Danse Macabre

CHAPTER V

Radio and the Set of Reality

BOOKS AND MOVIES are all very well, and we'll come back to them before long, but before we do I'd like to talk a little about radio in the mid-fifties. I'll start with myself, and from me, we can hopefully progress to a more profitable general case.

I am of the last quarter of the last generation that remembers radio drama as an active force-a dramatic art form with its own set of reality. This is a true statement as far as it goes, but of course it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. Radio's real golden age ended around 1950, the year at which this book's casual attempt at media history begins, the year I celebrated my third birthday and began my first full year of doing it in the potty. As a child of the media, I have been pleased to have attended the healthy birth of rock and roll, and to have seen it grow up fast and healthy . . . but I was also in attendance, during my younger years, at the deathbed of radio as a strong fictional medium.

Drama is still to be found on the radio, God knows-CBS Mystery Theater is a case in point-and there is even comedy, as every devoted follower of that abysmally inept superhero, Chickenman, knows. But the Mystery Theater seems oddly flat, oddly dead; a curiosity only.

There is none of the heavy emotional zap that used to come out of the radio when Inner Sanctum's creaking door swung open each week, or during Dimension X, I Love a Mystery, or the early days of Suspense. Although I listen to Mystery Theater when I can (and happen to think that E. G. Marshall does a great job as host), I don't particularly recommend it; it is a fluke like a Studebaker that still runs-poorly-or the last surviving auk. Even more than these, CBS Mystery Theater is like an electrical power cable through which a heavy, almost lethal, current used to run and which now lies inexplicably cold and harmless. The Adventures of Chickenman, a syndicated comedy program, works much better (but comedy, a naturally auditory as well as visual medium, often does), but the intrepid, klutzy Chickenman is still something of an acquired taste, like taking snuff or eating escargots. My own favorite moment in Chickenman's career occurs when he gets on the crosstown bus clad in boots, tights, and cape, only to discover that, since he has no pockets, he doesn't have a dime for the fare box.*

And still, endearing as Chickenman seems as he stumbles gamely from one abysmal situation to another-with his Jewish mother always close behind, bearing advice and chicken soup with matzoh balls-he is never quite in focus for me . . . except maybe for that one priceless moment as he stands slumped before the bus driver, cape between his legs. I smile at Chickenman; I have occasionally even chuckled; but there are never moments as gut-bustingly funny as the moments when Fibber McGee, as unstoppable as Time itself, would approach his closet or when Chester A. Riley would engage in long and uneasy conversations with his next-door neighbor, a mortician named Digger O'Dell ("He sure is swell").

Of the radio programs I remember with the most clarity, the only one which properly belongs in the clause macabre was Suspense, also presented by the CBS Radio Network.

My grandfather (the one who worked for Winslow Homer as a young man) and I really presided at the death rattle of radio together. He was fairly hale and fairly hearty at the age of eighty-two, but incomprehensible because he had a heavy beard and no teeth. He would talk-volubly at times-but only my mother could really understand what he was saying.

"Gizzen-groppen fuzzwah grupp?" he might ask me as we sat listening to his old Philco table model. "That's right, Daddy Guy," I'd say, with not the slightest idea of what I'd agreed to.

Nonetheless, we had the radio to unite us.

At this time-around 1958-my grandmother and grandfather lived together in a combination bed-sitting room that was a converted parlor, the biggest room in a small New England house. He was ambulatory -barely-but my grandmother was blind and bedridden and horribly corpulent, a victim of hypertension. Occasionally her mind would clear; mostly she would go into long, excited rants, telling us that the horse needed to be fed, the fires needed to be banked, that someone had to get her up so she could bake pies for the Elks supper.

Sometimes she talked to Flossie, one of my mother's sisters. Flossie had died of spinal meningitis forty years ago. So the situation in that room was this: my grandfather was lucid but incomprehensible; my grandmother was comprehensible but far gone in senility.

*And for some people, Chickenman doesn't work at all. My good friend Mac McCutcheon once played an album of the Great Fowl's adventures to a group of friends who simply sat and listened with polite, blank expressions on their faces. No one even chuckled. As Steve Martin says in The jerk: "Take those snails off her plate and bring her the toasted cheese sandwich like I told you in the first place!”

Somewhere in between was Daddy Guy's radio.

