My ‘horror moments’ examine horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. They are published weekly on Thursdays and come out in series of ten articles focussing on a particular source e.g. ‘Wallace & Gromit,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ or ‘Kate Bush Songs’. Catch up with the current series on Edward Gorey here and browse the full back catalogue of horror moments here.
The tv intro is a special artform; it’s such an underappreciated part of modern storytelling. Programme-makers have mere seconds to summarise the tone and content of the thing you are about to watch, to get you in just the right mood and focus your attention as you sit down and lock in.
Shows with an uncanny or bizarre premise have often had the most memorable intros, from the campy Rod Serling narrations of The Twilight Zone (‘You unlock this door with the key of imagination…’), to the campy sci-fi tones of the X-Files (‘government denies knowledge,’ the ‘truth is out there’), from the campy Bond-esque ladies of ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ (tarot and roulette wheels, anyone?) to the campy sing-song of children’s show ‘Funnybones’ (‘in a dark dark town there was a dark dark street…’)
Hm, there’s something of a running theme here, isn’t there? The arch metaknowledge of title sequences, their eye-catching visuals, their broad stroke treatments of the story at hand all feel ‘camp’ in the sense of self-aware excess. Intros of this kind are the spiritual successor to the showman standing at the opening of a tent, catching the ear of the passing punters as he tempts them to step inside.
Incidentally, Merriam-Webster has a great article on the vocabulary associated with this kind of patter. Apparently ‘ballyhoo’ is the proper slang.
And just as the carnival barker often promised more than he could deliver with his ballyhoo, intros can sometimes vastly overstate how interesting or well-crafted the programme itself will be. Amongst millennials a name that comes up a lot in this regard is the show American Horror Story which first aired in 2011.
Each series of AHS has a different setting and story although it has an ensemble cast with actors returning to play different roles. The first series (or season, I should say since it’s an American show) was set in a haunted house. The intro was full of tantalising promise, a strange collage of humming, pulsating, buzzing, screeching, and ticking intercut with scenes of implements on trays, of things floating in jars, of rooms and doors and corridors haunted by the incomprehensible…
The show itself was…messy. For what it’s worth, I did watch Murder House all the way through, then stopped halfway through the second season, Asylum, got back into it with Coven (the best season) soldiered on through Freak Show and lost interest with Hotel. As AHS wore on, the distinction between the quality of the teasers/title sequences and the show itself became more stark.
Watching the teaser trailers for AHS and speculating about the upcoming season, did become something of a tradition and a lot of them are genuinely creepy and filled with lurid promise. Oddly enough, some of the best came from the sixth season which was special because the theme was deliberately kept secret for as long as possible. The teasers were an eclectic mix of horror motifs and styles. If you don’t know already, try guessing what the theme of season six was from this compilation:
If you guessed ‘mockumentary about a North Carolina house built on the grounds of the lost seventeenth century Roanoke colony’ then well done, you might have psychic powers. This is a rare example of a show deliberately obfuscating its plot through its teasers and intros, something it could afford to do in its sixth season because it already had a loyal (if somewhat fatigued) fanbase.
But wait wait wait, this is supposed to be a horror moments series on illustrator Edward Gorey and I haven’t mentioned him once! Wasn’t he an artist and occasional theatre designer, what’s he got to do with TV intros? Gorey did in fact design an animated title sequence for a show called Mystery! You can watch the several different versions here:
Mystery! first aired in 1980 and was presented at different times by Gene Shalit, Vincent Price, and Diana Rigg. It was an anthology show where each episode presented a new mystery story, for example, an episode from an adaptation of an Agatha Christie. The presenter gave you a little preamble about what to expect and then you’d watch the episode, it was essentially a way to repackage a pre-existing show.
The opening credits of Mystery! were therefore its most original element. They were brought to life by animators Eugene Federenko, Derek Lamb, and Janet Perlman with delightfully spooky music composed by Normand Roger.
Gorey was not entirely appreciative of the way his drawings and ideas had been repackaged for animation, just as he’d baulked at the way his crosshatchings loomed when they were inflated in size to form stage backdrops. To be fair to executive producer Joan Wilson, she had asked for 75 seconds and he had given her 10-minutes’ worth of storyboarding to cut down.
And despite his misgivings, the final product feels like Gorey through and through, from the first glimpse of men huddled in the rain who scatter to reveal an urn, to the swooning ingenue on a rooftop wafting a handkerchief, to the two feet disappearing ignominiously into a pond, it manages to capture the spirit of a Gorey book in seconds. Many a child tuned in just to watch this strange macabre cartoon and were disappointed when the rest of the show was boring real actors.
Gorey also designed some of the sets for the preamble sequence. These, like his stage designs, were giant two-dimensional cut outs, as if someone was caught in the pages of a picture book. The idea was later abandoned but you can see some of the miniatures for these set designs in this clip of a visit to the WGBH Media Archives:
What are your favourite spooky opening titles and do you love them along with the programme or in spite of it? Next week we return to child imperilment with perhaps the bleakest Gorey horror moment so far… until then, happy nightmares everyone.
Horror moments are published on Thursdays and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Mondays.
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I'm quite old now but the title sequence of 'Children of the Stones' (HTV 1977, folk horror - for kids!) still terrifies me 48 years on from when I first saw it. The swoopy trippy camerawork round the Avebury stones is one thing, but it's the extremely sinister vocal music that does it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwT0wLnT7Rc
Love this - I went down the rabbit hole of title design years ago, purely due to the AHS intros. The True Blood opening is another favourite and really captures the Southern Gothic feeling.