Welcome to Midcentury Horror Radio

Tales of horror and the supernatural used to rule American radio waves. But why? The Ghost of Radio is here to tell you.  Join the Ghost for exploration, appreciation, and sometimes merciless critique of all things horror radio in this weekly podcast. 

Contact your Ghost at midcenturyghost@gmail.com
Instagram @ghostofradio - always look for the five o'clock drop...

Transcript

0:26 Ghost You're in—with The Ghost of Radio. 

This is the first episode of this podcast about horror radio shows from the mid-20th century, mostly from the United States, and since it's our introduction to each other and to the topic, I felt it was a good idea to start out by talking about intros. Every horror radio show had an intro. And like the shows themselves, some are great, some are okay, and some were pretty goofball. So let's start out with an intro to intros. 

And this is a good time to introduce you to the random nature of this podcast. Say there's a thousand radio shows out there from the U.S. and some other places in the world, between 1932, let's say, and the end of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater in 1982—let's get those 50 years in there. I'm just going to bring them to you very randomly, the same way I discovered these shows, the same way most people discover these shows: completely at random. I have a big fish bowl, or I guess given the topic, I should say something like a Cauldron. Let's call it the Cauldron for now. I put a thousand names of a thousand episodes in it, and each week, I'm going to blindly pull out one or two of them and talk about them. 

And as you can tell, if I'm going to do that, it means I'm going to spoil all of the plots. There are always going to be spoilers, okay, but I'm going to warn you which episode or episodes I'm going to spoil the plot of each time we meet. And you take off, you go and listen to that show or shows. You can find all of these shows on the internet, they are all outside of copyright, it's easy to listen to them all anywhere. Go to archive.com, relicradio.com, there are a lot of places to listen. So I’ll tell you what the show is, you go listen to it, and you come back to me, The Ghost of Radio and we talk about the story, and we can all enjoy it together. And that way everyone is happy. 

2:51 Ghost And now that everyone is happy, let me introduce myself: I am your Host. The Host had an important role in most midcentury horror radio shows, not just introducing the show, but helping to set the tone. And whether their role was large or small, they were always very distinctive, whether you liked them or not. I am probably not as distinctive as some of those great old hosts. But I will tell you a little bit about myself anyway. I came into horror radio fanship, fandom, like most other people do, as I say, which is totally at random. You know, you grow up and every Halloween, you hear about the War of the Worlds broadcast; I think it used to be that you'd actually listen to the War of the Worlds broadcast. Now you just hear about it every Halloween. And then I'll always remember the first time I actually bought a cassette tape and listened to the whole actual program. And I was really thrilled and really scared. And that did it for me. But you think “oh, this is a one off.” Like, “oh, there was one old scary radio show that really scared people that Orson Welles did and that was it.” 

But then you did a little investigating because the Internet comes along and you realize, oh no, hey, Orson Welles starred in some other shows. And he had his own show that was totally devoted to you know, kind of suspense and horror, called The Black Museum. And then you start realizing there's this whole wealth of old midcentury horror radio. And if you're like me, and you really liked The Twilight Zone, because it actually scared you, then this is for you, you know, because it's exciting to think that there's more than just War of the Worlds and the two-thirds of Twilight episodes that were any good. You've got lots more to listen to. So I think I went to archive.com and I found Suspense. No, I actually started with Lights Out. Girl, if you're starting out in midcentury horror radio, go to Lights Out! That's where you go for very distinctive and very good horror. Then, when your taste starts to become a little more sophisticated, you mosey on over to Quiet, Please, which has to be the most interesting horror series that ever aired. Yes, a few episodes are off, but when it's good, it's very good. And we will be listening to a lot of Quiet, Please. It’s all in the Cauldron. My list of the greatest episodes of horror radio is dominated by Lights Out and Quiet, Please. 

5:33 Ghost I got through those, and of course at first I was dragging my feet, I would just listen over and over again to my favorite episodes. But then I eventually began branching out. And I started going hither and yon and listening to a lot of different shows. I found the podcast site Relic Radio, which has Strange Tales and The Horror, where the host just archives all of these, just a wealth of these old shows. Oh, but you know, I have to think when it really started for me was when I was a very youthful Ghost, and I caught the tail end of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. And I used to listen to it, I remember it came on at 11:05 and a half. That's what the host on the radio station I was haunting would say: “It's 11:05 and a half—time for the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.” And then they would play that classic intro. And so that was a really great show. And now I have given away my age. 

