This horror anthology has the variant quality you expect from such creepy collections with a spread from “pretty okay” down to “lame” for, thankfully, just a couple. All in all this is a respectable effort and frankly I’ve seen a couple much larger budget examples from the anthology field that do *a lot* worse at telling scary stories. 

Nightmare Radio is a call-in show for horror fans of all kinds to share their spooky encounters or listen along as the DJ, Rod (James Wright), tells several stories of his own. Whether tales about creepy children, maniacs, monsters, creatures, or other things that lurk in the dark there’s no telling where the night leads–especially when Rod himself begins experiencing bizarre in-studio happenings…

Don’t let the immediate opening of A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio deter you, it gets better–even though you won’t want to hear the work “dark” again for a bit afterwards. Anyway, once the odd and disjointed premiere ramble wraps up and the radio show kicks in we get another seven horror shorts spread over the runtime. Before going into general specifics I will say that even though this didn’t make much of a lasting impression beyond some good unnerving bits here and solid frights there the overall atmosphere is nice and creepy.

There’s really only one short I’d call a complete fail (see the movie and guess below…) with the rest all having redeeming qualities of some kind. The old timey photography session is probably my favorite, though the last section about a woman who may not be as alone in her home as she thinks actually has a nice sustained tension I appreciate. A few middle-of-the-road entries have their peaks & valleys with one of them lightly reminding me of Stephen King’s It, for obvious reasons. There’s a subtitled short that for whatever reason didn’t have any subtitles on my copy so that one was fully about the mood/emotions–which probably worked in its favor as dialogue is often a weak part of many horror films.

A lot of this reminded me of things like Are You Afraid of the Dark? or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in that there’s really not much by way of gore/harsh language/etc and it’s more about trying to creep out friends over a campfire. Having said that, there’s definitely some blood to be found and one segment features an extremely naked lady (you see everything) that’d would nab the whole thing an R-rating for sure since America’s rather loony about naked parts. Also, I won’t be a jerk who points out grammatical errors in the end credits but if I were there are several noticeable flubs and I wasn’t looking–not that I said anything about it.

As for who might enjoy A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio? If you love being creeped out or scared you’ll have a good time. I actually think this would be perfect to have on during a Halloween party, or something. Obviously you’d have appropriate music, too, but this could be on in the den for those in the mood to hang out with some scary stories. Watching alone in a dark room is always a good way to experience a horror movie the first time, if you ask me, so if you like the occasional goosebumps and spine-tingles then bare minimum there are worse ways to spend an hour and forty five minutes.

6 out of 10 Call-in Scary Stories