Wednesday 2/26/25
Some classic dramatic radio programs can sound silly to people listening seventy years later. There are hokey touches, implausible plots, and an innocence that suggests naïveté but also a spirit of, "Let's just go for it."
There's an irony involved, though, when it comes to classic dramatic radio and that innocence--a two-pronged irony, really. You had shows--like Gunsmoke and Tales of the Texas Rangers--which may not have been shocking then, but which can shock us now. The best ones haven't aged at all, and they don't truckle. Punches aren't pulled. They deliver blows in ways that the works that we credit as doing so now don't really do. An episode of Gunsmoke can make that episode of what you think is the cutting edge drama on your favorite streamer service pale by comparison.
But people don't know. Their experiences are limited. They partake of a very small set of works that are in the communal air, if you will, which in turn sets the levels of their expectations and also what they think--and all that they think--is possible.
Then there's the further irony that the classic dramatic radio programs that were sillier still had a devil-may-care aspect to them. They weren't trying to protect anyone or create safe spaces and would have steamrolled over notions of trigger warnings. They were spirited in this regard, with what can be thought of as a daffy punk component.
A silly-ish program that also produced some scares was Inner Sanctum Mystery, which everyone who knows it just calls Inner Sanctum. Inner Sanctum was created by producer Himan Brown and, like a number of such radio programs, tapped into the book or magazine worlds for material. There was an Inner Sanctum imprint at Simon and Schuster, from out of which the radio program grew. What this meant is that writers wrote stories. Stories with a story. What a concept, right?
Now, the source material for Inner Sanctum wasn't the best, but consider the 1950s science fiction radio program X Minus One, which featured some legitimate radio art. Many of those episodes were based on stories by the likes of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, and Clifford D. Simak that had recently been published sci-fi pulp magazines. A writer would write an awesome story, it'd run in a magazine that people actually read, and then shortly thereafter, it'd be adapted for an episode of X Minus One and in the meanwhile the writer would have written several other stories.
Inner Sanctum didn't have that kind of pedigree, but it had staying power and the ability to diversify. There was an Inner Sanctum TV program and an Inner Sanctum film series as well. I wrote a feature about one of those films called Strange Confession with Lon Chaney Jr. which will either be part of a book of mine about various works of horror art or else one wholly about horror films. I'm doing both--I just don't know exactly what will be where yet.
Inner Sanctum the radio show premiered January 7, 1941 and ended October 5, 1952, so this was a long, successful run. There were more than 500 episodes, of which 145 survive. You'd like it to be all of them, but 145 is enough to keep you going.
A decent amount of corn was involved in this kind of undertaking, but a lot of it was purposeful corn. We also have to remember that people making shows like this weren't expecting anyone would ever listen to it again. It wouldn't be around decades later and certainly no one would study it and write articles and books and give interviews about it like I do.
What I've said before, though, is that dramatic radio represents some of the finest art ever made in this country. I gave the example of Gunsmoke above. You can put Gunsmoke in the group with The Searchers, Charlie Parker's Savoy recordings, Elvis's Sun sides, Moby-Dick, when it comes to American art. People don't think that way and they don't know it, because the few people who are aware of Gunsmoke are usually now-elderly hardcore radio buffs. It's not a not true thing; it's a not enough people have experienced this thing thing.
Inner Sanctum isn't in that group. But think of the cool music that's definitely worth listening to that isn't in that "best" category. Inner Sanctum is the horror dramatic radio version of that, and was also something of a trailblazer thanks to some key touches.
One of those touches was a sound effect: the famous--or infamous--creaking door from the beginning of each program. A simple device, but so memorable as to become ubiquitous. All heavily-played up screeching door sounds since--especially in radio, where they became a staple of sorts--owe a debt to those rusty door hinges of the Inner Sanctum.
Then we have the show's first host, Raymond Johnson. He was the MC ghoul of the festivities. A prime mover of a horror host, which are still around--Svengoolie, for instance. Raymond--as he was billed on the show--set the template. Cracking wise, making his puns, but with this streak of black humor that set him apart.
Like Orson Welles, Johnson was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He worked with Arch Oboler, who helmed Lights Out, which was created by Wyllis Cooper and was like a more sophisticated Inner Sanctum, though not as sophisticated and imaginative as Quiet, Please, the program launched by Cooper after leaving Lights Out. Got that?
This was in Chicago. Then Johnson went to New York and was picked up by Brown for Inner Sanctum, where he stayed until 1945 when he joined the army and was replaced by Paul McGrath (who did not go by the name of Raymond and was instead known as "Your Host" or "Mr. Host," which I rather like).
In addition to his badinage, Raymond also had a stellar sign-off line that my guess is he ad-libbed one night and then stuck with it, in which he'd go, "Pleasant dreams, hmmmmmmm?"
The Inner Sanctum stories themselves are full of outrageous plot twists and turns and things that happen just because that's going to make it easier to get to the pay-off and keep everything moving along--fast, fast, fast--but despite that, the series can be pretty creepy. You've just heard from the tea lady and Raymond, so you know you're not in too much danger--which isn't how we feel with, say, the early 1980s Canadian series Nightfall--but there are real passages of unease amidst the hokiness.
A good example in this vein is the episode "Detour to Death," from May 21, 1946. On its face, the story is ridiculous. This woman is a magazine writer and she wants to do a story on these "wreckers"--people who would deliberately try and lure ships to their doom along a rocky coast so they could scavenge them. She's talking to her brother about her assignment, and says something like, "If I leave right now--on this dark and rainy night--I can be at the craggy hollow on the coast at midnight." Ah, sensible. This type of thing is common with Inner Sanctum. You just need to roll with it.
She drives away, the brother goes to sleep, he has this vision that she needs him, and he sets off--that same night--with his totally annoying dog who does not stop making noise the entire episode. Try to get past that, too. There's a detour directing him down a different road, which itself has a felled tree across it. He finds his sister, and then they see this man in the woods, and stuff gets weird. We're in the car with them as they plot next moves, and it's genuinely creepy. The road is too narrow for them to turn around. Are they going to reverse it out of there? Are they stuck? What are they going to do? And what the hell is happening here?
With Inner Sanctum, there are loads of that stereotypical organ sound that people are wont to associate with vintage horror radio. But you also get things like this steady patter of rain evident in this episode, which isn't showy. Instead, it seeps into you, and absorbs you in the process into the proceedings.
In its early days, Inner Sanctum tried to be somewhat literary. There was, for example, an adaptation of Maupassant's "The Horla," but that wasn't what the show was about or did best, and to its credit, it played to its strengths.
Welles and Frank Sinatra were both on the show--the latter appearing the day after Christmas, 1949--which I think is pretty surprising, because it wasn't a prestige type of program. Boris Karloff was a first season regular, which was a big "get" and established credibility early on. He starred in the August 3, 1941 adaptation of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," which might be the best known Inner Sanctum episode and one of the best.
No show liked to use the word "death" in the titles of its episodes with greater frequency than Inner Sanctum. When in doubt, go with death, seemed to be how the staff thought, which also could be, fittingly enough, a Raymond line. Pleasant dreams, then.
Comentarios