That's my journey into horror radio. I'm not someone who likes to be scared. I don't like horror movies. I don't like the you know, blood and guts and the rape culture of horror movies. If you're wondering, Is midcentury horror radio for me, like it is for me, your host, I'm someone who loves War of the Worlds, and most of The Twilight Zone, because I want to be spooked out. I don't want the easy stuff, like blood and murder and knife knife knife; I want to be unnerved. And that's what horror radio does at its best. It gets you thinking about an episode and its ramifications for a long time after you hear it. It throws everything into question. And it really spooks you out. 

 The worst episodes are those that either don't have an unnerving plot or don't have the guts to carry an unnerving plot to its logical conclusion. And the best episodes are those that do both. It's kind of like, it's kind of like Agatha Christie's story And Then There Were None. Oh, here's my first spoiler—I’m about to spoil the plot of And Then There Were None. And I would hate to do that. It's such a fantastic story. If you have not read And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie, turn off your radio now and go read it and then come back. I'm giving you a few seconds to do that. …Okay, now I'm going to ruin the plot of And Then There Were None. So we've got these 10 people who are invited to an island by mysterious hosts who don't show up and each of them is accused of murder. And one by one, they're all killed. And you never know, throughout the book, who did it, like how are all these people dying, everyone you suspect then dies. And that's, you know, the incredible gimmick of the book, which is great. But the important point is that everyone accused of murder denies it. And some of the murders are particularly horrible, but all of them are guilty. And the one that you are most shocked by is that young Vera, the beautiful caring young schoolteacher; you find out she murdered a little boy that she was a governess to. She murdered little Cyril so that she could marry his uncle. Because if Cyril was dead, then the uncle would inherit. And that's the horrible beauty of Agatha Christie. She had a very dim view of human nature, and she was not afraid to fully express that. But there were, I think two or three movies made of And Then There Were None where people did not have the guts to follow through with that idea. And so it was always Vera, and then there was another young man named Philip Lombard who was handsome, but sketchy, and he was also guilty in the book of being a multiple murderer. But in the movies, they would always contrive a way for it to be that neither Philip nor Vera were guilty, and they both escaped the island and they ran off and got married, and it's a happy ending.

10:02 Ghost So, it wasn't until the BBC ran a special event a few years ago that they actually had the guts to tell the real story, even though they made a few fatal mistakes at the end there. But that is not only the end of me ruining that plot, but it’s what the beauty of good horror radio is: it has the courage of its convictions to spook people out. A good, a great horror radio episode has got to be unnerving. And it's got to be willing to set up a scenario that throws everything into question and let it play out. That's what the best horror radio does. And for me that's extremely gratifying because look, I'm a fan. I don't listen to horror radio to make fun of it. I'm a fan. And when there's a bad episode that lets me down, I am disappointed and I have to whale on it. When there's a great episode, I have to praise it and share it. When there's a good episode that is ruined by racism, or sexism or laziness or authorly cowardice, that also has to be called out as an also-ran—close, but no cigar. And those are the categories that we'll be dealing with most on this podcast. 

 All right, that is my introduction. Oh, I guess one other thing I will add is that I'm doing this podcast because as I said, there are tons of places where you can listen to the shows, but I haven't found places where you can really hear about them, discuss them, really hear them analyzed. I think it's because most normal people don't want to ruin the plots for other people. But I have warned you that I'm going to talk deeply about the episodes. I'm going to give you the chance to listen to an episode first and then come back to me. And then we create a place to talk about them and share them, with you who already know and love them and you who are new to them. And let’s say you decide to listen to your Ghost without listening to the whole episode first. That’s okay. You can do that. If listening to the Ghost inspires you to go listen to the episode, that’s fine. I will play enough clips from each episode for you to get it, but not so many that listening to the whole thing won’t be a good experience for you.

 All right, we’re ready now to talk about intros. We've done one. Now we're ready to listen to a few. And since I've talked big about Quiet, Please, let's start with them.

12:39 Quiet Please Quiet Please. [pause and static] Quiet, Please. The Mutual Broadcasting System presents Quiet, Please, which is written and directed by Willys Cooper, and stars Ernest Chapelle. Quiet, Please for tonight is called “Camera Obscura”.