On radio nights, I would bring in a chair and place it in my grandfather's corner of the room, and he would fire up one of his huge cigars. The gong would sound for Suspense, or Johnny Dollar would begin to spin that week's tale through the unique (so far as I know) device of itemizing his expense account, or the voice of Bill Conrad as Matt Dillon would come on, deep and somehow unutterably weary: "It makes a man watchful . . . and a little lonely." For me, the smell of strong cigar smoke in a small room brings up its own set of ghost referents: Sunday night radio with my grandfather. The creak of batwing doors, the jingle of spurs . . . or the scream at the end of that classic Suspense episode, "You Died Last Night.” They died, all right, one by one, that last handful of radio programs. Johnny Dollar went first; he totted up his last expense account and drifted away into whatever limbo waits for retired insurance investigators. Gunsmoke went a year or two later. TV audiences had associated the face of Matt Dillon, only imagined for the previous ten years or so, with that of James Arness, Kitty's with Amanda Blake, Doc's with Milburn Stone, and Chester's, of course, with the face of Dennis Weaver. Their faces and their voices eclipsed the voices which came from the radio, and even now, twenty years later, it is the eager, slightly whining voice of Weaver that I associate with Chester Good as he comes hurrying up the Dodge City boardwalk with gimpy enthusiasm, calling, "Mr. Dillon! Mr. Dillon! There's trouble down t'the Longbranch!” It was Suspense, the last of the grisly old horrors, that held out the longest, but by then TV had demonstrated its ability to produce its own horrors; like Gunsmoke, Inner Sanctum had made the jump from radio to video, the swinging door finally visible. And visible, it certainly was horrible enough-slightly askew, festooned with cobwebs-but it was something of a relief, just the same. Nothing could have looked as horrible as that door sounded. I'm going to avoid any long dissertation on just why radio died, or in what ways it was superior to television in terms of the imaginational requirements it imposed on the listener (although we will touch briefly on some of this when we talk about the great Arch Oboler), because radio drama has been rather overanalyzed and certainly overeulogized. A little nostalgia is good for the soul, and I think I have already indulged in mine.

But I do want to say something about imagination purely as a tool in the art and science of scaring the crap out of people. The idea isn't original with me; I heard it expressed by William F. Nolan at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention. Nothing is so frightening as what's behind the closed door, Nolan said. You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a tenfoot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. "A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible," the audience thinks, "but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.” Consider, if you will, the most frightening sequence in The Changeling. The heroine (Trish Van Devere) has rushed off to the haunted house her new friend (George C. Scott) has rented, thinking he may need help. Scott is not there at all, but a series of small, stealthy sounds leads her to believe that he is. The audience watches, mesmerized, as Trish climbs to the second floor; the third floor; and finally she negotiates the narrow, cobwebby steps leading to the attic room where a young boy has been murdered in particularly nasty fashion some eighty years before. When she reaches the room, the dead boy's wheelchair suddenly whirls around and pursues her, chasing her screaming down all three flights of stairs, racing along after her as she runs down the hall, to finally overturn near the front door. The audience screams as the empty wheelchair chases the lady, but the real scare has already happened; it comes as the camera dwells on those long, shadowy staircases, as we try to imagine walking up those stairs toward some as-yet-unseen horror waiting to happen.

Bill Nolan was speaking as a screenwriter when he offered the example of the big b,-g behind the door, but the point applies to all media. What's behind the door or lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening as the door or the staircase itself. And because of this, comes the paradox: the artistic work of horror is almost always a disappointment. It is the classic no-win situation. You can scare people with the unknown for a long, long time (the classic example, as Bill Nolan also pointed out, is the Jacques Tourneur film with Dana Andrews, Curse of the Demon), but sooner or later, as in poker, you have to turn your down cards up. You have to open the door and show the audience what's behind it. And if what happens to be behind it is a bug, not ten but a hundred feet tall, the audience heaves a sigh of relief (or utters a scream of relief) and thinks, "A bug a hundred feet tall is pretty horrible, but I can deal with that. I was afraid it might be a thousand feet tall." The thing is-and a pretty good thing for the human race, too, with such neato-keeno things to deal with as Dachau, Hiroshima, the Children's Crusade, mass starvation in Cambodia, and what happened in Jonestown, Guyana-the human consciousness can deal with almost anything . . which leaves the writer or director of the horror tale with a problem which is the psychological equivalent of inventing a faster-than-light space drive in the face of E=MC^2.

There is and always has been a school of horror writers (I am not among them) who believe that the way to beat this rap is to never open the door at all. The classic example of this-it even involves a door-is the Robert Wise version of Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House. The film and the book do not differ greatly in terms of plot, but they differ significantly, I think, in terms of thrust, point of view, and final effect. (We were talking about radio, weren't we? Well, we'll get back to it, I guess, sooner or later.) Later on we will have some converse of Ms. Jackson's excellent novel, but for now let's deal with the film. In it, an anthropologist (Richard Johnson) whose hobby is ghost hunting invites a party of three to summer with him at the infamous Hill House, where any number of nasty things have occurred in the past and where, from time to time, ghosts may (or may not) have been seen. The party includes two ladies who have' previously experienced aspects of the invisible world (Julie Harris and Claire Bloom) and the happy-go-lucky nephew of the present owner (played by Russ Tamblyn, that old dancing fool from the film version of West Side Story).

The housekeeper, Mrs. Dudley, offers each her simple, bone-chilling catechism as they arrive: "No one lives any closer than town; no one will come any closer than that. So no one will hear you if you scream. In the night. In the dark.” Of course Mrs. Dudley is proved absolutely right, and that right early. The four of them experience a steadily escalating run of horrors, and happy-go-lucky Luke ends by saying that the property he has so looked forward to inheriting should be burned flat . . . and the ground seeded with salt.

For our purposes here, the interesting thing lies in the fact that we never actually see whatever it is that haunts Hill House. Something is there, all right. Something holds hands with the terrified Eleanor in the night-she thinks it's Theo, but finds out the next day that Theo hasn't even been close to her. Something knocks on the wall with a sound like cannonfire. And most apropos to where we are now, this same something causes a door to bulge grotesquely inward until it looks like a great convex bubble-a sight so unusual to the eye that the mind reacts with horror. In Nolan's terms, something is scratching at the door. In a very real way, in spite of fine acting, fine direction, and the marvelous black and white photography of David Boulton, what we have in the Wise film (title shortened to The Haunting) is one of the world's few radio horror movies. Something is scratching at that ornate, paneled door, something horrible . . . but it is a door Wise elects never to open.

