Last time, I brought up this online article which I read about ten years ago, and which now looks to have vanished without a trace, decrying the 1980s Twilight Zone adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "The Burning Man" for being a pallid knock-off of the Night Gallery episode "Big Surprise". I consider "The Burning Man" to be pretty massively underrated, so naturally I couldn't let that pass without comment. Both stories certainly have a number of points in common - both are taut, tenses exercises in fairly minimalist horror, each roughly about eleven minutes long. Both involve deeply eccentric old men whose intentions, we suspect, are none too savoury for the gullible preteen children unfortunate enough to have crossed paths with them. Both also involve some form of unspeakable underground menace that's been threatening to claw its way up to the surface. But then, "The Burning Man" is no more of a recycling of "Big Surprise" than it is of "The Elevator" (or vice versa, given that Bradbury's short story came first), with which it also shares a few similar plot points (chiefly, that both come from a distinctly entomophobic vein). What "The Burning Man" is, when you strip it right down, is a variation on the old phantom hitchhiker legend, one which taps into numerous primal fears about venturing into the vast unknown, combining wary observations about nature's curiosities with shades of Biblical catastrophe in order to pit its hapless protagonists up against a particularly monstrous personification of the natural world. It's weird, it's unsettling and there's a likeable kind of elegance to its unyielding oddness. "Big Surprise" plays like one of those interactive campfire stories that went just a little too far - it feels, for better of worse, like the sick product of a diseased mind. Whose diseased mind, you ask? None other than I Am Legend author Richard Matheson, whose shorter pieces provided food for a number of horror anthologies throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Matheson wrote "Big Surprise" first as a short story in 1959, and later adapted a screenplay for Night Gallery in 1971, which was directed by Jeannot Szwarc.
Both tales, I think, are enormously underappreciated, but whereas I love "The Burning Man" with all of my heart, with "Big Surprise" it's much more of a fraught love/hate relationship. On the one hand, it would be just plain churlish to ignore just how beautifully, wonderfully executed a short-form horror "Big Surprise" is, just how ferociously it crawls under your skin and screws with your nerves. On the other hand, "Big Surprise" might just be the the most sickeningly ghoulish piece of horror television ever devised - it's mean and it's malevolent, and whenever I watch it, I inevitably end up feeling as if my personal and emotional space has been thoroughly violated. I certainly get my heebie jeebies' worth from this thing, and I do have to hate it for that.
Serling's opening narration:
"Our painting reminds us that there's a strange fascination at digging holes alongside ancient oaks. You give the average man a shovel and an "X" on a map and the fantasies come thick and fast. Pirate gold, hidden confederate treasure, and sometimes the unexpected...and sometimes the unwelcome. Hence the title: Big Surprise."
"Big Surprise" concerns a trio of schoolkids, Chris (Vincent Van Patten), Jason (Marc Vahanian) and Dan (Eric Chase) who get cajoled into digging a really deep hole by local kook Mr Hawkins (John Carradine) on the promise that if they walk ten paces and dig four feet, they'll unearth a "big surprise". Carradine is so skin-crawlingly repellent as Mr Hawkins that he makes Roberts Blossom from "The Burning Man" seem sweet and chummy, for all of his feverish rantings about human locusts and a genetic evil eating panting white dogs. He singles out one child, Chris, in particular, possibly because he recognises him as the most easily-led of the trio, or the most fearful and therefore the ripest prey for his malevolent capering. Szwarc's direction wastes no time in aligning Chris's fear and distrust of Mr Hawkins with our own; early on, there's a tracking shot revealing Chris's perspective as Mr Hawkins beckons him ever closer, followed by a number of queasy close-up shots in which you can practically feel the hot breath of this leering, whiskered creep as he bears down upon you. But what's queasier than Hawkins himself is the sensation that Chris is caught tight between two conflicting urges; the sensible urge from deep within his gut which tells him to keep his distance, and his fear of being exposed as a sissy before his peers; thus, the tracking shot plays like a particularly gut-wrenching game of chicken, testing just how close we're prepared to get to Hawkins before the tension becomes unbearable. This is something of which Hawkins is all-too aware; when Chris insists that he's not afraid of anything, Hawkins practically growls, "That's a lie!" He knows that Chris, more than anything, fears being made a fool. And this is something that he's only too eager to exploit.
