And the meters are over in the red

[sovay]

Courtesy of 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).

Comments

[selkie]

I dun think you want my suggestions at this hour, it seems fraught, but I will ponder.

[theseatheseatheopensea]

You're right, it feels like there should be 10000 examples, and yet I'm drawing a blank too! All I can think of is Becquer's "Miserere" (from the 1860s), which features a mysterious religious song (unfinished due to sudden, violent death) that drives a man who tries to finish it to insanity and death, but there must be better examples! (I approve of your music, by the way!)

[asakiyume]

I agree: it does seem like it should have come up earlier!

I wrote a story about recording technologies that stole/trapped the sounds they recorded, and at that time, I remember reading that when Bartok was making folk recordings, some people feared exactly that (or maybe that's what inspired my story; can't remember which way it went). That's not the same as a transferrable death, though.

That story of Gemma's was AMAZING; I loved it.

[ethelmay]

Not the same as the camera stealing souls, but it sounds a little bit similar. (And I recall Edward Lear sketching in Albania, I think it was, and people looking at his drawing of the landscape and shouting "Shaitan!")

[thisbluespirit]

because the mid-century feels incredibly late for it to show up.

It does, doesn't it? (I see we're all just unhelpfully saying the same thing, heh.)

[gwynnega]

I can't think of any earlier examples, but I agree that there must be something.

[skygiants]

I am fascinated by this research! I'm working on an article right now about the cyclical nature of archives & apocalypse in fiction (apocalypse --> archive to preserve the remnants of knowledge --> apocalypse generated from the Terrible Knowledge in the archive) and this feels like a kind of incredibly direct metaphor for that (death --> recording --> new death).

[chanter1944]

As a towering oldtime radio nerd over here, the device of death transmissible via radio sounds like something Lights Out would have used. 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. "Thirteen and eight!" As for Lights Out, I'm not going to explore that particular avenue to find out whether or not it ever did run with death as contagious in itself; that show gives me a case of the horrified disturbances much of the time for sheer, unrelenting darkness, title pun not intended. I can handle Inner Sanctum, I can handle dramatized Lovecraft, but Lights Out... brrrrr. Tag out.