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.

Flashback Radio: "Three Skeleton Key"

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 last week with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."

For our second selection, I chose "Three Skeleton Key." This teleplay, based on a 1937 short-story by French author Georges-Gustave Toudouze, was original broadcast on Escape on March 17, 1950. It was a popular story, having previously been adapted for Escape with a different cast in 1949. It would again be adapted for Suspense, with Vincent Price again reprising the role of Jean, in 1956 and 1958.

The story involves a lighthouse on a tiny, rocky isle off the coast of French Guiana. The three keepers receive an unwelcome and terrifying visit from a derelict ship.

Trey: Well, did this make you want to go into lighthouse keeping?

Jason: Well, it wasn't a bad life, as Jean tells us early on, although I reckon the sliding scale of what constitutes a good or bad life has slid substantially since the era depicted here. 

This is another strong entry in our seasonal survey. The tale measures up in terms of mounting suspense, frightful imagery, and compelling performances. 

Like "The Thing on the Fourble Board," this story exchanges plausibility for nightmare fuel, and it is, in my view, a favorable trade off. We are expected to accept this terrible occurrence as a natural event and so must accept that we have entered a heightened version of reality.

Vincent Price delivers as per usual, especially as the simple-but-effective plot unfolds and conveys Jean's descent into (temporary) insanity with only the pitch and tone of his voice. 

The same high marks go to the supporting cast, who also must portray the maddening effects of increasingly weird and dire circumstances on their hapless characters without makeup, mugging, or bugging their eyes. Well, maybe they did all that, but we can't see a damn thing!

If performances are perhaps a bit over the top vocally, it is incumbent upon the listener to recognize the need for this stylized approach in the audial medium and it's easy to forgive what might seem like excesses in other forms of entertainment. 

Now, how about those sound effects and Foley artists, Trey? Bananas or what?

Trey: Ha! I think it's interesting that they used a relatively light touch here for rat sound effects. They could have definitely gone more over the top with that!

It's true events as presented are unlikely and seem inspired by fears of rodents that are perhaps seldom provoked for most 21st century Americans but were probably more common for urban and rural populations in the first half of the 20th century. Or perhaps this is the exaggerated tale our unreliable narrator Jean told later, rather than a documentary? 

In any case, it's effective in making a swarm of rats feel like an elemental force. 

Similarly, while I think you're right that the performances are of the era and medium, fiction often views the sanity of the lighthouse keeper as a precarious thing. Eggers' The Lighthouse (2019) is likely the most recent example.

Anyway, it's a good story. I can see why it was redone so many times, and why Price was brought back for a number of them.

Flashback Radio: "The Thing on the Fourble Board"

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, hasn't heard many of these before, so he was up for giving them a listen. 

The first one I selected is often considered among the great horror/fantasy anthology episodes: "The Thing on the Fourble Board." It was an episode of Quiet, Please broadcast on August 9, 1948. It concerns workers on an oil derrick having an encounter with something strange emerging from under the earth.

Quiet, Please was created by Wyllis Cooper who had worked on another, well-regarded anthology show called Lights Out (which we'll be sampling later in the month) before this one. For a long time, most episodes of Quiet, Please were thought to be lost but in the late 80s, recordings of the majority of the episodes were rediscovered. Now they can be found on the Internet Archive.

Trey: So, Jason, what did you think of the episode?

Jason: For our inaugural review, we got a doozy. I found the episode to be compelling from the beginning with its Lovecraftian invocation of deep time. I half-expected a rationalized fantasy along the lines of At the Mountains of Madness. What we got instead was decidedly more dreamlike, and firmly on the nightmarish side of the bed. 

The performances were excellent, cliched elements enjoyed new life, not a moment of its scant running time was wasted, and the twist ending brought to mind the very best of the EC horror comics. I'd go into spoiler territory, but with its long years of obscurity I suspect many will not have heard this before, and I recommend they do. 

If I would have heard this around the family radio as a child, I would have contemplated its subtleties long into the wee hours. As it was, I was suitably disturbed on my morning drive to work. Good fun!

Your thoughts?

Trey: I think two things standout to me, as making it work really well. The very grounded, realistic discussion of the oil worker's trade (including the definition of the obscure "fourble" of the title) and the uncanny vocalizations given "Mike", presumably by Cecil Roy.

Jason: The old-timey organ musical accompaniment had a potent, almost psychedelic effect during the description of the storyteller's dreams as triggered by the uncanny revelation. This episode was also a great example of how a strictly verbal/audial media avoided what could have been risible if presented visually, especially in 1948, regarding the description of the unknown entity. 

Trey: It is definitely a story well-fitted to its medium.  I think it will be interesting as we go through the month to compare how different shows take a different approach to sound effects and music to produce atmosphere