Like Chris, we spend the segment caught between conflicting sensations - that is, our intuitive understanding that whatever's buried four feet below the specified location will certainly be nothing good, and our lethal curiosity to find out for sure. As we get deeper and deeper into the run-time, we know that we're marching closer toward inevitable doom and yet we keep on rolling with it. At first, Jason and Dan are reluctant to accompany Chris in his digging, particularly the yo-yo slinging Jason, who believes that Hawkins is playing a prank at their expense, but Chris convinces them that Hawkins might be sincere about sharing the location of hidden treasure. So they grab some shovels and start digging. After digging tirelessly for hours and boring out what they believe to be four feet, Jason and Dan grow weary of the endeavor and abandon Chris, taunting him for his gullibility. Chris feels humiliated, but remains too firmly committed to the task at hand to be capable of backing out now. He continues to dig, all by his lonesome, and eventually his shovel hits something. Chris considers recalling Jason and Dan, but decides that after their desertion he is not obligated to share any of the potential spoils with them. He uncovers a casket, and the lid opens up to reveal...actually, I'm not going to spell it out here. If you've read this far, then odds are that you already know the outcome or don't mind spoilers, but the fact is that mere words couldn't possibly do justice to the raw, visceral nastiness of that final twist (although the outcome is hinted at the start of the segment, when Chris insists that he wouldn't go near Mr Hawkins for a million dollars).
Back in my forum-lurking days, I came across multiple comments from viewers who were entirely unsympathetic toward Chris, with some even going to far as to express hope that he was dragged down into the casket and buried underground as comeuppance for his greediness. Good grief, people can be harsh. For one thing, Chris is only a child, and what he's doing has hurt nobody except himself (and surely if we're going to be casting morality stones we might lob them at the so-called friends who ditched Chris and left him all by himself in the woods?). Secondly, Chris is all of us. He's still caught up in that game of chicken he was pressured into at the start of the segment, and it's ultimately his determination and all-consuming inability to admit defeat and abandon an obviously self-destructive situation that drives him, not his avarice (although it's his decision not to call back his friends that proves his biggest mistake; he leaves himself alone, and therefore highly vulnerable). Chris's weaknesses are human weaknesses. Besides which, do we really want to see Chris shown up by the aloof, too-cool-for-school Jason? Naturally we don't. We're complicit in this obdurateness.
"Big Surprise" fails to impress reviewer David Juhl, who describes it as a "decent segment [with a] dumb ending", and poses the following questions of the final reveal: "Is Hawkins a ghost? An illusion? What is he? Also, Chris was the one of the three who most believed what Hawkins told him, so why punish him with such a fright?" I interpret the story differently, however. I don't believe the intention is to "punish" Chris so much as to bait him and prey on him. He goes after Chris because he sees him as the most likely to get caught up in this game of chicken. As for the actual nature of old Mr Hawkins, I don't think that's really important. He's simply an unspeakable terror that insists on getting up close and personal and staring us straight in the face, daring us to look away as his fiendish gaze transfixes us in horror. What does Mr Hawkins intend to do with Chris? Molest him? Cannibalise him? Or has this all just been some kind of elaborate, gruesomely-conceived prank? Whatever it is, we know that the final situation doesn't exactly spell benignity and that, whether literally or metaphorically, Chris has effectively been digging his own grave out there.
It's a short segment, and yet a good portion of the narrative consists of the three kids digging relentlessly and getting nowhere. Szwarc does an excellent job of sustaining tension throughout, however, with a succession of fast cuts showing the frantic shoveling and mounting dirt piles, but more hauntingly still, the subtle wind that appears to get increasingly prominent the deeper the young protagonists dig, as if the local landscape anticipates a disturbance of a cataclysmic nature. There's a strong sense that trouble is brewing, which gets especially pointed during the pivotal moment where Chris finds himself deserted and alone, and takes pause to reflect on the fruitfulness of his endeavors before returning to the task with renewed vigor. The overhead shots dwarf the solitary Chris, giving us a dizzying glimpse of just how little and vulnerable his is, as the branches of the decaying trees stretch across him like the talons of a predatory betroth waiting to swoop in for the kill.
The final image, after we're treated to our titular "big surprise", shows Chris's perspective blurring into an atmospheric shot of clouds sweeping over a sunset as the world fades into darkness. It's an intriguing case of pathetic fallacy, but it adds a doubly ominous dimension to a story that was already unbearably diabolical, as if time and space are unraveling while the entire world plunges into black. What the hell did you dig up out there, Chris? Have you doomed us all? I made a point last time about how I didn't perceive Roberts Blossom's character in "The Burning Man" as the Anti-Christ, despite his indirectly likening himself to the Devil. Mr Hawkins...well, I don't know. He's whatever the sickest and most twisted recesses of your warped imagination want him to be. Nothing good. And that's enough.
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