Lights Out (radio show)

[1] In the fall of 1933, NBC writer Wyllis Cooper conceived the idea of "a midnight mystery serial to catch the attention of the listeners at the witching hour.

In January 1935, the show was discontinued in order to ease Cooper's workload (he was then writing scripts for the network's prestigious Immortal Dramas program), but was brought back by huge popular demand a few weeks later.

A character might be buried, eaten, or skinned alive, vaporized in a ladle of white-hot steel, absorbed by a giant slurping amoeba, have his arm torn off by a robot, or forced to endure torture, beating or decapitation—always with the appropriate blood-curdling acting and sound effects.

The surviving recordings reveal that Cooper was experimenting with both stream of consciousness and first-person narration a few years before these techniques were popularized in American radio drama by, among others, Arch Oboler and Orson Welles.

When that doesn't work, they put him in a jail cell haunted by the ghost of a previous occupant, a smooth gangster named Skeeter Dempsey who describes his own execution and discusses the afterlife knowledgeably.

Another story, originally broadcast in March 1935 as "After Five O'Clock" and revived in 1945 as "Man in the Middle," allows us to follow the thoughts of a businessman as he spends a day at the office cheating on his wife with his secretary.

A version of Oboler's "Prelude to Murder" starring Peter Lorre and Olivia de Havilland was scheduled to air on a November 1936 Vallee broadcast.

Other Lights Out plays that turned up on various late 1930s variety programs included "Danse Macabre" (with Boris Karloff), "Alter Ego" (with Bette Davis) and "The Harp."

Oboler met the demand by adopting an unusual scripting procedure: He would lie in bed at night, smoke cigarettes, and improvise into a Dictaphone, acting out every line of the play.

Despite acclaim for Oboler's dramas, NBC announced it was canceling the series in the summer of 1937—"just to see whether listeners are still faithful to it," according to one press report but also, it seems, to allow the hard-working author a vacation.

In the spring of 1938, the series earned a good deal of publicity for its fourth anniversary as a half-hour show when actor Boris Karloff, the star of many a Hollywood horror film, traveled to Chicago to appear in five consecutive episodes.

Directing and hosting the 1942–43 broadcasts, mostly from New York and Hollywood, Oboler not only reused scripts from his 1936–38 run but also revived some of the more fantasy-oriented plays from his other, more recent anthology series.

It features the simple but effective "thump-thump" of an ever-growing, ever-beating chicken heart which, thanks to a scientific experiment gone wrong, threatens to engulf the entire world.

Part of the episode's notoriety stems from a popular standup routine by comedian Bill Cosby (on his 1966 album Wonderfulness), an account of his staying up late as a child to listen to scary radio shows against his parents' wishes and being terrified by the chicken heart.

After the 1942–43 Lights Out, Oboler continued to work in radio (Everything for the Boys and revivals of Arch Oboler's Plays) and pursued a second career in filmmaking, first in the Hollywood mainstream and then as an independent producer, writing and directing a number of offbeat, low-budget films, including Five, about survivors of a nuclear war, The Twonky, a satire of television, and the 3-D film Bwana Devil, which made a huge profit on a small investment.

He dabbled in live television (a six-episode 1949 anthology series, Arch Oboler Comedy Theater), playwriting (Night of the Auk), and fiction (House on Fire).

(Capitol T/ST-1763), which recreated abbreviated versions of his Lights Out thrillers, including "Chicken Heart" and "The Dark," about a mysterious creeping mist that turns people inside-out.

These included a bloodless ghost story about a man who accidentally condemns his dead wife to haunt a nearby cemetery and "The Rocket Ship", science fiction involving interstellar travel.

In fact, a review in Variety complained that the premiere episode, "The Seven Plovers", was "a little too serious in content for a thriller" since it included "religious background, philosophical discussion and dream diagnosis ..."[9] A third series of eight vintage Cooper scripts was scheduled to run in the summer of 1947 as well.

Broadcast from Hollywood over ABC Radio, it starred Boris Karloff and was sponsored by Eversharp, whose company president canceled the series after the third episode, apparently unhappy with the gruesome subject matter.

[10] From 1936 to 1939, Cooper pursued a screenwriting career in Hollywood (his major credits are the screenplay for Universal's 1939 Son of Frankenstein and contributions to the Mr. Moto mystery series starring Peter Lorre) but continued to work in radio, advertising and, later, television.

By 1940, he had changed the spelling of his name from "Willis" to "Wyllis" (to satisfy "his wife's numerological inclinations")[11] and lived mainly in the New York City area where he worked on a number of radio programs, the most important of which was probably Edward M. Kirby's popular and acclaimed government propaganda series, The Army Hour, which Cooper wrote, produced and directed for its first year.

NBC asked Cooper to write the script for the premiere, "First Person Singular", which is told entirely from the point of view of an unseen murderer who kills his obnoxious wife and winds up being executed.

[12] Critical response was mixed but the program was successful for several seasons (sometimes appearing in the weekly lists of the ten most watched network shows) until competition from the massively popular sitcom I Love Lucy on CBS helped to kill it off.

Among the young actors employed was Leslie Nielsen, who appeared in several episodes including "The Lost Will of Dr. Rant," based on "The Tractate Middoth", an M. R. James story.

Other notable guest stars included Anne Bancroft, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb, Anthony Quinn, Jessica Tandy, Veronica Lake, John Forsythe, Boris Karloff, Beatrice Straight, Eli Wallach, Vincent Price, Jane Wyatt, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein and Jack Palance.