Danse Macabre (21 page)

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)

* "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.

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.

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.

The Modern American Horror Movie

—Text and ,Subtext

R
IGHT NOW you could be thinking to yourself: this guy must have one hell of a nerve if he thinks he's gonna cover all the horror movies released between 1950 and 1980—everything from
The Exorcist
to the less-than-immortal
The Navy vs. the Night Monsters
—in a single chapter.

Well, actually it's going to be two chapters, and no, I don't expect to be able to cover them all, as much as I would like to; but yes, I must have some kind of nerve to be tackling the subject at all. Luckily for me, there are several fairly traditional ways of handling the subject so that at least an illusion of order and coherence emerges. The path I've chosen is that of the horror movie as text and subtext.

The place to start, I think, would be with a swift recap of those points already made on the subject of the horror movie as art. If we say "art" is any piece of creative work from which an audience receives more than it gives (a liberal definition of art, sure, but in this field it doesn't pay to be too picky), then I believe that the artistic value the horror movie most frequently offers is its ability to form a liaison between our fantasy fears and our real fears. I've said and will reemphasize here that few horror movies are conceived with "art" in mind; most are conceived only with "profit" in mind. The art is not consciously created but rather thrown off, as an atomic pile throws off radiation.