Lovecraft would open the door . . . but only a crack. Here is the final entry of Robert Blake's diary in the story "The Haunter of the Dark," which was dedicated to Robert Bloch: Sense of distance gone-far is near and near is far. No light-no glass-see that steeple-that tower-window-can hear-Roderick Usher-am mad or going mad-the thing is stirring and fumbling in the tower-I am it and it is I-I want to get out . . . must get out and unify the forces . . . It knows where I am . . . I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a monstrous odor . . . senses transfigured . . . boarding at that tower window cracking and giving way . . . I'd . . . ngai . . .ygg . . . I see it-coming here-hell-wind-titan blur-black wings-Yog-Sothoth save me-the three-lobed burning eye . . . So the tale ends, leaving us with only the vaguest intimations of what Robert Blake's haunter may have been. "I cannot describe it," protagonist after protagonist tells us. "If I did, you would go mad with fear." But somehow I doubt that. I think both Wise and Lovecraft before him understood that to open the door, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is to destroy the unified, dreamlike effect of the best horror. "I can deal with that," the audience says to itself, settling back, and bang! you just lost the ballgame in the bottom of the ninth.

My own disapproval of this method-we'll let the door bulge but we'll never open it-comes fromthe belief that it is playing to tie rather than to win. There is (or may be), after all, that hundredth case, and there is the whole concept of suspension of disbelief. Consequently, I'd rather yank the door open at some point during the festivities; I'd rather turn my hole cards face-up. And if the audience screams with laughter rather than terror, if they see the zipper running up the monster's back, then you just gotta go back to the drawing board and try it again.

The exciting thing about radio at its best was that it bypassed the whole question of whether to open the door or leave it closed. Radio, by the very nature of the medium, was exempt. For the listeners during the years 1930 to 1950 or so, there were no visual expectations to fulfill in their set of reality.

What about this set of reality, then? Another example, for purposes of comparison and contrast, from the movies. One of the classic fright films that I consistently missed as a child was Val Lewton's Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur. Like Freaks, it is one of those movies that comes up when the conversation among fans turns to what makes a "great horror movie-others would include Curse of the Demon, Dead of Night, and The Creeping Unknown, I suppose, but for now let's stick with the Lewton film. It's one that a great many people remember with affection and respect from their childhoods-one that scared the crap out of them. Two specific sequences from the film are always brought up; both involve Jane Randolph, the "good" girl, menaced by Simone Simon, the "bad" girl (who is, let's be fair, no more willfully evil than is poor old Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man). In one, Ms. Randolph is trapped in a deserted basement swimming pool while, somewhere nearby and getting closer all the time, a great jungle cat menaces her. In the other sequence, she is walking through Central Park and the cat is getting closer and closer . . . getting ready to spring . . . we hear a hard, coughing roar . . . which turns out only to be the airbrakes of an arriving bus. Ms.

Randolph steps onto it, leaving the audience limp with relief and with the feeling that a horrible disaster has been averted by inches.

In terms of what it does psychologically, I wouldn't argue the thesis that The Cat People is a good, perhaps even a great, American film. It is almost certainly the best horror film of the forties. At the base of the myth of the cat people-werecats, if you like-is a deep sexual fear; Irena (Ms. Simon) has been convinced as a child that any outpouring of passion will cause her to change into a cat. Nevertheless, she marries Kent Smith, who is so smitten that he takes her to the altar even though we pretty much understand he'll be spending his wedding night- and many nights thereafter-sleeping on the couch. No wonder the poor guy eventually turns to Jane Randolph.

But to return to those two scenes: the one in the swimming pool works quite well. Lewton, like Stanley Kubrick with The Shining, is the master of context here, lighting the scene to perfection and controlling every variable. We feel the truth of that scene everywhere, from the tiled walls, the lap of the water in the pool, to that slightly flat echo when Ms. Randolph speaks (to ask that time-honored horror movie question, "Who's there?"). And I am sure the Central Park scene worked for audiences of the forties, but today it simply will not wash; even out in the sticks, audiences would hoot and laugh at it.

I finally saw the movie as an adult, and puzzled for some time over what all the shouting could have been about. I think I finally figured out why that Central Park stalking scene worked then but doesn't work now. It has something to do with what film technicians call "state of the art." But this is only the technician's way of referring to that thing I have called "visual set" or "the set of reality.” If you should get a chance to see The Cat People on TV or at a revival house in or near your city, pay particular attention to that sequence where Irena stalks Jane Randolph as Ms.

Randolph hurries to catch her bus. Take a moment to look at it closely and you'll see it is not Central Park at all. It's a set built on a soundstage. A little thought will suggest a reason why.

Tourneur, who wanted to be in control of lighting at all times, * didn't elect to shoot on set; he simply had no choice. "The state of the art" in 1942 did not allow for night shooting on location.

