MONSTER MASHUPS #41

"Graveyard Shift," a 1973 episode of William Castle's CIRCLE OF FEAR anthology, includes five film-monsters brought to life for no explicit reason. All five were once played by former actor Fred Colby, but now his monstrous creations want his pregnant wife to choose one of them to incarnate the baby in her womb.

Like most of the show's episodes, "Shift" suffers from flaccid writing and poor motivation. Oddly, Castle himself has a brief scene in the show, playing a producer who reflects back on his great monsters, whom he calls "Wolfman," "Mummy," "Claw," "Scarface," and "Doctor Death." However, in the IMDB credits, the second and fourth monsters are replaced by "the Apeman" and "the Hunchback," and those names seems closer to describing what was put on screen here.

The weakest aspect of the script is that the story seems set up to imagine Fred as having conjured the monster-phantoms from his own psyche, perhaps because he's now a lowly security guard instead of "an actor." But the script seems to bend over backward NOT to make that connection. Was someone on the show averse to showing Fred to have a dark side to his already nothing personality?