Danse Macabre (19 page)

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

*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.

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. 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

*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. 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.