Invasion of The

By Richard Zoglin

Except for a few racy double entendres on The Golden Girls, network TV on Saturday night is a pretty tame affair. Twist the dial a few notches, however, and there's mayhem aplenty. One evening a few weeks ago, a man was impaled on the handle of a hay rake by a wolflike demon that had risen from hell at the behest of a satanic cult. A couple visiting an art gallery wondered why the sculptures of terrified people looked so unnervingly lifelike. (Any guesses?) And Freddy Krueger, the razor-clawed maniac from the Nightmare on Elm Street films, was back to his old tricks, scaring the wits out of people in their sleep. His latest victim: a dream expert who, convinced Freddy was after him, went berserk on a talk show and was shot to death in front of a live TV audience. Eat your heart out, Geraldo.

Slash TV? Not quite. But horror, fantasy and science fiction have invaded the medium with a vengeance. The NBC series Quantum Leap involves time travel, and Fox's new Alien Nation postulates a Los Angeles of the future, where people from another planet are trying to integrate into American society. Cable is going for classy shocks in such series as Shelley Duvall's Nightmare Classics on Showtime and HBO's Tales from the Crypt, adapted from the old E.C. horror comics and directed by such notables as Walter Hill (48 HRS.) and Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future).

Mostly, however, TV horror is flourishing in a batch of popular syndicated programs, usually tucked away on independent stations. Eight such series are on the market. Three of them -- Star Trek: The Next Generation, Friday the 13th: The Series and War of the Worlds -- were among the five top-rated weekly syndicated shows at the end of last season. Oddly, they have attracted little notice beyond their cult audiences, even from the clean-TV crusaders, who would probably be appalled by the prolific (though rarely graphic) violence. Which is just fine, since it allows the rest of us to enjoy some B-movie pleasures: comic-book energy, throw-logic-to-the-wi nds imagination and, occasionally, a good scare.

Such attractions were rare on mainstream TV in the past. Rod Serling's Twilight Zone served up some chills, but it was less interested in frightening the viewer than in offering moral parables. Star Trek will forever be enshrined in TV's science-fiction pantheon, but it wasn't nearly so scary as the sight of the cast members growing old in the movies that have followed. The 1960s anthology series The Outer Limits represented the outer limit of TV's flirtation with the fantastic, while Kolchak: The Night Stalker was the closest the medium ever got to a good monster show.

One problem in doing such programs is the cost. Elaborate special effects are too expensive for most TV series, and the tackiness can show. Superboy, for example, is an engaging adventure series based on the comic book, but the TV hero's cheesy superantics come straight from Woolworth's. Low-rent special effects have also turned War of the Worlds -- an update of the H.G. Wells novel and 1953 movie -- into a dreary stalemate. Last season the evil aliens seemed to do little but abduct unsuspecting earthlings and transform them Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style into blank-eyed automatons to do their bidding. A second wave of aliens has arrived this season with a slightly different plan: to abduct unsuspecting earthlings and make clones of them to do their bidding. Just how that is an improvement remains to be seen.

Snazzy makeup and special effects, however, are the stars of Monsters, a lively half-hour anthology, which each week delivers just what is advertised: a grotesque and usually malevolent creature, concocted under the supervision of makeup wizard Dick Smith (The Exorcist). Last season's menagerie ranged from an 8-ft.-tall bloodworm with carnivorous tastes to a woman who turned into a gigantic honeybee and flew off with her reluctant lover.

Even when Monsters' stories are predictable and thin, the show is enlivened by grisly good humor. In one episode, two burglar brothers kill an old lady (Imogene Coca) while ransacking her home, but not before she bites one on the hand. The swollen wound soon takes the shape of the dead woman's face, which won't shut up. "It's like in one of them Wolfman movies," cries the cursed fellow. Replies his dim-witted brother: "What, an old lady bites you, and you turn into another old lady?" This weekend Soupy Sales plays a traveling salesman who, after wrecking his car, spends a night with a farm couple who have a beautiful daughter living in the attic. Only one problem: when he touches the girl, her skin starts to dissolve, revealing a rotting corpse out for revenge against all the men who have wronged her. Some farmer's-daughter joke.

Tongue-in-cheek humor also lifts Freddy's Nightmares above the jolt-'em-out- of-their-seats level of its theatrical namesakes. Freddy (Robert Englund) can still be one ruthless customer: in the season opener, he sliced off a woman's head, which plopped to the floor like a ripe pineapple. Most weeks, however, he serves merely as the wisecracking narrator for unrelated stories revolving around dreams. Many are unexpectedly lighthearted; a few even approach satire. In one of last season's entries, a yuppie career woman had a thirtysomething nightmare about having a baby: her boss replaced her on the fast track, prison bars materialized outside her door, and she was sent to Post-Partum Sleep Deprivation Camp for Unprepared Mothers.

Friday the 13th bears even less resemblance to the infamous, inexhaustible series of slasher films for which it is named. The TV version is another anthology show, its stories linked by an antique shop whose objects were cursed and sold to unsuspecting customers. Each week three continuing characters try to retrieve one of the objects before it wreaks its supernatural havoc. That serviceable premise provides the excuse for segments that range from old horror chestnuts (the ventriloquist controlled by his dummy) to spooky original tales (two abused children lure playmates into an evil playhouse).

Friday the 13th's worst sin is an obsession with clunky, overexplanatory dialogue laying out the supernatural ground rules ("Demons can only rise or return on a full moon -- that's why the spectral energy is gathering ^ . . ."). But the show delivers a stronger dose of pure horror than anything else on TV. In the season's two-hour premiere episode, Lucifer tried to take over a convent in France. Before the overstuffed plot spun out of control, there were some startling set pieces: a possessed nun literally climbing the walls and patients in a mental ward going wild and murdering the staff. The show also managed to write one of its regular characters out of the series in possibly the screwiest manner in TV history. After being possessed by the devil, the fellow was transformed into a little boy and returned to his mother. A bit inconvenient for the family, perhaps, but in TV's world of horror, there are worse ways to go.