Listen in terror: British horror radio from the advent of broadcasting to the digital age

By Richard Hand

This groundbreaking book is the first full-length study of British horror radio from the pioneering days of recording and broadcasting right through to the digital audio cultures of our own time. The book offers an historical, critical and theoretical exploration of horror radio and audio performance examining key areas such as writing, narrative, performance practice and reception throughout the history of that most unjustly neglected of popular art forms: radio drama and ‘spoken word’ auditory cultures.

The volume draws on extensive archival research as well as insightful interviews with significant writers, producers and actors. The book offers detailed analysis of major radio series such as Appointment with Fear, The Man in Black, The Price of Fear and Fear on Four as well as one-off horror plays, comedy-horror and experimental uses of binaural and digital technology in producing uncanny audio.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526102577

Book preview

Introduction

Listening in terror

My mother was ten years old when the Second World War began and sixteen when it came to an end. She was raised in the East Midlands of England in the cathedral city of Peterborough. It was the brick-making capital of Britain, and some of its other industries – such as the Perkins Engines Company – threatened to make the city a target for German bombing raids. My mother had the chance to be evacuated, but she stayed with her family. Fortunately, the bombing of Peterborough proved to be limited. My mother remembers the uncertainty and austerity of the times, her cousins Fred and Jim joining the army and the navy respectively, and Italian prisoners-of-war. It was an era of terror and my mother had one particular moment of horror. It wasn’t the bomb that hit Peterborough Cathedral, the rumour of invasion or the close shave with an escapee prisoner-of-war. It was the BBC. At 9.45 pm on 13 January 1944, my fourteen-year-old mother listened to Appointment with Fear. The episode that night was ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story. For decades, my mother would recall that radio broadcast with a shudder.

In more recent times, BBC Radio can still be ‘dangerous’. An episode of Chris Morris’s Blue Jam (18 December 1997) was hurriedly faded out by BBC Radio 1 after approximately fifteen minutes because of a satirical re-edit of Princess Diana’s funeral (6 September 1997). The media furore caused by BBC Radio 2’s The Russell Brand Show (18 October 2008), when prank messages were left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone by the show’s host and Jonathan Ross, was instrumental in ending the BBC careers of two extremely popular radio personalities. These were pre-recorded sequences that ‘misfired’ on broadcast. News and current affairs broadcasting is frequently live, and this has led to unforeseen faux pas: on 6 November 2010, the BBC Radio 4 Today presenter James Naughtie accidently called Jeremy Hunt, the government Culture Secretary, ‘Jeremy Cunt’ live on air. Later that morning, another veteran BBC presenter made precisely the same error on Start the Week when Andrew Marr, in discussing Naughtie’s embarrassing mistake and Freudian slips with the journalist David Aaronovitch and psychotherapist Jane Haynes, made exactly the same error. The BBC iPlayer discreetly edited out the offending misnomers for ‘Listen Again’ reruns of both shows. At the other end of the spectrum, on the very same day, the 2010 Turner Prize was awarded to Susan Philipsz for an aural installation, the first time a sound artist had won this influential art prize. Our culture may seem visually dominated, but audio can be relevant, prescient – and risky.

