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EXIT DOES NOT EXIST: Intellectual Horror in Radio Narrative

H.P. Lovecraft, arguably the most influential horror author of the last century, believes that the “oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”1 In consideration of format, radio plays prove particularly adept in playing to this construct of horror. After all, the most direct, successful platform from which horror and disturbance can be projected is the inward- facing stage of the audience’s own imagination. As an intermediate between the more passive experience of television and the reader-reliant nature of literature, the radio play’s mental engagement makes it the best poised to most effectively prey upon the intellectual insecurities, vulnerabilities, and fears of its audience.

As a fundamental aspect of this assertion, it is important to understand the intellectual and psychological relationship between works of this genre (to whatever degree they are deemed “horror”) and listeners themselves. Questions arise: How does enjoyment exist when the immediate intention is to elicit a negative response? Why

1 Lovecraft, H. P. "Introduction." Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Dover Publications, 1973. N. pag. Print.

1 4,195 WordsBurke, Zach would an audience readily engage works that terrify and unnerve, repel and disgust?

Upon immediate reflection, this dynamic of pain-as-pleasure may appear masochistic, at best, and sadistic at worst. The answer, however, is that horror’s relationship with the audience functions just as tragedy does - a narrative structure which produces equally unpleasant, if not often exactly the same, internal responses, i.e. apprehension, depression, and hopelessness.

In David Hume’s essay “Of Tragedy,” in which Hume examines this seeming paradox of pleasure through displeasure, he writes that audiences of tragedy are

“pleased in proportion as they are afflicted.”2 As the audience’s sense of loss grows more profound, and the narrative’s descent more severe, the more audiences find to admire and adore in the work. These “uneasy passions,” as Hume terms them, produce an excitement equal to their devastation, as if the audience were charmed by the lash.

This conflicting dynamic is not as incongruous as it appears at first glance.

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s essay “Reflections on the Poetic,” as referenced by

Hume, describes the distinctions between pleasure and pain as fluid and instantaneous.

Fontenelle elucidates this point through the bizarre example of an “instance of tickling,” from which “it appears that the movement of pleasure, pushed a little too far, becomes pain; and that the movement of pain, a little moderated, becomes pleasure.”3 Although perhaps overly phenomenological, Fontenelle’s example clearly articulates the “how” of this conflicting dynamic. Unfortunately, it does not address “why” this paradigm functions like it does.

2 Hume, David. "Of Tragedy." Four Dissertations. London: Millar, 1757. N. pag. Print.

3 Fontenelle, Bernard L. "Section 36." Reflections on the Poetic. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.

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Noël Caroll, however, does concern himself with “why.” Author of The Philosophy of Horror; Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, Caroll directly links Hume’s discussion of tragedy with the nature of horror narratives, beginning with an explanation of Hamlet’s longstanding death grip on its audiences. Indeed, the “interest that we take in the deaths of Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius, et al.,” he explains, “is not sadistic, but is an interest that the plot has engendered in how certain forces, once put in motion, will work themselves out. Pleasure derives from having our interest in the outcome of such questions satisfied.”4 Thus, although both horror and tragedy produce “uneasy passions” within their audiences - morbid curiosity, powerless wonderment, fear of dark, inevitable conclusions - the fulfillment of the stimulus sought by each relies upon proper intellectual satisfaction being produced at the narrative’s close.

How is this intellectual contract between audience and narrative fulfilled? By answering the question proposed by a story’s opening in a logical, mentally engaging way. No audience enjoys feeling cheated by utterly unforeseeable circumstance. Were deus ex machina at play in Hamlet, with the tragic hero able to inexplicably halt the crushing gears put in motion by his own inaction, the impact of Shakespeare’s story would be dramatically reduced. Just the same, should the protagonist of a horror story cheat death or worse through authorial intervention, avoiding consequence without intelligible cause, the entire narrative deflates. Robbed of their fear, either for the well- being of the protagonist or for the validity of the scenario, audiences become mentally disengaged.

