I love doing the Halloween specials. It takes me back to the days of watching my favorite sitcoms with their Halloween specials, or scooting up too close to the set for “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” Just like audiences today love a good horror movie, the audiences of OTR liked their spine tinglers. I’ve mentioned before how hard it is to find a place for Madison in some of the anthology shows. The problem always is that the lead on the episode usually is the killer or victim. And how do I resolve that with Madison? Well, like the Halloween specials of yore (or the Simpsons which I couldn’t get enough of in the early seasons), I decided to let Madison step outside of her usual self and into the world of Edgar Allen Poe.
If you’re familiar with the actual short story of “The Tell-Tale Heart” it’s, well, super short. Honestly, I realized my memory of it was based on other media doing versions of it because not a lot happens! Poe gets to the point. Nameless narrator starts off by saying he hated this old guy and decided he needed to kill him and he wasn’t sorry. Under the floorboards with you. Guilt. Freak out. Roll the credits. So I can see how the writers of the 1941 “Inner Sanctum” episode looked at it and were like, “Okay… gonna need to flesh this out a tad to make our usual 30 minute run time…”
I liked their device of the deluded deaf patient and the blind patient escaping their hospital to a violent end. Inner Sanctum made this a vehicle for Boris Karloff, who chews up the scenery with epic monologues. I always prefer Madison to have banter. We are a comedy after all. So I stretched out the Host from bookending the show/acts to being an intricate character to the plot. Because, hey, Madison is playing a role this time around, but she isn’t inherently prone to murder! She at least needs a bad influence to talk her into it. Which I imagine has been the root of many of her own poor life choices prior to zapping into OTR.
Now, in the Inner Sanctum episode, Madison’s character is returned to the hospital and Olive (Oliver in their version, naturally their lead characters were two men) is injured during the attempt on her life, but will recover. I make a joke that the sponsors wouldn’t have allowed her to be murdered for real, but I don’t know if that’s true. (I bet it is, tho!) However, they certainly made a hard left turn from Poe’s gory ending. So I added in the second cop who knows the truth, making the head constable arrogant and dismissive of him, until it’s finally revealed in a smash cut to the Host. The line “you cut off the head and the arms and the legs” was me putting Poe’s writing back into the story. And you know how Madison and Olive are staying in an abandoned mill? Well, Inner Sanctum alludes to it being a grain mill. Where the water wheel in the river would turn a large stone and crush grain so it could be used for baking. So I decided instead to make it a sawmill. I envisioned where Charles Ingles in “Little House on the Prairie” worked. Same concept. The water wheel activated a spinning saw blade so wood could be cut. So I’m pretty proud of peppering that detail in throughout the story so when the body is dismembered and the Host asks “How did you even manage that?!” Duh. The sawmill!
Inner Sanctum did several Poe stories. Why not? They were public domain. And what Hollywood actor wouldn’t love to sink their teeth into those juicy monologues? So maybe we’ll see another Poe story in a future Halloween episode. In any case, it was a ton of fun to team up with Edward October of OctoberpodAM (you might catch Chrisi on his show this October…) And yes, we have killed Sharon five times now. Which is the benefit of our show. You can die and that doesn’t mean you’re off the show! (Did you catch the Easter egg in there? When Madison is smothering Sharon, she has Deja vu. Because Madison smothered Sharon in our Inner Sanctum back in July) Thanks for listening and Happy Halloween!
