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).
no subject
(a) Your article sounds great; I would love to read it when it's published.
(b) The cycle you describe makes me think of a line from
(c) If I manage to trace this motif further back than "The Voice of Death," I will let you know! I just can't believe it popped into existence in finished form in a five-page horror comic from the '50's. It's too weird and too close to folklore and all the recording-related beliefs and fictions people have been citing in comments. I still keep coming up with later examples only, or adjacent concepts like David Langford's "Different Kinds of Darkness" (2000), which remains one of the best sfnal takes I have encountered on the idea of something you just cannot look at.