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Canwest News Service
All is not lost for Halloween TV devotees and horror-show shut-ins hoping for that out-of-body Halloween TV experience.
In an audacious stunt reminiscent of Halloween TV’s glory years of yore, the supernatural drama Medium, starring Patricia Arquette as an idealized – and fictionalized – version of real-life psychic medium Allison DuBois, will feature a Halloween Eve episode in which Arquette will be digitally inserted into scenes from George A. Romero’s horror classic Night of the Living Dead.
The episode, Bite Me, finds Allison (Arquette) suffering vivid nightmares of being in Night of the Living Dead. When she wakes up, she finds unexplained cuts and bite marks all over her body.
“I love a good monster movie,” Arquette said in an interview. “Here, I’m in a monster show. I’m the monster, but it’s exciting.”
Medium creator Glenn Gordon Caron says he initially came up with the idea while producing Moonlighting, with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd, in the late 1980s.
Caron secured the rights to the drive-in classic Mothra vs. Godzilla at the time, and intended to insert Willis and Shepherd into the film, but never found the time or the wherewithal to pull it off.
This past summer, he landed the rights to Night of the Living Dead.
Night of the Living Dead, Romero’s 1968 black-and-white zombie film about a group of young people trying to survive the night in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse, is considered a horror classic, as well as a wry commentary on society during the Vietnam era. Critics at the time labelled it “really silly” (Vincent Canby, New York Times) and hailed its “crude realism” (Pauline Kael, The New Yorker) – an apt description for Halloween itself.
“The film provides the landscape of her dreams,” Caron explained. “We’re going to insert Patricia into the film. We have some really interesting people coming to play with us, and we like to mix things up as we go along.”
Arquette, for her part, was looking forward to her zombie experience.
“I was a teenager when I saw the movie (for the first time),” she said. “It came along at that time when you start breaking away from the establishment and your parents. It’s like you find these jewels after school, usually at a really weird time, watching this weird movie. It’s exciting for me, especially as I started out in horror films like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3.”
Ghost Whisperer, the fifth-year series featuring Jennifer Love Hewitt as communicator-with-the-dead Melinda Gordon, will also feature a Halloween episode that same night.
The episode, Head Over Heels, finds Melinda’s waking dreams haunted by the Headless Horseman from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow fame. When the original book turns up at her son’s school, she starts to fear for the boy’s safety.
And The Vampire Diaries, the surprise freshman TV drama starring Nina Dobrev, Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder in a Twilight-like love triangle between high- school teens, will feature a Halloween-themed episode, Haunted, in which the living and undead alike will don Halloween costumes and explore a haunted house, only to have events take a terrifying turn.
While children of the night will have a handful of TV dramas to mark the occasion in the days leading up to All Hallows’ Eve, there won’t be many laughs.
In a sign that TV Halloween is not the event it used to be, Saturday Night Live will be a rerun that night.
Halloween worshippers hoping for an SNL sketch to rival last year’s to-die- for “Vincent Price’s Halloween Special,” featuring guest host Jon Hamm as the ghost of James Mason, will just have to settle for a rerun of Lady Gaga’s admittedly spooky medley of Bad Romance, LoveGame and Poker Face, from SNL’s Oct. 3 show.
It’s a long cry from as recently as 2006, when then Saturday Night Live guest host Hugh Laurie and musical guest Beck fronted a show that featured the sketch “The Curse of Frankenstein,” with Bill Hader as the monster-of-legend facing down a mob led by a torch-bearing, God-fearing Laurie.
Then there was 2004, when host Kate Winslet and musical guest Eminem – holy smoke! – fronted a show that featured “Mrs. Dr. Frankenstein,” with Winslet as feminist-minded mad scientist Dr. Colleen Frankenstein, with Chris Parnell as a drooling, hunchbacked Igor.
The Saturday Night Live fan has to go all the way back to 1992 for a Halloween-night show that was actually live. That show was hosted by Catherine O’Hara, and featured musical guest 10,000 Maniacs. Sketches that year included “Richmeister Halloween” and “After the Halloween Party” while 10,000 Maniacs performed a song called, aptly enough, Candy Everybody Wants.
Saturday Night Live isn’t alone in cutting back on Halloween cheer.
Annual Halloween-themed sitcoms, advertised early and often during the golden age of TV comedy, would try to one-up each other with wacky costumes, over-the-top guest stars and out-there Halloween tales.
Growing Pains, Home Improvement, The Golden Girls and Roseanne were just a few that treated Halloween as an annual event.
Roseanne in particular would try to top the previous season’s Halloween episode each time out, culminating with 1996’s “Satan, Darling,” featuring appearances by Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley – the AbFab duo – and Sandra Bernhard, Arianna Huffington and Marlo Thomas.
Friends featured a much-beloved 2001 episode, The One with the Halloween Party, in which Monica and Chandler threw a costume party where Monica and Phoebe squared off as Catwoman and Supergirl, and guest star Sean Penn tried to kiss Phoebe, mistaking her for her twin sister Ursula.
Will & Grace famously featured a Halloween episode in 2002, It’s the Gay Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, in which Grace was hit in the stomach with a pumpkin after taking a day off work to go on a pumpkin-picking bike ride in the Catskill Mountains with her then-beau Leo, played by guest star Harry Connick Jr.
Economic cutbacks and a post-Seinfeld chill in the sitcom form in general have caused most TV comedies to dial back so-called big-event episodes in recent seasons. Even ratings-chart toppers like The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men – two sitcoms that, because of their themes, fans would expect to produce larger-than-life Halloween episodes – are airing repeats during Halloween week this year.
The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror is virtually alone in clinging to Halloween tradition, though this year, because of the baseball playoffs, the annual Halloween celebration aired two weeks early.
This season, Halloween TV is no laughing matter. It’s a year for vampires, zombies and headless horsemen.
Medium’s Halloween homage to Night of the Living Dead airs Friday, Oct. 30 on CTV and CBS at 9 ET/PT. Ghost Whisperer airs Friday at 8 ET/PT, also on CTV and CBS. The Vampire Diaries airs Thursday, Oct. 29, on CTV at 7 ET/PT and The CW at 8 ET/PT.
astrachan@canwest.com
blog: www.canada.com/tvguy