So instead of shooting in daylight with a heavy filter, a technique that shows up as even more glaringly faked, Tourneur quite sensibly opted for the soundstage-and it is interesting to me that, some forty years later, Stanley Kubrick did exactly the same thing with The Shining . . . and like Lewton and Tourneur before him, Kubrick is a director who shows an almost exquisite sensitivity to the nuances of light and shadow.

To theatrical audiences of the time there was no false note in this; they were used to integrating movie sets into their imaginative processes. Sets were simply accepted, the way we might accept a single piece of scenery or two in a play that calls (as Thornton Wilder's Our Town does) for mostly "bare stage"-this is an acceptance that the Victorian playgoer would simply have balked at. He or she might accept the principle of the bare stage, but emotionally the play would lose most of its effect and its charm. The Victorian playgoer would be apt to find Our Town outside her or his set of reality.

For me, the scene in Central Park lost its believability for the same reason. As the camera moves with Ms. Randolph, everything surrounding her screams fake! fake! fake! to my eye.

While I was supposed to be worrying about whether or not Jane Randolph was going to be attacked, I found myself worrying instead about that papier-mache stone wall in the background. When the bus finally pulls up, the chuff of its air brakes miming the cat's cheated growl, I was wondering if it was hard getting that New York City bus onto a closed soundstage and if the bushes in the background were real or plastic.

*William F. Nolan, mentioning this film, said that the memory which remained with him most strongly from the Central Park sequence was the pattern of "light-shadow-light-shadow-light-shadow" as the camera moves with Ms. Randolph-and it is indeed a fine, eerie effect.

The set of reality changes, and the boundaries of that mental country where the imagination may be fruitfully employed (Rod Serling's apt phrase for it, now a part of the American idiom, was the Twilight Zone) are in near-constant flux. By the 1960s, the decade when I saw more movies than I ever have since, the "state of the art" had advanced to a point where a set and soundstages had become nearly obsolete. New fast films had made available-light shooting perfectly possible. In 1942 Val Lewton could not shoot in Central Park by night, but in Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick shot several scenes by candlelight. This is a quantum technical leap which has this paradoxical effect: it robs the bank of imagination. Perhaps realizing the fact, Kubrick takes a giant step backward to the soundstage with his next film, The Shining. *

All of this may seem far afield from the subject of radio drama and the question of whether or not to open the door on the monster, but we're really standing right next to both subjects. As movie audiences of the forties and fifties believed Lewton's Central Park set, so radio listeners believed what the announcers, the actors, and the soundmen told them. The visual set was there, but it was plastic, bound by very few hard and fast expectations. When you made the monster in your mind, there was no zipper running down its back; it was a perfect monster.

Audiences of today listening to old tapes don't accept the Make-Believe Ballroom any more than I am able to accept Lewton's papier-mache rock wall; we are simply hearing a 1940s deejay playing records in a studio. But to audiences of a different day, the MakeBelieve Ballroom was more real than make-believe; you could imagine the men in their tuxedos, the women in their gowns and smooth elbowlength gloves, the flaring wall sconces, and Tommy Dorsey, resplendent in white dinner jacket, conducting. Or in the case of the infamous Orson Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds, a Mercury Theater Halloween presentation (and that was a trick-or-treat millions of Americans never forgot), you could broaden that country of the imagination enough to send people screaming into the streets. On TV it wouldn't have worked, but on the radio there were no zippers running down the Martians' backs.

Radio avoided the open-door/closed-door question, I think, because radio deposited to that bank of imagination rather than making withdrawals in the name of "state of the art." Radio made it real.

*Want more proof of how the set of reality changes, whether we want it to or not? Remember Bonanza, which ran on NBC for a thousand years or so? Check it out in syndication someday. Look at that Ponderosa set-the front yard, the big family room-and ask yourself how you ever believed it was "real." It seemed real because we were used to seeing TV series shot on soundstages up until 1965 or so; nowadays even TV producers don't use soundstages for exteriors. The state of the art has, for better or worse, moved on.

2

My first experience with real horror came at the hands of Ray Bradbury-it was an adaptation of his story "Mars Is Heaven!" on Dimension X. This would have been broadcast around 1951, which would have made me four at the time. I asked to listen, and was denied permission by my mother. "It's on too late," she said, "and it would be much too upsetting for a little boy your age.” At some other time Mom told me that one of her sisters almost cut her wrists in the bathtub during the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast. My aunt was not going about it hastily; she could look out the bathroom window and had, she said later, no plans at all to make the cuts until she saw the Martian death machines looming on the horizon. I guess you could say my aunt had found the Welles broadcast too upsetting . . . and my mother's words echo down to me over the years like a voice in an uneasy dream that has never really ended: "Too upsetting . . . upsetting . . . upsetting . . .” I crept down to the door to listen anyway, and she was right: it was plenty upsetting.

Space travelers land on Mars-only it isn't Mars at all. It's good old Greentown, Illinois, and it's inhabited by all the voyagers' dead friends and relatives. Their mothers are here, their sweethearts, good old Clancey the patrolman, Miss Henreys from the second grade. On Mars, Lou Gehrig is still pounding them over the fences for the Yankees.

