Thursday 9/12/24
There are a number of artful, evocative, honestly frightening episodes of what we can call classic radio horror. I try to stay away from the Old Time Radio descriptor, because it suggests radio programs from an earlier vintage are necessarily passé.
We don't need to do that. What you'll find with legitimate art is how modern it resonates, if you will, no matter when it was made. Watch a Buster Keaton film from the 1920s. The humor works now. The humor would have worked 100 years before the films were made. Read Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. Doesn't feel like it's from the 1860s. You could be told that Sun Ra's Jazz in Silhouette was from any of the last however many decades and you'd accept that information unchallenged. I see many comments about my favorite book, William Sloane's To Walk the Night, in which the reader says they can't believe it's from 1937.
Radio programs--or, more specifically individual episodes of radio programs--were meant to b experienced in that half hour, and then to vanish, unless they were aired again later as filler content while other episodes were being produced, or at the end of a season, or after the show had been cancelled and something had to hold that space until a different show came along.
There is outstanding radio horror out there. Don't I know. I've written and spoken about it enough. But a challenge with classic radio programs was one of consistency. For instance, we have some of our best radio horror from the program Suspense, but Suspense often didn't work. You had a lot of ropiness. More misses--by wide marks at times--than hits. I don't rate the program highly, but I count its best horror episodes as some of the best art of its time. Suspense was better on the whole when it dealt in horror. Its highest percentage of top episodes were horror ones.
Quiet, Please dealt in horror, but I wouldn't call it a horror series. How about a cerebral series? Listeners didn't know what they were going to get each week from auteur Wyllis Cooper and host/actor Ernest Chappell. Are we doing horror? Are we doing philosophy? Whimsy? Black humor? Meta-radio?
There really isn't anything in radio history like Quiet, Please. It's inner circle radio Hall of Fame material along with Gunsmoke, the Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar five-parters, Fort Laramie, and Tales of the Texas Rangers, but if you recommend it to that person in your life for whom it's horror or bust, they might be coming back to you with a bone to pick in keeping with their favored horror imagery.
Horror turns up in unexpected places, which can be delightful. "The Buoy" episode, for instance, from The Cape Cod Radio Mystery Theater is one of the scariest radio horror installments out there (it definitely was a foggy night on old Cape Cod). Truly unnerving in that "Where the hell did this come from?" low-budget, off-the-cuff way--which can make horror feel more organic--that we also get with the film, Carnival of Souls. The horror is not "official," if that makes sense. It's just horror that happened, which is how horror in life works, which is why these works can lay us out as they do.
Radio horror is an important aspect of my book, And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. More days than not I listen to horror radio. It's good for your mind. Like a workout of the imagination. We talk about the mind's eye; horror radio helps to keep your internal vision sharp. As I've suggested, this listening involves a great deal of hopping around. I prize those top episodes from series to series. Orson Welles's Dracula from 1938. Nightfall's "The Porch Light," which is imperfect but also not what you want to risk listening to right before bed, and I mean that as a compliment.
But something I really respect is a horror program that delivered the horror each week with pretty good qualitative consistency, and by that standard, The Hall of Fantasy might be the best out-and-out horror program of all.
We've discussed it in these pages, but I'm spending a lot of time with the series of late, so I thought I'd circle back to it. The show began out in Salt Lake City in the late 1940s, but really only became the horror heavyweight that it was after being revised in Chicago in the early 1950s by the same two people--Richard Thorne and Carl Greyson--who happened to be working at the same station. Isn't that neat? They said, in effect, "Want to give The Hall of Fantasy another go?" and we're fortunate they did.
This is an important show in a manner not dissimilar to Gunsmoke, because it elevated radio to an adult realm. Made this serious entertainment. Grown-up stuff. Horror before The Hall of Fantasy often went something like this: Line of ominous dialogue--blast of organ--frightened reaction--blast of organ--statement of exposition that makes sure to tell us things are very grim indeed--blast of organ.
You get the idea. Frasier did a nice job satirizing this style of approach in the episode "Ham Radio." It's what most people who are aware of dramatic radio as a thing would conjure in their minds, I'd say, as horror radio. Now this is old time radio. Punctuative blasts of organ and and characters who often feel like they're on the verge of saying, "Dun dun dah!"
The Hall of Fantasy didn't feel a need to proceed as horror radio so often had. The audience was treated like grown-ups, but kids were still welcome in theory, though they would have been a small part of the audience. Think about Gunsmoke. Previous radio oaters were pitched to those kiddies. They weren't serious. Or, I should say, meant to be taken very seriously. You could argue that Gunsmoke made listeners take things too seriously. I wouldn't say that, but some of the best Gunsmoke episodes like "The Cabin" and "Home Surgery" are among those I listen to the least. Don't be misled by that idea--you can save yourself up for certain works of art.
The Hall of Fantasy, circa 1952, must have been a true surprise for those who heard it, accustomed as they were in the horror radio vein to something else. Also notable was that the malevolent forces often "won." The Hall of Fantasy harbored no illusions about life. We were dealing in the supernatural whereas life often doesn't, but you have to understand that the baddies are going to be hard to overcome. Their victory is the more likely outcome, especially if you don't do anything, but it can also be through no fault of your own and you're just out of luck. Maybe you'll win a different battle on a different day, if you're still around.
Unlike Quiet, Please, the surviving episodes of The Hall of Fantasy (unfortunately, many are unaccounted for) are in solid sound. This was a literate, crafty show--Sheridan Le Fanu's Professor Hesselius from his 1872 lesbian vampire novella Carmilla is reincarnated I guess we could say in the episodes "The Shadow People" and "The Beast with Red Eyes." The Hall of Fantasy did fatalistic very well, but without snuffing out--sort of a "The Shadow People" pun--human agency even if humans had no real shot. Bleak! But it was entertaining, and it can be hard to pair the two and produce a viable, desirable work.
One such episode was that of "The Sea Phantom" from August 24, 1953. Two friends--a writer and a painter--rent a house on the coast of Maine and get busy with their work. The writer finds himself writing a story he doesn't mean to write while the painter is executing a seascape he hadn't intended to paint. They both realize they're depicting a ghost ship.
What we have here is what I call the It could be/But it might not be principle of horror. Could be a coincidence, might not be a coincidence at all. Can you think of another example? You may have your hand up there in the back of the class because you're ready to say, "W.F. Harvey's 'August Heat'!" Excellent answer. This principle causes us to debate within our own heads, turning possibilities over; it makes us an active participant in the story because we have an important job: To determine if this thing is happening, or that thing.
Turns out in "The Sea Phantom" that this isn't a coincidence. The seaside, foggy mood is an important part of the story, which also feels like something from out of the early days of American sail and a contemporary age; a perpetually contemporary age. I think the moment where there's a knock at the door and the one guy decides to just open it is so relatable. Both men are in agreement to open the door. No matter what is out there. They've been made desperate to the point of wanting to get something over with, if that's really what everything has come to.
As I said, fatalistic, but with some element of agency. They could leave the door shut, I suppose. The opening of the door and the singular conversation that follows somehow seems to result in the forestalling of death. The awful outcome can be avoided. We start to think that said avoiding is a matter of simply refusing to answer what is tantamount to a call. But it doesn't quite work that way.
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