Flashback Radio: "The Dark"

For the month of October and the Halloween season, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, was up for it. We started with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."

For this our last episode of the season, I wanted us to return to Lights Out in the Arch Oboler era. "The Dark" aired (possibly, there is some disagreement) on January 19, 1938. In this story, a ambulance crew responds to a routine call and finds something decidedly nonroutine. 

The episode as it aired is lost today, though it was remembered well enough to form the basis of a segment in The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror V." This likely came from a truncated vignette that appeared on the Oboler's LP Drop Dead! An Exercise in Horror in 1962. That 7ish minutes version is on YouTube and elsewhere.

How could we listen to a lost episode? Well, a group did a recreation based on the existing script. If you want to see the actors actually doing the recording, that's on YouTube:

Trey: Jason, did this episode make you afraid of the dark? Or at least steer you away from a second career as an EMT?

Jason: I don't know that I am permanently scarred by the experience, but I was again surprised by the intensity of this program's fright factor, and just how outré such a mass media production managed to get in it's short run time. 

Events were skewing fairly mundane, if horrific, until the climactic minutes, when all bets were off and no holds were barred in terms both of graphic (or should I say sonic?) violence and a sharp turn into the unexplainable so profoundly weird that it gives Lovecraft a run for his money. 

I'm once again avoiding spoilers because the big reveal really must be heard to be believed.

My only criticism lies in the challenge of reviving a piece of media from a bygone era. The performances make an admirable attempt at reproducing period acting styles, which lends an air of goofiness a bit at odds with the tone of the events portrayed, until the bitter end when the viewpoint character is left alone to face existential terror. 

But man, that last 5 minutes!

Trey: Yes, no slight to the recreation voice actors who do a great job, but I would like to hear the original crew because there would have been a "naturalism" for them in some of those lines and those performances.