“The Dream” – Lights Out! – March 23, 1938Ĭreated by Wyllis Cooper and taken over in 1936 by Arch Oboler, Lights Out! epitomizes old time radio horror (for this listener, at least). When the shadows grow long, I can still hear Welles intoning, “Blood of my blood…” Ĥ. I first listened to this all alone at night when I was a teenager, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. “Dracula” – Mercury Theater – 11 July, 1938Ī few months before he shook up America with his War of the Worlds martian hoax, Orson Welles played everyone’s favorite undead count with sinister aplomb.
A long stretch of airtime filled by nothing but breathing and quiet footsteps never fails to spook the hell out of me. This episode easily stands among best and most disturbing haunted house stories from the golden age of radio.Ĭar trouble forces a woman, her cold and snappish husband, and her brother to spend the night in a deserted house with a macabre past.
The Hermit’s Cave‘s plots were often formulaic, but the series outdid itself here. “The House on Lost Man’s Bluff” – The Hermit’s Cave – c. In “The Devil Doctor,” a long-dead warlock in league with Satan rises from the dead and seeks a woman’s blood to reassimilate his decayed body. Its tales often had a Gothic feel to them, probing into a fantastic past when sorcerers and spirits roamed the earth and made mere mortals their playthings. Alas, only a small percentage of episodes survive to this day. “The Devil Doctor” – The Witch’s Tale – January 8, 1934Ĭreated by Alonzo Deen Cole, The Witch’s Tale was the first radio show devoted to horror and the supernatural. (My favorite Nightfall episode is The Porch Light, though, if you’re wondering.)ġ. I could easily have filled this list up with only a few shows, but what would be the fun in that?įinally, although I did venture outside of my pre-1965 comfort zone, I draw the line before CBC’s Nightfall, since, unlike CBS Mystery Radio Theater, it has a more distinctly modern vibe to me. I also tried to include episodes from a wide range of series.
If I missed one of your favorite spooky OTR episodes, feel free to mention it in the comments. After countless hours poring over archives of old shows, I’ve selected 31 bloodcurdling episodes, from 1934 all the way up to 1979, for your pleasure.Ī few caveats… First, scariness is obviously a very subjective thing. In case you can’t tell, I adore old-time ratio (OTR) horror. And they could manipulate the imagination so that listeners themselves collaborated in the summoning of their worst fears.
They suggested depravity and gore that screen censorship would’ve banned. Radio writers and actors spawned monsters that the technology of the time couldn’t have realistically portrayed on film. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but, when it comes to the best old-time radio horror, each word is worth a thousand pictures.īy using voices, sound effects, and snippets of music, masters of radio terror turned what could’ve been a disadvantage of the medium-we can’t see what’s happening-into their greatest asset.