FOR SCREAMING OUT LOUD, LISTEN TO

RADIO 71

CBC RADIO'S NEW HORROR SERIES, NIGHTFALL

June 12, 1980.

       In the dream you are falling, plummeting through a dark, seemingly bottomles chasm. You scream in terror with the wind. Suddenly, you come awake, bathed in a cold sweat, chills down your spine, heart pounding...

       With that ominous beginning CBC Radio introduces Nightfall, a new drama series exploring horror, the bizarre, the unexplained. Nightfall will be heard weekly in the last half hour of As It Happens at 7:30 P.M., 8 Nfld., Starting Friday, July 4.

       While it is not intended to induce nightmares, producer Bill Howell suggests listeners finish eating before the program begins. If you're on the road, keep your hands firmly on the wheel. Nightfall is not for the timid.

       Horror stories seem to be having a renaissance. The CBS Mystery Theatre, a close cousin of the genre, is highly popular among American radio listeners. Two examples of the world's greatest horror literature - Dracula and Frankenstein - turn up regularly on stage, TV or film. One of Broadway's most successful current musicals, Sweeney Todd, is based on the macabre story of a barber who converts his customers into meat pies. The hunger for horror continues unsatiated.

       Nightfall is the first CBC Radio drama series devoted entirely to tales of terror and dread. Not that it's all grim fantasy. Most of the settings for the original commissioned plays are very contemporary, not remote Transylvania. Three of the first 13 of the 26-week long series are adaptations of classics: W.W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw, Edgar Allen Poe's The Telltale Heart, and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatchers.

       On July 4, Nightfall introduces the work of a young Motreal writer John Graham, Love and the Lonely One, in which a pair of medical students steal the corpse of an old lady from anatomy lab, as a lark. They soon discover the joke's on them. Jay Bowen, John Stocker, Elva Mai Hoover, Mignon Elkins, and Graham Haley make up the cast.

       Nightfall reverts to traditional horror literature July 11 with Len Peterson's radio version of The Monkey's Paw. Chris Wiggins, Ruth Springford, Eric House, Michael Wincott and Graham Haley are featured in this story of a British Army sergeant-major who returns from India with more than just the usual yarns from his years of military service.

       In Welcome to Homerville by Don Dickinson and Alan Guttman, July 18, a trucker travelling a lonely highway hears a mysterious female on his radio who says she is waiting for him in Homerville. Unnerved, he tells his CB radio buddies who warn him not to go there because danger lies ahead. But the seductive voice keeps luring him on, until finally.... The large cast is headed by Neil Dainard, with Jim Morris, John Stocker, Frank Perry, Robert Christie, Aileen Seaton, Marian Waldman, Ron Hatmann, Elva Mai Hoover, Arch McDonell, Budd Knapp, Lynn Daragon, Gord Thompson.

       Hands Off, July 25, yet another creation of Johm Graham, is a real chiller. This time, a scientist experimenting with hostility in animals, accidentally spills some of the chemical he's using on his hand. Immediately, his wife flies into a rage and try as he might, he cannot wash the chemical off. After a series of hostile reactions, he's forced to take desperate measures. Colin Fox plays the lead role, with Marian Waldman, Jennifer Browne, Murray Westgate, Ruth Springford and Ken James.

       For screaming out loud, CBC Radio's Nightfall is just the thing. Not recommended for solitary listening, however. Lock the doors, turn up the radio, and the lights down if you dare. Let your imagination take wing. Was that s footstep upstairs, a noise in the baement, a knock at the window??? Horrors, it's Nightfall!