Flashback Radio: "The House in Cypress Canyon"

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 kicked it off two weeks ago with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."

For our third selection, I chose "The House in Cypress Canyon." This was an episode of the series Suspense. Written by Robert L. Richards, and produced and directed by William Spier, it originally aired on December 5, 1946, on CBS radio. It stars film actor Robert Taylor and radio veteran Cathy Lewis. Despite being a well-regarded episode, it was only performed once on Suspense.

Despite their being a touch of the Gothic in it, the story here is relentlessly contemporary. A couple, moving for the husband's work to California, can't be picky due to the post-War housing shortage. Lucky for them, they happen upon a newly constructed house that has just been listed. Things take a take a bad turn when they begin to hear strange noises, and there's the matter of a mysteriously locked closet door. It appears the house is haunted.

Trey: So, Jason, as you sipped you Roma wine, as Suspense's sponsor would want you to do, and listened to this episode, did you get the sense that this one had more to say than our previous selections?

Jason:  suspect some listeners back in its day would be inclined to throw back a bracer a bit more potent than those produced by the master vintners of Grand Estates after wading through this piece of fiction!

Rather than the primordial terrors evoked by our previous entry, this tales has plenty of undercurrents that hint at more modern anxieties. As with many entertainments of the mid-twentieth century, the long shadow of World War II casts its pall here, the reconfigurations of domesticity and gender roles perhaps chief amongst them. 

The uncanny elements of the tale remain unexplained, and their ability to disturb benefits from this ambiguity. It's a haunted house story, but it's weird disturbances are triggered by future events, rather than those lingering from the past. 

I have to wonder if the story has lost (or gained) any of its ability to invoke horror for modern listeners, or at least those significantly younger than I, who are less steeped in 20th Century media, especially with modernity's open examination and long-term experimentation with non-traditional gender roles. Or am I completely off the rails? Help, Trey!

Trey: I'm afraid I'm in no better position to judge how the kids might take it, but I think it's a remarkable story, in the sense that it is at once, I think, fairly obvious while being utterly uncanny at the same time--even if the point of it might be lost on modern audiences.

What I mean is that it is clearly about anxiety over women's changing roles post-war in society. There's closet, where things must be kept in check. The flow of blood evoking menses. The milkman, frequent foil for jokes about infidelity, as the first victim.

But then there's the framing sequence, making the story not a haunting so much as a dire portend. Likewise, the specific malign spirit inflicted upon the wife is unexplained. Despite its utterly mundane setting, it makes no effort to make its horrors make sense. There's a nightmare logic to it.

Both for its strangeness and for the perhaps outdated nature of the concerns animating it, I don't think you'd get a story like this today.