4 Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.pg. 182

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Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt, a short story adapted for radio by Ernest Kinoy on

Dimension X in 1951 and X Minus One in 1955, exemplifies this intellectual necessity through its successful horror arc. The narrative begins benignly enough: a husband and wife purchase a state of the art “nursery” for their two children, Wendy and Peter. Of course, Bradbury’s concept approaches the fantastic, as the “nursery” is itself “a miraculous theatre of virtual reality.”5 In essence, the parents have installed a room that shapes whim and fantasy into real, sensory experience. As the father says, “when you felt like a quick jaunt to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery. Well, here it was!”6

Similarly, the rest of the house propagates the same spoon-fed lifestyle, suggesting a world overly rich with technological amenities and instant gratification. With this narrative foundation in place, Bradbury’s audiences can begin to pick at the problems posed by the existence of such a realm.

Were The Veldt pure tragedy, the audience would begin to speculate as to the nursery’s corrupting influence in broader strokes, such as the dissolution of the family unit. Because The Veldt is horror, its audience anticipates something far more insidious and, “as it will turn out, [the nursery] is also, necessarily, a theatre of cruelty.”7 As Peter and Wendy become more and possessive of their new space, the authority of the parents is subverted by the nursery, and the children obsess over illusionary safaris into the African plains.

5 Tofts, Darren, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro. Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. 155. Print.

6 Bradbury, Ray. "The Veldt." The Vintage Bradbury; Ray Bradbury's Own Selection of His Best Stories. New York: Vintage, 1965. N. pag. Print.

7 Tofts, Jonson, Cavallaro. 155.

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Disturbed by the lions who stalk the nursery walls - constantly feeding in the distance on unseen prey - Peter and Wendy’s parents decide to decommission not only the nursery, but the entire house in the coming week. Naturally, the children, who the family psychologist says display “the usual violence, a tendency towards slight paranoia” in feeling “persecuted by their parents,"8 do not react well. When ominous signs of growing aggression appear inside the nursery - a blood smeared wallet, the mother’s scarf stained red, screams from the nursery both strange and familiar - the audience knows “what the Hadley parents cannot see:” that their decision to unplug the room “is already too late.”9 It is this growing tension, this latent knowledge of the story’s potential, that drives successful horror. All that remains is for Bradbury to supply a satisfactory answer.

For The Veldt, the fulfillment of this answer comes in the climactic scene where

Peter and Wendy trap their parents inside the nursery, locking the door from the outside.

Here, the illusionary lions become all to real, encircling the parents, and, as Bradbury writes, the parents suddenly realize “why those other screams had sounded familiar.”10

Having been given all the clues, the audience, too, now understands the horrific parallels between what images Wendy and Peter called to mind the weeks previous and what has come to pass. Like tragedy, the audience’s interest “in how certain forces, once put in motion, will work themselves out” becomes satisfied by having been given all the pieces beforehand, with no inexplicable twists.

8 Bradbury, Ray. "The Veldt." GENERIC RADIO WORKSHOP OTR SCRIPT: X Minus One. Ed. Ernest Kinoy. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 July 2014.

9 Tofts, Jonson, Cavallaro. 157.

10 Bradbury, 263

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Bradbury succeeds through a natural progression of compounding details. At the story’s open, able to suspect what the parents cannot, the audience is given room to ponder the nursery’s dark influence over the children. Moreover, as warning signs grow increasingly apparent - remnants of bloody clothing, the pride’s ramping aggression towards parental entries into the room - the question of horror evolves, morphing from a simple “if something bad will happen” into “when and how.” With the increasingly tangible physical nature of the room growing in parallel to these questions, it feels not only natural, but necessary, for The Veldt to close with the parents’ murder, an act framed by the exact image of the pride’s feeding in the distance referenced earlier in the story. Here, the “uneasy passions” of Hume’s tragic sense are perfectly mirrored, replaced only by darker meditations, and once again audiences are “pleased in proportion as they are afflicted.”

