Escape!
1947-1954
Known Episodes: 250 (250 Circulating per OTRR)
Tired of the everyday grind? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all? We offer you… Escape!
A high-quality, high production series of High Adventure! Their stories included some great science fiction and some of the most memorable thrillers, like Three Skeleton Key and Bradbury’s Zero Hour.
Sources:
Escape & Suspense (.com)
Wikipedia
OTRR
Abominable Snowman, The
A Himalayan expedition sets out to capture one of the cannibal Yeti seen at 16,000 feet. Its attack cry is memorable. No one lives to describe it.
Adaptive Ultimate, The
A scientist discovers a serum that allows a person to heal instantly from anything. The Tuberculosis patient they test it on soon becomes the most powerful and dangerous woman in the world! She commits murder, and when the doctor tries to kill her he finds her nearly invincible. How will they defeat her?
Ancient Sorceries
A man is drawn to a small English village though he is warned against visiting. Everyone there seems to know him, but he doesn’t remember being there before. He remembers his escape soon enough, when confronted with great were-cats! Will he escape again? Will he want to?
Bloodbath
(Vincent Price) Five partners discover a trillion dollar uranium deposit in the jungle, but try to knock off the competition on the way home. Adventure, no supernatural. Only one guy left at the end; he offers the listener a uranium mine in South America. Want it?
Casting the Runes
A book critic is cursed by a sorcerer after giving a bad review. He returns the runes and thus the sorcerer dies. [Adapted from M.R. James, Also the movie: Curse of the Demon]
Country of the Blind
Lost in the mountains, a man finds an Eden populated with blind people. Escaping a ritual blinding, he ends up blind from the snow glare!
Dead of Night, The
A dummy grows tired of is ventriloquist, and when a renowned rival ventriloquist visits town, it falls in love with the competition’s wife. The performer has a breakdown, arguing with his partner. When the dummy is smashed, he loses himself.
Drury’s Bones
(Boris Karloff) An amnesia victim lands a job at Scotland Yard and soon investigates a murder scene… at his own house! Happy ending! He’s really a doctor, and the bones were only his lab display. (Gag!)
Earth Abides
(Two Parts) More similar to I am Legend or Omega Man, with no zombies, a virus leaves only a few human survivors. Man meets woman and a few stragglers join them to form a community. A man is murdered by a newcomer. Will he face the death sentence? [Adapted from George Stewart]
Evening Primrose
People secretly living in a department store warn of The Dark Men. The Dark Men turn them into dummies. [Adapted from John Collier]
Eye of Evil, The
Steven Loring travels to Burma to find a lost friend, Campbell. In Mandalay, he is lured by a femme-fatale who would have killed him if the faithful servant of Campbell hadn’t saved him. When Steven arrives at the jungle temple, people in the village shun him, believing that he, like his colleague, has the evil eye. Again, he is almost seduced to his doom. Mungba, his guide, saves him. When Mungba is shot with a poison blowgun dart, Loring storms into the temple and finds his friend Campbell emotionally enslaved by the Temple Priestess of Chaena! The horror. Similar to the episode “The Power of Hammer” in that the protagonist’s goal has been possessed by “a feeling, a mystic something that has been known to take hold of men.” but adds a poetic theme implying his eye is evil because it can see no beauty, and thus must see only evil. When an eye is filled with evil alone, it must no longer see. Campbell is blind. Like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the ending is vague. Racism is rampant in this episode.
Green Splotches
(William Conrad, Paul Frees) A team is ambushed out in the rocky Andes. They hit the hidden assassin, but he leaves behind a trail of green splotches. A geologist is taken for a ride by a local who pays for his pompous book with a handful of gold… that’s been irradiated! Turns out he’s an alien, and the splotches were the chlorophyll he has for blood, because he’s a plant! Their saucer ships run on radium. They are on Earth to steal specimens for their zoo! Do they even have any weaknesses? [Adapted from T.S. Stribling, 1920]
How Love Came to Professor Gildea
A twist on LeFanu’s Green Tea, an invisible, slobbering thing expresses love for an introverted professor. He thinks he can escape by rejecting it, but the trans-dimensional thing can kiss him from the inside!
I Saw Myself Running
A woman tormented by nightmares discovers she has an alter ego within her lucid dreams and learns she can communicate with her. Predictable, but fun. She would do anything to escape her world of horror.
Incident at Quito
A South American explorer acquires ten perfectly shrunken heads for his museum, bankrolled by his wife. But the Head Man will only trade for one thing… her head! Once happily remarried, the anthropologist is sent back to the area. His new wife picks up an unusual gift for him at a local shop. (Ha ha ha!) He takes it in stride. Then shoots her.
Jimmy Goggles the God
A sailor in a diving suit walks his way up from the depths after he sees his crew sink past him, dead. They failed to retrieve a chest of gold… but the local natives revere him as a god! When a British explorer threatens to expose him, the sailor makes a thoughtful trade with a sleazy translator. [Adapted from H.G. Wells. The Sea God (1930) is also loosely based on this story.]