Mars is heaven, the space travelers decide. The locals take the crew of the spaceship into their homes, where they sleep the sleep of those perfectly at peace, full of hamburgers and hotdogs and Mom's apple pie. Only one member of the crew suspects the unspeakable obscenity, and he's right. Boy, is he right! And yet even he has awakened to the realization of this deadly illusion too late . . . because in the night, these well-loved faces begin to drip and run and change. Kind, wise eyes become black tar pits of murderous hate. The rosy apple cheeks of Grandma and Grandpa lengthen and turn yellow. Noses elongate into wrinkled trunks. Mouths become gaping maws. It is a night of creeping horror, a night of hopeless screams and belated terror, because Mars isn't heaven after all. Mars is a hell of hate and deception and murder.

I didn't sleep in my bed that night; that night I slept in the doorway, where the real and rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine on my face. That was the power of radio at its height. The Shadow, we were assured at the beginning of each episode, had "the power to cloud men's minds." It strikes me that, when it comes to fiction in the media, it is television and movies which so often cloud that part of our minds where the imagination moves most fruitfully; they do so by imposing the dictatorship of the visual set.

If you view imagination as a mental creature of a hundred different possible forms (imagine, if you will, Larry Talbot not just condemned to turn into a wolf man at the full of the moon but into an entire bestiary on successive nights; everything from a wereshark to a wereflea), then one of the forms is that of a rampaging gorilla, a creature that is dangerous and totally out of control.

If this seems fanciful or melodramatic, think of your own children or the children of close friends (never mind your own childhood; you may remember events that took place then with some fidelity, but most of your memories of how the emotional weather was then will be utterly false), and of the times when they simply find themselves unable to turn off the second-floor light or go down into the cellar or maybe even bring a coat from the closet because they saw or heard something that frightened them-and not necessarily a movie or a TV program, either.

I've mentioned the fearsome twi-night double-header already; John D. MacDonald tells the story of how for weeks his son was terrified of something he called "the green ripper.” MacDonald and his wife finally figured it out-at a dinner party, a friend had mentioned the Grim Reaper. What their son had heard was green ripper, and later it became the title of one of MacDonald's Travis McGee stories.

A child may be frightened by such a wide sweep of things that adults generally understand that to worry about this overmuch is to endanger all relations with the child; you begin to feel like a soldier in the middle of a minefield. Added to this is another complicating factor: sometimes we frighten our kids on purpose. Someday, we say, a man in a black car may stop and offer you a sweet to take a ride with him. And that is a Bad Man (read: the Boogeyman), and if he stops for you, you must never, never, never . . . Or: Instead of giving that tooth to the Tooth Fairy, Ginny, let's put it in this glass of Coke.

Tomorrow morning that tooth will be all gone. The Coke will dissolve it. So think about it the next time you have a quarter and . . . Or: Little boys who play with matches wet the bed, they just can't help it, so don't you . . . Or that all-time favorite: Don't put that in your mouth, you don't know where it's been.

Most children deal with their fears quite well . . . most of the time, anyway. The shape-changing of their imaginations is so wide, so marvelously varied, that the gorilla pops out of the deck only infrequently. Besides worrying about what might be in the closet or under the bed, they have to imagine themselves as firefighters and policemen (imagination as the Very Gentle Perfect Knight), as mothers and nurses, as superheroes of various stripes and types, as their own parents, dressed up in attic clothes and giggling hand in hand before a mirror which shows them the future in the most unthreatening way. They need to experience a whole range of emotions from love to boredom, to try them out like new shoes.

But every now and then the gorilla gets out. Children understand that this face of their imagination must be caged ("It's only a movie, that couldn't really happen, could it?" . . . Or as Judith Viorst writes in one of her fine children's books, "My mom says there are no ghosts, vampires, and zombies . . . but . . ." ) . But their cages are of necessity more flimsy than those their elders build. I do not believe there are people out there with no imagination at all-although I have come to believe that there are a few who lack even the most rudimentary sense of humor-but it sometimes seems that way . . . perhaps because some people seem to build not just cages for the gorilla but Chase Manhattan Bank-type safes. Complete with time locks.

I remarked to an interviewer once that most great writers have a curious childish louk to their faces, and that this seems even more pronounced in the faces of those who write fantasy. It is perhaps most noticeable in the face of Ray Bradbury, who retains very strongly the look of the boy he was in Illinois-his face retains this indefinable look in spite of his sixty-plus years, his graying hair, his heavy glasses. Robert Bloch has the face of a sixth-grade cutup, the Klass Klown, don't you know, although he is past sixty (just how far past I would not venture to guess; he might send Norman Bates after me); it is the face of the kid who sits in the back of the classroom-at least until the teacher assigns him a place up front, which usually doesn't take long-and makes screeching sounds on the top of his desk with the palms of his hands.

Harlan Ellison has the face of a tough inner-city kid, confident enough in himself to be kind in most cases, but more than able to fuck you over royally if you give him any shit.

But perhaps the look I'm trying to describe (or indicate; actual description is really impossible) is most visible on the face of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, while regarded as a "straight" writer of literature by the critical establishment, has nonetheless made the cataloguing of devils, angels, demons, and dybbuks a good part of his career. Grab a Singer book and take a good look at the author photo (you can read the book, too, when you're done looking at Singer's picture, okay?). It is the face of an old man, but that is a surface so thin you could read a newspaper through it. The boy is beneath, stamped very clearly on his features.