Successful fulfillment of this intellectual contract makes horror a powerful medium, capable of eliciting extreme reactions in its audience. But is horror, as a label, limiting? It certainly doesn’t need to be. If horror can be defined as “a genre that represents the need for suppression,” especially “if the horror shown is interpreted as expressing uncomfortable and disturbing desires which need to be contained,”11 then the presence of “horror” in popular storytelling is far more readily apparent. Thus, the style’s presence is often deeply ingrained but commonly overlooked, particularly in the absence of its most obvious tropes. As such, without the arbitrary need for ghosts, ghouls, killers, or extraterrestrials - while not excluding them, either - horror’s purest element remains its cerebral, unnerving investigation between audience and narrative.

11 Strinati, Dominic. An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

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In turn, by allowing listeners to sculpt the nightmare for themselves, radio stands as the storytelling mode most latently poised to effectively prey upon the mental vulnerabilities of its audience. As a medium, radio employs literature’s subjective, internal world building, combining it with the immediacy of scripted audio minus the literal, potentially limiting visuals of television. These features allow “for an extreme

fluidity and flexibility in narrative construction - literally anything imaginable can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time - but it demands active audience participation.”12 By employing the audience’s imagination for most of the heavy lifting, while still directly projecting the story sonically onto the soundstage of the human mind, radio exists uniquely in the membrane between television and literature.

As a result, the nature of radio’s “reality is never consistent,” meaning “it is perfectly adapted to the portrayal of an absurd universe.” Adding to this, and important to the success and tension of radio horror, is how “the theatre of the skull does not display those little signs that twinkle so comfortingly in the theatre during the most despairing analysis of the world - the ones that say 'Exit.’"13 By barricading the usual escape routes, like simply looking away from the screen or page, while mirroring the conscious nature of the listener’s own thoughts, radio presents a near perfect platform for horror.

Although accounts of its influence are often exaggerated,14 Orson Welles’ dramatic retelling of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds provides an excellent example

12 Radio Narrative from Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory Herman, David, 1962-; Jahn, Manfred, 1943-; Ryan, Marie-Laure, 1946- (eds). London: Routledge, 2010

13 Gray, Frances. The Nature of Radio Drama. N.p.: Longman, 1981. 48-77. Print.

14 Newspapers, which had something to fear from the emerging power of radio, fanned the story of a panic: Pooley/Socolow.

7 4,195 WordsBurke, Zach of radio drama’s potential for horror narratives. Originally broadcast on 30 October,

1938, subsequent reports of widespread panic quickly made headlines across the

United States. Popular opinion as to the play’s impact became so substantial that the

Federal Communications Commission even went so far as to investigate the legality of the broadcast itself, hoping to determine whether any laws were broken by mimicking the style of a real emergency report. More alarming, albeit never confirmed, are the rumored suicides resulting in direct response to the broadcast’s convincing imitation.15

Of course, Wells’ adaptation is hardly the first foray into radio horror. Richard

Hand, a veteran radio author working between 1931 and 1952, notes that more than

“eighteen months before the Mercury Theatre’s Wells’ adaptation, Lights Out had broadcast “Chicken Heart” (March 10, 1937), a play... [whose] animation of national emergency and mass panic in a recognizably contemporary context make it an unmistakable precursor to ‘War of the Worlds.’”16 Stepping even further back, the “first fully fledged horror program was The Witch’s Tale,” a recurring horror series originally produced on WOR AM 28 May, 1931.

Samuel Beckett, too, contributes to the genre’s broad potential and prevalence on radio, albeit in less immediately recognizable ways. His play, All That Fall, written in

1956 and originally broadcast 3 January, 1957 on BBC Third Programme, is the kind of slowly unwinding, cerebral puzzle-box that demonstrates the strengths of the format. In particular, it uses sounds of the external world to display the internal turmoil and collapse of its fragile characters.

15 “Welles scares nation.” 2014. The History Channel website. Aug 6 2014, 12:32 http://www.history.com/ this-day-in-history/welles-scares-nation.

16 Hand, Richard J. Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931-1952. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Print.

