Moving the camera meant moving the room, and that was expensive in terms of time as well as money. But it was more than camera noise, a factor Méliès certainly didn't have to contend with. A lot of it was simply that mental set thing again. Bound by stage conventions, many early directors simply found themselves creatively unable to innovate.
Oboler used gore and violence by the bucketload, but a good deal of it was implicit; the real horror didn't come alive in front of a camera but on the screen of the mind. Perhaps the best example of this comes from an Oboler piece with the Don Martin-like title, "A Day at the Dentist's.” As the story opens, the play's "hero," a dentist, is just closing up shop for the day. His nurse says he has one more patient, a man named Fred Houseman.
"He says it's an emergency," she tells him.
"Houseman?" the dentist barks.
"Yes.” "Fred?” "Yes. . . do you know him?” "No . . . oh, no," the dentist says casually.
Houseman, it turns out, has come because Dr. Charles, the dentist who owned the practice previously, advertised himself as a "painless dentist"-and Houseman, although an ex-wrestler and footballer, is terrified of the dentist (as so many of us are . . . and Oboler damned well knows it).
Houseman's first uneasy moment comes when the doctor straps him into the dentist's chair.
He protests. The dentist tells him in a low, perfectly reasonable voice (and oh, how we suspect the reason in that voice! After all, who sounds more sane than a dangerous lunatic?) that "In order to keep this painless, there must be absolutely no movement.” There is a pause, and then the sound of straps being buckled.
Tightly.
"There," the dentist says soothingly. "Snug as a bug in a rug . . . that's a curious thin[, to call you, isn't it? You're no bug, are you? You're more the lover-boy type . . . aren't you?” Oh-oh , the morbid little guy inside speaks up. This looks bad for old Fred Houseman. Yes indeedy .
It is bad indeed. The dentist, still speaking in that low, pleasant, and oh-so-rational voice, continues to call Houseman "lover-boy." It turns out that Houseman ruined the girl who later became the dentist's wife; Houseman slandered her name from one end of town to the other.
The dentist found out that Houseman's regular dentist was Dr. Charles, and so he bought out Charles's practice, figuring that sooner or later Houseman would come back . . . come back to "the painless dentist.” And while he was waiting, the new dentist installed restraint straps on his chair.
Just for Fred Houseman.
All of this, of course, has parted company with any semblance of reality early on (but then, the same can be said of The Tempest -how's that for an impudent comparison?); yet the mind cares not a fig for that at this crucial juncture, and Oboler, of course, never cared at all; like the best writers of horror fiction, he is interested in effect above all else, preferably one that will wallop the listener like a twenty-pound chunk of slate. He achieves that quite nicely in "A Day at the Dentist's.” "W-What are you going to do?" Houseman asks fearfully, echoing the very question that has been troubling our own minds almost since the moment we were foolish enough to turn on this piece of coldblooded grue.
The dentist's answer is simple and utterly terrifying-more terrifying because of the unpleasant seminar it convenes in our own minds, a seminar in which Oboler ultimately refuses to take part, thus leaving the question to hang for as long as we want to consider it.
Under the circumstances, we may not want to consider it long at all.
"Nothing important," the dentist replies as he flicks a switch and the drill begins to whine.
"Just going to drill a little hole . . . and let out some of lover-boy.” As Houseman gasps and slobbers with fear in the background, the sound of the drill comes up . . . and up . . . and up . . . and finally, out. The end.
The question, of course, is where exactly did the demon dentist drill the hole to "let out some of lover-boy"? It is a question that only radio, by the very nature of the medium, can pose really convincingly and leave unanswered so uneasily. We hate Oboler a little for not telling us, mostly because our minds are suggesting the most outrageously nasty possibilities.
My first thought was that the dentist had almost surely used the drill on one of Houseman's temples, murdering him with a little impromptu brain surgery.
But later, as I grew up and grew into a better comprehension of just what the nature of Houseman's crime had been, another possibility began to suggest itself. An even nastier one.
Even today, as I write this, I wonder: exactly where did that crazy man use his drill?
4
Well, enough is enough; it is time to move on from the ear to the eye. But before we go, I'd like to remind you of something that you probably already know. Many of the old radio programs, from Inner Sanctum to Gangbusters to the sudsy Our Gal Sal have been preserved on record and tape, and the quality of these recordings is actually better in most cases than the quality of the TV kinescopes that are broadcast on nostalgia programs from time to time. If you're interested in seeing how your own ability to suspend disbelief and to circumnavigate that visual set engendered by TV and the movies is holding up, you can get a start at almost any well-stocked record store. A Schwann's Catalogue of spoken-word records can be even more helpful; what your friendly neighborhood Record Mart doesn't have, they'll be glad to order. And if your interest in Arch Oboler has been at all piqued by the foregoing, let me whisper a little secret in your ear: Drop Dead! An Exercise in Horror -produced, written, and directed by Arch Oboler, available for your delectation on Capitol Records (Capitol: SM-1763).
Probably more of a summer cooler than a tall glass of iced tea . . . if you can get rid of that visual set for forty minutes or so.