It's in his eyes, mostly; they are young and clear.

One of the reasons for these "young faces" may be that writers of fantasy rather like the gorilla. They have never taken the trouble to strengthen the cage, and as a result, part of them has never accomplished the imaginative going-away that is so much a part of growing up, of establishing the tunnel vision so necessary for a successful career as an adult. One of the paradoxes of fantasy/horror is that the writer of this stuff is like the lazy pigs who built their houses of straw and sticks-but instead of learning their lesson and building sensible brick houses like their oh-so-adult elder brother (memorialized in his engineer's cap forever in my memory by the Disney cartoon), the writer of fantasy/ horror simply rebuilds with sticks and straw again. Because, in a crazy kind of way, he or she likes it when the wolf comes and blows it all down, just as he or she sorta likes it when the gorilla escapes from its cage.

Most people aren't fantasy writers, of course, but almost all of us recognize the need to feed the imagination some of the stuff from time to time. People seem to recognize that the imagination somehow needs a dose of it, like vitamins or iodized salt to avoid goiter. Fantasy is salt for the mind.

Earlier on I talked about the suspension of disbelief, Coleridge's classic definition of what the reader must provide when seeking a hot shot from a fantasy story, novel, or poem. Another way of putting this is that the reader must agree to let the gorilla out of its cage for a while, and when we see the zipper running up the monster's back, the gorilla goes promptly back into its cage. After all, by the time we get to be forty or so, it's been in there for a long time, and perhaps it's developed a bit of the old "institutional mentality." Sometimes it has to be prodded out with a stick. And sometimes it won't go at all.

Seen in these terms, the set of reality- becomes a very difficult thing to manipulate. Of course it leas been done in the movies; if it had not been, this book would be shorter by a third or more. But by detouring around the visual part of the set of reality, radio developed an awesome tool (perhaps even a dangerous one; the riot and national hysteria following The War of the Worlds broadcast suggests that it could have been so) * for picking the lock on the gorilla's cage. But in spite of all the nostalgia we might want to feel, it is impossible to go back and reexperience the creative essence of radio terror; that particular lock pick has been broken by the simple fact that, for better or worse, -,ve now demand believable visual input as part of the set of reality. Like it or lump it, we seem to be stuck with it.

3

We're almost done with our brief discussion of radio now-I think that to do much more would be to risk droning along like one of those tiresome cinema buffs who want to spend the night telling you how Charlie Chaplin was the greatest screen actor who ever lived or that the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns stand at the apex of the Existential/Absurdist movement- but no discussion of the phenomenon of radio terror, no matter low brief, would be complete without some mention of the genre's prime auteur-not Orson Welles, but Arch Oboler, the first playright to have his own national radio series, the chilling Lights Out.

Lights Out was actually broadcast in the forties, but enough of the programs were rebroadcast in the fifties (and even in the sixties) for me to feel I can justify their inclusion here.

The one I remember most vividly from its rebroadcast on Dimension X was "The Chicken Heart that Ate the World." Oboler, like so many people in the horror field-Alfred Hitchcock is another prime example-are extremely alert to the humor implicit in horror, and this alertness was never on better view than in the Chicken Heart story, which made you giggle at its very absurdity even as the gooseflesh raced up and down your arms.

"You remember that only a few days ago you asked me my opinion on how the world would end?" the scholarly scientist who has un-wittingly perpetrated the horror on an unsuspecting world solemnly tells his young protégé as they fly at 5,000 feet in a light plane over the ever-growing chicken heart. "You remember my answer? Oh, such a scholarly prophecy! Mighty-sounding theories about cessation of earth rotation . . . entropy . . . but now, this is reality, Louis! The end has come for humanity! Not in the red of atomic fusion . . . not in the glory of interstellar combustion . . . not in the peace of white, cold silence . . . but with that! That creeping, grasping flesh below us. It is a joke, eh, Louis? The joke of the cosmos! The end of mankind . . . because of a chicken heart.” "No," Louis gibbers. "No, I can't die. I'll find a safe landing place-” But then, perfectly on cue, the comforting drone of the plane's engine in the background becomes a coughing stutter. "We're in a spin!" Louis screams.

*Or what about Hitler? Most of us associate him now with newsreel footage and forget that in the pretelevision thirties, Hitler used radio with a kind of malevolent brilliance. My guess is that two or three appearances on Meet the Press or maybe one you're-on-the-griddle 60 Minutes segment with Mike Wallace would have cooked Hitler's goose quite effectively.

"The end of all mankind," the doctor proclaims in stentorian tones, and the two of them fall directly into the chicken heart. We hear its steady beat . . . louder . . . louder . . . and then the sickly splash that ends the play. Part of Oboler's real genius was that when "Chicken Heart” ended, you felt like laughing and throwing up at the same time.