The focus of this study is audio drama, a cultural form that not only makes use of sound, but has no choice but to privilege it entirely. Audio drama is a cultural form that is entirely non-visual at the point of reception. Sound is invisible, and in a visually dominated culture this is not just in a literal sense. In the broad field of cultural studies, radio studies has been almost entirely eclipsed by screen studies. For Allen S. Weiss, ‘the history of mainstream radio is a suppressed field’ and ‘the history of experimental radio is utterly repressed’ (Weiss, 1995: 3). Radio drama is a comparatively new art, a few decades younger than cinema, and, in its history, many notable examples are experimental, trying to make sense of this new medium or optimising its potential. The neglect of radio is compounded by another problem: available material. Broadcasts during the early days of radio were usually live, and hardly any recordings were made or have survived. Likewise with scripts, these works of radio drama were produced literally ‘for the moment’, with no view to the future, and most scripts were simply discarded immediately after broadcast. To this end, newspaper listings are sometimes the only clue to what was aired and when. However, even if the BBC has been notorious in the past for creating shelf space by destroying recordings, their written archives at Caversham are a priceless resource with examples of scripts and other documentation. The problem affects not just historical material: it is very unusual for radio plays to be released commercially and radio scripts are hardly ever published. However, in recent times there have been concerted efforts (many web-based) by aficionados and academics to locate and share digitised recordings, and also to categorise and chronicle the schedules and repertoire of broadcast drama. These endeavours help to expand available resources and ‘fill the gaps’ in the history of radio drama. In addition, the digital world has created a renaissance for spoken-word performance with downloadable or streaming plays and a new and prolific generation of podcast drama.

There are many genres and subgenres of radio drama: soap operas, sitcoms, spoof comedies, sketch shows, literary adaptations, biographical dramas, science fiction serials and crime thrillers. The topic of this book is closely affiliated with the last two categories and concerns a similarly popular genre of perennial importance throughout the history of audio drama: horror. There have been countless attempts to define the characteristics of horror and its effects and uses. However we may care to define horror, it has always had a special place on radio. This has frequently been most evident in crossovers with literary adaptation: the BBC has produced numerous radio interpretations of the classic forebears of horror literature, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). These have included many audio readings of the novels through to, in recent years, frequently inventive adaptations by distinctive dramatists such as Nick McCarty’s seven-part (2004) and Liz Lochhead’s two-part (2007) versions of Dracula; Nick Stafford’s two-part Frankenstein (2003); Robert Forrest’s (1993) and Yvonne Antrobus’s versions of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde (2007). At the time of writing this book, BBC Radio 4 had run a whole season titled The Gothic Imagination (October–November 2012) which featured impressive two-part adaptations of Dracula by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Frankenstein by Lucy Catherine, as well as relevant documentaries and works of original drama.

Radio has also presented adaptations of playfully inventive fiction such as Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula (1981), Glyn Dearman’s major ninety-minute version of Loren D. Estleman’s 1978 novel. As Seán Street implies, on the most fundamental level, radio is particularly well-suited to the supernatural:

The use of montage, shifting perspective, changing acoustics and voice over sound and music have been used through the history of radio to create effects relating to the uncanny, the unearthly and the ghostly. It is because of the suggestibility of sound to the imagination that the medium has excelled in creating pictures and images out of darkness. A key part of this power is the non-specificity of sound, its capacity to act upon the imagination of individuals in different ways. (Street, 2012: 29–30)

Street’s observation links closely with the sense of fantasy. As Rosemary Horstmann observes, ‘Radio lends itself particularly well to fantasy’ (Horstmann, 1997: 36). The use and concept of ‘dreams’ is recurrent in radio, partly because the radio medium has the potential to step effortlessly and seamlessly between fantasy and reality.¹

At the same time as its ethereal nature (in part literal), radio can be formidably real, not least in the way it can draw on our imagination in creating an ultimate, even uncontrollable, conception of horror. As Jack Bowman explains:

The ultimate strength of audio is the lack of visuals – a lot of horror movies can start to think showing more blood, more gore, more screams, more wounds is the way to go. After a while the audience ends up – to use the cliché – desensitised to it all. However, take away the visuals, and with some good acting and the right sound design to match it, suddenly with audio it’s your imagination that makes it only as horrible as you yourself can imagine it. You’re responsible for your own mental imagery and in a way, not able to control that imagery, especially if you don’t like it. (Jack Bowman, 2011)

Bowman is one of many contemporary audio practitioners interviewed for this book. The passion he reveals is detectable in other writers who have created works of audio horror and have found the form liberating or have discovered a way to optimise its effect, as these statements make clear:

