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Released by: Severin Films
Released on: October 25th, 2022.
Director: Narciso Ibáñez Serrador
Cast: Narciso Ibáñez Menta, Estanis González, Lola Lemos, Pedro Sempson, Luis Peña
Year: 1966-1968, 1974, 1982
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Tales To Keep You Awake – Movie Review:
Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, the man who directed Who Can Kill A Child? and The House That Screamed, was behind Tales To Keep You Awake (Historias Para No Dormir), a Spanish television anthology series that was produced by Televisión Española and broadcast on the Primera Cadena network beginning in 1966. The first run of the series, in black and white, ran until 1968 but in 1974 there was a self-contained TV special made and then in 1982 it was brought back for four feature length episodes.
Although the series was almost certainly inspired by the success of shows like The Outer Limits and more likely The Twilight Zone, the series has its own feel and tone to help make it more than just a foreign language knock off of those better known efforts. This is likely because Serrador not only directed each episode, but he also wrote them (using the pen name Luis Peñafiel) and starred in their respective introductory segments, just like Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock in Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The series was popular enough in its homeland to make Serrador quite famous.
Here’s a quick look at the different episodes that this set contains.
Disc One - Season One:
The Birthday - Adapted from the Fredric Brown story of the same name, this nineteen minute introductory episode tells the story of a middle aged man who works at a bank. When he's about to turn fifty, he decides to celebrate the occasion by murdering his wife and fleeing the country to Brazil.
The Hand – This fifty minute episode is literally Demon With A Glass Hand, from the first season of The Outer Limits and written by Harlon Ellison, dubbed into Spanish. It tells us the story of a man (Robert Culp) with amnesia and, as the title implies, a hand made of glass.
The Cellar Part 1 & The Cellar Part 2 - The first part of this two part series runs thirty-two minutes, the second part twenty-seven. The story adapts Ray Bradbury's story, Come Into My Cellar from 1970. The story revolves around a man who has to deal with some mushrooms that start growing out of control and causing problems in the town.
The Cask - This fifty-two minute entry is an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask Of Amantillado. As it's such a well-known story we won't go into the plot but it's quite a strong version of the story with some nice atmosphere and good performances.
The Offer - This twenty-seven minute episode starts off as a fairly standard gangster story but it evolves into something a good bit more interesting as it plays out, with a great ending that you probably won't see coming.
The Double - This thirty-five minute story adapts Ray Bradbury's Marionettes, Inc., and it details the exploits of a man who follows his friend's lead by purchasing a robotic duplicate of himself that he can use to get out of dealing with the things in life he doesn't want to deal with.
The Pact: This sixty-four minute adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar. In it, the doctor in charge of a mental hospital decides to try his hand at hypnotism to interesting results.
The Doll - This episode is a fifty-two minute adaptation of Robert Bloch's Sweets To The Sweet and it tells the story of a woman who takes a job working for a wealthy family only to get upset about the way the child she's hired to care for is treated by dear old dad.
The Rocket - This forty-six minute adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Rocket (also known as Outcast Of The Stars), which was also adapted by Joe Orlando and Al Feldstein in the November, 1953 issue of Weird Science. In the story, an aged man who obsesses over rockets and wants to send a family member into space using one.
The Joke - This thirty-five minute episode follows a man obsessed with pranks whose wife and the man she's having an affair with behind his back realize that enough is enough and devise a plan to do away with him for good. Of course, it doesn't go as planned.
The Cabin - This thirty-three minute story follows two girlfriends that wind up snowed in at a remote cabin. This isn't such a big deal to start with, they've got a fire to keep warm and enjoy being with each other, but all of that changes when night falls.
The Anniversary - This thirty-one minute story introduces us to a retired police chief who decides to host a party at his country home to celebrate the end of his working days. As the party takes place, we and he both realize that his past ties into that of one of his esteemed guests.
The Wait - Bradbury once again serves as the inspiration in this forty-two minute piece taken from his story The Long Years from The Martian Chronicles. In this story, a couple of their two children are left alone on a Martian settlement with their maid. They're relieved when a ship arrives to transport them back to Earth, until they realize what's really going on.
The Alarm Part 1 & The Alarm Part 2 - The first part of this two part episode runs thirty-six minutes, the second runs forty-six minutes. The story shows us what happens when an alien invasion occurs and a scientist who thinks the cause could be a radioactive woman.
The Smile - This episode is another Bradbury adaptation, taken from the titular short story from 1952. This story takes place after the fall of society as we know it and things have gotten so dire that the surviving population can no longer bring themselves to smile.
The Asphalt - The last episode on the first disc, which was the final episode of the original run, is unique in that it doesn't feature an introduction from Serrador. The story is a very strange tale of a man who quite literally gets stuck on the sidewalk without any way to get help or free himself.
Disc One - Season Two, The 1974 Special & The 1982 Series:
The Nightmare – This forty-eight minutes piece is an interesting story about a small town having to contend with a vampire bound and determined to feast on its populace, leaving the people who live in the town to try and figure out who the vampire really is and what to do about it.
