Almost 60 years after it was destroyed, an episode of the terrifying BBC series Late Night Horror has been unearthed and will be shown again.
Late Night Horror was a deeply unsettling six-episode anthology which first came out in 1968. Just two years later, it disappeared from screens and the BBC archives.
The show was notoriously gory with storylines chock-a-block with severed limbs, creatures of the night and ghastly tales, with the scant reaction we have from the time showing ‘complaints it was too scary’ and had BBC technicians ‘buckling at their knees’.
BFI film curator Atlas Obscura added: ‘It was quite shocking, I think it was controversial.’
Although vast amounts (anywhere upto 70%) of the BBC’s output was purged across the 60s and 70s in order to free up tapes (Doctor Who famously has over 90 missing episodes from this era), a 2007 BBC news feature speculated that the sheer horror of it drove it to the chopping block.
Four of the episodes- William and Mary, The Triumph of Death, The Bells of Hell and The Kiss of Blood – remain lost to time. In 2016, archivist Chris Perry got his hands on The Corpse Can’t Play after a 30-year hunt.
Now, a decade later, another has resurfaced – this time, the episode titled No Such Thing As a Vampire, based on I Am Legend novelist Richard Matheson’s short story.
As it says on the tin, this is a blodsucker-themed horror of a woman who falls mysteriously ill and, notably, has two pinprick marks on her neck – the nightwalker’s trademark.
The film, which has not seen the light of day in six decades, was tracked down by cinema projectionist Darren Payne in a small storage area of The Regent, a 1930s art deco cinema and theatre buried in the heart of Christchurch, Dorset.
Recovered ‘purely by chance’ when a whole box of tapes, including No Such As a Vampire, was ‘on the verge of being thrown away’.
I was asked to check one of the rather nondescript silver cans, which had the words Late Night Horror handwritten on the label. I’m a passionate horror aficionado, and the title rang a distant bell with me…
‘Lo and behold, it turned out to be the long-lost first episode of the Late Night Horror series. I had to pinch myself; it was an astonishing and quite emotional moment.
‘I wouldn’t underestimate that experience of being the first to watch a production for the first time in nearly 60 years.’
The episode is set to be aired, in conjunction with BBC Archives, in Dorset on September 20, as part of the three-day Grindfest event.
No Such Thing As a Vampire is far from the only rare BBC footage. In fact, 1984 Sheffield-based drama Threads, which speculated on the unrelenting impact of a thermonuclear blast on ordinary Brits, has only aired a handful of times after deeply disturbing audiences.
Meanwhile, the BBC recently celebrated the recovery of two more Classic Who episodes, involving First Doctor William Hartnell’s run, which were expertly restored before being released on iPlayer.
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