Tales from the darkside intro location

1980s television had some anthology series I liked that were either all devoted to horror, or occasionally had some scary episodes — series like Amazing Stories, Freddy’s Nightmares, Ray Bradbury Theater, Tales From the Crypt and, of course, Tales From the Darkside.

Tales From the Darkside was probably my favorite among these, even if the episodes themselves didn’t necessarily scare me; I often found them kind of cheesy.

But the series, created by Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero, had a wonderfully spooky ambience set up with its opening credits. Just hearing the creepy music of the intro could, and still can, give me a feeling of unease.

Eerie enough on its own, the music, composed by Donald Rubinstein, was enhanced by an ominous voiceover that I can still recite off the top of my head to this day:

“Man lives in the sunlit world of what he *believes* to be reality. But … there is — unseen by most — an underworld. A place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit — a Darkside.”

This intro is a great example of how even normally innocuous images like a forest or farmland can appear nightmarish through the right presentation of editing and sound.

Here’s a nice video that features the show’s intro, and its closing credits, which revisits the opening melody and features the voiceover dude warning us that “the Darkside is always there … waiting for us to enter. Waiting to enter us.”

Tales From the Darkside debuted with a pilot episode that aired just ahead of Halloween in 1983 — Oct. 29, 1983.

Fittingly, that tale was titled “Trick or Treat,” written by Romero and directed by actor Bob Balaban in his directorial debut. The story has the feel of those old E.C. horror comics like Tales From the Crypt that Romero and Stephen King had recaptured so wonderfully a few years earlier in the movie Creepshow (1982).

It also borrows a little from A Christmas Carol, except this story’s miser (played by Barnard Hughes) gets a far worse comeuppance on Halloween than Scrooge did on Christmas:

After being picked up for series, Tales From the Darkside began airing regularly on Sept. 30, 1984, and ran four seasons, until July 24, 1988. Along with the pilot, Romero wrote three more episodes, but did not direct any.

While the episodes were largely hit or miss, Tales From the Darkside was well-received enough on television to inspire a feature film, Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, which hit theaters in 1990, two years after the series itself ended.

That movie, featuring Debbie Harry, and some early performances from Christian Slater and Julianne Moore, was pretty good in its own right, and you can see its trailer here:

Interestingly, even given the film’s presumably larger budget than the TV series had, its opening credits still do not hit as hard as the ones heard and seen on the small screen:

So it’s the title theme to the TV series that makes it the ultimate representation of the “darkside” to me.

You can have another listen to Rubinstein’s main melody from that opening theme below, on an hourlong loop. Pleasant dreams!