From MadCap's Couch - Tales from the Darkside: "The Cutty Black Sow"

"Don't...forget...to drink...your Ovaltine..."

So...here we are. Halloween. This entire month, all of Horror Month 2017, has been building to this moment. If I could be permitted to stroke my own ego a bit here (and I will, it is my blog), I think I've saved the very best for very last. "The Cutty Black Sow", besides having an incredibly silly name, is considered by many fans to be the absolute scariest episode of Tales from the Darkside. But is it?

Portrait of a family, their great-grandmother on Death's Door. She asks for the day and, when told it is the 30th of October, she becomes hysterical and proclaims she's going to die on Halloween. Her great grandson, Jamie, awakens in the night and hears her speaking of the monster known as the Cutty Black Sow, a monster who comes on Halloween night to take the souls of a family...unless a certain ritual is performed to shield each member of the family.

...the ritual of which, Granny is very much able to give detailed exposition about despite having a foot in the grave. Convenient!


And, of course, because she's delirious from the dementia, she puts doing this ritual onto the eight year old Jamie. He takes to it with surprising gusto. And what should be a tense and frightening scene is completely ruined as Granny frantically warns him of what he must do...with a chorus of bagpipes playing over what otherwise sounds like a good score for a horror scene.

And then she dies immediately afterward! Rude!

After a rather cliched pep talk from his father that seems less like he's comforting a child who just lost his great-grandmother and more a man reading a shopping list with vague disinterest, Jamie listens to a recording he made of his great-grandmother's words...somehow...and begins to go into research mode to find out more about the Cutty Black Sow.

Really, Jamie strikes you early on as a very thoughtful, resourceful kid. He wants to do this last thing for his Great Grandmother and he even agrees to still take his little sister Trick or Treating after he completes the ritual...y'know, which they're still doing despite the fact that their great grandmother just died in their own living room last night.

Also, she's apparently already going to have a funeral on November 1st. Speaking as someone who has had a family member pass away, I don't recall it being that quick. Maybe that was a thing in the 80s?

But the two leave to go trick or treating...and the stones ominously begin to glow...

When they return, they dump out their candy...and Jamie's sister sees that one of the stones has fallen, going to pick it up...

...and, after she burns her hand on it, Jamie realizing that it was the stone marked to protect him. As the night goes on, a pair of bright, yellow eyes is seen around the house...and something is clearly trying to get in...or is it?

Christ, I can hear the bagpipes now...

I won't spoil the ending except to say if you're looking for a happy one...you need to look elsewhere. What I will say is that the back half of this episode is absolutely dripping in atmosphere. The build up to the full emergence of the Cutty Black Sow is absolutely tense and pays off in an excellent way.

The only thing that gets me is the near constant bagpipe music playing in the background, almost as if the showrunners were scared to death that you might forget the country that the monster comes from.

...it was India, right? I'm pretty sure.

That being said, it does have a good, if somewhat clunky set up, and the second half, like I said before, is absolutely excellent. Is it the scariest episode of Tales? Most likely. There are several that are better written and definitely several better acted, but few that match this level of tension and a genuine feel of horror. Would it be the same if the protagonist was an adult? Probably not, mostly since adults and children don't process things in the same way. And I do think, to the benefit of this episode, that having a child protagonist makes it work far, far better than it would with an adult.

Though that is also a bit to the episode's detraction, and what many have considered to be a rather callous ending to the episode.

For all the asshole protagonists in the series (and there are many), Jamie is a very caring soul. All he wants to do is protect his family from a monster that he doesn't even know is real, but wants to honor his great-grandmother's last wishes. For all the characters who were just assholes to be assholes so we would enjoy their eventual comeuppance, Jamie was really the only focus of an episode in so many of them that I actually wanted to see succeed.

This is about all we see of the monster, and that's a good thing!

But not everybody comes back out of the dark, not even those with the best of intentions. And it's important to remember that Tales from the Darkside does actually try to say that it's a horror show...even if some of its episodes go far and away from the horror genre, often dipping deep, deep into batshit goofy territory.

While Tales from the Darkside is definitely very dated (not just in this one episode) and is not immune to some ridiculously goofy moments, there is a lot to like about the series. Perhaps the entire series itself deserves a full retrospective at some point. I hope that my few stabs at reviewing it did it justice.

And so, with this last episode of Tales from the Darkside, we come to the end of another Horror Month. Happy Halloween, everyone! The season of horror may be coming to an end, but you must remember: the dark side is always there, waiting for us to enter - waiting to enter us.

Until next time...try to enjoy the daylight...

Tales from the Darkside: The Complete Series is available on DVD from CBS.

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