I think radio’s strength is one of intimacy. If someone’s listening on headphones, it’s like they’re whispering in their ear. Like theatre, it’s a bit more demanding of its audience, forcing them to use their imagination to ‘fill in the gaps’. You need to concentrate more, but the rewards can be immense. Long scenes and internal monologues – both of which often fall flat on TV or film can be mesmerising on radio. As a medium for horror, these are clearly strengths as you can really get inside a character’s mind. There is also an ‘unlimited’ budget as a story set in a distant post-apocalyptic future costs the same on radio as one that’s set in a caravan. (David Lemon, 2012)

The idea of trying to script out horror for a theatrical audience never worked for me until I started working in radio format. I was set free. Apart from The Woman in Black any stage production that tried to be scary was anything but, however radio allowed the best way of scaring someone – use their own mind against them. The visuals are suggested – you say spooky house and add some gravel footstep Foley and suddenly each individual audience member is transported to the spooky house that scared them as a child. (Stuart Man Price, 2011)

The disappointing man-in-a-rubber-suit movie monster, the fearsome TV chill that simply doesn’t look the way you imagined it would, the stage shock that neither surprises nor horrifies – these problems are all neatly sidestepped in a medium where every listener can create an intensely personal visual experience in the privacy of their own mind. But there’s more to it than that. Radio is just about the most intimate of all performance media. When everything’s working well there’s a glorious feeling that the story is being told not only to you, but for you, and only for you. Audio drama can get deeper and more affectingly inside your head than almost anything else, and of course the more personal the experience, the more unsettling the horror. (Bert Coules, 2011)

The obvious advantages of radio horror are the ways in which it drags the imagination of the individual audience member into the creative process: ‘I’ll provide the story, the voices, the sounds, but I need you to do the cinematography’. A lot of modern horror film makers are basically like axe murderers – the audience sits there passively while the artist thwacks them over the head as hard as he can. The radio horror artist has to be more your seductive vampire, teasing that audience member into a kind of intimate bond – and only then doing horrible things to them. (Marty Ross, 2011)

Audio horror certainly has an advantage, in that we’re unsettled by incomplete information. Who’s outside? What’s making that noise? The moment you switch the lights on to see, that entire little universe of uncertainty collapses into something quantified. But with audio horror there’s always something legitimately withheld. (Stephen Gallagher, 2011)

Radio has to be more ambiguous. We have to leave questions open. The more questions you leave open in a radio play, the scarier it becomes. There is a cliché that radio is ‘the most visual medium’, but I think that when you’re doing something genuinely horrifying, you really do have to work the audience’s imagination. There is an exact void, an empty space that can really terrify the listener if you get it right. (Oliver Emanuel, 2011)

The writers quoted above (whose plays will be examined in this book) can be seen to compare radio favourably with television, film and theatre. For all of these writers, who range in age and experience, audio has proved to be consummately effective for the genre of horror. Their perspectives and attitudes may vary, but overall, audio works for them as a medium for horror in the way that it is intimate, limitless and yet advantageously ‘incomplete’ and ‘open’: these traits allow audio drama to tap deeply into our subconscious, our memories and our anxieties.

The advantages notwithstanding, artists who regard radio as ‘easy’ do so at their peril. This is because it is easy to be confused or distracted when listening to audio. The ‘exact void’ so aptly described by Oliver Emanuel can become a deadly vacuum. As Hugh Chignell explains, radio is typically defined by ‘secondariness’ wherein a ‘listener can easily perform some other activity (work, drive and so on) while listening and paying attention to the radio’ (Chignell, 2009: 70). However, it is easy not to ‘pay attention’: unless a play can ‘hook’ the listeners and get them to ‘hold’ the concept and trajectory of an audio narrative in their minds, the radio becomes background noise and even soporific. Listening attentively (even when it is ‘secondary’) to spoken-word audio is definitely a learned skill, but the failings of audio drama cannot be simply levelled at the listener. As Bert Coules (2011) states, ‘just as it’s very hard to write well for radio, it’s distressingly easy to write badly’. Radio drama has always been a tremendous medium for playwrights, as this book will reveal, but there is always a risk of over-narration and over-description in clumsy – even patronising – attempts to compensate for the perceived ‘lack’ of visuals and anxiety about radio’s ‘blindness’.²