"Cue the bombers," an old ad for radio used to run (drone of bombers in the background; the mind's eye visualizes a sky black with Flying Forts). "Drop the ice cream into Puget Sound," the voice continues (whining, hydraulic sound of bomb bays opening, a rising whistle followed by a gigantic splash). "All right . . . cue the chocolate syrup . . . the whipped cream . . . and . . . drop the maraschino cherries!" We hear a great liquid squishing sound as the chocolate syrup goes, then a huge hissing as the whipped cream follows. These sounds are followed by a heavy plop . . . plop . . . plop in the background. And, absurd as it may be, the mind responds to these cues; that interior eye actually sees a series of gigantic ice cream sundaes rising out of Puget Sound like strange volcanic cones-each with a maraschino cherry the size of Seattle's Kingdome on top of it. In fact we see those disgustingly red cocktail cherries raining down, plopping into all that whipped cream and leaving craters nearly the size of Great Tycho. Thank the genius of Stan Freberg.

Arch Oboler, a restlessly intelligent man who was also involved in the movies (Five, one of the first films to deal with the survival of mankind after World War III, was Oboler's brainchild) and the legitimate theater, utilized two of radio's great strengths: the first is the mind's innate obedience, its willingness to try to see whatever someone suggests it see, no matter how absurd; the second is the fact that fear and horror are blinding emotions that knock our adult pins from beneath us and leave us groping in the dark like children who cannot find the light switch. Radio is, of course, the "blind" medium, and only Oboler used it so well or so completely.

Of course, our modern ears pick up the necessary conventions of the medium that have been outgrown (mostly due to our growing dependence on the visual in our set of reality), but these were standard practices which audiences of the day had no trouble accepting (like Tourneur's papier-mâché rock wall in Cat People). If these conventions seem jarring to listeners of the eighties, as the asides in a Shakespearean play seem jarring to a novice playgoer, then that is our problem, to work out as best we can.

One of these conventions is the constant use of narration to move the story. A second is dialogue-as-description, a technique necessary to radio but one TV and the movies have rendered obsolete. Here, for instance, from "The Chicken Heart that Ate the World," is Dr.

Alberts discussing the chicken heart itself with Louis-read the passage and then ask yourself how true this speech rings to your TV- and movie-trained ears: "Look at it down there . . . a great blanket of evil covering everything. See how the roads are black with men and women and their children, fleeing for their lives. See how the protoplasmic gray reaches out and engulfs' them.” On TV, this would be laughed out of court as total corn; it is not hip, as they say. But heard in the darkness, coupled with the drone of the light plane's engine in the background, it works very well indeed. Willingly or unwillingly, the mind conjures up the image Oboler wants: this great jellylike blob, beating rhythmically, swallowing up the refugees as they run . . . . Ironically, television and the early talkies both depended on the largely auditory conventions of radio until these new mediums found their own voices-and their own conventions. Most of us can remember the narrative "bridges" used in the early TV dramas (there was, for instance, that peculiar-looking individual Truman Bradley, who gave us a miniscience lesson at the beginning of each week's episode of Science Fiction Theater and a mini-moral at the end of each episode; the last but perhaps the best example of the convention were the voice-overs done by the late Walter Winchell each week for The Untouchables). But if we look at those early talking pictures, we can also find these same dialogue-as-description and narration devices used. There is no real need for it, because we can see what's happening, but they remained for awhile just the same, a kind of useless appendix, present simply because evolution had not removed them. My favorite example of this comes from the otherwise innovative Max Fleischer Superman cartoons of the early forties. Each began with the narrator explaining solemnly to the audience that once there was a planet called Krypton "which glowed like a great green jewel in the heavens." And there it is, by George, glowing like a great green jewel in the heavens, right before our eyes. A moment later it blows to smithereens in a blinding flash of light. "Krypton exploded," the narrator informs us helpfully as the pieces fly away into space. Just in case we missed it. *

Oboler used a third mental trick in creating his radio dramas, and this goes back to Bill Nolan and his closed door. When it's thrown open, he says, we see a ten-foot bug, and the mind, whose capacity to visualize far outruns any state of the art, feels relief. The mind, although obedient (what is insanity conceived of by the sane, after all, if not a kind of mental disobedience?), is curiously pessimistic, and more often than not, downright morbid.

Because he rarely overdid the dialogue-as-description device (as did the creators of The Shadow and Inner Sanctum), Oboler was able to use this natural turn of the mind toward the morbid and the pessimistic to create some of the most outrageous effects ever paraded before the quaking ears of a mass audience. Today, violence on television has been roundly condemned (and largely exterminated, at least by the Untouchables, Peter Gunn, and Thriller standards of the bad old sixties) because so much of it is explicit-we see the blood flowing; that is the nature of the medium and part of the set of reality.

* "Staging" was another convention that both the early talkies and early TV leaned upon heavily until they found their own more fluid methods of storytelling. Check out some TV kinescopes from the fifties sometime, or an early talking film like It Happened One Night, The Jazz Singer, or Frankenstein, and notice how often the scenes are played out from one stationary camera location, as if the camera was in reality a representative playgoer with a front-row seat. Speaking of the pioneering director of silents, Georges Méliès, in his fine book Caligari's Children, S. S. Prawer makes the same observation: "The double exposures, jump-cuts, and other technical tricks which Méliès played with the shots he had taken from a fixed position corresponding to a fixed seat in the stalls of a theatre-these amused rather than frightened their audiences, and, in the end, wearied them sufficiently to ensure Méliès's bankruptcy.” In regard to the early talkies, which came nearly forty years after Méliès pioneered the fantasy film and the idea of "special effects," audio limitations dictated the stationary camera to some extent; the camera made a loud clacking noise as it operated, and the only way to beat it was to put it in a soundproof room with a glass window.

