“Big Surprise” (1959)

[spoilers] This Richard Matheson story turned out to be a big surprise indeed for me. I hadn’t known he wrote the story (or the screenplay that came of it) for a Night Gallery episode that first ran in November 1971 and scared me silly. Not everyone had the same reaction, but it worked very well on me. As usual “scary” is at once the most personal and the most subjective element of all in horror. Anything that has scared anyone badly enough is sure to be weak sauce to someone else. Still, the way the phrase “big surprise” was used in that Night Gallery piece (of maybe 11 minutes) is so memorable I thought of it when I first saw this story title all these years later, before I knew it was the source story. In a way it’s not surprising because even by 1971 I knew and treated Matheson’s name with respect as someone whose stories would get to me—scare me, disturb me, worry me over their ideas and images long after reading. Matheson had also by then been working for some time with Rod Serling, dating back to The Twilight Zone and some of its most famous episodes, such as “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” I was interested to find out this story was published originally as a “riddle story” contest in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, under the title “What Was in the Box,” with $25 awarded to the reader with the best solution for the open-ended finish. It makes me wonder—is this ending, which so unnerved me on TV, a contribution from some reader?

It’s a really simple story, deceptively so. There’s a scary old man in the neighborhood. All the neighborhood boys are afraid of him. One day he beckons one of them to come over and talk to him. He tells him if he digs in a certain spot—10 paces from an oak tree facing the church steeple—he will find a “big surprise.” The surprise turns out to be the old man himself, looming up out of a box uncovered by the digging. He is laughing and says, “Surprise!” I looked it up online a few months ago, found it on Vimeo, and watched it again (unfortunately it’s no longer there and the show appears to be mostly unavailable at this time). It’s John Carradine playing the old man, a notably good casting call in the early ‘70s. The screenplay, not surprisingly, is faithful to the story. It doesn’t work on me the same way anymore, of course, but I appreciate the craft of how it’s done. Night Gallery remains generally underrated as a TV show capable of great scares. One interesting difference between story and show is that the boy is told to dig 10 feet down in the story but only four in the show, which is actually more plausible and helps the setup. In the story you know you are really in deep but there are distracting details about cutting in steps and such. (I myself have failed in my life to ever dig a hole even four feet deep—too much work.) It’s hard for me to know how I would take this story without my experience with the TV version. I mean it really scared me—how was this thing I was seeing even possible at all? I even swore off Night Gallery awhile as a result. Now I would like to know more about the details of the original publication and the reader endings. As it is, the ending of “Big Surprise” is just the very best I could ever think of, perfect in its way—so unlikely, and somehow so terrifying.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Story not available online.