Oboler later admitted in an interview that he really wasn’t much of a fan of horror: “I wrote about the terror we each have in us,” he explained. NBC handed the Lights Out baton to Arch Oboler, a promising network scribe who plied his trade on such programs as Grand Hotel and The Irene Rich Show. After two years of frightening listeners, Cooper answered the siren song of Hollywood (he contributed to the screenplay of Son of Frankenstein, among others)-but on his return to radio in the 1940s, demonstrated that he could still create first-rate horror with the underrated Quiet Please in 1947. Complementing the tales of terror was the show’s novel use of sound effects: spare ribs snapped with a pipe wrench allowed listeners to visualize human bones being broken, and bacon in a frying pan conveyed a realistic impression of someone being electrocuted. But the prestige of the program was such that even a Hollywood horror icon like Boris Karloff could be lured in front of the microphone to participate in a half-hour of mayhem.
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Lights Out’s Chicago origination meant that some of the Windy City’s finest radio actors collected a paycheck for appearing on the show, including Harold Peary, Willard Waterman, Mercedes McCambridge, Arthur Peterson, Macdonald Carey, and Betty Winkler. Want to hear about it? Then turn out your lights!” Because Lights Out was usually presented around 11:30pm or midnight (and in some instances after midnight), the show’s memorable opening referenced its “midnight hour” timeslot: “This is the witching hour! It is an hour when dogs howl, and evil is let loose on the sleeping world. A quarter-hour show when it debuted in January of 1934, Lights Out soon became so popular that it was expanded to a half-hour in April and, a year later, went coast-to-coast on NBC.
#Lights out radio shows series
Lights Out-which premiered over NBC on this date in 1935-was one of the earliest and longest-running of the “spook shows.” Its origins can be traced to a NBC staffer named Wyllis Cooper, who created, wrote, directed, and produced the series for Chicago’s WENR. Even prestigious programs like The Mercury Theatre on the Air (“The War of the Worlds”) and Suspense (“The House on Cypress Canyon”) presented the occasional spine-tingling tale, as did the later Escape (“Three Skelton Key”) and X-Minus One (“Mars is Heaven”). It began with offerings like The Witch’s Tale and The Hermit’s Cave, and expanded in the 1940s to programs like Inner Sanctum Mysteries and The Mysterious Traveler. In the early years of Radio’s Golden Age, those individuals who worked in radio discovered fairly quickly that the medium was ideal for presenting horror tales-listeners reveled in stories guaranteed to raise goosebumps on arms and hair on the backs of necks.