I remember seeing Thriller back in the mid-1970's when I was about ten. I found it the most terrifying TV series I have seen before or since! It had a memorable creepy theme tune accompanied by fish-eye lens shots of the locations used in that week's story, with a blood red surround. You never knew what to expect from an episode, some being supernatural, others being real world whodunits or Hitchcock style dramas. Some of the mysteries are very intriguing, and the direction is always good. Thriller can be criticised as being of its time in some negative ways, such as being slow moving, having a lot of stock characters, being predictable, and having plot holes. Also, the great clunking fist of Lord Grade appears frequently in the form of many characters being irrelevantly American to please ABC, who reportedly paid $100,000 per episode! But when you look at almost any good TV series many years later you see these sort of faults, and Thriller is inventive, frightening and enjoyable enough to brush its bad points aside. A few years after its first showing, the series was broken up into stand alone TV films with rubbish music/credits replacing the classic theme with the fish-eye lens shots. This made the episodes easier to repeat, as they were no longer officially a series, but it meant subsequent generations of viewers have been less aware of this fine series, and it would have been forgotten were it not for online fan-sites creating demand for the superb 16 disc boxed DVD set of all 43 episodes.
Review of Thriller
