Using radio to explore American history

Much of my work over the years has involved using popular culture as a means of understanding American social attitudes, whether we look at religion and cults or politics and race. This post is a commentary on an important resource that we may often forget. That comment may be unfair, in that this resource may be very well known to others, but I hope some will find this useful. In short – we all know books, magazines, films and television – but what about radio?

My current book project is a history of the folk horror genre, which utilizes the idea that powerful ancient forces and deep-seated evils survive in the landscape barely recognized by the modern world. In isolated communities, active witches or pagan groups try to mobilize these dark forces, using rituals from pre-Christian times. I follow this idea from its beginnings in the 1880s to the explosion of fictional works around 1970, and groundbreaking productions such as The wicker man. Then lately we move on to productions such as Midsummer. This is a major area of ​​study these days, leaning heavily towards films, albeit with some recognition of literary horror – novels, short stories and pulps. I am certainly following in those footsteps and doing my utmost to avoid what we might call cinematic imperialism, the almost exclusive focus on films because they are so easy to research.

My current main goal is to highlight the American contribution to the genre, which generally gets short shrift in a British-dominated field. I can point to many American stories and novels that fit the description perfectly, including the very famous writings of HP Lovecraft, such as in ‘The Dunwich Horror’. There is a huge amount in legendary pulp magazines such as Strange stories. But I find very little in the way of films, largely I think because of the operation of the Hollywood Production Code, the censorship system that became draconian in 1934. I find a few important B pictures, but nothing major. Hmm, where is folk horror in popular culture?

But if cinema didn’t allow for folk horror treatments, other popular media were much more welcoming. There are certainly a number of important television series of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including a 1961 item that I studied that I think might have been the very first folk horror production in the visual arts ever, namely the 1961 film. Thriller episode entitled “Pitchfork and Bill-hook”. It concerned a gruesome (true) witch murder in an English village.

But television is only a small part of the story. Between the 1920s and 1950s, the United States had an incredibly vibrant radio culture of music, news, sports, comedy, serials, soap operas, drama, westerns and romance, which reached impressive mass audiences, literally in the millions. In terms of drama, by far the most famous product of this era was Orson Welles’s 1939 broadcast The War of the Worlds, but this was just the tip of a big iceberg. When ordinary people didn’t go to the movies, they stayed home and listened to the radio. This was not a niche market, and any major commercial company that cared about its revenue targeted its advertising budgets accordingly. And of course politicians knew the vital significance of this market. Think of radio priest Charles Coughlin, and Franklin Roosevelt owed much of his popularity as president to his radio presenting skills. In terms of broadcast standards, this was by no means a libertarian environment for creators, but in crucial ways it functioned differently from the Hays Code in cinema.

I mentioned that I study horror and suspense fiction, so what can I find in these radio resources? Actually a huge amount. The groundbreaking anthology series by The witch story (1931) and Lights out (1934) were followed in 1940 by the hugely popular CBS series Tension, which offered free-standing productions that fit that very general title. Many of these were in fact horror articles, with titles like The Lord of the Witch Doctors And Would you like to make a bet with death? Over nine hundred shows – nine hundred! – appeared during the 22 years it lasted Tension series, many featuring the leading stars of the day. Mutual Broadcasting had its critically acclaimed horror/suspense series Quiet please! And The mysterious traveler.

Different types of media are also intertwined and cross-pollinated in surprising ways. Actors moved easily between the worlds of stage, film and radio. Many Hollywood films used the world of radio as the setting for stories, whether comedy, romance or drama. Many radio series also migrated to theatrical series, and a few (such as the Lone Ranger) became the mainstay of early television. The chilling horror/suspense series Inner sanctuary (1941-1952) led to several film spin-offs and eventually a television show. By the way, original Inner sanctuary the radio series itself had 526 episodes.

And don’t forget comics. The evil witch from the radio series The witch story evolved into the Old Witch who presented the infamous bloody EC comics in the 1940s and 1950s. Superman started as a comic strip and always remained so, but from 1940 to 1951 it was also a very popular radio series. It then became a television show and, in 1978, a film franchise. The mysterious traveler became a pulp magazine.

In the case of horror, the sheer volume of production meant that producers were always on the lookout for useful material, and they had an almost symbiotic relationship with the pulp. In 1932, The witch story dramatized the famous confessions of the Scottish witch Isobel Gowdie. In 1945 the very controversial actor Ronald Colman starred in one Tension Lovecraft production The Dunwich Horrorwhich I have described as the author’s most explicit venture into folk horror.

All of these shows presented horror that would have been unacceptable in Hollywood. In 1951, NBC Presents had a dramatized adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’, which would not appear in cinematic form for another twenty years.

I’m making a point that should be clear. Many scholars rightly point to film noir as one of the great cultural products of mid-century America. But would those famous films have found anything like the market they have now had radio shows not spent the last few decades creating and expanding a huge national audience passionately interested in horror, crime and suspense? Cinema did not and could not stand alone.

That anthology format remained virtually intact into the 1950s, as American networks transitioned from radio to television. NBC, CBS and ABC all originated as radio broadcasters, the first two in 1926-1927, and ABC in 1943. Mutual (1934) represented the other member of what was then the Big Four, although it remained largely concentrated on the radio. the TV revolution.

An early suspense/horror manifestation on television was Cameo Theater, which offered its television dramatization of “The Lottery.” The best-known of these new anthology series gained visibility through the use of a celebrity presenter who appeared at the beginning of each episode. Alfred Hitchcock presents proved very popular, and that of Rod Serling Twilight zone dates from 1959. That model was imitated by Thriller by Boris Karloff, where ‘Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook’ were guests in 1961. And that certainly wasn’t the only continuity of the themes of the old pulps. In the first two series alone, Thriller presented eighteen episodes drawn directly from stories first published in Strange stories, including work by Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner and August Derleth. One of the show’s most highly regarded episodes was an adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “Pigeons From Hell,” which often appears on lists of the all-time greatest horror/gothic stories.

If we are looking for media treatments of witches, cults and haunted landscapes in this era, and of folk horror in general, we must look first to radio, and then to the television industry that was its heir. And every word I say there applies to all other topics we may explore in that long and crucial period of American history. The amount of potential material for studying (for example) gender, race or ethnicity is limitless. Oh, and if you want to know why early American television looked and behaved the way it did, never forget that they’re essentially just making a transition from their decades of experience in radio. Yet for many of us, radio remains a completely missing dimension of social and cultural history.

Go and listen.