The reason I brought up Unsolved Mysteries in the last thread? Some kind folks got me a few of the swank topic-specific DVD sets for Christmas, and I've been watching them nonstop. I absolutely loved the show as a child, being simultaneously engrossed and petrified of every single episode from the tip of Robert Stack's opening monologue until the end credits.

That creepiness has remained familiar. When I watch the show now, I'm obviously not scared of the stories (and truth be told, time hasn't been kind to many of them, which now seem so obviously fabricated that I'm surprised I bought them even as a child), but the overall mood and tone of the series still manages to make me a little unsettled. Granted, that's half due to creating the right set of circumstances -- pitch black, late night viewings -- but I really can't think of a single movie (let alone another television show) that'd have me suspiciously eyeing every corner, window and mirror in our apartment. Hell, I'm in my late twenties, and Unsolved Mysteries still persuades me to keep a light on at bedtime. Either I'm a big baby, or the show was timelessly effective.

The two DVD sets I own are compilations of random UFO and ghost stories. Combine that with the various cryptozoology episodes that I've yet to pick up on DVD, and you've got the holy trinity of Unsolved Mysteries theme episodes. Whenever the show delved into any of those three topics, I was beyond stoked.

The UFO stories are great, because for every well-known story about human interaction with aliens (Area 51 and so forth), there are a dozen more that are so goofy and unbelievable that no skeptic would ever touch them. The beauty of it is, while the show maintained a neutral POV on whatever was impossible to prove, it never took a condescending tone: Every story was treated like it could've been true, and the eerie reenactments for even the stupidest made-up tales were just as effortful as the "true crime" stories that Unsolved Mysteries tackled more often.

So, no matter what the freaks on the show claimed, the production team was ready to film stunningly creepy dramatizations for it. I'm talking about everything from simple saucer sightings to a tiny-sized UFO that flew into a woman's bedroom at night and beamed cancer-curing lights at her head. They never skimped. Even when the stories called for them to create realistic alien costumes and have little midgets prance around someone's backyard, they totally did it.

The show did an amazing job of making even the most innocuous UFO story look like the creepiest shit ever, but those stories never came close to the ultimate Unsolved Mysteries horror: The ghastly ghost tales. My God. The reenacted (a loose term, but yeah) scenes of random, shapeless spectres turning up all over the place firmly altered my childhood brain to believe that such events could and probably would happen to me at any given moment. To this day, I have Robert Stack to thank for making every reflective surface, glass pane and creaking stairwell seem like my personal doorway to Hell.

The funny thing is, most of the ghost stories are obviously made up. Most of the segments featured interviews with the people claiming to have been haunted, and 90% of the time, they're the kind of folks who you'd actively avoid shopping next to in supermarkets. It's tough to believe that ghosts universally chose freaks and trashy failures to annoy, but smartly, the show never treated the obvious suspects as probable liars: If you had a story to tell, your word was as good as gold.

Course, I'd be remiss not to mention the true reason for the show's unending creepiness: Its incredible instrumental theme, which manages to be iPod-worthy while sending shivers down every bone in my body at the same time. Hearing that song is like doing the stupid Bloody Mary trick in a mirror: You know you're being ridiculous, but you still achieve an instantaneous notion that something bad is watching you. This doesn't sound like something to strive for, but I kinda dig it.

Of course, Robert Stack himself had more than a small part in the overall vibe of the series, combining his boomingly eerie inflections with the innate ability to make trenchcoats look fashionable even when he was being filmed in warm climates. Though my original kinship with him had more to do with knowing that he voiced Ultra Magnus in Transformers: The Movie, today, it's Unsolved Mysteries that will drive me to steal a handshake from him before God kicks me out of heaven because of the time I stole three packs of 1991 Upper Deck baseball cards from the local ice cream parlor.

There's a definite nostalgic appeal to the series; so much so that I can't firmly recommend it to people who didn't know what Unsolved Mysteries was until reading this entry. Still, if you remember pulling the sheets up a little higher every time Robert Stack intro'd a story about a semitransparent goblin who terrorized a children's hospital, grab a DVD set and keep a Friday night open. A+! The series is rumored to be making a comeback later in the year, but I doubt it'll manage to achieve the same aura of fright that the original run so effortlessly tormented me with.

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In totally unrelated news, Waiterbot has reviewed Cloverfield. Don't click if you don't want spoilers, and please limit all Clover discussions to the original thread. What an amazingly tight ship we run.

Posted by Matt on 01/23/2008. E-mail me!