13:27 Ghost I hope that you are still with me. Did you hear a little bit of… static? That wasn’t just Ghostly interference from me.  What you find, and what you're hearing here—could you hear that intro over the static? The sad fact is that most old-time horror radio shows are not very well-preserved. And it's a shame because while a lot of the episodes are great, sometimes you have to strain every bit of your ears to hear what they're saying. And it's especially sad with Quiet, Please because as I said, it has so many really great episodes, but they are so hard to hear. It's one of the least well-preserved shows around. And just like, you know, they find old movie reels where the movies have just turned to dust in the canister, you know, you have to take care of these things. And so sadly, it's a little difficult to hear that awesome intro to Quiet, Please. But you know, it’s just what you have to live with. One of my favorite episodes is called “Nothing Behind the Door”. And it is one of the least well-preserved episodes, just, you've got to really work at it. Just tell yourself that this adds to the atmosphere, all right? and then you will be just fine. You have to listen, you have to go into it knowing that you’re going to have to fight, you’re going to have to battle a little interference. The audio is not going to be superb. Just like my audio on this podcast is not superb. We're not here for technical perfection, people. We're here for horror radio, so we're just going to have to all hang in there. I note that they end saying the next, the episode we’re going to hear is “Camera Obscura.” Ooh, “Camera Obscura”! That is one of my favorite favorite episodes of Quiet, Please. And we'll definitely be pulling that out of the Cauldron at some point to talk about it. 

15:24 Ghost Now to the intro itself and not just its static. That intro may not be what you expect, right? It's not, you know, it's brooding kind of classical music, you know, it's not the shrieking organ that you expect. And there's actually—I just broke my own rule. There's not really a host outside of the stories of Quiet, Please. Ernest Chapelle was the lead actor, and often he was the only voice you heard on a Quiet, Please episode. And so he kind of served as your host but he was really more than that. It is a great intro. At first I didn't take Quiet, Please too seriously, kind of because of its name and because of its low-key intro, but once you hear a few great episodes and you get shook by them, then you are on board. It's short. It's not trying too hard. And it shows you that it's unusual with its intro. 

But now let me play one that's a little more predictable, maybe a little more what people are expecting and this is the intro to Inner Sanctum.

 16:33 Inner Sanctum Lipton Tea and Lipton Soup present: Inner Sanctum mysteries, starring Boris Karloff! [long sound of a door creaking open] 

Raymond: Good evening, friends of The Inner Sanctum. This is your host. Welcome again through the squeaking door to another session of murder, mystery, and madness. Excuse me if I don’t get up but I’m all worn out; I’ve just had a hectic few days with an old friend who blew into town. He’s one of those earnest souls who insists on doing everything for himself—consultations with a monument maker, the grave-diggers, fittings at the coffin makers, yes… quite a busy body. But then we only die once, you know… heh heh heh.

17:43 Ghost …heh heh heh. Ah, Inner Sanctum. You know, it was very popular in its day, it ran for a long time and everybody loved the host Raymond except me. I can't stand him. I mean, it's got the creaking door sound which became very iconic, a lot of shows used it, there was actually a show later called The Creaking Door, and the CBS Radio Mystery Theater would use it too, years later, but for me the organ; the organ is hilarious, because as I'm sitting here watching my audio input, the minute that organ comes on, it just goes nuts. It's like a seismograph recording an earthquake with that organ sound. So hilarious. It wasn't supposed to be—well, it kind of was supposed to be hilarious, because Inner Sanctum made the, for me, and therefore for you, if you’re gathered around this Cauldron, the fatal mistake of trying to mix comedy and humor into the story. You know, I'm going have to say no! When I come to horror radio, I am coming to be spooked out. I don't need comic relief. I'm not looking for that. So Inner Sanctum will always strike out for me. But it has all of the elements that you are probably expecting, that you might be familiar with, the crazy organ, the spo-o-oky voice. For me, it's a little too obvious. And again, no humor. I don't want it. Plus the stories are often not good at all. Let’s steer away from this, back to a classic opening that does work, from the great, eternal show Lights Out, Everybody. You'll see why I like it. And why it's so famous, I think. 

 19:33 LIGHTS OUT Ironized Yeast presents—Light Out, Everybody. It – Is – Later – Than – You – Think. This is Arch Oboler, bringing you another in our series of stories of the unusual. And once again we caution you: these Lights Out stories are definitely not for the timid soul. So we tell you calmly and very sincerely, if you frighten easily, turn off your radio now. But if you’re fascinated by the mysterious and fantastic and unearthly, then anticipate chills in our story of—Poltergeist. [gong fading]

