By BETHANY LAKE
Canadian horror was booming in the early ’80s, thanks to high-profile films like My Bloody Valentine, Curtains and Funeral Home (also released as Cries in the Night). However, Canadian-made genre content extended well beyond the silver screen. All one had to do to hear bloodcurdling tales of horror was to tune in to CBC Radio on Friday nights and wait for these iconic lines to come barreling through their speakers: “In the dream, you are falling. Lost in the listening distance, as dark locks in.”
A woman tormented by a psychotic caller (“Mr. Agostino”). A serial killer who takes his corpses down to a local laundromat for a good cleaning (“All-Nighter”). A dentist who performs more than fillings on his patients (“The Dentist”). These tales and more pulsated through the airwaves all over the country when NIGHTFALL debuted in 1980. Treating horror fans to a unique experience in storytelling during a time when the entertainment landscape was largely dominated by film and television, the series ran until 1983.
RUE MORGUE sat down with NIGHTFALL creator Bill Howell to talk about the show and why it remains fresh and effective today.
What inspired you to create NIGHTFALL?
It started in the spring of 1979 at a national producers meeting in Banff called by the new head of CBC Radio Drama, Susan Rubes. I had a good track record, so I was offered first shot at the gig. We never did an actual pilot; I just started in on a couple [of stories]. They seemed to work out pretty well, and we took it from there.
“NIGHTFALL” creator Bill Howell
In my mind, it was always going to be a half-hour suspense/horror anthology based on a mix of original plays and adaptations from genre classics. That gave everybody a broad enough base to work from, with a range of contributions across Canada. I was immediately attracted to horror on radio because it’s an intimate medium. It gets people right where they live.
I shot for a primetime slot on Friday evenings right after The World at Six, just as listeners would be cooking their suppers and starting to relax into the weekend.
I produced and directed most of the first season myself, discovering what I was looking and listening for as I went along. I wanted the shows to jump out of the speakers at you. We took huge risks, often going way over the top, and genuinely enjoyed all the synthetic dread.
Was it a difficult sell to CBC? Had CBC ever produced anything like it before?
It just grew into itself, and I never felt any sense of pressure. I transferred over to Radio Drama from Radio Variety, having produced two seasons of Air Farce (a live-audience comedy) and Johnny Chase, Secret Agent of Space (a Saturday morning sci-fi radio serial), so I had the production chops. I’d also just had three shows nominated for ACTRA Awards in the 1979 Best Radio Program of the Year category. The CBC heard NIGHTFALL as a breath of fresh air.
The writers on the show included Bill Gray, Len Peterson and Tim Wynne-Jones. Was there anything specific about their previous work that made you realize that they would be a good fit to write for NIGHTFALL?
We deliberately looked for a wide range of writers. Some of them were old pros in radio; others had huge learning curves. John Gavin Douglas, the Radio Drama area exec, started the editorial process and was soon joined by Howard Engel and Earl Toppings. They shaped ideas and shipped off drafts to regional producers, advised on proposals and commissioned work. I read everything, and each producer-director had the final say on the given last draft. The subjective reality of each particular script was what really mattered, rather than superimposing a series style. And the range of writers’ voices helped to build a broader audience base than most genre series.
Do you have a favourite episode?
I guess my favourite episode was always the one I was working on. Our version of Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” holds up because it’s archetypal. NIGHTFALL had essentially one plot each week, week after week: an apparently sympathetic character loses all control of his or her destiny. And as the given episode progresses, everything (music, sound sets, spot effects, other voices) is increasingly heard from that central character’s perspective. People usually listen to the radio alone. In this case, the solitary listener gets sucked into adopting the consciousness of our protagonist. That was what we strove for and sometimes achieved.
From 1980 to 1982, the host of the show was a character you created, known as “the mysterious Luther Kranst.” Who or what was the inspiration for the character?
The show intro and closing were done by actor Henry Ramer, one of the prime voice specialists in Toronto at the time. Most program hosts were sweetly unctuous, certainly not threatening. At one point, I asked him who he was playing, and he came up with that name. We decided nobody could stand being alone in the same room with Luther for more than five minutes. We loved that chilly “Good evening.” Meanwhile, the consequential falling dream-scream was done by the irrepressible actor, John Stocker.
NIGHTFALL’s intro is legendary, with its jarring, frightening music that leads into the now-classic opening narration. Who wrote those iconic lines?
I did. Sometimes it’s actually useful to also be a poet. I wanted a ritual, a sense of occasion and a hook to tune people in, to get them to commit themselves to foreground listening for the whole half hour. Something immediately engaging and completely unapologetic – radio as something more compelling than just a friendly background noise. We had to win our place and justify it. I can’t say how many of our plays actually lived up to that opening, but it sure gave us something to shoot for.
It’s been said that some listeners found NIGHTFALL so terrifying that several stations dropped it. Is that true? Do you recall which episodes created this kind of controversy?
A lot of them, I hope! Our entire output aired several times across both English CBC radio networks. John Boz, then network program director at NPR, made NIGHTFALL the first-ever series sold in the U.S. The problems started when he tried to get McDonald’s as a national sponsor for us. Tough to stir up interest in horror radio from people selling Happy Meals. Not sure which sample episodes shook up the local NPR station managers back then, but we’ve always had much more liberal content and language standards here in Canada. How can you have a worthwhile horror series if you’re afraid to ask the big, dangerous questions? Perhaps the real horror starts when people don’t know what they don’t know.
Listening to episodes of NIGHTFALL today, such as “All-Nighter,” “The Porch Light,” “The Dentist” and “Mr. Agostino,” it is clear that the show still wields an eerie power and remains terrifying and effective all these years later. Why do you think the show has such lasting power?
Quality. Everybody involved was a professional. We always shot for the best. I took a lot of the old-time radio moves and translated them through the modern recording studio. Radio drama sets and costumes are cheap, but per air minute, this is still the most expensive form of radio to produce. And you have to have enough quantity to get real quality. After all, your body remembers fear, horror and dread, even when your mind tells you it’s all make-believe. People never knew quite what to expect from Luther. And they still don’t.
You worked at CBC for decades and were involved in many projects over the years. Was there anything about your time working on NIGHTFALL that stands out as unique or special for you?
What that show taught me best is that there’s nothing wrong with entertaining people. A radio drama producer is the first audience for the given play. You never stop learning how to listen to the listening of others. The job, script writing and editing, casting and directing, music composition and recording, location sound and special spot effects, evolving production technology and mic techniques, promotion and audience relations, budgeting and corporate politics.
The CBC owns all the production rights to NIGHTFALL, and has contractual obligations to the writers, actors and musicians who worked on the shows. Most of what people are hearing now are recordings ripped off air from the NPR run rather than quality-enhanced digital dubs based on the original masters.
You can only go so far exploring our darkest urges, and I came close to burning out before handing NIGHTFALL over to old pal Don Kowalchuk in Vancouver. I was ready to move on, but was still in love with the big emotions.
For the next ten years, I did hour-long feature dramas as the executive producer of Sunday Matinee. Then came Midnight Cab, a half-hour detective series, which led to The Mystery Project.
In all, I spent 27 years on contract as a network radio drama producer-director, 22 as a program executive producer. My last special was in 2004, a production of Rue Morgue Redux, a Neil Munro dramatization of the classic Poe story. That June, it won the World Gold Medal for Best Radio Drama at the New York Festival. The president of the CBC emailed his congratulations. He didn’t know I’d been fired the month before. The End.
NIGHTFALL is available on iTunes, Spotify and Internet Archive.
