A projectionist at a cinema in the British county of Dorset opened a rusty film can in a warehouse. It was an episode of a series that had been missing for years and about which the legend had spread that it was too scary. However, the explanation for its disappearance was much more mundane: the same reasons why seventy percent of British television programming at the time had disappeared (or so it was believed). What they found. On May 23, the film preservation organization Film is Fabulous! announced the discovery. Darren Payne, a projectionist and technician who runs the 35mm film exhibition collective ‘Dirt in the Gate Movies’, commissioned a small collection of film reels that was about to be destroyed. One of the cans had handwritten, without further detail, ‘Late Night Horror’. “I’m a horror fan and the title resonated with me,” Payne explained. He took the film home, screened it on his own computer, and what he saw left him speechless: the first episode of a series that had been believed to have been destroyed for more than half a century. Nothing like a vampire. ‘No Such Thing as a Vampire’ is the pilot episode of ‘Late Night Horror’, a series of six 25-minute episodes that BBC2 broadcast in the spring of 1968. It was the network’s first color horror production, although the recovered print is in black and white: a 16mm secondary run made for international distribution before the color masters were removed. What is it about? The script was based on a story by the great Richard Matheson, a writer to whom the fantastic Anglo-Saxon owes, among other things, the founding novel ‘I am legend’ and 16 episodes of the original series of ‘The Twilight Zone’. The plot follows a woman who appears paler and weaker every morning, with marks on her neck, while her husband and the family doctor discuss whether or not there is a vampire in the town. The answer is the kind of twist that Matheson was adept at: rational, disturbing and with a bitter aftertaste. Who is behind. The direction was, amazingly, by a woman: Paddy Russellwho at that time was already an exceptional figure at the BBC. She was the first female plant manager of the entity and one of the first two directors of the chain, at a time when the technical teams were dominated by men to the point that the name with which she appeared in the reports (Paddy is a diminutive of Patricia, but can be perceived as an acronym for Patrick) also functioned as a kind of protection. Russell directed two of the six episodes of ‘Late Night Horror’: the first, now recovered, and ‘The Corpse Can’t Play’, the only one that was already known. With this discovery, his complete work in the series once again exists. The episode aired on 19 April 1968 at 10:55 pm and attracted 1.8 million viewers, the highest audience of the series and one of the highest BBC2 had recorded since its launch in 1964. The legend. This is where we must clarify the legend of “the episode that was destroyed because it was too terrifying”, a rumor that has been spreading on the internet mainly due to the creepy credits of the series. Actuallybetween the mid-1950s and mid-1970s, the BBC eliminated between 60 and 70% of its television production due to company policy: two-inch tape masters were very expensive, union contracts prohibited more than one or two rebroadcasts, and there was no legal obligation to archive the material. It was not until 1981 that the BBC began to retain its archives. ‘Dr. Who’ is the case of the most famous series with episodes lost due to this policy. ‘Late Night Horror’ disappeared, exactly like hundreds of other shows disappeared. That is why a 16mm copy has been found: it was certainly not in BBC warehouses. With this international material, lost episodes of ‘Doctor Who’ have also been recovered. It will be seen. At the moment the BBC is investigating whether it is technically possible to recover the original color through chromatic restoration processes, since the episode was recorded in color but only survived in black and white. And there will be a grand premiere: on September 20, 2026, as part of Grindfest. It will be the first time the episode has been seen since its only showing in 1969. Who knows if they will appear in some forgotten warehouse. Like a horror movie. In Xataka | The curse of ‘At the Mountains of Madness’: the horror story that Hollywood has been trying to adapt for 20 years without success
