Reviews for Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931-1952

The average rating for Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931-1952 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-27 00:00:00 Alan Smith Hand, Richard J. Terror on the Air! Horror Radio in America, 1931-1952. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012 [2006]. 192 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-0-7864-6919-2. Ebook ISBN 978-0-7864-9184-1. $25.00. Richard J. Hand's full-length study of the golden age of American horror radio (1931-1952) is a welcome addition to the ever-expanding field of cinema and media studies. Beginning in the second half of the 1970s, when the horror genre is put on the agenda of film studies, scholarship has tended to remain encumbered by the disciplinary boundaries of gender, psychoanalysis and auteurism. Rather than assume that an overarching theoretical and generic unity exists within and flows from horror cinema, Hand provides an intermedial history of the influence of crime and horror on the U.S. cultural imaginary by focusing on the relationship between horror radio, television, film, comics, theater and literature. Terror on the Air! is divided into ten chapters which concentrate on six representative radio programs, starting with The Witches Tale in 1931 and ending with The Mysterious Traveler in 1952. Other series include Lights Out (1934-1947), The Hermit's Cave (1935-1944), Inner Sanctum Mysteries (1941-1952) and Quiet, Please (1947-1949). In addition to a critical and historical investigation of specific horror radio programs, the opening three chapters of Terror on the Air! provide a history of horror radio and the golden age of American broadcasting, formal strategies and horror radio narrative and the dynamics of performance and genre. In his conclusion, Hand looks at the demise of horror radio and its influence. From the opening pages of Terror on the Air! Hand is concerned with the aesthetic and technological transitions between horror radio, television and cinema: Radio is older than television but younger than cinema. By the time of the introduction of radio in the 1920s and its subsequent phenomenal ascendancy, Hollywood had already established itself as the dream factory of American identity. However, in the domestic environment, the living space of the listener, radio was king. The family crowded around a massive wooden set, and the adolescent alone in the bedroom tuning a homemade crystal set, are potent images of the domestic status of, and personal relationship with, radio (5). The technological and historical convergence of American radio and Hollywood is an especially compelling aspect of Terror on the Air! From Orson Welles' broadcast of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898; The Mercury Theater on the Air, 1938) to the performances of Agnes Moorhead, Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, Lucille Ball, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Vincent Price, the popularity of horror radio in America reaches its peak in the late 1940s, with nearly 80 horror programs being aired every week: In the golden age, all Hollywood stars made significant appearances on radio. It was partly a contractual obligation and partly an important form of publicity for their work. Probably the most significant example of this is The Lux Radio Theatre (1934-55). This long-running drama program presented one-hour versions of Hollywood movies. Sometimes these adaptations would be made a long time after the Hollywood films ' for example, Judy Garland recreated her 1939 role of Dorothy in Lux's version of The Wizard of Oz on December 25, 1950 ' but frequently they were contemporaneous with the release of the movie. On these occasions, the Lux broadcasts were equivalent to a trailer, or a prose and photo magazine adaptation; but the Lux plays were also a precursor to video/DVD release: a slice of Hollywood to be enjoyed in your own home (Hand 44). While the chapters that are dedicated to specific horror radio programs are at times overburdened by plot summary and fail to address the political and cultural conditions of America between the Great Depression and World War II, Hand's comparative analysis of the horror program Lights Out, produced by Arch Oboler between 1936 and 1947, is outstanding. In the radio play "Poltergeist" (October 20, 1942), for example, a group of three young women (Kay, Edna and Florence) are travelling across a snowy landscape. Not entirely at ease in the wilderness, their vacation is interrupted when Kay, dancing on a grave in a cemetery, angers Edna, who believes that Kay's irreverent behavior will summon a poltergeist. Kay and Edna begin to argue, when suddenly "a rock strikes Edna on the head and she is knocked unconscious" (Hand 95). Interrupting their vacation to allow Edna to convalesce, Kay and Florence hear Edna scream and discover their friend "in bed with her 'head crushed flat' by a tombstone" (Hand 95). Realizing that Kay has awoken a vengeful spirit, the surviving women take flight. "Florence realizes that Kay has gone out into the snow, and she follows. In one of the finest examples of the disembodied voice in horror radio, Florence hears the voices of Kay and Edna on the wind of the blizzard as they chant an eerie mantra: 'Here we are Florence … This way Florence …' Florence follows, and the scene culminates in her scream as she 'discovers' her friends" (Hand 95). The final section of the play commences "with two men heading out into the wilderness to find the missing women" (Hand 95). After locating a shoe and a set of footprints that lead them to the graveyard, the men "see the women 'dancing on the graves' in the distance," but later discover "the corpses of Florence and Kay, frozen stiff, with their heads crushed flat under tombstones" (Hand 95). According to Hand, Oboler's