The Veil
Where I watched it: Amazon Prime
Episodes Watched:
Episode 1: “Vision of Crime”
Episode 6: “Genesis”
Episode 8: “Summer Heat”
Note: The titles and synopses correspond to the incorrect episodes on Amazon.*
TV-viewing is one of the few contexts in which optimism almost never pays off. When we watch a TV show and find ourselves saying “maybe this will get better,” we almost always end up feeling duped and disgusted. That’s where I was this week with One Step Beyond, a paranormal anthology that ran from 1959-1961. The episodes I watched had traffic-jam pacing and flat characters, but I gave it a chance until a couple of gratuitous scenes of sexual violence. To ease my disappointment, I decided to try to find a better show in a similar vein.
That show is The Veil, a 1958 paranormal anthology that never aired (the studio went bankrupt). Although horror legend Boris Karloff (best known for playing Frankenstein) hosts the show and acts in every episode except one, the series isn’t all that scary -- in fact, it’s downright cozy at times. The Veil doesn’t have the wow factor to be many people’s favorite, but its plot, characters, and tone make it a nice little show that’s worth remembering
The Veil is a series of self-contained teleplays, each presented as a true story of a supernatural occurrence (this is completely a narrative device, and the stories aren’t based on any real claims). A lot of this genre can tend to rely on absurdity or shock, but The Veil tends to keep each impossible event as a relatively small, understated part of each episode. The supernatural is a springboard for the rest of the story, instead having stories just as an excuse for something supernatural to happen. The otherworldly forces in each episode are fairly neutral, too: a premonition may start off a plot, or a ghost may offer a character some useful information, but ultimately, it’s up to the characters whether they use these things for good or evil.
Each episode has a compact principal cast (about five main players), which allows for the characters to be fairly fleshed out in the short span of the episode. There are some strange little idiosyncrasies to these characters (eg, a man eats soup every night in a heatwave, there’s no explanation why, he just likes soup) that bring some texture and levity to each story. There are some really good performances in the series, especially by Karloff, who transitions from role to role without letting it feel like a gimmick.
I went into the series expecting it to either be frightening or cheesy, but the overall tone is warm, like being invited to sit by the fireside and having a kindly old uncle tell a story. While the synopsis on Amazon calls it a horror/suspense analogy, the stories are more similar to mystery stories or domestic dramas.
This show probably won’t stick with you. It’s not going to give you belly laughs, it’s not going to make you gasp in shock, it’s not going to make you consider difficult questions about life. That’s okay, though. Not every show has to be high octane or flashy, sometimes a show can be a decent way to spend a couple of hours. The Veil is good enough that it should have survived longer, and is definitely good enough to be revisited.
*The episodes in order on Amazon as of writing this, are:
Vision of Crime
Girl on the Road
Food on the Table
The Doctor
The Crystal Ball
Genesis (listed elsewhere as “A Chapter of Genesis”)
Destination Nightmare
Summer Heat
Return of Madame Vernoy
Jack The Ripper
Detailed content advisory for The Veil
(Note: I have only watched 3 episodes):
Language:
“Bloody” is used as a curse word.
Violence:
Murders are part of the plot in this show, but blood / the most violent parts aren’t really shown
A man is shot (we see the gun, but not the victim) and killed. “A pool of blood” is mentioned, but not shown.
A man threatens another man with a gun.
Men shove/fight one another.
A grown man mentions that his father likely wants to “whale the tar” out of him.
A man tries to bludgeon another man.
A woman is murdered, and we see the struggle (a man chokes her, she bites him), but not the final blow (she’s bludgeoned to death). Her body is shown briefly, but we don’t see her injuries.
Sexual content:
None in the episodes I watched. One or two episodes center around infidelity. Another episode centers around the Jack the Ripper murders, and from the few minutes I previewed of that episode it seems like the show doesn’t talk about his victims (although a character does refer to them as “terrible”).
Questionable content
Children might have trouble understanding that the show’s assertion that each episode is based on a report of a real event isn’t meant to be taken seriously.
I watched part of “The Return of Madame Vernoy” because I wondered how it would depict Indian people (given when the show was made), and it’s about as racist as you’d expect from a 1950s depiction of India. None of the actors are Indian, the accents are really off, and it generally exoticizes Indian people (besides being racist, it seems like a dud of an episode. Skip it, if you want to watch a show that deals with the idea of past lives, I will make you a list of pertinent K-dramas).
Smoking. Characters drink alcohol, and one character is an alcoholic.