When it comes to the genre of horror there are other problems. As a popular genre, horror can sometimes be seen – especially by its detractors – as being trapped in its conventions and formulas: horror radio is no exception. Writing in The Listener in the 1940s, Philip Hope-Wallace complains that with certain examples of radio drama – above all the uncanny – he has ‘the dread faculty of foreseeing the end of the radio play before it had been launched three minutes’ (13 December 1945). However, despite this sense of predictability, Hope-Wallace will have to admit that certain works of horror radio can hit their mark: six months later Hope-Wallace is astonished by a work of uncanny drama. Listening to E. J. King-Bull’s radio adaptation of J. M. Barrie’s unperformed stage play The Fight for Mr. Lapraik: The House of Fear (15 May 1946), Hope-Wallace describes how in the play there are three simultaneous manifestations of Mr Lapraik (Bernard Miles) in his house:

These moments which tighten the scalp are hard to analyse or explain, even when you can reproduce them, as with a film or gramophone record. Was this merely a matter of stage-craft? (Barrie was never writing better than in 1916.) Or some chance reference of the kind which just does the trick in radio, to ‘moonlight shining on the wet pavements seen through the front door’ which jumped the whole scene in the dark hall before our eyes? Or an effect of timing, or the incidental music (Anthony Hopkins)? At any rate there was that nasty little shock which swings open the door in the mind we prefer to hurry past. (The Listener, 23 May 1946)

Hope-Wallace reveals that it was only when the resolution became clear that ‘the creeps began to wear off and we relaxed’. It was a play that had a ‘nightmare quality’ and made the listener ‘see ghosts’, but the greatest praise Hope-Wallace gives is that ‘It might have been written for radio’. Barrie’s pre-radio play proved unperformable until the BBC demonstrated how this work of the uncanny could be realised.

This book will endeavour to explore examples of audio drama that ‘swing open the door in the mind’ to give us ‘nasty shocks’ and ‘nightmares’. Initially, we will look at sound and radio technology and its links with the uncanny and then embark on a survey of British audio horror from the beginnings of broadcasting through to the digital age. Central to this will be a figure synonymous with British horror radio: ‘The Man in Black’, the host of Appointment with Fear, Fear on Four and the eponymous series The Man in Black. Through and around this most famous, long-lived yet scarcely examined figure, we will look at other series and standalone plays that explore the uncanny, the supernatural or the gruesome to disturb, fascinate and even amuse us.

Notes

1    The word ‘dream’ and its variants is one of the most commonly used in the history of British radio drama. In the 1930s, the BBC aired The Dreaming Man: A Fantastic Comedy for the Microphone (6 March 1936) by Leonard Crabtree and Dream Faces: A Dramatic Comedy (15 May 1936) by Wynn Miller. The Dream is the title of different radio plays by Francis Foster (31 July 1946) and Paolo Levi (21 April 1959); Dreams is the title of plays by Kenneth Alexander (24 March 1947) and Janet Grey (4 March 1964), while Max Koster wrote Dreams Limited (7 February 1944). The Dreamers is the title of plays by Gillian Reynolds (18 December 1955) and Seán Walsh (31 July 1974), while, R. E. T. Lamb wrote Dreamers Awake (5 February 1975) and Nick McCarty wrote Dreamers and Liars (3 January 1990). In 1963 James Hanley wrote A Dream, a drama about ships, and a decade later A Dream Journey (3 December 1974), a completely different play with which adapts his own wartime novel No Directions (1943). Radio listeners also heard Derek Hoddinott’s Wilkie Collins adaptation The Dream Woman (19 July 1961), Alun Richards’s Dream Girl (16 October 1978) and J. MacLaren-Ross’s Dream Man (12 April 1960). Interestingly, these many ‘dream’ plays cross genres: Vernon Scannell’s A Dream of Guilt (20 April 1963) and J. C. W. Brook’s A Dream of Murder (6 December 1979) are both crime plays, while The Dream of Andreana (14 March 1955) is Sasha Moorson and Rayner Heppenstall’s adaptation of Boccaccio, and Colin Style’s A Dream of Ophir (6 December 1986) is a script compiling ‘Glimpses of War and Peace in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe 1886–1986’. R. F. Delderfield’s The Dreaming Suburb (October to December 1959) was a sweeping twelve-part epic about a suburban neighbourhood based on his own novel, while radio also presented enigmatically titled works such as Harold Rogers’ Dream of a Chinese Student (2 June 1947) and Peter Myers’ Dream of Tigers (19 January 1998).

