Scary Shangrila 2023 - Unsolved Mysteries

It's Halloween time again, so my blog is featuring all the thrills, chills, and scares of the season. Today, I present to you one of the scariest TV shows of all time - Unsolved Mysteries, hosted by the late great Robert Stack:

If you're a child of the 1990s, then this theme music will probably trigger a visceral, reptilian fight-or-flight response:

Unsolved Mysteries was a prime-time documentary show on NBC. Each hour-long episode featured reenactments and dramatizations of, well, unsolved mysteries: cold case murders, missing persons, and other unexplained occurrences. The series mostly focused on true crime (presaging today's podcasts), but sprinkled in more and more of the paranormal as time went on (UFO abductions, ghosts, and even Bigfoot sightings). The real-life crime segments lent credibility to the supernatural bits, making them even scarier for a young kid.

More than anything, it was the eerie presence of the show's first host, Robert Stack, that really made Unsolved Mysteries special. The veteran actor commanded the screen; you'd see him in a trenchcoat or business suit in interstitial segments, walking in some deserted forest or cemetery, grimly narrating a brutal killing or strange haunting. I always expected something horrible to pop up during those host sequences, and I'm sure that was the intended effect.

The series was revived on Netflix with no host, though for my money, the original Robert Stack run will always be the best. You can still watch those episodes, now nearly 30 years old, on Youtube.