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American old time radio program

Lights Out is an American old time radio program devoted mostly to horror and the supernatural. Created by Wyllis Cooper and then eventually taken over by Arch Oboler, versions of Lights Out aired on different networks, at various times, from January 3, 1934 to the summer of 1947 and the series eventually made the transition to television. Lights Out was one of the earliest radio horror programs, predating Suspense and Inner Sanctum.

The success of Oboler's 1942–1943 Lights Out revival was part of a trend in 1940s American radio toward more horror. Genre series like Inner Sanctum, Suspense and others drew increasingly large ratings. Perhaps with this in mind, NBC broadcast another Lights Out revival series from New York in the summer of 1945, using seven of Wyllis Cooper's original 1930s scripts. Like Oboler's, this revival aired in the early evening and not late at night, and because of this, it was reported, "only those Cooper scripts which stressed fantasy rather than horror" were broadcast. These included a bloodless ghost story about a man who accidentally condemns his dead wife to haunt a nearby cemetery and "The Rocket Ship", science fiction involving interstellar travel. Cooper, then an advertising executive at New York's Compton Agency, may have had little or nothing to do with the actual broadcasts other than allowing his scripts to be performed. This was followed by an eight episode revival in the summer of 1946, from NBC Chicago, although at least one of the scripts is not by Cooper (an adaptation of Charles Dickens' "The Signal Man"). This series also avoided the use of outright gore. In fact, a review in Variety complained that the premiere episode, "The Seven Plovers", was "a little too serious in content for a thriller" since it included "religious background, philosophical discussion and dream diagnosis "

A third series of eight vintage Cooper scripts was scheduled to run in the summer of 1947 as well. Broadcast from Hollywood over ABC Radio, it starred Boris Karloff and was sponsored by Eversharp, whose company president canceled the series after the third episode, apparently unhappy with the gruesome subject matter. The premiere, "Death Robbery", featured Karloff as a scientist who brings his wife back from the dead, only to find she's become a gibbering homicidal maniac. An uncredited Lurene Tuttle plays the wife. This episode is one of the few surviving examples of Cooper's Lights Out work that reflects the sort of explicit horror that characterized the original series. Eversharp paid off Cooper for his five unused scripts and Lights Out ended its long run on network radio. From 1936 to 1939, Cooper pursued a screenwriting career in Hollywood (his major credits are the screenplay for Universal's 1939 Son of Frankenstein and contributions to the Mr. Moto mystery series starring Peter Lorre) but continued to work in radio, advertising and, later, television. By 1940, he had changed the spelling of his name from "Willis" to "Wyllis" (to satisfy "his wife's numerological inclinations") and lived mainly in the New York City area where he worked on a number of radio programs, the most important of which was probably Edward M. Kirby's popular and acclaimed government propaganda series, The Army Hour, which Cooper wrote, produced and directed for its first year. In 1947, Cooper created Quiet, Please, another radio program dealing with the supernatural, which he wrote and directed until 1949, occasionally borrowing ideas from his Lights Out stories while creating wholly new scripts that were often more sophisticated than his 1930s originals. In 1949 and 1950, he produced (and contributed scripts to) three live TV series that frequently dealt with the supernatural: Volume One, Escape and Stage 13.

In 1946, NBC Television brought Lights Out to TV in a series of four specials, broadcast live and produced by Fred Coe, who also contributed three of the scripts. NBC asked Cooper to write the script for the premiere, "First Person Singular", which is told entirely from the point of view of an unseen murderer who kills his obnoxious wife and winds up being executed. Variety gave this first episode a rave review ("undoubtedly one of the best dramatic shows yet seen on a television screen"), but Lights Out did not become a regular NBC TV series until 1949. Coe initially produced this second series but, for much of its run, the live 1949–1952 program was sponsored by appliance maker Admiral, produced by Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr., directed by Laurence Schwab, Jr., and hosted by Frank Gallop. Critical response was mixed but the program was successful for several seasons (sometimes appearing in the weekly lists of the ten most watched network shows) until competition from the massively popular sitcom I Love Lucy on CBS helped to kill it off. The 1949–1952 series featured scripts by a variety of authors, including a young Ira Levin. In 1951, producer Swope even bought a few stories from Cooper and Oboler. "Dead Man's Coat," starring Basil Rathbone, was adapted from one of Cooper's 1930s plays (and not to be confused with his Quiet, Please episode "Wear the Dead Man's Coat" with which it shares a similar premise). Oboler's "And Adam Begot," adapted by Ernest Kinoy from a radio play, starred Kent Smith. Among the young actors employed was Leslie Nielsen, who appeared in several episodes including "The Lost Will of Dr. Rant," based on "The Tractate Middoth", an M. R. James story. These and many others are available on DVD. Other notable guest stars included Anne Bancroft, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb, Anthony Quinn, Jessica Tandy, Veronica Lake, John Forsythe, Boris Karloff, Beatrice Straight, Eli Wallach, Vincent Price, Jane Wyatt, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein and Jack Palance. Notable directors included Delbert Mann and Fred Coe.

+ Partial List of Episodes of Lights Out Date Episode Actor(s) December 19, 1949 "The Elevator" Royal Dano, Helene Dumas, Dolores Badaloni, Jack Hartley, James van Dyke December 26, 1949 "The Man Who Couldn't Lose" NA May 29, 1950 "How Love Came to Professor Gildea" Arnold Moss June 26, 1950 "Encore" Donald Hammer July 17, 1950 "The Devil to Pay" Theodore Marcuse, Grace Kelly, Jonathan Harris July 31, 1950 "The Strange Case of John Kingman" NA November 20, 1950 "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" Billie Burke

In 1972, NBC aired yet another TV incarnation of Lights Out, a TV movie pilot which was not well received. In fact, Oboler (who was then syndicating his The Devil and Mr. O radio show) announced publicly that he had nothing to do with it. Despite its modest television success, radio historian John Dunning suggested that the legend of Lights Out is firmly rooted in radio.

"What the Devil" (1942), about two motorists menaced by a truck whose driver they cannot see, was similar in plot to Steven Spielberg's TV movie Duel, adapted by Richard Matheson from his own short story. Oboler, feeling his copyright had been infringed, claimed in an interview that he "reached for a lawyer and got paid off by Universal Studios."