It's Coming This Way Now, About Twenty Yards To My Ri-

[filkertom]

Seventy-one years ago tonight, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds was adapted for radio by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre. Several other versions, including the 1988 NPR adaptation with Jason Robards and the 2005 version done by members of the cast of Star Trek, can be found here.

What are some of your favorite scary stories? I mean good, old-time, low-gore, on-the-door-handle-was-a-hook kinda stories. I love The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and a lot of Poe ("The Tell-Tale Heart" is still chilling -- here's Part One and Part Two of an amazing television performance by Vincent Price, and an animated version from 1953 narrated by James Mason). And H. P. Lovecraft's "The Statement of Randolph Carter" fucked me up for days.

Comments

[atalantapendrag.livejournal.com]

Lovecraft. Pickman's Model. Hands down.

[bryanp.livejournal.com]

You've already mentioned The Tell-Tale Heart. Eek. The first time I read that I was 8. At night. Under the covers. I was sleepy as hell at school the next morning.

[rev-ursa.livejournal.com]

Lovecraft has always been a great one for creeping me out. I love his work.

[ericcoleman]

The main important fact is that I lived in a house with pigeons on the roof ... all the time. My room was in the attic.

I stayed up late one night reading Lovecraft's Rat's In The Walls. Shortly after I finished the pigeons started moving around.

I spent the night downstairs in front of the TV.

Also, I don't remember any of the stories particularly well, but my Grandfather was a great teller of tales. We were driving back to his house from Charleston (about a half hour drive) and he started telling ghost stories about a couple of the hollows we went past. By the time we got back I am fairly certain my hair was standing on end. The best part of this is ... I was about 30 at the time. Yeah, he was good. I miss him.

[joshuwain.livejournal.com]

I sense that H.P. Lovecraft is going to be a theme, here, as he certainly was for me. Certainly The Rats In The Walls was a great story (the first Lovecraft tale I ever read) but the one that really, really creeped me out was the immortal, In The Vault.

That's absolutely perfect horror!

[misterseth.livejournal.com]

Rod Serling's Night Gallery had some great Lovecraft skits, including Cool Air, Pickman's Model, and my favorite, Professor Peabody's Last Lecture.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

You mean this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyRnn-csx5s) one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh3A0CQsXoM)?

And then there's "The Escape Route (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVSCxIoQ5Bk)".

[misterseth.livejournal.com]

Yeah! Those are classics! Here's another one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y11KPc2BicY Possibly the only short film of one of Lovecraft's works while he was alive.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Ray Bradbury's Fever Dream scared the crap out of me as a kid. I didn't read Zenna Henderson's Hush until my college days, but that one's high on the list too.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Oh god. "The October Game (http://lib.ru/INOFANT/BRADBURY/october.txt)".

[ladysmith.livejournal.com]

I remember when they ran the Orson Wells version on the radio for the 50th anniversary. Absolutely terrifying, and I KNEW it wasn't real.

[saganth.livejournal.com]

Only ones I can think of are:

"Mars is Heaven!" by Ray Bradbury - I had to read it for 8th grade English class, and I read it at night in a mostly darkened room. The climax of the book scared the crap out of me.

and

"The Thing in the Crib" by... some weird wacko no one's probably ever heard of I think... ;)

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

One that's always stuck with me is "Bianca's Hands", by Theodore Sturgeon. Interestingly, of the people I know who've read it, it tends to disturb men more than women.

"Sandkings", by George R.R. Martin, creeped the hell out of me.

Ditto "Press Enter (beep)" by John Varley.

[bayushisan.livejournal.com]

Usher 2 by Ray Bradbury is a great one. So was the Cask of Amontillado by Poe. Movie wise Something Wicked This Way comes still gives me the creeps and I love the old Universal movies.

[batyatoon]

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MONTRESOR

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". All those poor innocent townspeople, hounded and eventually murdered by one wicked visitor.

[archiver-tim.livejournal.com]

The 1938 broadcast of "War of the Worlds" is an intersection of two of my loves, radio and science-fiction. I would say by 1968, I had heard of the broadcast, and might have heard a re-broadcast. Impact is much less as radio was so new, new to being in homes and new ways to present news, music and drama. In one of the TV shows on the impact, which I can not find right now, it summed things up with "...and the smart people were listening to a ventroliquiest, talking to his dummy, on the radio", on another network.

