Back in 1968, the BBC aired a horror anthology series called Late Night Horror. It ran for just six episodes. Then it was canceled, most of its tapes were destroyed, and it nearly vanished from history altogether.
Only two episodes have ever been found. And the mystery of what happened to the rest has turned this forgotten little show into something of a legend.
A Show Built to Frighten
Late Night Horror was produced by Harry Moore, who made his intentions very clear from the start. Before filming began, he sent his staff a memo with a message that left nothing to the imagination: “We must do everything we can from the very beginning to stimulate suspense, tension, atmosphere, potential horror and HORROR! If there is blood, let’s see the blood.”
The show brought in several directors, including Paddy Russell, the first female floor manager ever hired by the BBC. When someone suggested she couldn’t direct “like a man,” she responded that she had no desire to. She would run it like herself.
The show premiered that same year, received mixed reviews, and was quickly canceled. Dick Fiddy, a curator at the British Film Institute, told Atlas Obscura that the BBC simply didn’t want to continue in that direction. “It was quite shocking,” he said.
The Radio Times published a letter from a viewer who said they were horrified and “at a loss to understand the attitude of those responsible.” The same publication reported that BBC technicians were buckling at the knees during filming, with some running outside to be sick. It’s possible those accounts were at least partly the work of producer Moore, who had a flair for the dramatic. Either way, the show was finished.
Lost for Decades
Like many BBC programs from that era, nearly all of the Late Night Horror tapes were wiped and destroyed. The BBC, funded largely by taxpayers and working under tight budget limits, found maintaining old tapes too costly. It wasn’t unusual; an enormous amount of British television from the 1950s through the 1970s was lost the same way.
A vintage TV collector named Chris Perry was one of the few people still thinking about the show. In 1985, he nearly got his hands on a tape of one episode, titled “The Corpse Can’t Play” only to have the anonymous seller disappear without a trace.
The show got a second look in 2007, when a BBC News program reported it had been canceled for being “too scary.” But it wasn’t until 2016 that Perry finally tracked down a copy of that same episode on eBay. In 2017, Late Night Horror screened in front of a live audience for the first time in 50 years.
“The Corpse Can’t Play” tells the story of a boy at a birthday party who is bullied about his father’s death, until the lights go out. Viewers who saw it at the 2017 screening generally agreed that while it doesn’t match today’s horror in sheer fright, it’s easy to see how it would have rattled audiences in the ’60s.
A Second Episode Surfaces
Then in 2026, a second episode turned up. “No Such Thing as a Vampire” (based on a story by Richard Matheson and featuring a sharp-toothed Transylvanian man) was discovered in a storage area at The Regent, a 1930s-era cinema in Dorset, England. It was screened publicly in September of that year.
The other four episodes are still missing. We know their names and plots, though. “William and Mary” is an adaptation of a Roald Dahl story about a brain kept alive in a jar. “The Triumph of Death,” based on an H. Russell Wakefield ghost story, takes place in a haunted mansion. “The Bells of Hell” adapts a Robert Aickman story called “Ringing the Changes.” And “The Kiss of Blood” is drawn from a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tale centered on violent revenge.
Whether those tapes are still out there somewhere, tucked in a storage room or sitting in an attic, nobody knows. What is certain is that the disappearance of Late Night Horror has only added to its mystique, giving a show most people never saw a strange kind of immortality all its own.
