"The Howling Man", Poll and discussion thread

A man (H. M. Wynant) tells a story about a prisoner in a monastery. With John Carradine.
Originally aired November 4, 1960.

Full video of the episode on CBS.com
List of musical cues

This is the preferred thread for any and all of your "The Howling Man" posts--facts, opinions, questions, speculations, and whatever else you can think of.* You can also give your opinion of the episode on a 1 to 10 scale, in the poll shown above.

Let the discussion begin!

*More specific instructions and suggestions about posting questions/comments related to this episode are located here.

Not quite in my Top 10, but still a 10 for me. I hope we still have some Howling Man Haters among us. Those arguments were more fun than not.

A theory about "The Howling Man," submitted for your consideration: Could this be an allegory about the warring good and bad elements in each of us? If you prefer Freudian terms, you can see David Ellington as representing the ego, the Devil as the id, and Brother Jerome as the superego. Also notice that contained in the letters of the name "David Ellington" are the letters of the words "devil" and "god." (Thanks to TT for introducing me to the first fact, even though I don't think he buys my theory.)

Even without the facts about the name, which may or may not be coincidental, I think you can make a good case for this interpretation in general. Even if Beaumont didn't consciously intend this meaning, I still find it an interesting way of looking at the episode.

I HATE this one! It's awful!

The brothers look like extras from The Ten Commandments, and their hair and beards look like dyed cotton candy that's been glued on them.

And the ending is WAY too predictable, you just KNOW what Ellington's housekeeper is going to do.

Well since Brother Jerome (Carradine) played Aaron in the Ten Commandments that must be why Jayo!

I, on the other hand, love it. Always in my Top 10. Here's another one that could use a sequel, "Housekeeper goes on lifelong search to recapture the devil." What an idiot she was.

Love the line "That is no man. It's the devil himself!" Carradine has a voice on him.



Leen

I love this episode.
First saw it as a child and it scared the sh$t out of me!
This episode has some wonderful horror elements in it....will always love this episode.

Well since Brother Jerome (Carradine) played Aaron in the Ten Commandments that must be why Jayo!



Leen

Really? I had no idea. Thanks for the info!

I still hate the episode, though.

Well since Brother Jerome (Carradine) played Aaron in the Ten Commandments that must be why Jayo!



Leen

Really? I had no idea. Thanks for the info!

I still hate the episode, though.

Darn! Well, ya can't blame a gal for trying!

Enjoyable episode. I like the unstable camera angles - helps you feel the main character's confusion. Of course you knew the housekeeper would let the devil loose. The writers were trying to say the perpetuation of evil is inevitable.
I did have trouble, though, with his trusting this critical quarry to her when she was obviously simple minded.

http://www.scifi.com/freezone/twizone/images/howling.jpg

I like this one a lot...love the cinematography. I recently read the original story by Charles Beaumont and I could imagine the episode scene by scene. Different ending, but still 'devilishly' good. Ellington's narration creates a chilling mood.

http://leapinbass.com/zone/picture_pages/t...2/tz041-032.jpg

***SPOILERS***



Better late than never . . . I disagree, I don't think she was an idiot at all. Ellington was the idiot for expecting her to believe him, which she had no reason to do as far as I can see. One could say that she should have known something was going on when he couldn't kick the door down, but he could have been tied up or something for all she knew.

Now in Ellington's case, at least he could have seen that the prisoner should have been able to pull up the Staff of Truth by himself. He may not have made an idiotic decision back then, but he wasn't as smart as he should have been. I'm sure I would have made the same mistake myself. Put together an incredible story to start with, plus an entirely sympathetic act by the prisoner, plus Brother Jerome's seeming like the textbook religious fanatic, and Ellington certainly had more than enough reason to let the prisoner go. By this time, you can hardly blame him for having his mind made up to let him go. Then life threw him a detail at the last minute that undermined everything, and due to a combination of fear and inflexibility, he couldn't adjust to it. A very human mistake that just so happened to be utterly disastrous.

