Wednesday 1/17/24
Over the past several days, I've been listening to dozens of episodes of the old time radio program, The Hall of Fantasy, which was a unique program for a number of reasons. Co-created by Richard Thorne and Carl Grayson, The Hall of Fantasy originally aired in the late 1940s in Salt Lake City, Utah, and with the surviving broadcasts you get ads for the furniture store with a listing of its various outlets, which I like quite a bit.
This wasn't a program--not yet, anyway--ringing out across the country. It's fascinating, sometimes, what has managed to survive, even in piecemeal fashion, and in very nice quality, too. This initial version of the program reached its end, but as circumstance would have it, Grayson and Thorne both ended up at Chicago's WGN, and there they relaunched their brainchild, which eventually went out to a national audience fin the early 1950s.
The Hall of Fantasy specialized in horror. They did adaptations of works like Edith Nesbit's "Man-Size in Marble" (which is discussed in my Scrooge book) and Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," but the best episodes featured scripts by Thorne.
At the time, Suspense was the big prestige horror--or mystery, or thriller, which at the time all got lumped together for ventures of this nature--show. It got the huge stars, had the lavish budget, the fancy scores.
The Hall of Fantasy had none of that. Minuscule budget, sparse--at best--musical soundtracks, and no stars at all. It had gumption, ingenuity, macabre pluck, and enough balls to cede more victories than not to the supernatural. It's a radio show that would have caused Ambrose Bierce to think, "Hey, I dig this."
People will often talk about how real a monster looks or doesn't look in a horror film, like with Jaws, for instance. This means nothing to me. What does mean much to me is that the imaginative has taken over to such a degree that what that is is in part piloting my imagination. If I am all in imaginatively, I'm not going to be sitting there assessing the believability of a robot shark, in this example.
In the rest of my life, I can know that sharks don't do that. But I'm not in the rest of my life right then and there. I am in a no less valid part of my life where a shark may do that. And such a shark is this shark. I'm not comparing it to other sharks or sharks in nature documentaries. A monster can be some guy with a sheet over him and his legs sticking out and it won't matter to me, or be relevant to me, if the imaginative hold has been taken. We are in a different place at that point. I am not looking back or to the sides; I am there.
Nor do I need a sweeping musical soundtrack, or accomplished actors, or even professional actors. Enfold me in your imagination.
That's how The Hall of Fantasy worked. You get a lot of crickets making noise at night. There's your musical soundtrack. The Hall of Fantasy was more consistently effective than Suspense, which could be both formulaic and take these over-the-top swings and misses at the same time. Not a good combo. Sometimes you want to say, "Come on, Suspense, knock this shit off."
Suspense was better when it was less obsessed with having the big twist at the end, and the best episodes of Suspense--"Ghost Hunt," "The House in Cypress Canyon," "The Hitch-Hiker"--are as effective as anything that's ever aired on American dramatic radio.
The best of The Hall of Fantasy didn't go quite that high up the achievement scale, but it's still some of the best radio horror we have. I've discussed the episode, "The Shadow People," on the radio in the past, which is a great place to start with The Hall of Fantasy, so I'll only mention that in passing right now.
Let's look at a few choice episodes.
Here we have "He Who Follows Me," which the well-read reader may recognize as a radio riff on M.R. James's "Count Magnus." The people in this story--a man and wife--do nothing wrong. Their fate, as such, is sealed by the failure of a caretaker to do his job and have a lock in place where a lock should be (he's out picking one up). There's no "reason" beyond the appetites of evil for he who was formerly dead, and also still is for all intents and purposes, to stalk these people right into their own graves. If the actor playing the title character asked, "What's my motivation?" then Thorne could have said, "Evil." It's what this follower wants to happen, going by the inscription near his crypt. A sort of devilish form of entrapment.
I should mention, too, that the characters in most of these episodes are quite likable. They have healthy relationships, too, where a brother, a sister, and the sister's husband will go off on a vacation together. They like each other. People--often a couple--in some dire situation will have a friend they turn to and count on to be there for them, and the friend will do just that, but typically it doesn't matter.
This next episode, "Stone's Revenge," is another ideal entry into the series, but with a happier outcome, for almost everyone, save the one fellow who tries to spare everyone else a bad end. The Hall of Fantasy liked to take us out into the woods. We go on camping trips, fishing trips--lots of fresh air in our lungs. People seek a respite, and tend to find something else. Part of the reason--and it was fortuitous--was because you can make the sounds of the woods on a next-to-nothing budget. Crickets are the unsung starts of many an effective natural soundtrack. Good for them. I like the story within the story--the legend that serves as the driver--of this one, and we get humor, too, with the sheriff and his side hustle near the start.
An episode that will creep you the hell out is "The Dance of the Devil Dolls." There's some silliness--a doomed guy happens to mention the name of the expert you're going to want to consult if in a similar situation before he kicks off--but we get legit terror frisson with the dance and the sound effects that accompany it. That clave-type thing is a willy-inducer. Personally, I like the premise of two young adult friends--one of whom might soon be getting married--living together in the city and taking trips to the country. William Sloane's To Walk the Night had the same set-up. This is back when people had real friends. It's not a roommate situation nor a romantic one, just two friends at a time in their life before other matters probably take them in different directions. I also get a kick out of how little stress their is regarding the shooting at the end, as if the cops will just accept the explanation for what happened.
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