decision to "send his protagonists into an alienating American wilderness" is reminiscent of James Dickey's novel Deliverance (1970; Boorman, 1972), while the bleak and desperate tone of the radio play, centering on three friends who are beyond salvation, is a precursor to The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez, 1999) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975). "With this Blair Witch Project-style ending," Hand writes, "wherein none of the three friends survive, Oboler produces an uncompromising shock. The listener expects at least one of the disparate women to survive, possibly rescued by the two men at the end of the play in a melodramatic denouement (95). Hand's comparative study of horror radio continues with "Valse Triste" (March 30, 1938; revived December 29, 1942), "perhaps one of the finest works in the Lights Out repertoire" (96). A Gothic tale based on "the clash of urban and rural values," Dotty and Laura are two New Yorkers on "a camping holiday in a remote area they chose through a process of 'eeny-meeny-miny-mo'" (Hand 96). Yet Dotty and Laura soon find themselves at the mercy of John Boyd (played by Boris Karloff in the 1938 performance), a blind and hideously disfigured recluse. Not unlike the spur-of-the-moment decision to take "a 'healthy' camping holiday," Dotty and Laura are now forced to participate in a deadly game of chance. John Boyd "explains the deal to them: he will marry one and kill the other, a decision to be determined by the flip of a coin. 'Chance must choose the bride … and the bride of death,' he intones" (Hand 96). "The play certainly possesses a melodramatic and Gothic quality," Hand writes, "with its two maidens trapped in the desolate house of a sinister, disfigured man. Moreover, the play experiments with a notion of sexual horror we might associate with these heightened forms, and with the quasi-melodramatic thrills of the Grand-Guignol" (96). Hand also argues that "Valse Triste": Is a forerunner to what has become a standard theme in American horror, a motif repeated in later generations of films such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), as well as numerous other horror movies in which young, usually attractive and urbane people are lost in remote patches of America and find themselves where no one wants to be ' in the lair of the American psycho" (97). Drawing a line between the work of Boris Karloff, Alfred Hitchcock, and Tobe Hooper, Terror on the Air! is at its best when it addresses the correspondence between the golden age of American horror radio (1931-1952) and the classic (1931-1956) and modern American horror film (1960-1996). The transition between the classic and modern phases is "understood traditionally in terms of formal change: otherworldly threats become frighteningly human monsters whose carnage is depicted through graphic violence" (Lowenstein vii). Yet, as Adam Lowenstein points out, a strictly formalist interpretation of the classic and modern horror film tends to overlook the political, historical and cultural dimensions of horror cinema; in an effort to position the horror genre as a collection of monsters and graphic acts of violence, the question of why horror shifts from one phase or medium to another is overlooked. In his analysis of "Valse Triste" Hand is acutely aware of the "'real' and possible horrors that often exploit contemporary sexual anxieties," pointing out that "Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may have been loosely based on the true story of the 1950s serial killer Ed Gein, but the narrative structure, characterization, and plot twists and surprises . . . owe a debt, directly or indirectly, to 'Valse Triste'" (97). Hand's interdisciplinary study of the golden age of American horror radio is a well-written and highly documented book. Including an extensive bibliography and index, I recommend it not only to the general reader, enthusiast and scholar, I am confident that Terror on the Air! is a key text within the field of horror cinema and media studies. BIBLIOGRAPHY Benshoff, Harry M. "Introduction: The Monster and the Homosexual." In Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997: 1-28. Print. Butler, Ivan. Horror in the Cinema. London: Zwemmer, 1970. Print. Clarens, Carlos. Horror Movies: A Illustrated Survey. London: Secker and Warburg, 1968. Print. Clover, Carol J. "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film." In Representations 20 (Fall), 1987: 205-28. Print. Creed, Barbara. "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection." In Screen 27 (1) January-February, 1986: 44-54. Print. Gledhill, Christine. "The horror film." In The Cinema Book, 3rd Ed., ed. Pam Cook. London: British Film Institute, 2007. Print. Lowenstein, Adam. Shock Waves: Trauma, history, and art in the modern horror film. Diss. U of Chicago, 1999. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1999. Print. Williams, Linda. "When the Woman Looks." In Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, eds. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams. Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1983: 83-99. Print. Wood, Robin. "The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s." In Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986: 70-80. Print.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-10-22 00:00:00 Carlo Tamez A quick history of horror radio that isn't nearly as detailed as I'd hoped. TOTA relies heavily on plot summaries and the analysis is too light to justify spoiling the endings of so many wonderfully twisted tales. That said, Old Nancy and her "wise black cat, Satan" do get their due, and I did come away with a nice list of titles to hunt down in iTunes' podcast directory. There are also some fantastic photographs of radio mainstays, Arch Oboler and Agnes Moorehead among them, included throughout the book.