The Man Who Scared Stephen King

I have really enjoyed Gerald Nachman’s book, “Raised On Radio.”  The book leaps neatly from genre to genre, show to show, giving readers the best of each subject and personality.  While some books on old radio are so massive they are nothing more than encylopedia’s – this book does not feel the need to give every detail.

I think radio is really much more scary, and powerful, than television or movies.  In fact, I think two of King’s work have translated nicely to radio – Pet Sematary and Salem’s Lot were both radio plays.  The 3D Mist was also a radio like experience that was nicely done.  I also think The Shining, Dolores Claighborn, and IT would all make great radio plays.

Know who I think would do a good job translating King to radio?  A guy named Arch Oboler.  He was reponsible for a program called “Lights Out Everybody.”  If you haven't’ heart it, quickly rush over to Internet Archive and turn out your lights. Unfortunately, he died in 1986.  Bummer!  (1987 -- that means he could have enjoyed Return of the Jedi without the experience being marred by the prequels!)

Nachman calls Oboler the "Edgar Allan Poe of the genre."

King's love for radio, and in particular Arch Oboler, is discussed on pages 314-315 of the hardcover, in a section titled, "Radio Noir -- Cops  and Grave Robbers."

I do not know where Nachman is getting his quotes from King, because I have long wondered  what King thought of Oboler's work.  I was glad to read these few paragraphs.  Check out the entire book, it's wonderful!

About King (and Oboler), Nachman writes the following:

One o the little boys Oboler scared half to death was the postmodern prince of horror, Stephen King, who has called Oboler “the genre’s prime auteur.”  King heard Lights Out reruns in the 1960s on Dimension X, recalling especially Ray Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven!”  “I didn’t sleep in my bed that night,” he remembered.  “That night I slept in the doorway, where the real and rational light of the bathroom bulb could shine in my face.  That was the power of radio at its height.”  Oboler, like Hitchcock, loved merging horror and humor into a gross-out giggle.  “Part of Oboler’s real genius was when ‘Chicken Heart’ ended, you felt like laughing and throwing up at the same time.

Oboler, said King, played on two of radio’s prime strengths: “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 and 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.”  In radio, King obsverved, we never saw the zipper running down the monster’s back.

On TV, King said, The Shadow and Inner Sanctum over described scenes, whereas Oboler relied on speech, sound, and silence to achieve his effects.  He can’t forget the gruesome, “A Day at the Dentist,” in which a dentist extracts revenge from a patient who, years earlier ruined the dentists’s wife when she was a young girl.  With the patient strapped in his chair, the dentist drills a hole in him (“to let out some of lover-boy”), but the audience is left to guess where – his brain?  Heart?  Genitals?  The lone sound of a burrowing drill left listeners very much in the dark indeed.  Iing singles out radio’s ability to unlock the door of evil without “letting the monster out,” as movies or TV or theater would be forced to, because our eyes demand to know what’s behind the door; our ears leave the solution tantalizingly, and horrifyingly, up in the air.  Yet in the hands of a master radio storyteller like Oboler, we don’t feel heated.  We feel challenged. . . and chilled.

The author of The Shining, Carrie, and Misery remembers how, when Inner Sanctum left radio for TV, it finally made the creeding door visible, “And visible, it certainly was horrible enough – slightly askew, festooned with cobwebs – but it was something of a relief, just the same.  Nothing could have looked as horrible as that door sounded. . .”

There were weaknesses in Oboler's writing.  He was particularly fond of the monologue.  I guess in radio, it's one of the few ways to convey what's going on -- but sometimes Oboler's went on-and-on-and-on.

My favorite Arch Oboler "Lights Out" play was titled "Revolt Of The Worms."  (Brian Keene has a book that reminds me of this short radio play.)  The story "Murder Castle" reminds me very much of the documentary about H.H. Holmes, America's First Serial Killer.

Like King, Oboler was incredibly prolific.  He was a fast writer, known to leave a dinner party at 11pm and return at 1am with a finished script.  Where did he get his ideas?  Nachman fills in this interesting detail, "He often got  ideas  from listening to sound effects records, and took special delight in devising grotesque effects.  His scare tactics included the sound of a man frying int he electric chair (sizzling bacon), bones being snapped (spareribs or Life Savers crushed between teeth), heads  being severed (chopped cabbages), a knife slicing through a man's  body (a slab  of pork cut in two) and, most grisly of all, somebody eating human flesh (wet noodles squished with a bathroom plunger.)"

Does this sound familiar: Nachman quotes Oboler, "I didn't write about little green men. .  . monsters with dripping talons and grotesque faces from the special effects department. . . I wrote about the terrors and monsters within each of us."  (Well, he did write about worms!)  But the quote is very close to King saying he is more interested in the characters than the monsters.