2    For a detailed account – and dismantling – of the ‘blind’ myth that surrounds radio see Crook (1999a: 53–70).

1

Are you sitting (un)comfortably? Sound, horror and radio

The power of sound

What is sound? Sound exists in waves, consisting of vibrating molecules. It is literally invisible, and when it arrives in the forum of human perception – hearing – it can seem elusive by comparison with other senses such as vision, touch or taste. Yet the perception and impact of sound can have a profound effect. The power of sound in relation to emotion, memory and imagination can be immense and sometimes startling. Contrary to expectations, music or a particular voice or auditory ambience can conjure up a memory or feeling more profoundly than a snapshot image of – or object from – a time and place. This is the concept of anamnesis, a phenomenon defined by Jean-François Augoyard and Henri Torgue as:

An effect of reminiscence in which a past situation or atmosphere is brought back to the listener’s consciousness, provoked by a particular signal or sonic context. Anamnesis, a semiotic effect, is the often involuntary revival of memory caused by listening and the evocative power of sounds. (Augoyard and Torgue, 2005: 21)

By implication, anamnesis can create a channel into our memory and consciousness that can take us by surprise (the ‘involuntary’ aspect that Augoyard and Torgue emphasise). Sound can also invisibly manipulate our mood, making us feel relaxed or ill at ease, most obviously in the form of music, but through other subtler means as well. Sound is also extremely hard to avoid. We might keep our mouths closed to refuse to taste something, we might shut our eyes to block out something we do not want to behold, but we cannot shut our ears. For most people, putting our fingers in our ears, or using earplugs or noise-reducing headphones, can never completely obliterate noise. Sound can creep and permeate like nothing else. Just as an alarm clock or fire alarm can wake us up, the dripping tap, buzzing mosquito or ticking clock can unnerve us; and a cacophony outside the window or noisy ‘neighbours from hell’ is a social problem that can drive people to complete despair and acts of murder.¹ Sound can be literal torture: the theme tune to the children’s television programme Barney & Friends (1992–2010) and other music has been used to enforce sleep deprivation on internees in the ‘Global War on Terror’ (Cusick, 2008). By the same token, the deprivation of sound can be similarly tortuous: when not listening to maddening tunes on a loop, ‘terror’ suspects have also been forced to wear sound-excluding headphones. After all, noiselessness – total silence – can be equally alienating. This is evident in the anechoic chamber, an environment that ‘halts all sound reflection’ (Crook, 2012: 194), and is a realm of total silence which can only be endured for a brief period of time. As Mark Z. Danielewski writes in The House of Leaves:

When a pebble falls down a well, it is gratifying to hear the eventual plunk. If, however, the pebble only slips into darkness and vanishes without a sound, the effect is disquieting. (Danielewski, 2000: 46)