Moving the camera meant moving the room, and that was expensive in terms of time as well as money. But it was more than camera noise, a factor Méliès certainly didn't have to contend with. A lot of it was simply that mental set thing again. Bound by stage conventions, many early directors simply found themselves creatively unable to innovate.

Oboler used gore and violence by the bucketload, but a good deal of it was implicit; the real horror didn't come alive in front of a camera but on the screen of the mind. Perhaps the best example of this comes from an Oboler piece with the Don Martin-like title, "A Day at the Dentist's.” As the story opens, the play's "hero," a dentist, is just closing up shop for the day. His nurse says he has one more patient, a man named Fred Houseman.

"He says it's an emergency," she tells him.

"Houseman?" the dentist barks.

"Yes.” "Fred?” "Yes. . . do you know him?” "No . . . oh, no," the dentist says casually.

Houseman, it turns out, has come because Dr. Charles, the dentist who owned the practice previously, advertised himself as a "painless dentist"-and Houseman, although an ex-wrestler and footballer, is terrified of the dentist (as so many of us are . . . and Oboler damned well knows it).

Houseman's first uneasy moment comes when the doctor straps him into the dentist's chair.

He protests. The dentist tells him in a low, perfectly reasonable voice (and oh, how we suspect the reason in that voice! After all, who sounds more sane than a dangerous lunatic?) that "In order to keep this painless, there must be absolutely no movement.” There is a pause, and then the sound of straps being buckled.

Tightly.

"There," the dentist says soothingly. "Snug as a bug in a rug . . . that's a curious thin[, to call you, isn't it? You're no bug, are you? You're more the lover-boy type . . . aren't you?” Oh-oh, the morbid little guy inside speaks up. This looks bad for old Fred Houseman. Yes indeedy.

It is bad indeed. The dentist, still speaking in that low, pleasant, and oh-so-rational voice, continues to call Houseman "lover-boy." It turns out that Houseman ruined the girl who later became the dentist's wife; Houseman slandered her name from one end of town to the other.

The dentist found out that Houseman's regular dentist was Dr. Charles, and so he bought out Charles's practice, figuring that sooner or later Houseman would come back . . . come back to "the painless dentist.” And while he was waiting, the new dentist installed restraint straps on his chair.

Just for Fred Houseman.

All of this, of course, has parted company with any semblance of reality early on (but then, the same can be said of The Tempest-how's that for an impudent comparison?); yet the mind cares not a fig for that at this crucial juncture, and Oboler, of course, never cared at all; like the best writers of horror fiction, he is interested in effect above all else, preferably one that will wallop the listener like a twenty-pound chunk of slate. He achieves that quite nicely in "A Day at the Dentist's.” "W-What are you going to do?" Houseman asks fearfully, echoing the very question that has been troubling our own minds almost since the moment we were foolish enough to turn on this piece of coldblooded grue.

The dentist's answer is simple and utterly terrifying-more terrifying because of the unpleasant seminar it convenes in our own minds, a seminar in which Oboler ultimately refuses to take part, thus leaving the question to hang for as long as we want to consider it.

Under the circumstances, we may not want to consider it long at all.

"Nothing important," the dentist replies as he flicks a switch and the drill begins to whine.

"Just going to drill a little hole . . . and let out some of lover-boy.” As Houseman gasps and slobbers with fear in the background, the sound of the drill comes up . . . and up . . . and up . . . and finally, out. The end.

The question, of course, is where exactly did the demon dentist drill the hole to "let out some of lover-boy"? It is a question that only radio, by the very nature of the medium, can pose really convincingly and leave unanswered so uneasily. We hate Oboler a little for not telling us, mostly because our minds are suggesting the most outrageously nasty possibilities.

My first thought was that the dentist had almost surely used the drill on one of Houseman's temples, murdering him with a little impromptu brain surgery.

But later, as I grew up and grew into a better comprehension of just what the nature of Houseman's crime had been, another possibility began to suggest itself. An even nastier one.

Even today, as I write this, I wonder: exactly where did that crazy man use his drill?

4

Well, enough is enough; it is time to move on from the ear to the eye. But before we go, I'd like to remind you of something that you probably already know. Many of the old radio programs, from Inner Sanctum to Gangbusters to the sudsy Our Gal Sal have been preserved on record and tape, and the quality of these recordings is actually better in most cases than the quality of the TV kinescopes that are broadcast on nostalgia programs from time to time. If you're interested in seeing how your own ability to suspend disbelief and to circumnavigate that visual set engendered by TV and the movies is holding up, you can get a start at almost any well-stocked record store. A Schwann's Catalogue of spoken-word records can be even more helpful; what your friendly neighborhood Record Mart doesn't have, they'll be glad to order. And if your interest in Arch Oboler has been at all piqued by the foregoing, let me whisper a little secret in your ear: Drop Dead! An Exercise in Horror-produced, written, and directed by Arch Oboler, available for your delectation on Capitol Records (Capitol: SM-1763).

Probably more of a summer cooler than a tall glass of iced tea . . . if you can get rid of that visual set for forty minutes or so.