 20:37 Ghost Ooh, Poltergeist. Oh that’s in the Cauldron. Let’s start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start, with the very first words you hear, which are “Ironized Yeast Presents.” Let’s identify the yeast elephant in the room. Yes, they just said “Ironized Yeast presents Lights Out.” Every show had a sponsor, right? You had to have a sponsor would would to pay for things. And the sponsor could really make or break a show because of the tone they helped to set. Did you notice back at the very start of The Inner Sanctum that the sponsor was Lipton Tea? All these very innocent kind of sponsors that you wouldn't think would be sponsoring a horror radio show. But they did because these were the second-most popular show on the air, after, I think comedies or music. Comedy, horror, you know, you need to run the full gamut. So a lot of very big brands would hop on to sponsor these shows. And sometimes it just did not work out. Let me go back to that Inner Sanctum intro and play just what comes after the carefully-edited clip I played before, just so you can hear how terrible the Lipton tea sponsor really was. I’m going to double back on it just a little bit so you can hear the transfer.

 22:04 Inner Sanctum 

 Raymond: …yes, quite a busy body. But then we only die once, you know…

 Mary, the Lipton Tea spokesperson: Humph! These friends of yours. They’re such unhappy people! They never seem to enjoy life.

Ghost: They’re dead.

 Mary: Never seem interested in any of the quiet, good, peaceful things in life.

 Ghost: They’re dead.

 Mary: For instance, what’s the use of telling one of your spooky characters about Lipton Tea? They wouldn’t like it. But other people enjoy that brisk Lipton flavor. They settle back in an easy chair and say to themselves, “Mm, Lipton certainly has a rich, hearty flavor.” Never the least bit wishy-washy, no sirree! But would a ghost appreciate Lipton’s?

 Ghost: Hey!

 Mary: Indeed he would not! And it’s a good thing Lipton’s is made for real, live folks who like good things, or else it wouldn’t be the world’s largest-selling brand of tea!

 Raymond: Mary, you’ve been very hard on my friends. Very. And they won’t like it. But then most live folks don’t enjoy being scared to death! And that’s just what’s going to happen to you tonight! Our story is called “The Corridor of Doom”!

 23:09 Ghost Girl, please! At this point no, there’s no way I’m going to be scared to death by this story after hearing that. The Lipton tea lady who had to come in and always just chide Mr. Raymond for being so spooky! Oh my god; it was just the worst and it's one of the many reasons I hate Inner Sanctum. So if we come back to Lights Out, Ironized Yeast was a product that at the time they may not have thought was a complete snake oil hoax, though it was. The idea was that it's was being run, Lights Out, during World War Two, this version with Arch Oboler as the host. People are on food rationing, they're not eating enough meat, and so they're not getting enough iron and have iron poor blood. And so you take an Ironized Yeast tablet, and you're going to get back your strength and, crucially, as they say, your pep. So how did they, how did this work? How could you have the spookiest, most unnerving show sponsored by this tablet that gives you energy to work and play? You know, how do you mix horror with pep? 

 They did it because Ironized Yeast was helping you to keep your strength up for the war effort. And World War Two was a visible, palpable, often-referenced presence in that run of Lights Out. That connection to real horror in the real world was part of what made the show very impactful during that run. And so taking something so that you can keep working in the factory to make bombers, that kind of was one of a piece with Lights Out. Plus the spokesman for Ironized Yeast, Frank Martin, unlike the Lipton tea lady, knew how to keep it together. And he would often just say, you know, when the break in the story would come, like “Wow. I think we all need something to help us turn our attention from the horror we just heard. Now let me talk to you seriously about, you know, how you need to be doing your bit for the war.” So they were able to make that work. Unlike… Inner Sanctum! And you love everything about it. The two sounds of Lights Out, the clock at the start, bonging out midnight, and the gong at the end. 

 25:33 Ghost “It is later than you think.” I remember when I was a young Ghost watching Bugs Bunny cartoon reruns, once Bugs was in a tough spot, probably in a haunted house, and he just holds up a sign that said “it is later than you think”. And of course, I didn't know what that meant, but he was referencing Lights Out. There's no shrieking organ, there's no creaking door. It's just someone telling you that they're about to lay something on you that is going to seriously wig you out. And if it's shticky to say “we're warning you to turn off your radio now”, that only seems to be the case before you've heard a lot of the creepiest Lights Out episodes. Once you've heard a few of them, you know that they were not kidding around, and it's actually true, and you're going to have to really get it together before you listen to an episode. So it just creates an intense atmosphere that you know eight times out of 10 is really going to pay off. So Lights Out is great. 

