008 Horror – Old
Prepare to be frightened out of your wits. I listened to a lot of horror in October and
November, for obvious reasons, and made a point of listening to what was deemed
by general opinion to be some of the scariest OTR (Old Time Radio) horror. My verdicts?
Well, here are the ones I thought were scare-your-pants-off-scary.
“The Porch Light”
episode of Canadian second wave OTR series Nightfall
was probably the scariest of all.
Written by Randy Brown, I don’t know who played the leads nor do I know
who was the director. Not only was it
intriguingly structured, the conspiracy of haunted house, previous murders and
hauntings, and terrible weather—in this case, a Canadian January snowstorm
which was to dump one meter of snow—created fertile ground for heart-stopping
suspense and terror. Bob and Carol live
in a remote Canadian house, having moved from Toronto. Bob is awoken at 3 am one morning to cold and
the porch light, which he was sure he turned off. He and Carol see a figure in pajamas in the
snow waving up at them, then hear knocks.
When they go to investigate, no one is there; there are not even any
footprints. Listening to the radio with
the report of imminent bad weather, they realize the phone lines are out as is
the electricity. There’s a weird
repetition to this story which goes totally unexplained and contributes to the
freakiness. The SFX were really good. Listen to it with the lights on, and whatever
you do, don’t look at the window!
I’m glad I listened to “Behind
the Locked Door” episode of The
Mysterious Traveler by Robert A. Arthur and M. Coban before I listened to
the equally if not more famous “The
Thing on the Fourbleboard” (see below) from Quiet, Please! as I might have thought it derivative—as some have—if
I had listened to it the other way around. As it was, I enjoyed this completely
bonkers and unexpected story. A man (in
1951) goes on an expedition to a cave system in Arizona with a professor and an
Indian guide named Joseph (who unfortunately talks in pidgin-English; what a
world). The man returns later and
barricades himself in his house. When
his girlfriend, Cathy, comes by to find out what happened, he tells her—on the
condition that she will leave afterwards.
He explains that in the cave he and the professor found the remains of a
wagon train which they later confirmed came through during the Gold Rush of
1849. They find arrow heads and assume
that the wagon train was driven into the cave during a Navajo attack (which
historically seems unlikely, but who knows), and then got trapped during a
cave-in. However, after finding an underground
river and fish bones, the professor hypothesizes that not all the wagon train
people died. I will say no more. It starred Lyle Sudro, Ann Shepherd, Robert Dunley,
and Maurice Topling.
I love Suspense,
but they didn’t often do supernatural stories.
“Ghost Hunt” by H.R.
Wakefield and Walter Newman is left ambiguous, but it’s a great story. As others have observed, this story,
originally from 1949, predates all found footage film but preserves much of the
same technique. It’s told in a very
intriguing way, back-to-front, and with the aid of an early on-location
recording device and walkie talkies, it feels surprisingly modern. A zany radio host (Ralph Edwards) is
spending the night in a haunted house
(the site of at least four suicides as people jump out the window to their
deaths drowning in the sea) with a parapsychologist (English, evidently, and
studied with Oliver Lodge and suffered from mustard gas in WWI). The radio host’s dog runs off, he keeps
getting attacked by bats, he loses contact with the parapsychologist who has
gone upstairs to investigate, and is wholly unnerved by the sight of a
spreading blood stain on the ceiling. It
was directed by Anton M. Leader.
The infamous “The
Thing on the Fourbleboard” from 1948 was written and directed by the
inimitable Wyllis Cooper for Quiet,
Please! Ernest Chappell, the star,
must be one of the unsung heroes of radio drama acting; he was capable of an
astonishing character range. As an oil
drilling “roughneck,” he first invites you into his house and mentions that his
wife, Mike, who doesn’t hear very well, will be joining you soon. He tells the story of many years previously
when he was working on an oil drill and waiting for the cement to set. He was waiting with a geologist who was surprised
by the shavings coming up with the drill bit.
They are both surprised to find a ring and a finger made of stone,
having come from miles into the Earth. A
fourbleboard, by the way, is some kind of gantry area on an oil rig. Besides the chilling and unusual story, this
piece is a cut above the rest due to its beautifully conveyed setting about oil
digs, the performances, and interesting sound effects.
Another entry from Suspense,
“The House in Cypress Canyon,”
haunts me to this day—I find myself thinking about it from time to time,
wondering if I’ll ever piece together its story. Originally from 1945, it starred Robert Taylor. Set around Christmas, it followed a real
estate agent of a new build in Cypress Canyon, started before WWII and only
recently (postwar) completed. In this
house, he found a diary in a shoebox hidden on a ceiling beam. The diary described how an engineer, Robert
Taylor, and his wife moved into the new house in Cypress Canyon. One room in the house they couldn’t
open: the closet. They also heard sounds like a scream or an
animal howl coming from inside the house.
In the night, they were awoken by the sound of the scream inside their
bedroom, and the wife found blood coming from the closet door. You wouldn’t believe the rest if I told you.
Now, let’s not forget the BBC is quite good at horror radio
. . . Edinburgh Haunts: I Remember Yesterday was originally from
2013. I don’t normally listen to or review read stories, but I made an
exception for Halloween (naturally). A
young woman remembers “our song”—“I Remember Yesterday” by Donna Summer. It becomes apparent halfway through that the
young woman is a ghost. Beautifully read by Hannah Donaldson, this was just the
right amount of spookiness, definitely giving an atmosphere of Edinburgh, and
very well-written by accomplished author Val McDermid. It was produced by Allegra McIlroy.