The Paw – Clearly inspired by W. W. Jacob's The Monkey's Paw, this forty-seven minute episode follows a couple that comes into possession of an animal’s paw that allows them to see their wishes come true, but with unexpected complications.
The Seer – This fifty minute story follows some police as they try to solve a string of seemingly inexplicable suicides only for a psychic to alert them to their connection to a strange ghost that they expect to bring more death.
The Return – In this fifty-seven minute story, we meet two young guys whose uncle lets it slip that they aren't in his will. This causes them to exact a plan to pay him back in kind.
The Raven - This is a forty-nine minute adaptation of Poe's The Raven but with Poe himself as the central character in a story that works in quite a few interesting references to the author's life and work.
The Promise – Another Poe adaptation, this forty-nine minute episode, inspired by The Premature Burial, follows a man who works as an undertaker who is unusually frightened of being buried alive, so much so that he has his niece agree to make sure that it never actually happens to him.
The House – This forty-six minute episode beings when a countess dies, many suspecting she was murdered. When a distant relative moves into her house years later, the truth about whether her spirit haunts the home or not comes to light.
The Transplant – This sixty-one minute episode finishes up the second series of the show with a bizarre musical story about a future wherein transplants are now the norm and anyone who says otherwise is ostracized from society.
The TV – This is the color 1974 special and it runs sixty-nine minutes. Shot in color, the story revolves around a man named Enrique who works at a bank and at a farm hoping to make enough to support his family and give them a leg up in life. The only thing he wants for himself is a new color TV but once he gets it things take a surprisingly strange and dark turn for him.
Freddy – In the first of the four part resurrection of the series from 1982 we travel with a French theater troupe that involves a strangely aggressive ventriloquist who mingles with a few other odd characters like the magician and some dancing girls that round out the company. When someone winds up murdered, things get seriously weird leading up to a fantastic finale.
The Case Of Mr. Valdemar – This sixty-six minute episode ones again adapts Poe's The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar, though this color version of the story is better fleshed out and considerably more forceful in its final half than The Pact was.
The End Began Yesterday – This sixty-five minute story takes place in and around a college campus where the brightest kid in the class runs into problems with his professor. A short time later, with the various other students enjoying the freedom that college life can offer, a murder occurs.
The Junkman - The last episode in the set is a seventy-nine minute story set in the London of the 1800s where a series of grave robberies has occurred. Here an impoverished man has to wonder if his son may be connected to the crimes. This was inspired by Poe's Bernice and it ends the collection on a high note.
As is the norm with anthology shows, some episodes hit harder than others but the ratio of good to not so good is surprisingly high with this series. There are very few episodes that don’t at least provide some good acting and strong tension, and a few of them are downright gripping. The fact that a lot of it is based on well-known material may dull the impact a little bit, but Serrador and company bring a lot of skill and creativity to the series, which winds up making it a lot of good, spooky fun to watch. The series is also rife with social commentary and allegory with different episodes providing plenty of food for thought on the consumption of television and media, the importance of accepting others as they are, consumerism, greed and the environment. It never feels especially heavy-handed, however, and anything in this collection can be just as easily enjoyed as a good horror or science fiction story as anything else.
Tales To Keep You Awake – Blu-ray Review:
The thirty-one episodes that make up the series are spread across two 50GB region free Blu-rays and presented in 480i standard definition. Taken from older tape sources, presumably the only existing elements available, the black and white episode, which are the majority of them, are a little soft and a little murky but as these episodes were shot on tape, this is probably about as good as they’re going to get. They are perfectly watchable, just limited by the source. The color episodes were shot on 16mm but transferred to tape, they look quite a bit better than the black and white ones do but are still, understandably, limited by the source material.
Audio options are offered up on the disc for each episode in Spanish language Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono track with optional subtitles in English only. There are some spots where tape damage interferes with the audio quality a bit and those same limitations with the source material mean that this isn’t ever going to sound amazing, but for the most part it’s fine. The fact that the subtitles are yellow is a nice touch, as it makes them much easier to read over the black and white episodes.
There are no extras on the first disc but on the second disc we get Tales From The Spanish Twilight Zone — The Chicho Ibáñez Serrador Story which is a half hour piece hosted by Dr. Alex Mendibil wherein we get an interesting overview of how Serrador got his start in the Spanish television industry and how he was responsible for bringing some interesting horror content to the masses in the comfort of their own living rooms. It's a well put together piece that sheds some welcome light on the man's life and career and which also contains some interesting clips from other projects that he was involved with over the years.
Also included on the disc is a collection of a half dozen episode introductions by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador that are interesting to watch, and a seven minute bit that showcases a press conference that was held to promote the episode El Televisor (The TV). Menus and episode selection are also provided on each disc.
Tales To Keep You Awake - The Final Word:
Severin Films’s Blu-ray release of Tales To Keep You Awake might not blow you away with sterling audio and video quality but it offers up a watchable presentation taken from less than ideal elements and throws in a few extras as well. The series itself is really good and absolutely recommended for fans of shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents or even Ultra Q.
Click on the images below, or right click and open in a new window, for full sized Tales To Keep You Awake Blu-ray screen caps!