[archiver-tim.livejournal.com]

I think that quote came from The Night That Panicked America (1975) (TV) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073454/). I thought it was newer, maybe it was broadcast again, but I also thought I had a VHS of it.

Around 1977, 1978 or so, Steve Dahl, still in Detroit and on WWWW, Detroit, 106.7fm did a 'War of the Mars Candy Bars' type of thing across the morning. Fuzzy memory, no recording.

I also swear that WDET did something on the order of 'The Day the Peace Broke Out', using the newscast format to describe how peace broke out all over the limits. Was it as early as 1968-1969, or could it have been like 1978-1979? Anybody remember? Detroit local thing or produced for all NPR-type stations?

[darkwolf69.livejournal.com]

Heinlein. The Puppet Masters.

That one had me waking up in the middle of the night checking my wife's back.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

My absolute favorite Stephen King tale, and one of the scariest things I've read by any author, ever, is The Library Policeman, a short novel found in the collection Four Past Midnight (the other three parts of which are, IMHO, utterly pathetic compared to most King). A movie adaptation of The Library Policeman that starred an actor mostly known for comedy (Steve Martin, Rick Moranis or Jim Carrey would all work well) would be a sensation, and probably inspire a good deal of controversy.

[batyatoon]

Oh dear god, that would be terrifying.

(I kinda liked "The Langoliers".)

[dragon-avatar.livejournal.com]

Statement of R.C creeped me out, seeing how you can just imagine some of those crypts being portals into the Deep Dark. Plus I have an adversion to crypts unless i'm playing an RPG, then its on like Donkey Kong.

You think me mad!?!?

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I remember we had a vinyl record with "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" on one side, to which I thought, eh, so what, and "The Tell-Tale Heart" on the other. The narrator (I have the record now and he is not named) did such a wonderful first-person madman narrative that it instantly became my all-time favorite horror piece. I used to listen to it over and over, and really annoy my siblings.

Which is why "Telly-Taley Heart" has a special place in my, uh, heart.

[laura47.livejournal.com]

If anyone's in the boston area this weekend, there's a live radio play adaptation of welles's war of the worlds. Bb1938.com

[unclelumpy.livejournal.com]

Beats the Hell out of the torture-porn that passes for "horror" nowadays.

[sazettel.livejournal.com]

H.G. Wells wrote a horror piece called "The Red Room," which freaked me for YEARS.

I cherish a love for The Raven. Wrote this on the recent Poe-Anniversary celebration:

If you follow the story in The Raven, there's something quite sinister going on here. I don't think it's a random haunting. First, we have the narrator pouring over "quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore." Just what is in those books? Forgotten lore can cover a lot of ground, not all of it savory. And he's mourning his dead love. How did she die? We're never told. Was it murder? Was it suicide? And that book, that forgotten lore, what if it's not his? What if it's HERS? What if that bird, that raven, that familiar belonged to the lost Lenore? Or knew her? It clearly knows him, it knows what happened. What if the narrator had a hand in Lenore's death? After all, he says this house is "horror haunted." Doesn't sound like Lenore went peacefully in her sleep. What horror came before the raven did?

When we get to the end, when the narrator demands to know if he will meet Lenore in the afterlife, the raven utters its single word; Nevermore. The implication is clear. One of them, either the narrator or Lenore, is damned. Which is it? Is he damned because he killed her or caused her death? Is she damned because she killed herself or dabbled in the forbidden? Poe was not a modern horror writer, he was a moralist. Horrors were visited upon the characters in Poe narration for a reason. It is not an accident, not a mild or random occurence that the raven is there, and that it will not leave.

All of that, and so much more swirls in the air carried by the relentless rhythm, the lush language, the imagery and the emotional roller coaster from mourning to sad humor to fury to despair, and then you get the last verse:

"And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!"

[roman-mclaze.livejournal.com]

While not supernatural, exactly, I'm a fan of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" I also like the novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by the same author.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Actually I hate to be scared. I derive no joy at all from any horror movie except the truly terrible, un-scary ones.

So, no favorites to speak of, except maybe to invite you to Google "Bragg Ghost Light Road" and see if you come up with anything interesting from the local ghost legend of the woods where I live...

[gardnerhill.livejournal.com]

"Sorry, Wrong Number."

I didn't sleep for 3 nights after our junior high acted out that radio play in Drama.

[batyatoon]

The first horror story to ever keep me awake after I finished reading it was Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.