And the meters are over in the red
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moon_custafer: "The Voice of Death" (Journey into Unknown Worlds #6, 1951). I have become suddenly obsessed with trying to trace the antecedents of this proto-Nigel-Kneale conceit of the recording of a death being contagiously deadly, because the mid-century feels incredibly late for it to show up. It feels like the kind of urban legend that should have started to filter into fiction as soon as the mechanism existed to support it, cf. the theory of residual haunting which can be traced as far back as the early nineteenth century and really seems to take off with the commercial proliferation of recording technologies, but I am drawing a blank on potential earlier iterations even though it feels like a horror evergreen. All that's coming to mind are later takes, like Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm (1983) or Gemma Files' "each thing i show you is a piece of my death" (2009). It doesn't feel as though it came, like so much of the prevailing aesthetic of EC Comics, from Grand Guignol. It does feel like the kind of parapsychological sci-fi horror William Sloane was writing in the '30's, which just indicates it was a viable mode of weird fiction. It has obvious predecessors in mind-annihilating art like Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow (1895), but the media aspect is what I am specifically curious about: the real-time capture of something that cannot be survived contact with, a transferrable dying. My suspicion is that it comes out of radio, where the foley terror of a needle-drop would be most effectively concentrated, but I have not heard anywhere near enough Inner Sanctum (1941–52) or Quiet, Please (1947–49) or any of a number of other suspects of old-time radio to be sure. It could be as old as Dr. Seward dictating his notes into a phonograph. Suggestions appreciated. In the meantime, I am stuck listening to Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" (1986).
moon_custafer: "The Voice of Death" (Journey into Unknown Worlds #6, 1951). I have become suddenly obsessed with trying to trace the antecedents of this proto-Nigel-Kneale conceit of the recording of a death being contagiously deadly, because the mid-century feels incredibly late for it to show up. It feels like the kind of urban legend that should have started to filter into fiction as soon as the mechanism existed to support it, cf. the theory of residual haunting which can be traced as far back as the early nineteenth century and really seems to take off with the commercial proliferation of recording technologies, but I am drawing a blank on potential earlier iterations even though it feels like a horror evergreen. All that's coming to mind are later takes, like Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm (1983) or Gemma Files' "each thing i show you is a piece of my death" (2009). It doesn't feel as though it came, like so much of the prevailing aesthetic of EC Comics, from Grand Guignol. It does feel like the kind of parapsychological sci-fi horror William Sloane was writing in the '30's, which just indicates it was a viable mode of weird fiction. It has obvious predecessors in mind-annihilating art like Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow (1895), but the media aspect is what I am specifically curious about: the real-time capture of something that cannot be survived contact with, a transferrable dying. My suspicion is that it comes out of radio, where the foley terror of a needle-drop would be most effectively concentrated, but I have not heard anywhere near enough Inner Sanctum (1941–52) or Quiet, Please (1947–49) or any of a number of other suspects of old-time radio to be sure. It could be as old as Dr. Seward dictating his notes into a phonograph. Suggestions appreciated. In the meantime, I am stuck listening to Kate Bush's "Experiment IV" (1986).
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Good to know! It gives me somewhere to look.
(His company, the Post-Meridian Radio Players, famously recreated the full version of Arch Oboler's "Chicken Heart" for a fundraiser in 2005 and subsequently for First Night in 2008.
Quiet Please did get if not close to the idea, then at least in the same general vicinity as the idea, with a semi-haunted camera intended to capture the moment of death on film.
I just bet that worked out for all concerned.
I see that a media scholar named Richard J. Hand has produced two books, Terror on the Air! Horror Radio in America, 1931–1952 (2006) and Listen in Terror: British Horror Radio from the Advent of Broadcasting to the Digital Age (2014), which may be worth my tracking down if I think this idea really came from the airwaves.
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I... erm. I mean no offense whatsoever when I say I might not go investigating that recreated audio just at the moment. I've heard the original twice, and that's plenty for me. I'll need to be in a suitable frame of mind before I click.
Re Thirteen And Eight (that's both an exclamation throughout the episode and its title): Oddly enough, the plot device *did* seem to work out better than expected, at least for one character. I won't spoil you, in case you want to investigate.