I rewatched this episode last night. Like most of my other 10s, it has background music that I enjoy a lot and that seems to fit the episode very well. Great camera angles, as Crown said, and John Carradine is just fantastic.

El sucko. 1.

El gemmo. 9

BEST.
EPISODE.
EVER.

Great episode. One of my favorites.
BUT?
That's not all. I've decided to make myself useful and throw my hat into our little thematic discussion. Here goes:
A strange man makes an appeal to David Ellington from a prison cell. Ellington is reluctant to believe the stories told to him by either the prisoner or the religious order that imprisoned him, as both are strangers in the strongest sense of the word. However, the prisoner eventually wins the battle for Ellington's trust by painting himself as a helpless victim of madmen, and also because Ellington (like all men) are reluctant to believe that they have come face to face with evil. For this reason Ellington gives no thought to the Staff of Truth being the man's only barrier to freedom. For this reason Ellington is able to look the devil in the eye and not recognize him.
And it is for this very reason that Germany was able to look a prisoner named Adolph Hitler in the eye and not recognize him as the hate-filled, evil man he was. Hitler made an appeal from behind a prison cell in the form of a book which portrayed him as a helpless victim struggling for justice (Mein Kampf or My Struggle). Because he portrayed himself as a victim and because all men are reluctant to believe that they have come face to face with evil, the German people gave him the power he needed to manufacture his New World Order.
This is "man's weakness, and the devil's strength". And this episode is Beaumont's warning to all of us.

That's a very interesting analogy, Ryan, in light of the following excerpt from the end of Beaumont's original short story, as told in the first person by Ellington:

"When the pictures of the carpenter from Braunau-am-Inn began to appear in all the papers, I grew uneasy; for I felt I'd seen this man before. When the carpenter invaded Poland, I was sure."

This might be the one episode that has grown a lot on me over the years. Time was, I'd've given it a 6 or 7, but to me it's a solid 9.

The transformation scene w/ the devil is pretty cool, and I love any kind of storm scene at night with a spooky story unfolding. Really sets the mood...

Then you must like "Night Call", another of my favorites with a storm scene to open the episode.

Hey Crown,

It was a dark and stormy night....

Leen

Ohhhhhhh, yeahhhhh....funny thing, though it wasn't really a dark and stormy night, doesn't Mirror Image have that same kind of feel to it even though there wasn't really a storm going on at the time? For as much as I love that episode, I think I might even love it more if there WERE a storm going...as for other episodes, not even a storm could save the one where Inger Stevens is a ro-bit...

Thanks for the striking picture, Leen. Made me sit bolt upright.

Aha!

i gave it an 8.
i felt that this was more the the evil in one's self that was held captive. at war with the good and bad in one's own mind. with the stronger carnal part of the human mind gaining control.
john carradine showed here just why he is one of the best of all time.

loved the part at the end where the guy said that he could see it but didn't recognize it. sounds like so much of the christian world of today. they see what is presented and called christian when it is a bunch of new philosphies and teachings from outside of the bible.

What I didn't like was that it's so melodramatic like one of the early "talkies". And, I hate the voice and acting of Wynant.
Other than that, I like it.
When I 1st saw it, I didn't like it because I thought it was just too dark - but now I like it because of the story and the message.

Obviously, the devil is not held prisoner right now.

You would think that this would be the perfect episode to air before halloween - but they showed it a week later.

i hated the way it started with the guy talking to the camera. one thing i first saw that gave it away was when he first found the man behind the door. the man reached his entire arm out to him. then when the man told him to remove the wooden bar from the door, it was a dead giveaway. if all that was that was holding him and he could put his whole arm out the door, he could've freed himself at any time. but he needed someone else to free him. that's just like in the book of genesis. satan could have done whatever he wanted in eden, if he could have done it. but he needed one of us to disobey to invite him to wreak his havok. he couldn't just do it on his own. in eden he had eve. in this monestary, he had ellington. and then the housekeeper........

So then what does the housekeeper do? I find it difficult to believe she travels all over the world to trap him. She doesn't look like she has the stamina or the means. Mr. Ellington must have gathered some funding. Helpmecapturethedevil.com Oh wait, that was before the time of internet.