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On a base level, All That Fall tells the story of septuagenarian Maddey Rooney,17 a self described “hysterical old hag... destroyed with sorrow and pining and gentility and church-going and fat and rheumatism and childlessness.”18 Over the course of nearly an hour, the audience follows her dismal odyssey to the local train station. There she intends to meet her husband Dan, an ill-tempered, misanthropic old man unaware of

Maddey’s hopes to surprise him at the platform for his birthday. When the train arrives late, Maddey’s world takes one final turn towards Beckett’s pitch black reveal of the human soul. Thus, though fairly static at first, All That Fall ultimately forms a complex, horrifying narrative of existential turmoil, spiritual disfigurement, and the potential murder of a child.

To begin, it is important to underline that All That Fall’s story, a slow burn by any measure, would have great difficulty maintaining or reaching its desired effect outside the medium of radio. Himself having heard the question of such an adaptation to the stage, Beckett clarified that the process would “be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing’s coming out of the dark.”19 As Katherine

Worth notes in Beckett and the Radio Medium, “Our attention as listeners is drawn to our inability to see and to the compensating ability we share with the characters, to

‘see’ in a different way, with the eye of the mind.”20 The narrative’s entire source of

17 Notably, Beckett’s first female protagonist.

18 Beckett, Samuel. All That Fall. New York: Grove, 1957. Web. 28 June 2014. pg 490

19 Zilliacus, Clas. "Frontispiece." Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television. Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1976. N. pag. Print.

20 Worth, Katherine J. "Beckett and the Radio Medium." On Beckett: Essays and Criticism. By Samuel Beckett and S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1986. N. pag. Print. p. 193

9 4,195 WordsBurke, Zach power, as well as the insidious nature of its psychological revelations, stems from this emergent meaning from the darkness, with Maddey embedded at the play’s center.

Beckett accomplishes this by manipulating the external setting so as to exhibit the declining light of Maddey’s own inner world. The play’s Irish landscape, typically vibrant with life by connotation, is presented here as a desolate soundscape of failing automobiles, cloying voices, and mechanical disturbance. But it is not only the world’s mechanisms that come in sputtering bursts: “What's wrong with me, what's wrong with me,” says Maddey along the side of the road, half mad, “never tranquil, seething out of my dirty old pelt, out of my skull.”21 The external world replies only with silence and

Maddey with her own “wild laughter,” waiting for other passersby to help continue her journey. This largely lifeless soundscape, paired with Maddey’s despairing, self- deprecating monologues, etches the play’s dark tone inside the listener’s mind.

Most effectively, the complete “absence of visual signs renders the listener a blind person,” thereby directing the audience’s attention towards “the pure imagery of sound, whereby the flow of human consciousness can be grasped without being impeded by redundant signs.”22 The world, as glimpsed from behind radio’s blindfold, becomes purified of competing language and artistic modifiers, allowing the listener

“more autonomy in producing the textual meaning.” By producing this meaning themselves, the listener’s engagement with the piece is not only immediate, but personalized to their own subjective auditory experience.

21 Beckett, 491

22 Desolate Soulscape Embedded in Beckett's Radio Drama: All That Fall Hoonsung Hwang The Harp Vol. 13, (1998), pp. 61-62 Published by: IASIL-JAPAN

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Beckett plays to this subjectivity through All That Fall’s ramping tension between

Dan’s refusal to explain the train’s delay to Maddey and the external world’s continued antagonism, with the weather boiling slowly into a thunderstorm that mirrors the moods of both. It is also the weather’s looming auditory presence that shifts All That Fall from a wholly existential meditation on dissatisfaction with life’s outcomes into a layered, cerebral examination of the darkest human desires. Like the paranoid pulse of Edgar

Allen Poe’s “A Tell-Tale Heart,” howling winds, the threat of rain, and booming thunder all signpost Maddey’s growing inner turmoil. In parallel, during this final push towards home, the listener’s participation actively increases to match Maddey’s own inquisitive mindset, demanding an investigation of her husband’s brooding answers to seemingly inoffensive questions.

