About ten years ago, I was seeing radio horror programs, usually from the forties, passed around on my usual online haunts. It’s always interesting to me when something that old unexpectedly finds new life on the Internet. Remember when people were suddenly obsessed with Dracula when it was retold through Tumblr? I’ve observed that kind of thing happening on occasion, and while it’s sometimes difficult to tell if all the people suddenly buzzing about a viral golden oldie aren’t coming from a place of weird kitschy irony, I think it’s safe to say that the starting point is usually someone with a genuine interest in these historical pieces of entertainment, sharing their finds not just out of a semi-detached academic curiosity, but because they like the style of this old thing, even if it’s “dated.”
Radio shows have been one example of the outmodded finding strange new life in current times—you can find quite a few them uploaded to sites like Youtube, as bizarre as that sounds. Radio used to be the broadcast medium of choice once upon a time, the source for mainstream thrills—it was, to say something dumb and obvious, the television of its day. When a person unfamiliar with radio plays encounters these shows, they may recognize all the ways TV takes after this style, while also having a hard time adjusting to all the idiosyncrasies the medium developed. It’s familiar, and yet so different…on the other hand, we’ve also been seeing more than a few podcasts start telling stories in a similar manner. A revival of that style may indeed have led to some seeking out its historical antecedents.
Among those old horror programs uploaded to Youtube (the video part usually just a single image of a haunted-looking radio sitting in a foreboding void), the one I really saw get talked up was the anthology series Quiet, Please, and what was one of its most famous episodes, “The Thing on the Fourble Board.” Being interested in Things, it immediately drew my attention, and what I found was an interesting monster story in a style I had little familiarity with at the time. One would probably not expect to be creeped out by a radio program from 1948, but at least on first listening, the way this particular story utilizes the radio medium is clever, intentionally ridiculous, and, at times, unnerving.
Quiet, Please ran from 1947 to 1949, and was the creation of Wyllis Cooper, who had earlier created the influential program Lights Out, which was subsequently taken over by Arch Oboler (director of previous site subject The Twonky, but who is more famous for his outlandishly ghoulish scripts for radio.) Cooper’s other contribution to the history of horror entertainment was the script for 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, so he was already a major player in the realm of monsters by the time “The Thing on the Fourble Board” broadcast in August 1948. The show’s style is quieter and more based in narration, with subdued organ and piano music marking transitions between “scenes”, while the stories are primarily told in the first person by narrator Ernest Chappell, with only a few other actors present—all of this was apparently due to budget limitations (the show never found a sponsor, which explains its short run when compared to Lights Out), but these also gave it a style that listeners of time—and those who discovered it much later—would come to appreciate.
In this story, Chappell is playing a former oil field worker telling us about something that happened on an oil derrick twenty years prior, talking to the listener as if we’re all collectively a single person sitting in his house hearing his story. He spends quite a bit of time explaining the intricacies of oil drilling—the title of the story comes from jargon names used for various parts of the derrick—all of it coming from Cooper’s own experience working on oil derricks, which reminds me a lot of the technical detail Theodore Sturgeon included in the short story version of “Killdozer!”, also written in the forties. The narrator muses about how they never really know what kinds of things exist in the depths of the earth, and remains amazed that his job involves digging up oil and gas that was created from the decayed remains of organisms from millions of years ago, with fossils sometimes dredged up when they go about coring. Although coming from a certain blue collar background, the narrator is very engaged with the fundamental natural mystery of his work. Oil and gas have been a cornerstone of modern civilization, and the actual scientific origins of them have always made the whole business a strange case of contrasts: our living technological life powered by the remains of dead prehistoric life.
