Jeff Corey mostly worked as an actor but also directed several TV series, including nine episodes of Night Gallery. Here, he’s working from a script by Robert Malcolm Young (Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land ) based on a story by Kurt van Elting.

Tom Oglivy (Stuart Whitman) and his wife Leona (Barbara Anderson) have moved into the home of Tom’s dead cousin Zachariah Ogilvy (Alan Napier). But something is wrong with the home, something so off that even the maid, Miss Patience(Ellen Corby), won’t stay after dark.

There’s also a warning. No one is to move the trunk.

Leona dreams that a man is in her bed. Crickets stop and start with no warning. And Tom’s latest novel has a Satanic prayer typed into the middle of it. Yes, this house is strange and Halloween is getting closer, the night that the dead can return. Return for their trunk!

The Oglivy house in this episode was the Bates house from Psycho. That’s about the best thing one can say about this entry, which lives up to what Universal wanted from the show. It seems scary but has no lasting terror. It’s fun horror and not deep darkness.

“I hated “Fright Night,”” said Corey to Scott Skelton and Jim Benson for their book Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After Hours Tour. “…I didn’t understand the goddamn story. It was a terrible script. You see, the others I did were Rod’s and really made sense.”

Ah well. This season had been two for two before this. Hopefully next week will improve the average.