Tricks and Treats: TV’s Scariest Episodes

At The Paley Center for Media, “Tricks and Treats: TV’s Scariest Episodes” traces how television learned to frighten viewers without the scale of cinema. The program moves across eras and genres, showing how writers and directors used suggestion, timing, and the limits of broadcast standards to turn ordinary living rooms into uneasy spaces. In New York, where much early TV production and criticism were centered, the screening reads as a small history of the medium’s city-linked afterlife. One clear takeaway is how fear on TV often comes from what the frame refuses to show.