie via blackmail, but seductive Cissy keeps local Sheriff Ulysses wound around her finger tighter than a pig's tail.

Season 2, Episode 14: Portrait Without a Face
Original Air Date-25 December 1961

Season 2, Episode 15: An Attractive Family
Original Air Date-1 January 1962
Family that kills together seeks to stay together in style, by icing the heir of one of their victims, before she comes into her inheritance. If the heiress audits the books, she'll discover that the family has already blown her share of the estate. Her newlywed sister was backed off a cliff while having her photo snapped, so the younger sister is understandably leery of heights, but not of her very understanding new in-laws.

Season 2, Episode 16: Waxworks
Original Air Date-8 January 1962

Season 2, Episode 17: La Strega
Original Air Date-15 January 1962
Three men try to drown a young woman, fearing she's a witch. A wandering painter pulls her from the river, refusing to believe in such rural superstition. The young artist shelters her, but her elderly aunt who rules the 18th Century Italian countryside via supernatural power, plots to keep her niece as a sorcerer's apprentice - no matter what.

Season 2, Episode 18: The Storm
Original Air Date-22 January 1962
Woman & her jumpy black cat Baba increasingly besieged by amorous loon of a cabbie, power outages, and menacing sounds throughout her isolated home during a devastating storm. The newlywed just returned early from 2 weeks caring for her sister. As she prays for her husband's arrival, she decides to confront strange sounds emanating from the storm cellar.
Season 2, Episode 19: A Wig for Miss Devore
Original Air Date-29 January 1962

Season 2, Episode 20: The Hollow Watcher
Original Air Date-12 February 1962

Season 2, Episode 21: Cousin Tundifer
Original Air Date-19 February 1962
Mass murderer's descendant plots quicker inheritance options when his ill, rich uncle Pontifex, takes up with Queenie De Lyte, a stripper turned art fancier. A psychologist cured Pontifex's obsession with restoring ancient family homes, destroying nephew Tundifer's hope of having Pontifex declared incompetent. Tundifer looks exactly like his evil ancestor, a portrait of whom hangs in one family mansion, whose expensive renovation may include a portal to a prior century.

Season 2, Episode 22: The Incredible Doktor Markesan
Original Air Date-26 February 1962
Penniless Fred Bancroft, along with his new wife Molly, visits a sinister uncle he hasn't seen in years in hopes of living rent-free in his musty, decaying mansion.

Season 2, Episode 23: Flowers of Evil
Original Air Date-5 March 1962

Season 2, Episode 24: 'Til Death Do Us Part
Original Air Date-12 March 1962

Season 2, Episode 25: The Bride Who Died Twice
Original Air Date-19 March 1962

Season 2, Episode 26: Kill My Love
Original Air Date-26 March 1962

Season 2, Episode 27: Man of Mystery
Original Air Date-2 April 1962
An author is murdered when his book exposing an ex-employer, a secretive international financier, is to be published. A reporter tracks the case, but everyone he tries to interview dies under suspicious circumstances. Meanwhile, the financier gets a comic fired because he's obsessed with ensnaring the funny-man's girlfriend, a leggy nightclub chanteuse.

Season 2, Episode 28: The Innocent Bystanders
Original Air Date-9 April 1962

Season 2, Episode 29: The Lethal Ladies
Original Air Date-16 April 1962
2 twisted tales of timid people hitting their breaking point. A philandering investor dreams of independence from his wife, a wealthy, bold geologist, but when his latest scheme plummets down the big board, Myron plots murder. Alice Quimby's entire life is her work at a university library, but she's passed over to be chief librarian, in favor of Dr. Wilford Bliss, a martinet who's going to clean house, forcing her out before she can collect her pension.

Season 2, Episode 30: The Specialists
Original Air Date-30 April 1962

 

Himself	---	Boris Karloff
Charlie	---	Richard Peel
Count Alexander Cagliostro	---	Henry Daniell
Alan Mervyn	---	David Frankham
Joe Henshaw	---	Paul Newlan
Dame Alice Mervyn	---	Doris Lloyd
Major Domo	---	Peter Brocco
Brundage	---	Ed Nelson
First Pub Patron	---	J. Pat O'Malley
Frank Loga	---	Edward Andrews
Meg O'Danagh Wheeler	---	Audrey Dalton
Louise Chase Logan	---	Patricia Barry
Dr. Edward Stone	---	Ronald Howard
Attorney Pinchot	---	Alan Napier
Arabella Foote	---	Linda Watkins
Police Superintendent	---	Alan Caillou
Alfred Marvin, Ph.D	---	Chet Stratton
Gloria	---	Pamela Curran
Lester Clyne	---	Bernard Fein
Joe Thorp	---	Ken Lynch

Directed by Herschel Daugherty, John Brahm
Written by Donald S. Sanford, Robert Bloch
Produced by William Frye
Original Music by Morton Stevens, Pete Rugolo
Cinematography by Benjamin H. Kline, John L. Russell
Film Editing by Danny B. Landres, Richard Belding