Beginning with only the sound of footsteps and the strengthening wind to focus on, Beckett allows the listener room to grow suspicious of Dan’s tightlipped responses just as Maddey does. Despite arriving on a nearly full train, Dan insists he had the compartment to himself. Although normally an otherwise innocuous comment, when the couple are pelted with mud by two local adolescent twins, Dan quietly asks, as if to himself, “Did you ever wish to kill a child?”23 Troubling enough on its own, it is Dan’s admission of having to resist the impulse himself that darkens the question of the train’s late arrival. When Jerry, the boy who normally helps Dan to the taxi, catches up to them to return a small ball Mr. Rooney dropped, Maddey’s perplexity simmers over. When pressed, Dan snaps in refusal to explain the presence of the child’s toy, offering only

23 Beckett, 498-99

11 4,195 WordsBurke, Zach that it “is a thing I carry about with me.”24 Moments later, and much to Dan’s chagrin,

Maddey stops Jerry for an explanation of the train’s delay. The boy replies: “It was a little child fell out of the carriage, Ma’am… Onto the line, Ma’am… Under the wheels,

Ma’am."25 Maddey, left speechless, offers no further inquiry, and the pair return home in silence, trapped with the audience in a cage of wind, rain, and doubt.

As such, All That Fall stands as an excellent example of radio horror through its projection and construction of internal struggle through a nuanced layering of external audio cues, creating a world inside the listener’s mind that matches Maddey’s own precarious mindset. After all, due to the “sheer flexibility of the sounds stage,”26 radio proves itself as an “ideal medium for representing the haphazard shift of human consciousness.”27 Moving from the outside in, All That Fall builds itself entirely around this conceit and the intellectual fabrication of this paired soundscape leaves audiences satisfied. However, Beckett takes radio art’s propositioning of itself as a model for human consciousness even further only two years later.

! Beckett’s 1959 radio play - broadcast on BBC Third Programme - entitled

Embers, inverts the external-to-internal pattern of All That Fall and instead builds the world entirely from the consciousness of a sole narrator. More psychologically nuanced, stream-of-consciousness ghost story than conventional narrative, Embers tells the story of Henry, a man walking alone along a strand, as he recalls, in spiraling loops of dialogue, the story of his father, his wife Ada, and his daughter Addie. What provides the

24 Beckett, 502

25 Beckett, 502

26 Gray, 50

27 Hwang p.62-63

12 4,195 WordsBurke, Zach intellectual horror element in Embers is the audience’s gradual realization that every facet of the play, from audio cues to the narrator himself, may well be fictional, hallucinatory, deceased, or altogether unreal. The result: a haunting portrait of a mind

flagellating itself into pieces.

Embers opens with a monologue in which Henry says that the “sound you hear is the sea… I mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if you didn't see what it was you wouldn't know what it was." That Henry is alone

(implied by the lack of reply), but that the dialogue reads “you,” proves important in not only calling into question to whom Henry might be speaking, but constructs a metafictional bridge to directly link Henry and the radio audience. Indeed, the actor’s voice seems “to speak words directly into the listener’s mind, without allowing them to pass through a reader’s filtering consciousness.”28 This immediately imbibes the listener into Henry’s consciousness, as if the man were interpreting thoughts in advance. Later on, as Henry’s precarious mental state becomes increasingly clear, it arises that Henry may be directing these asides towards his vanished father. This ambiguity will be the

first of many spectral allusions.

Of these, the oceanic sounds of the strand on which Embers is set remains the most consistent signifier. Embers’ entire narrative is punctured by the intermittent crashing of waves, growing louder or quieter in response to Henry’s exclamations, almost like a character itself. Increasing the strand’s importance is its representation of the grave, connoting memories of Henry’s father ("the evening bathe you took once too

28 Jesson, James. ""White World. Not a Sound": Beckett's Radioactive Text inEmbers." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 51.1 (2008): Web. p.50

13 4,195 WordsBurke, Zach often"29), a man who mysteriously disappeared untold years previous following an argument after Henry refused to join his habitual, nightly swim. Though he presumably drowned, it is unclear whether Henry’s father died accidentally, killed himself, or even died at all. By leading with this audio cue as a primary narrative motif, Beckett embraces the visual limitation of radio as an innate aspect of the story, instead of a handicap.