Leiningen And The Ants
Its man vs. nature when a tough-as-nails plantation owner faces a swarm of deadly jungle ants. He commands the respect of his men who volunteer to fight. The ants pass the huge pipes of running water and are almost past the river of petrol when Leiningen decides to tape up his sleeves, put on goggles and a mask… and run for a mile through the black mass of venomous bugs to flood the plantation!
Log of the Evening Star, The
When a ship’s captain dies, the first mate is promoted and marries his former captain’s wife! The ghost of Capt. Dayrell appears and pushes her overboard. Then it opens fire and shoots most of the crew. Guilt makes people do funny things. Was it possession or madness? No one survives (not even the ship’s cat).
Loup Garou, The
Bayou folk believe a newly arrived stranger is a Loup Garou, a werewolf, but the only real evil spirit is Guy, who riled up the angry mob. (Script was reused with better sound quality for Romance in 1956)
North of Polaris
Interplanetary explorers discover a world destroyed by nuclear war. Then the army of giant rats appears.
Papa Benjamin
A band leader uses a voodoo chant in his act. He is cursed for his brevity, and even killing the houngan doesn’t end the curse. [Adapted for Karloff’s TV series Thriller.]
Pass to Berlin
Just after the war, a soldier stationed in Germany and on leave kills a woman. At a psychic show, the mentalist detects a murderer in the audience! When her husband, The Great Stanley craftily tries to blackmail the killer, he is murdered. The blind psychic Mona won’t let him off easy! [*The script was done earlier as Leona’s Room with Vincent Price for the Philip Morris Playhouse.]
Power of Hammer, The
Similar to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. King Hammer gets shot.
Runing Man, The
An evil woman claims a man for her own on a plantation in Honduras. If Owen can only stop gambling, he can have Betty, the woman he truly loves. But when the Voodoo witch woman Selena casts a spell so that he can never lose a game, what’s a guy to do? In the end, he ends up killing a man… who is knitting him socks.
Scarlet Plague
A couple escape from a fast-kiling epidemic by hiding on the top floors of a high-rise. The only two left alive… can they repopulate the Earth? Nope. Her skin turns red. Like a zombie apocalypse, only they all stay dead. [Adapted from Jack London] (Similar to Earth Abides)
Shipment of Mute Fate
A bushmaster is loose on a cruise ship! Don’t worry, the cat makes it to the end.
Silent Horror, The (1951)
This one has everything! A pirate, a cheating wife, a tribe in the jungle where the jilted man runs off to hide, a jealous and threatening Big Man who covets a watch wound nervously three times a day… because if it stops and the sun that the tribe believes is controlled by it still comes up, he’ll die! One night, during a malaria fever, silence comes. No ticking. He runs from the tribe who discovers he is a charlatan, he runs listening to the cries of the native woman he loves. She is killed. (But then they tacked on a happy ending.)
Study in Wax, A
(William Conrad) The title refers to “wax” as in vinyl records. Two men on a geodetic survey where it’s forty below zero start to get cabin fever. When they open their Christmas presents, it’s a phonograph and two terribly grating records. The music drives one so crazy they fight… and one ends up lost in the snow without gear! The ice cracks! Will his friend forgive him and save him, or is it already too late?
Taboo
Vacationers take on a werewolf that’s been picking off villagers. A rumor begins that Kira’s Slavic blood may be responsible What’s the deal with the game warden’s “slightly moronic” son delivering “fresh venison”? Is it really lycanthrope? [Adapted from Geoffrey Household]
Three Skeleton Key
An abandoned ship overrun by thousands of ravenous rats makes landfall. Vincent Price performed it in 1950 for Escape, and it was also done in 1956 and 1958 for Suspense. Best episode ever. [Adapted from George Toudouze]
Vanishing Lady, The
In this classic urban legend, an English woman and her mother travel to the Paris World‘s Fair, the Great Exposition of 1889. When the mother falls ill, the woman is sent for medicine. But it seems there is a conspiracy to make her late! When she returns, her mother has disappeared without a trace. The hotel manager has no recollection of her traveling companion, and the police are useless. Is it a cover up? Gaslit beyond measure, the woman slowly becomes unhinged.
The tale is covered by Snopes as “The Vanishing Hotel Room.” The story first appeared in the pages of the Detroit Free Press in 1889 and reappeared in the London Daily Mail in 1911. It was adapted by Escape in 1948 and 1950 and by Suspense in 1957, their renditions based on Alexander Woollcott ‘s adaptation “While Rome Burns” (1934).
Novelizations:
The End of Her Honeymoon by Marie Belloc Lownde (1913)
She Who Was Elenor Cass by Lawrence Rising (1920)
The Vanishing Of Mrs. Fraser by Basil Thomson (1925)
The Torrent Of Spring by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White (1936)
Film:
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The Midnight Warning (1932)
So Long At The Fair (1950)
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Into Thin Air” (1955)
Bunny Lake is Missing (1957)
Frantic (1988)
Flightplan (2005)
Sources:
Escape & Suspense .com
“Fright Plan” The Village Voice, October 25, 2005 by Devin McKinney
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Zero Hour
Neighborhood children have a new game called “Invasion” that is sweeping the nation… They pretend to assist aliens in conquering the world! Don’t try to hide in the attic. [Adapted from Ray Bradbury, Also by: Suspense and Dimension X]