Stephen King names “the most frightening” episode of TV ever: “Never been beaten”
Whether it’s in print or on film, Stephen King has been scaring the shit out of the general public for half a century, so if he says one episode of television is the “most frightening” ever made, it carries weight.
It would be easy for the author to pat himself on the back and say it’s one of his, but it isn’t. That’s not to say he’s ever been overly modest, with King naming Storm of the Century as his favourite adaptation, which happened to be an original script he’d written himself that wasn’t based on a book.
On the other side of the coin, he’s also happy to name and shame the worst offenders to emerge from the perpetual page-to-screen pipeline. For every Shawshank Redemption, Carrie, Stand by Me, or The Green Mile, there’s a Dreamcatcher, The Dark Tower, Sleepwalkers, or the self-directed abomination Maximum Overdrive to balance the scales.
The streaming era has only increased the volume of King-penned projects, and the consistency has been about as inconsistent as it’s been in cinema. No matter how good or bad they are, though, the prolific scribe wouldn’t dare place any of the shows bearing his name on the same pedestal as his all-time favourites.
Even though King named the largely forgotten, albeit not by genre aficionados, Boris Karloff-hosted TV series Thriller as the best horror-centric show to ever air on television, he doesn’t think it contained the single scariest standalone instalment in the medium’s small-screen history.
He also named The Twilight Zone segment ‘Gamma’ as “the most terrifying 19 minutes ever put on television,” but since it was part of an anthology and not an episode unto itself, he was free to point to a short-lived drama that only lasted one season and 26 episodes and ended in 1962 as “the single most frightening story ever done on TV.”
“My own nominee for that honour would be the final episode of a little-remembered programme called Bus Stop (adapted from the William Inge play and film),” he wrote in Danse Macabre. “The series, a straight drama show, was cancelled following the furore over an episode starring then-rock star Fabian Forte as a psychopathic rapist. The episode was based on a Tom Wicker novel.”
An interesting fact, but that wasn’t the episode he was talking about. Instead, King pointed to ‘I Kiss Your Shadow’, Bus Stop‘s 26th and final chapter. Knowing that its fate had been sealed, the show “deviated wildly into the supernatural” for its grand finale, which follows a husband grieving the death of his wife in a car accident on their wedding night, only to be visited by her spirit.
According to King, ‘I Kiss Your Shadow’ has “never been beaten on TV, and rarely anywhere else, for eerie, mounting horror.” As a drama, most ardent horror fans probably haven’t even heard of Bus Stop, but if one of the genre’s most notable figures thinks it’s the scariest episode of anything that ever reached the airwaves, they’d be easily persuaded to check it out and see if it lives up to the hype.