Leen

I gave it a 7. It's never knocked me out, although I enjoy it to a point. I agree with Dan62 that's it's overly melodramtic and comes across as a bit "overcooked". It's a mood piece, and I understand that, but reality is just reality until the end and I think that's also a weak point with me. As a kid it turned me off because I thought it was way too preachy, but I can sit back and enjoy it for what it is now.

Most people seem to either love or hate this episode. Well, I saw it for the first time during the New Year's marathon and thought it was one of the best Twilight Zone episodes I've seen. When it was over, I immediately wanted to watch it a second time. I did the next best thing and found an online text version of the episode. Here it is if any other fans are interested:

http://www.geocities.com/emruf2/tz/howling.html

Hi, Kathy! Thanks for the link.



Hope you like it here.

Kathy!

If you love Howling Man you are in good company here!

Leen

James and Leen; thank you for the warm welcome. I'm not a very frequent poster, but I'm sure I'll enjoy myself here when I do post.

(Glad you liked the link).

Howling Man is one of the best TZ episodes ever. It fits the mood of TZ extremely well, and it makes me feel as if Beaumont (my favorite TZ writer, incidentally) was right at home writing horror stories like this.

10/10

The episode is a favorite of mine too, as I have already mentioned on this thread.

I understand that Beamont adapted the episode from a short story he wrote? If you've read the story, I'd be interested to hear how close of an adaption it was.

***SPOILER ALERT***




I read it once a couple of months ago, but don't remember it awfully well. Besides the Hitler reference already mentioned, the two big differences I remember are the two mentioned in Zicree: 1) the monastery is a religious order in the story, and uses a cross to hold in the prisoner instead of the Staff of Truth, and 2) Ellington doesn't see the prisoner transform into the Devil in the story. He just gets a note after World War II from the monastery saying "Relax, my son, we have him back with us again."

I don't remember the line "You can catch the devil, but you can't hold him long" in the story, either. This line adds a slightly different shade of meaning to the episode in my opinion.

I think it would have been a good idea to keep the cross. The Staff of Truth is a little abstract. (But it served well enough). The ending, I'd say, is improved. The transformation scene was very dramatic; it's a great deal more satisfying to see Ellington witness the consequence of what he's done. Also the moral: "You can catch the devil, but you can't hold him long", is a good addition. It makes the episode much more timely. If Brother Jerome had caught the devil again, then why all the current evil?


(P.S)
Thanks for taking the trouble to answer my question.

You're welcome, Kathy.

It was director Douglas Heyes's decision to substitute the staff for the cross, in order to prevent objections from non-Christian religious groups. (Source: Marc Scott Zicree's Twilight Zone Companion.) I personally like the staff better, but Beaumont wasn't wild about it either.

Beaumont's short story leads us to believe that the title character took the form of Hitler after his release. It was written not too long after the fall of the Third Reich, hence the primary cause of evil at the time had vanished. Lesser forms of evil might fall under the heading of what Jerome says we're meant to suffer.

I didn't quite mean this as a question. More as a comment that having the devil get out at the end made the episode up to date with the present times. Needless to say, all the evil Brother Jerome mentioned as being manufactured by the devil did not end after WW2. If the episode had followed the short story ending, with the devil captured again, then the story would have ended right there. Having him escape leaves the viewer to say: "Yes, it all happened again". Or to quote Eric Bogle: "Again, and again, and again, and again.

P.S to James again: (I thought the reason why they switched from the cross was probably something like that --- hope Beaumont didn't mind too much.)

i LOVE The Howling Man. I love the sequence of the man turning into the devil when he walks by.

I'd give it a 9 or 10

One of my all-time favorite TZ sequences too. According to AllMovie it was a tribute to 1935 film "Werewolf of London".
http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=1:198322

SPOILER

Before the transformations facilitated by passing behind the pillars,
the howling man's face becomes devilish due to a lighting change,
similar to the effect used at the end of "Long Live Walter Jameson."