Radio Show - Inner Sanctum's "The Lonely Sleep"

Going to cultivate the habit of uploading my favorite creepy radio shows. Its a great sport for me to dig up forgotten series and listen to all of them and find the very best ones. I tend to get excited at new discoveries anyway, so I want to make a point of sharing and reviewing these.

It should be said that I never listen to anything other than suspense/horror OTRs, and maybe sometimes a bit of sci-fi (tho i find it dull). The holy Grail is always to find something actually frightening, but ghoulish/noir will do as well.

For the former I have no better example than the episode of Vanishing Point that I have posted on here, "Snow Shadow Area". If i could rent radio time, and play that 12 hours straight so that everyone gets scared out of their mind, i would. i'd like to see that one become a classic- its so incongruous, to find something like that and it be so unknown. its like seeing Larry Olivier in dinner theatre in Florida. Its still on here, if you are into it, go download it.

This one falls into the "ghoulish/noir" category. "The Lonely Sleep" is an unusual entry for "Inner Sanctum", a show that excelled at promising more than it delivered. Experts in hyperbole, the show has become a bit of a classic, and i think its just because of sheer numbers. Thousands of episodes were produced while superior shows like Night Fall only did about a hundred. They simply outweigh most other series and i have found the vast majority of them to be simply overbaked crime dramas. But this time, it actually gets really weird, unbelievably weird actually, at least for the time. Hell, for any time.

The story concerns a lonely young bachelor who can't stand to be laughed it. He eases his pain by spending time with his mannequins, and by mannequins, we mean, hmmm. Weird parallels between this character and Dennis Nielsen, the English serial killer whose motive could be summed up as "Killing for Company". Again, this one really gets a bit ghoulish and i bet the switchboards lit up after this one was aired, and the kiddies had a few nightmares.

Something about this show is so clammy, so dark, its like finding one of those lurid "Hollywood Confidential" mags from the late 1940's about the Black Dahlia-all grainy and ghoulish and darker than you would think- and the pages are all crumbling and you feel like you need to wash your hands afterward. Naturally it strains credibility and the acting is over the top and all that, but still, its good spooky fun and you can get it HERE.