Confined to bed after fracturing her leg in a horse riding accident, young Marianne Austen is fed up with her predicament – until she discovers an indelible pencil in an old sewing box. After drawing an imaginary house and garden in a sketchpad, Marianne falls asleep and finds herself on a remote cliff top facing the house from her picture, now seemingly given form. Marianne goes on to draw a boy inside the house – and when she dreams again, she meets the same boy, Mark, who seemingly also has a life back in the real world. As the two children slowly become friends, they discover that this dreamworld is also home to a terrifying menace: huge, menacing stones with fearful glowing eyes are approaching the house – and unless Marianne and Mark can escape, these monstrous creatures will surely kill them…

Based on Catherine Storr’s 1958 children's novel ‘Marianne Dreams’, ‘Escape Into Night’ was adapted for television by Ruth Boswell (‘Timeslip’, ‘Shadows’, ‘The Tomorrow People’). Despite its low budget and small cast, this six-parter is an amazingly atmospheric foray into the world of nightmares, illness and morality, with a particularly impressive performance by then-newcomer Vikki Chambers as young Marianne.

Sadly, although originally made in colour, only black and white copies of the episodes exist – but if anything, this only adds to the show’s feeling of menace, by accentuating the shadows in the crooked house of Marianne’s dreams, and making the sinister stones with their terrifying glowing eyes even more threatening.

This is a show that scared a generation of children witless. Indeed, it’s one of the programmes I get the most emails about, “do you remember the children’s programme with the really scary stones in it…?” If you’ve never seen ‘Escape Into Night’, then make sure you do – and I dare you to watch it with the lights off…


Escape Into Night - Eps 1-6

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Legal Bit: 'Escape Into Night' is a registered trademark of Carlton International Media Ltd. The 'Escape Into Night' logo and all images from the television series are copyright Carlton International Media Ltd unless otherwise stated; no copyright infringement is intended. All specially created images and text are copyright © Clive Banks; please do not use these without my permission. All rights reserved. No profit is made from this website, and any revenue made from using the banner-links featured goes straight back into the costs of maintaining it, which comes out of my own pocket in the first place. No profit advertising is accepted. This website was created purely to entertain and amuse, and any references to persons living, dead, comatose, in suspended animation, not born yet, drawn in crayon, or a figment of someone's imagination is purely coincidental. All opinions expressed are my own, so there...

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