Night Gallery episode review — 2.21 — The Sins of the Fathers/You Can’t Get Help Like That Anymore

Original air date: February 23, 1972

The Sins of the Fathers

Director: Jeannot Szwarc
Writer: Halsted Welles

I find most of the Night Gallery horror segments to be sort of horror-lite. They’re horror in the sense that they’re filled with fixtures of the genre — gothic sets, ghosts, etc., but that’s about it. This is an exception.

This is a hard-hitting segment, and perhaps the best so far not to have been written by Rod Serling. Set in medieval Wales, this is a truly original story involving sin-eaters, people who feast beside corpses to absorb all of their sins so that they go to heaven.

The Widow Craighill (horror legend Barbara Steele) desperately needs a sin-eater for her late husband, though she’s been informed that nobody is available. She eventually finds a volunteer in a starving young man, Ian Evans (Richard Thomas), who wants to do it because his father is sick and unable to work.

Ian doesn’t know what he’s doing, though, and his mother tells him to sort of make it up as he goes along, just so long as he screams at the right moment when the sins are supposedly transferred to him.

As he performs the task, he takes all the food he can and is convincing in his screams.

He forgets his money as he leaves in a hurry to go eat actual food. When he arrives back, he finds that his father has died, and his mother asks that he perform the sin-eating task again.

He does so, and his screams this time around are absolutely agonizing.

I’d definitely call this segment unsettling, and it is incredibly effective. All the performances are solid, especially Richard Thomas, who knocks it out of the park.

You Can’t Get Help Like That Anymore

Director: Jeff Corey
Writer: Rod Serling

“You can’t Get Help Like That Anymore” isn’t overtly comedic, but it is very silly. It involves a robot maid (Lana Wood, Diamonds Are Forever), who’s mistreated by the Fultons (Broderick Crawford and Clois Leachman).

As one might expect, things turn violent. It’s a decent segment, but nothing spectacular. But it’s a good supporting story because “The Sins of the Fathers” is so clearly the highlight here.
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Rating: 8/10