Saturday 7/6/24
There is a long list of contenders for the silliest episode ever of classic horror radio. You could find hundreds in the running. These things were often meant to be fun, plain and simple, nothing more.
Usually they were done fast, and the people who made them weren't worried about how they'd stand up to scrutiny. The idea of people listening to recordings of these broadcasts years, decades, and generations later rarely, if ever, would have entered the minds of the people who worked on them. They were just these things that went out over the radio lasting a half hour that hopefully put a charge in someone's evening and then that was that. On to the next.
It's cool that there are episodes from various shows that do hold up, which you can listen to as many times as you like and still be be delighted by them, and even scared, if we're talking horror.
An example I like to point out as fitting this criteria is "The House in Cypress Canyon" from Suspense and which I wrote about in an essay that will be in And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. That's the imperishable frightening stuff right there.
But when is silly too silly? And can mitigating factors give us reason to experience that otherwise excessive silliness as charming in some degree?
Macabre was a radio show that lasted for only eight episodes, running from 1961 to 1962. That second year is a big one for radio buffs, because that's when the Golden Age of the radio program came to a close. An all but official close.
Matters had really tapered off in the second half of the previous decade, but long-running programs Suspense and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar (which was without Bob Bailey by that point) wrapped up in 1962, after Gunsmoke going off the air the year before, and that was that: Television's time had come.
Television and radio are so different and you would have liked to think they could have co-existed. People are simple, though. They're all going to do one thing. Which is sad. Limiting. But humans are simply not about getting the most out of things, life included.
But don't get too retroactively down in the mouth: Other shows will be coming along over the rest of the 1960s, and there was quality programming to be found like Black Mass (an essay regarding which is also featured in And the Skin Was Gone) and Beyond Midnight, but hearing things like those two shows was dependent on where you lived (Black Mass broadcast out of Berkeley, Beyond Midnight originated in South Africa).
As for Macabre, though, one of the last Golden Age radio programs to get started, if not the last: The show was not made by radio professionals, which was probably the only reason it happened. Instead, it was a project of love undertaken by members of the United States armed forces who were stationed in Japan and working for Armed Forces Radio.
Wanting something to do, or thinking it'd be fun to get creative, and led by William Verdier, the assistant production director for the Far East Network and a former radio employee of CBS and NBC, these folks essentially said, "Why not us?"
(The show's title likely isn't pronounced the way you'd pronounce the word today. It was one of those words whose pronunciation has changed over time, sort of like "robot" in the 1950s vs. the way people say it now.)
Verdier wrote the shows and often played the lead in them. I'm not going to make fun of the guy. You suspect, in listening, that his casting, as such, was because they had no one else. And yes, he sounds a bit like Elaine's boss from Seinfeld.
This episode here, "Final Resting Place," from November 13, 1961, is, well, just about the silliest horror radio episode I can think of. For any show. I'm not saying it's the radio equivalent of an Ed Wood movie, but yeah...kind of. Which also means its spirited and plucky. These are good qualities for anything to have. For any person to have. And I like the idea of people taking themselves seriously and not seriously at the same time. The Macabre troupe was trying, but they didn't have any illusions.
The episode is about a newlywed couple who stumble across a carnival where you can be buried alive for a while for a decent amount of coin. She's like no, this is bad, and he's like, we could use the money, babe.
Silliness compounds silliness. Things take a The Vanishing type of turn, but then there's this sort of cellphone. A prodigious stacking of improbabilities and inanities.
You know that episode of Frasier where they recreate a vintage radio broadcast and things go decidedly off-script, but the listeners at home--like Martin--don't know that? That's the feel of this episode, except they were sticking to the script.
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