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Fear in the Night is reworked in a Suspense OTR Play

posted 12 years ago by grantch
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Interested in Cornell Woolrich who created to many stories and ideas which became successful movies and radio plays, I looked up Fear in the Night and when I saw it was one of DeForest Kelley's first film roles, checked it out on Netflix streaming. The plot is an adaptation of a Suspense radio play "The Singing Walls" with Preston Foster and Dane Clark. Although some details differ, the radio offering is a respectable variant of the same story. You may find it as an MP3 at archive.com.

[–] PBear_SF 12 years ago

It was also remade - by the same writer/director, Maxwell Shane (almost word-for-word, scene-for-scene identically!), nine years later, as NIGHTMARE, starring Kevin McCarthy in the DeForest Kelley role and Edward G Robinson as his brother-in-law.

I stumbled on the remake about eight years ago (on TCM, I think) and, when I finally caught this version for the first time (on Netflix) a couple of months ago, I thought at first I was losing my mind.

I knew I'd never seen this movie before, but there were scenes that I remembered down to the last camera shot -- and I kept knowing exactly what was going to happen next! After about 20 minutes, it came to me that I HAD already seen the movie -- with a different cast!