Radio Recap: Creeps by Night

Creeps by Night was a very short-lived old-time radio horror series, lasting just February 15-August 15, 1944 on the Blue network. It was apparently produced by Robert Maxwell and directed by Dave Drummond. Alonzo Dean Cole (the Witch's Tale) was one of the contributing writers. Boris Karloff was the series' star and apparently also served as the host of the series (some of my sources claimed Bela Lugosi was the original host but apparently that was just scuttlebutt); after Karloff had to leave the show, the host became the anonymous "Doctor X."

(I don't think there's any connection between the series and the hardcover anthology Dashiell Hammett edited, but they both came out in 1944, so I'm using the book cover for this post; it's a swell anthology, check it out!)

The series' short length of just 25 episodes is further diminished in that only 7 episodes are known to exist - and even then, several of them are truncated versions from the Armed Forces' Mystery Playhouse.

Since we have only 7 episodes to hear, I might as well summarize their plots:

• "Those Who Walk in Darkness" (April 25, 1944) starring Boris Karloff as an eye doctor operating on the husband of the woman he's had an affair with.
• "The Final Reckoning" (May 2, 1944) starring Boris Karloff as a man who gets out of prison and seeks revenge on his former partner-in-crime by scaring him to death.
• "The Hunt" (May 9, 1944) starring Boris Karloff as a farmer whose property is being stalked by a werewolf.
• "The Walking Dead" (May 16, 1944) On a plantation in Haiti, zombies rise to assault the living.
• "The Strange Burial of Alexander Jordan" (May 23, 1944) Edmund Gwenn stars as a man who is afraid of being buried alive.
• "The Three Sisters" (June 20, 1944) as one woman lies dying, her two sisters hold a vigil, expecting their dead mother to come and claim her.
• "The Six Who Would Not Die" (July 11, 1944) a pearl diver sends six men to their deaths in the ocean but they don't stay dead.

Of these, naturally the Karloff episodes are of most interest to horror buffs; "the Final Reckoning" probably has the best audio; "the Hunt" has somewhat patchy audio although the story is good; but I think the best of Karloff's is "Those Who Walk in Darkness."

As a whole, I think Creeps by Night is comparable to Inner Sanctum Mysteries; there's some decent chills and good performances. Who knows, we might yet unearth more lost episodes some day - they'd be most welcome.

A fan has a playlist of Creeps by Night here on the Internet Archive.