Monsters

Monsters was a Horror anthology TV show that aired on TV in 1988 and lasted for 3 full seasons. It was basically a continuation of Tales From The Darkside.

The Monsters TV series had a very low budget and some of the episodes were hit and miss. This is a list of the scariest episodes of the series.

The Match Game

A group of teenagers decide to hang out in a spooky old Victorian mansion. They play a scary story-telling game they call the match game. “The first guy lights a match. He starts telling a story, and when the match burns down, he stops. Then the next person in line continues the story from where he left off.” The teenagers tell a story about the previous owner of the house, a Mr Herbert Wavely. Apparently, Herbert was disfigured and drowned himself in the nearby pond. Of course, after they tell the story, the ghost of Herbert rises from the dead and begins stalking and killing the terrified teens. In one shocking and gruesome scene, old Herbert grabs one of the girls by the head and crushes her skull with his bare hands.

The Moving Finger

A man hears a strange sound one night and follows it to find a finger coming out of his drain. He attempts to get rid of the mysterious finger in a number of ways, but all of them fail. Eventually, he pours industrial strength dissolving solution down the drain. After a billow of green smoke the finger raises out of the drain and starts creeping across the floor. It grabs his leg and tries to pull him into the sink. He takes a saw into the bathroom and tries to cut it up. Later, a female police officer finds the man huddled in a corner of the bathroom, covered in blood and mumbling gibberish. She hears a loud thump coming from under the toilet seat. When she lifts it up, a hand comes out. It is missing a finger. Based on a story by Stephen King.

Holly’s House

A woman works as a puppeteer on a popular children’s TV show called “Holly’s House”. She controls a life-size doll named Holly using a high-tech glove. The doll is an animatronic robot, but something is seriously wrong. It seems like the doll has a mind of its own, saying horrible things on camera. When the woman decides that she wants to leave the show, Holly becomes homicidal. In a dimly-lit storage room, Holly suddenly sits up and begins speaking in a creepy little girl’s voice. Then she grabs a scissors and stabs a crew member to death. The woman finds the corpse of her fiance stuffed in a broom cupboard and goes nuts, smashing the doll’s face open. In the end, she loses her mind and winds up getting locked up in an insane asylum where she just keeps singing the theme song to “Holly’s House” over and over again.

The Waiting Game

Two men are trapped in a nuclear bunker after a nuclear war has destroyed humanity. They think they are the only survivors, but they hear a female voice over the radio, telling them that other people have survived too. One of the men wants to go outside, but the other is too scared. One man comes out of the bunker and meets the woman who was talking on the radio. She is a vampire and attacks him. The other man is left waiting inside the bunker as the vampires outside try to work out the security code on the door.

Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites

A boy named Kevin is obsessed with the barber’s shop across the street from his house. He believes the barbers who own it are vampires. He tells his friend, Tommy, that he has been watching the place closely and customers often go in with large empty bottles and come out with small bottles filled with a red liquid that looks like blood. The boys break into the barber’s shop during the night to gather evidence, but they are caught snooping around by the two elderly barbers. Kevin accuses the men of being vampires, but they prove him wrong by showing him that they are carrying crucifixes and can see their reflections in the mirror. Finally, the barbers reveal that they are keeping a giant leech-like creature in the basement. They cut the boy’s necks and drain their blood to feed to the giant leech. Based on a short story by Dan Simmons and starring Matt LeBlanc and Will Wheaton.