Moreover, Henry admits in the opening monologue, that he has been unable to escape the noise of the sea ever since: “Today it’s calm, but I often hear it above in the house and walking the roads and start talking, oh just loud enough to drown it, nobody notices.” This is why Henry speaks into the void presented by radio, seemingly at no one. Interviewed in French by P.L. Mignon, Beckett commented on this dynamic, remarking that Embers’ entire narrative hinges upon “an ambiguity: is the character hallucinating or is he in the presence of reality?”30 Because of radio’s total removal of visual signifiers, this ambiguity can be maintained for the duration of the story.

It isn’t until Henry’s third attempt to complete the first monologue that the audience begins appreciates Henry’s fatiguing mental state. The narrative, though never completed, is simple. Bolton, a seemingly sick or weary man, has invited Dr. Holloway, the local physician, for an “urgent need”31 on a freezing winter’s eve. Henry speaks for both men in his own warping voice, making it evident that the character of Bolton has called the doctor so as to beg for an injection. Indeed, nearly Bolton’s only word of

29 Beckett, Samuel. "Embers." Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove, 1984. N. pag. Print.

30 Translated from the original French: “une ambiguité: le personnage a-t-il une hallucination ou est-il en présence de la réalité?” Beckett in the 1990s: Selected Papers from the Second International Beckett Symposium Held in The Hague, 8-12 April, 1992, Volume 2 (Google eBook) p.270

31 Beckett, 25

14 4,195 WordsBurke, Zach dialogue is the drip feed succession of “Please!”32 However, when offered an injection by Dr. Holloway, Bolton does not reply. Henry instead narrates his actions, describing

Bolton aligning his face to Holloway’s, almost touching, “Not a word, just the look, the old blue eye, very glassy, lids worn thin, lashes gone, whole thing swimming, and the candle shaking over his head.”33 This description of the eye not only connotes the sea, but also mimics the confrontation between Henry and his father prior to the disappearance. With Bolton’s pleading more indicative of assisted suicide than the hope for an anesthetic (given Bolton’s continued begging post-offer of injection by Holloway), listeners are given a final puzzle piece with which to wrestle.

As such, the listening audience, seated inside his cracking consciousness, hereby suspects that Henry’s spiraling language functions as an aural levee intended to constrict the background noise of his growing psychosis. Later, Ada’s spectral appearance, herself seeming to manifest from nowhere and creating no discernible noise to affirm her physicality, confirms the noise being confined to Henry’s mind, saying: “It’s silly to say [your talking] keeps you from hearing it, it doesn’t keep you from hearing it and even if it does you shouldn’t be hearing it, there must be something wrong with your brain.”34 That the reveal of these auditory meanings comes so late into the narrative, with Henry only able to finish the story of Bolton and Dr. Holloway after the third fragmented attempt, transform the initial shock of horror found in All That Fall into a recursive, sinking anxiety.

32 Beckett, 38

33 Beckett, 39

34 Beckett, 32

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After all, the entire world, insofar as the listening audience knows, has been fabricated through Henry’s consciousness. Indeed, the incongruity of the closing line

(“Not a sound” 35) against the taunting ocean waves heard by listeners cements Henry’s disconnect and mental dissolution. The audience, having puzzled out the ontologically ambiguous nature of all audio presented in the play, have found in Henry a sympathetic, if utterly unreliable narrator. Embers, then, forms an auditory exhortation of each of

Henry’s ghosts, using sound cues (or a lack of them) as a primary device through which to construct an audio blueprint of the narrator’s buckling mind. The fulfillment of radio drama’s potential for intellectual “horror” is achieved here through the complex satisfaction of Beckett’s inciting question: “is the character hallucinating or is he in the presence of reality?” By answering through a compelling, medium specific use of audio,

Beckett’s Embers exemplifies radio’s potential for horror narratives.

