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Lights Out Old Time Radio show (1934 – 1947)

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Lights Out Old Time Radio show (1934 – 1947)

Lights Out AdAdhesive tape, stuck together and pulled apart, simulated the sound of a man’s or woman’s skin being ripped off. Pulling the leg off a frozen chicken gave the illusion of an arm being torn out of its socket. A raw egg dropped on a plate stood in for an eye being gouged; poured corn syrup for flowing blood; cleavered cabbages and cantalopes for beheadings; snapped pencils and spareribs for broken fingers and bones. The sound of a hand crushed? A lemon, laid on an anvil, smashed with a hammer.

Predating Suspense and Inner Sanctum, versions of Lights Out aired on different networks, at various times, from January 1934 to the summer of 1947 and the series eventually made the transition to television. Radio’s premier horror series, Lights Out was created by writer/director Wyllis Cooper who later scripted Boris Wyllis CooperKarloff’s 1939 classic Son of Frankenstein.  An innovative writer for the medium of radio, Wyllis Cooper worked on other notable shows such as The Empire Builders, Quiet Please, Campbell’s Playhouse, The Army Hour, and Whitehall 1212.  One of the first old time radio shows to  develop the medium of radio with distinct sound effects and dramas, Lights Out truly set the bar for other radio dramas of the time due entirely to its gore and strangeness.

Among the many young actors employed on the series was Leslie Nielsen who appeared in several episodes including “The Lost Will of Dr. Rant,” based on “The Tractate Middoth”, an M. R. James story. Other notable guest stars included Ann Bancroft, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb, Anthony Quinn, Jessica Tandy, Veronica Lake, John Forsythe, Boris Karloff, Beatrice Straight, Eli Wallach, Vincent Price, Jane Wyatt, and Jack Palance.

Steven Dark
Host of dARk arTS Horror Radio – Broadcasting From Beyond the Grave 24/7/365 Vintage Old Time Radio Horror, Mystery and Suspense.
https://darkentertainments.com
http://horror.radio

Horror and Suspense Old Time Radio

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Inner Sanctum Mysteries

Inner Sanctum Mysteries

Horror and suspense

The horror genre was very effective on radio because of the gruesome and frightening images that could be suggested by purely aural means. One of the earliest radio horrors was The Witch’s Tale, which debuted in May 1931 over WOR in New York and ran on the Mutual network starting in 1934. In that same year Lights Out, a true milestone in radio horror, was launched by producer-director Wyllis Cooper; in 1936 Cooper accepted a Hollywood screenwriting job and left the series to writer-director Arch Oboler. The show (which frequently aired at midnight so as not to be heard by the young and impressionable) became radio’s ultimate gore fest, filled with various grisly dismemberments accomplished by imaginative sound effects. Oboler tried to make some important points about society’s mores in his stories, balancing the gory with allegory.

A blend of the ghoulish and the murder mystery came with producer Himan Brown’s Inner Sanctum Mysteries (January 1941–October 1952), which almost always involved a murder and some supernatural element. An ironic finish was virtually a given; for example, in “”Elixer Number Four,”” an episode from 1945, a character played by Richard Widmark murders a scientist who has created a serum that gives immortality, only to be sentenced to prison for life. Weird characters abounded, their antics punctuated by the most uninhibited pipe-organ “stings” in the history of radio. The show’s best-remembered trademark was the ominous squeaking, creaking door that opened each episode and slammed shut at the episode’s conclusion.

Suspense (June 1942–September 1962) was certainly the longest-running horror-oriented show, as well as the most star-studded. As hinted by its title, the program was more suspenseful than horrific, and it was almost always rooted in contemporary everyday reality. The series’s best-remembered story, frequently reprised, was “”Sorry, Wrong Number, “” actress Agnes Moorehead’s tour-de-force portrayal of a bedridden woman who accidentally overhears a murder plot on her telephone, unaware that she is the intended victim. Despite shrinking budgets during its last years, Suspense continued to deliver first-rate programs until the final day of the series—and of network dramatic radio—on September 30, 1962.

Encyclopeadia Britannica