Considering how simple the actual plot of the broadcast is, the technical explanations and musings do help it reach its 25-minute runtime—but don’t call it padding! It provides atmosphere! In the actual sequence of events, the narrator is alone at the site of the oil derrick and meets up with a geologist, who hears strange sounds coming from high up on the structure, and then discovers a gold ring in one of the cores they’ve dug up…with the ring adorning a strange stone object that not only resembles a finger, but turns invisible when the dirt is rubbed off of it. The narrator later hears the geologist fall to his death off the titular fourble board (and finds one of his fingers missing), but is unable to give much detail to the police and the site foreman (J. Pat O’Malley, longtime character and voice actor from radio to film to television, known for the broad Irish accent he’s also sort of doing here.) What’s funny is that the foreman manages to convince the police not to take the narrator in for questioning not because he thinks he’s completely innocent, but because he’s short on workers and can’t spare him. I’d sure love to work for a boss with that much confidence in me! In no time at all, however, the foreman finds himself on the receiving end of several tons of steel equipment, released by a wire that has been mysteriously sheared through. Needless to say, that particularly incident-prone oil derrick is shut down.
Desperate to know what was going on, the narrator returns to the derrick on his own and climbs up to the fourble board while armed, and hears what sounds to be a young girl crying, despite seeing nothing there. In the action that ensues, a can of red paint is splashed on whatever is there, revealing its shape to be a creature with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a spider—which the narrator had told us earlier was his one major phobia. Whatever this Thing is, it was accidentally pulled up from the deepest reaches of the earth on the drill, and had been hiding out on the derrick all that time—the gold ring was its…or hers, I should say.
Now, the basic physiology of this creature has a certain pulp implausibility about it. This is not only a human-spider hybrid from the centre of the earth, but also one whose skin is entirely stone-like in texture, and is normally invisible—at least in that last detail, the narrator mentions that she can only see when she herself is made visible, which is at least a little more scientifically accurate. Monsters from deep underground are a common trope, and very rarely have they ever conformed to anything we know about animals that live in the absolute darkness of caves and tunnels (until more recently, probably), but I guess this particularly strange combination of traits is at least an attempt to make a being from beneath our feet feel alien in the appropriate ways? Kinda?
I guess Cooper’s goal was to create something eerie and mysterious, which is achieved primarily through the creature’s vocalizations, which remain to this day genuinely unsettling. The narrator’s description of it sounding like a crying child is accurate, and the many variances of that mournful mewling give it a truly uncanny sound that is significantly more disturbing than its rather pulpy visual description. This is all comes down to the performance of Cecil Roy (who is credited at the end of the show with Chappell reservedly saying she was “…also a member of the cast”), a voice actress best known as the original voice of Casper the Friendly Ghost.
But Roy’s voice is only one of the reasons people seemed to have remembered this broadcast—the other is the way it pulls the rug from under the audience. No sooner has the narrator witnessed the appearance of this monstrous being, which resembles his greatest fear, then he begins to…soften on it. First, he simply sounds sympathetic to this creature’s plight, lost in a world it doesn’t understand. But then he makes it quite clear: oh, he thinks this human-spider mutant has a pretty face. We very quickly learn that he had fallen in love with the monster at first sight, and he then explains that, by using grease paint, he is able to sort of make it resemble a human, while hiding its arachnid lower half with dresses. Then you remember that at the beginning of the broadcast he wanted us, the listener(s), to meet his wife…
The end of the broadcast pretty brilliant use of the format for a horror story, making everyone listening an integral part of the shock ending—it’s a meta quality that was used frequently on Quiet, Please, and it managed to get me on my first listening just as it might have to a kid listening to the show in 1948. I would say that after a second listening, I can also appreciate the ending as something bordering on gleefully silly, despite Chappell’s effectively earnest performance and everything else that also aims to make it genuinely spooky. That it is so confidently sits on that border between creepy and ridiculous is what makes it feel unique even to a modern listener like me. The broadcast ends with Chappell and Cooper having a tongue-in-cheek conversation about both this story (“I’m reasonably sure the characters from tonight’s story are completely fictional…or, at least, I for one hope so”) and the next week’s, reinforcing the mirthfully macabre undertone of the broadcast. The tone is surprising and weird in a way that only something of this vintage really can be, smartly basing itself in a style that only made sense at the time it was made…but maybe we’ve come around to appreciating it again.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 