Naturally, Embers is one of countless examples of intellectually successful radio horror. The medium has embraced the genre for decades following its start in the

1930s, though many popular radio horror programs such as America’s Dimension X (8

April, 1950), X Minus One (24 April, 1955), and Lights Out (January 1934) were eventually converted to television. However, original productions and literary adaptations are continually produced for the mass market. Richard Matheson’s I Am

Legend, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and Lovecraft’s At the

Mountain of Madness, among many others, have enjoyed recent runs on BBC Radio.

Tellingly, The Twilight Zone, television’s spiritual successor to the likes of Lights Out and

X Minus One, has since returned to the radio format, beginning in 2002.

35 Beckett, 39

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That the genre’s popularity persists across such an expansive timeline testifies to its being a natural fit for the medium. Between horror’s heavy emphasis on audience engagement and radio’s spartan skill set, fewer artistic pairings feel more natural. After all, the intellectual satisfaction brought out by a properly told horror narrative matches the Shakespearian sense of tragedy: a mixture of fulfilled expectations (not to say a lack of surprise) and logic’s reveal of what happens when the world’s darkest mechanisms are irreparably put in motion. But, above all, conjured purely by sound, these unsettling worlds fabricate themselves exclusively inside the human mind, demonstrating that for radio horror the medium is quite often the message.

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Works Cited

• Beckett, Samuel. All That Fall. New York: Grove, 1957. Web. 28 June 2014.

• Beckett, Samuel. "Embers." Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove, 1984. N. pag.

Print.

• Bradbury, Ray. "The Veldt." GENERIC RADIO WORKSHOP OTR SCRIPT: X Minus

One. Ed. Ernest Kinoy. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 July 2014.

• Bradbury, Ray. "The Veldt." The Vintage Bradbury; Ray Bradbury's Own Selection of

His Best Stories. New York: Vintage, 1965. N. pag. Print.

• Buning, Marius, and Lois Oppenheim. Beckett in the 1990s: Selected Papers from the

Second International Beckett Symposium Held in The Hague, 8-12 April, 1992.

Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. Print.

• Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York:

Routledge, 1990. Print.

• Fontenelle, Bernard L. "Section 36." Reflections on the Poetic. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag.

Print.

• Gray, Frances. The Nature of Radio Drama. N.p.: Longman, 1981. 48-77. Print.

• Hand, Richard J. Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931-1952. Jefferson,

NC: McFarland, 2006. Print.

• Hume, David. "Of Tragedy." Four Dissertations. London: Millar, 1757. N. pag. Print.

• Jesson, James. ""White World. Not a Sound": Beckett's Radioactive Text in Embers."

Texas Studies in Literature and Language 51.1 (2008): 47-65. Web.

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• Lovecraft, H. P. "Introduction." Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Dover

Publications, 1973. N. pag. Print.

• Pooley, Jefferson, and Michael J. Socolow. "Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds Did Not

Touch Off a Nationwide Hysteria. Few Americans Listened. Even Fewer Panicked."

Slate Magazine. N.p., 28 Oct. 2013. Web. 7 July 2014.

• Prohászková, Viktória. "The Genre of Horror." American International Journal of

Contemporary Research 2.4 (2012): 132-42. Web.

• Riezler, Kurt. "The Social Psychology of Fear." American Journal of Sociology 49.6

(1944): 489. Web.

• Strinati, Dominic. An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture. London: Routledge,

2000. Print.

• Tofts, Darren, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro. Prefiguring Cyberculture: An

Intellectual History. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. 150-60. Print.

• Worth, Katherine J. "Beckett and the Radio Medium." On Beckett: Essays and

Criticism. By Samuel Beckett and S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove, 1986. N. pag.

Print.

• Zilliacus, Clas. "Frontispiece." Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of

Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television. Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1976. N. pag.

Print.

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