I wasn't sure I was going to include this in my roster of Halloween-appropriate posts because there's so little information on most of this Saturday Wide Theater stuff that I didn't know if it would be worth it. But, as there's no English-language info about these TV movies out there, anything I write about them would technically be fulfilling the purpose of this blog.
So, what exactly is Saturday Wide Theater?
Starting in 1977 a variety of original TV movies were broadcast on TV Asahi every Saturday night as part of this series (although it's more of a timeslot than a "series", since all the films were unrelated). It pioneered the format of a consistent, recurring broadcast of 90-minute original movies (later some of the films would run for 2 hours or more) and continued running films until 2017. Other similar programs began doing the same thing, including Tuesday Suspense Theater, but I believe Saturday Wide Theater was the first. Nothing mentioned in this post has a physical media release and I can't find any records of it ever being re-aired; whether or not TV Asahi still has the tapes is doubtful and they may in fact have been destroyed due to copyright laws.
From what I can gather, a lot of the films shown during this timeslot were mysteries. I'm going to be taking a look at a few of them that Hirata was in - as I've mentioned, after he left Toho he worked extensively in TV but unfortunately the majority of that work is most likely lost - but be warned that none of these are really horror; they're mostly just murder mysteries with unusually spooky-sounding titles.
None of this stuff has official English titles, so these translations are done by machine.
1. The Devil's Mask: Full Moon Murder Case [魔性の仮面] February 24, 1979 - directed by Katsumune Ishida
Very few details about this can be found anywhere, but it sounds like a psychological thriller-type thing that apparently entails a lawyer and a reporter exploring a horrific incident from a woman's childhood after she's accused of murder.
The script for this (pictured below) is held in the National Diet Library.
2. House of Evil Spirits [悪霊の住む家] June 7, 1980 - directed by Hideo Suzuki
I mean, that sounds pretty scary, doesn't it? What's interesting about this one is that the plot sounds quite similar to Chitei no Satsui, a Tuesday Suspense Theater film that I looked at here due to Yoshiko Otowa having a small role in it. The plot concerns a woman who kills her boss (played by Hirata; sounds like he kind of had it coming) and buries him under her floorboards, but is then tormented by guilt over what she's done.
We do actually have an image from this one! See a bigger version of this image (with watermark) over here.
3. The Mystery of the Ghost Ship [幽霊船の謎] October 18, 1980 - directed by Yoshiyuki Kuroda
This sounds like it was the second installment in a series of detective mysteries starring Tatsuya Mihashi. It involves an inspector solving the mystery of some murders on a yacht. No information available, but the script is, again, held in the National Diet Library.
That is pretty much that for suspense/horror-adjacent TV stuff. I would really love for someone to get in the National Diet Library and scan or just summarize those scripts so we could have some idea of what these movies are about beyond the few sentences that tvdrama-db.com provides. It is nice to know somebody is taking care of the scripts, at least.
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