Results are in for the poll on scariest classic show and there's a bit of a split here. Five votes were cast, and they were pretty much spread about. In a tie for fourth place with no votes are Rod Serling's Night Gallery and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. I really find this somewhat puzzling. While Night Gallery was never first rate Serling I remember it as frequently quite chilling - and that was just the intros. As for Kolchak: The Night Stalker, I was under the impression that the show had such a tremendous cult following which was why ABC decided to try their rather weak revival.
Tied for second are Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and The X-Files. Each got 1 vote or 20% of the rather anemic total. I confess that Alfred Hitchcock Presents was never really a horror based show or even a particularly frightening show. What Hitch had going for him was a reputation for building suspenseful stories around basically ordinary people. The Twilight Zone extended the concept a bit further so that you had basically ordinary people but this time dealing with extraordinary situations like the vision of a mythical beast like a gremlin pulling apart an airplane which only one passenger can see. As for The X-Files, they traded on a variety of fears beyond simply monsters and unexplained or unexplainable phenomena; that paranoia might be valid ("Trust No One"), that shadowy men are really running things, and that the people we are supposed to trust - be it government, colleagues, or our own parents - may be more than they seem, usually in a bad way.
But the winner for the Scariest Classic Show - albeit with a small sample - is The Outer Limits and it's not really a show I feel qualified to comment on since I only saw the most recent remake. On the other hand just reading the episode description on TV.com is enough to convince me that this show goes beyond the ordinary.
Next poll, something really scary - the Parents Television Council's listings of the best and worst shows on TV!
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