 Alright, let's go to Suspense. Suspense! That was a long-running show, and so it had several very, very different intros. The original one was just an unnamed person telling you what the series was about. The big deal of Suspense at the start was… the suspense. And so the intro would say, you're going to listen to a story, and it's going to lead you one way, you think it's going to end one way, but it's really going to end another and so they would just hammer that home. Then when they started feeling more confident they introduced the host of The Man in Black. And then when the show totally hit the skids and went downhill after the war, it totally changed. But let's go to one of those Man in Black episodes because I like those episodes the best.

 27:38 Suspense This is the Man in Black, here again to introduce Columbia’s program, Suspense. Our star tonight is Bela Lugosi playing the part of Professor Antonio Basile, psychologist. The story is by J. Donald Wilson, who calls it “The Doctor Prescribed Death”. If you’ve been with us on these Tuesday nights, you will know that Suspense is compounded of mystery, and suspicion, and dangerous adventure. This series of tales is calculated to intrigue you, to stir your nerves, to offer you a precarious situation and then withhold the solution until the last possible moment. And so it is with “The Doctor Prescribed Death”, and Bela Lugosi’s performance, we again hope to keep you in… Suspense!

 29:08 Ghost That episode had everything you needed to know about Suspense, which was that moment when they say, “[organ chord] Suspense!” they did that throughout their 20-year run, and it became very famous. And for the few extremely scary Suspense episodes, and there were a few, you'd be clinging to that, trying to laugh at that overdone note just to try to keep it together. I love these early, explanatory, over-explaining, tell-don’t-show intros. They will sometimes say that they are only occasionally going to horrify you. “We're going to have stories from stage and screen.” They're trying to be a little bit classy. They're trying not to get you too scared. And I like to think that this was the influence of shows like Lights Out that were so heavy-duty that people were a little nervous, a little wary about listening to a new show they weren't sure about. 

 Hm this title sounds interesting: Hall of Fantasy. I wonder what its intro sounds like?

 30:17 HOF And now welcome to the series of radio dramas dedicated to the supernatural, the unusual, and the unknown. Come with me, my friends, we shall descend to the world of the unknown and forbidden, down to the depths where the veil of time is lifted, and the supernatural raises its head. Come with me and listen to the tale of—The Shadow People.

 30:58 Ghost …what on earth. Hall of Fantasy has perhaps the worst intro of all the shows. It sounds like people in a jug band, you can hear the guy playing the jug, you can hear that [blowing sound]. Someone stood at a microphone in a radio studio and did that. And I think they are beating that drum in an attempt to replicate the bell tolling of Lights Out. It's just the worst because it's trying to be scary. I mean, there were a lot of freaky shows in the 60s and 70s who had funky music intros and they were kind of crazy, but this one's actually trying. Hall of Fantasy had one or two good episodes but it's going to be in our racism fails category a lot and the intro is just the worst, every time. Let's round things out with a good intro. This from the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.

 32:00 CBSRMT The CBS Radio Mystery Theater presents; [creaking door sound, music] Come in. Welcome. I’m E. G. Marshall. Welcome to the sound of suspense—the fear you can hear. For the next 52 minutes we’re going to take you into the world of mystery, into the world of terrifying imagination. The story you are going to hear concerns a question that’s been asked since the first men on Earth were born… and died: is there a life after death? Is there a way to return from the grave? And if there is, can we come back in the body of a living creature? Even one that has claws, instead of fingernails? Here is one chilling answer.

 33:04 Ghost Ah, that is “The Return of the Moresbys”, from the CBS. A good and interesting episode. But the intro is what’s really great. What gets me about that is that there's real dread in that crashing piano chord and that cello and when a story got oppressive on the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, as it sometimes did, you heard it at the start, and you heard it between each of the three acts, because this was one of the rare one-hour shows, and you heard it at the end, and it just emphasized that dread you are feeling. It starts with a creaking door because Hyman Brown who back in the day had produced the show The Inner Sanctum came out of retirement to make the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, and so it was a call back. And it works here. I generally like the tone that the host E.G. Marshall set; this series will be in our sexism fails a lot, and it suffered from its one-hour format, but when it was good, it was good. When it was good, it was spooky.

 34:14 Ghost Well, you know there are at least a dozen other intros I could play from a dozen more shows, but we'll get to them. We'll get to them, over the course of this, our podcast. I can't promise we will have as many episodes as Suspense or CBS but in time, we will cover everything you need to know. So hang in there. 

 34:38 Ghost Tune in again next time, and I will pull our first episode out from the Cauldron and we will dive in. So for now, as we say goodbye, and our creaking door is closing, I will say: as you go your way this week, be safe, be happy; and I’ll see you soon…