Given the immense power of sound, it is no surprise that there is an authentic phobia relating to sound: ligyrophobia (also known as phonophobia or acousticophobia) is a ‘fear of sound’ in which an individual develops a decreased sound tolerance for noises, whether these are music, voices or other auditory signals. A ligyrophobic person might become anxious about phones ringing, balloons bursting and other sudden sounds; they might also become obsessed about recurrent sounds, no matter how slight; and, in extreme cases, they live in fear of speaking aloud and social contact in general. Between anamnesis and ligyrophobia, it is clear that sound can have an exceptional potency. Sound can also be immensely uncanny: the alienating phenomenon of the echo (one’s own voice momentarily detached from the self) and other forms of reverberation; noises (whether familiar or unearthly) that are heard but remain unseen; sounds beyond the door; things that go bump in the night.

Sounds frightening: the auditory in horror culture

Horror fiction and horror cinema often foreground the image: authors make us ‘see’; and filmmakers determine our point-of-view. In remembering or describing an example of horror that we have consumed, we tend to recount what we saw. Nevertheless, in the realm of the uncanny in culture, sound has a particularly important role. As Robert Spadoni writes, when it comes to ‘Unseen bumps and audible screams […] no one would deny that such sounds are ingredients of the horror film as we know it’ (Spadoni, 2007: 2). Certainly in horror cinema, there are countless examples of atmospheric sounds or indistinct ‘noises’ outside a room or a window as a device to build suspense and foreboding: a film like The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) is in many respects a film that demonstrates the power of horror sound through its ‘noises off’ and terrifying sounds that fill the air or are heard behind closed doors. Sometimes in the horror film genre, sounds may even have a practical function for exposition: in fact, the enigmatic sound that lures a victim into peril has become a cliché. Sound in the form of music is indispensable in horror screen culture from films to digital games. Subgenres of action-adventure games such as ‘survival horror’ make ubiquitous use of in-depth soundscape and atmospheric music, while the iPhone game Soul Trapper (2009) is a stereo audio-game that primarily tests the player’s skills of aural – not visual – perception.

In horror cinema, we might think of the music in John Carpenter’s early movies such as his self-scored Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Halloween (1978) or the Ennio Morricone-scored The Thing (1982) in which the minimalist and cyclical synthesised music creates an inexorable unease. Non-diegetic music is invaluable to enhance the impact of a ‘jump’ moment on screen, but it can also be immensely effective in creating a profound sense of atmosphere through subtlety. In Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) the appearance of the demonic Sadako (Rie Ino’o) is heralded and accompanied by the unnerving yet subtle screeching of the strings of a musical instrument. A well-loved test of the importance of music in horror film is to watch sequences of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) with the volume first turned on and then turned off. Watching in silence, we realise how important Bernard Herrmann’s music is in creating the tension and exacerbating the horror of the film: without it, key moments of the film (on a freeway or in a bathroom) become just a montage of images devoid of edgy suspense or sheer terror. However, it is also worth mentioning how ‘silence’ can also be carefully deployed as ‘sound’. In Psycho itself, we might look at the scene in which Arbogast (Martin Balsam) climbs the stairs looking for Norman Bates’s mother. After he has called out her name we are in complete silence for a few moments until a door swings open and Herrmann’s music ‘bursts’ into our hearing like a jack-in-a-box effect. Silence in horror films can build tremendous suspense as we wait for the inevitable sound.

The importance of sound in horror film continues to the present day: in fact, not only has sound technology advanced as exponentially as visual technology, it has become an invaluable resource in creating effect and impact. Graham Reznick is a sound designer for film, notable for his work on Ti West’s horror movies The House of the Devil (Ti West, 2009) and The Innkeepers (Ti West, 2011).² In discussing the place of sound in contemporary horror film, Reznick reveals:

The most exciting thing about sound, to me, is that it’s most effective as an intangible modifier of any narrative or visual that it’s accompanying. Sound can be at the forefront, most obviously in dialogue or overt thematic scoring, but good sound design is more often than not felt rather than noticed. This puts it in the realm of emotion – creating a direct link between the storyteller and the audience. It may seem manipulative when revealed as such, but that’s the real task of any good storyteller: to manipulate the audience down a path while allowing them to feel like they are getting there on their own. (Graham Reznick, 2012)

As Reznick indicates, the ‘intangible’ essence of sound – in other words, its invisibility – gives it a fluid and emotional quality that enables its usage to shift from the blatant to the latent. Reznick goes on to stress that sound design in film remains largely free of the contemporary audience’s knowingness and cynicism (a challenge for any filmmaker, particularly when working in a popular genre such as horror):

Great picture editing, camera direction, and mise-en-scène can likewise affect a scene without drawing too much attention, but awareness of the tools of visual filmmaking has grown to the point where viewers are much savvier to the usual tricks, and a little more wary. Luckily, sound is still a bit of a black art. It can live in that emotional space and warp reality in a way that similar visual tricks would have viewers crying foul. Because of that power, sound design has the great ability to unwrite and rewrite reality at any time. Combine these techniques with the framework of horror, and you can bring viewers to a very vulnerable place. (Graham Reznick, 2012)

In Reznick’s opinion, sound design is evidently one of the most potent weapons in a horror filmmaker’s arsenal. In particular, the manipulative ability to unwrite and rewrite reality is a formidable power and is one that reveals the potential of sound as a whole to create a sense of the uncanny.

In theatre, sound has an extraordinary, albeit not always blatantly evident, ability to create the dramatic intensity and verisimilitude of certain situations. Milly S. Barranger outlines the functions that can be achieved by sound in theatre:

(Barranger, 2005: 285)

Along with sound options that have a function in creating a sense of location, time or realism, Barranger mentions ‘ominous sounds for scary moments’ as an example of ‘mood’, an aspect that can imbue a sense of psychological atmosphere to a performance. Barranger also mentions ‘thunder’ and elsewhere cites specific technologies developed from the days of the Elizabethan stage – such as ‘thunder machines’, ‘thunder-sheets’ and ‘thunder runs’ (Barranger, 2005: 284) – that were used to create tremendous effects and atmosphere. The role of such off-stage sound has a particular significance in horror theatre.

The theatre most synonymous with horror – the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, which existed in Paris from 1897 to 1962 – has acquired a legendary status for its repertoire of short, sensationalist plays which featured special effects such as trick knives, guillotines and stage blood which would congeal under stage lighting. These effects were highly visual, often deploying what was essentially the technology associated with magicians’ tricks into narrative contexts. If the Grand-Guignol’s renown (and its entry into the language as a phrase for over-the-top horror) rests on its (in) famous set pieces of eye-gouging, throat-slitting and the like, the execution of the plays in production relied on a more careful creation of atmosphere and subtly paced development through its well crafted scripts and measured performances. An important part of this journey was the use of sound. As Hand and Wilson write:

Sound effects as a whole were treated with great seriousness at the Grand-Guignol. It is remarkable how many of the plays include significant use of off-stage sound (which helps) to establish the context, environment and mood of the plays, and substantial time and resources were invested in perfecting such sound effects. (Hand and Wilson, 2002: 64)

The off-stage sounds in the Grand-Guignol repertoire include storms (inevitably), tolling bells (of churches or boats), seagulls (in plays set in lighthouses) and so on: these serve to paint a picture of the world beyond the confines of the Grand-Guignol’s tiny, claustrophobic stage as well as enhancing the mood of the story. Paul Ratineau was the most celebrated technician at the Grand-Guignol and led the theatre’s innovation of special effects. When it came to using sound Ratineau, according to Mel Gordon, ‘discovered the further away the sound source was from the audience, the more effective (or chilling) it was’ (Gordon, 1997: 44). The aforementioned seagull effect was used in Paul Autier and Paul Cloquemin’s Gardiens de phare (1905) in which the screeching birds hammer their beaks against the windows of the lighthouse. According to