Orson Welles' War of the Worlds Broadcast Can Teach a Lesson to Contemporary Horror Filmmakers
It perhaps should be a vitally important lesson to those who wish to scare the bejebus out of American audiences that Orson Welles quite literally caused a panic without so much as showing anything, much less needing to show blood and gore and disgusting images of the human being torn apart. Do you know how Orson Welles conducted his radio show that has come to be seen, probably inaccurately, as the single greatest entertainment hoax in history? For perhaps the only time in history, the suits at CBS were right to be concerned. Reading the script to Orson Welles' War of the World broadcast is silly and ridiculous and boring. Heck, even listening to Welles' original War of the Worlds broadcast is boring. And yet, it managed to scare the crap out of thousands of people, perhaps millions.
How did Orson Welles pull off this incredible hoax with such a pedestrian script? There are some who say the greatest hoax in history, if it can even be called that, came about precisely because it was so pedestrian. What Orson Welles' War of the World hoax proved was that the scariest thing in the world is reality. What the suits at CBS called boring, Orson Welles would probably have described as authentic. There was an authenticity to the War of the Worlds broadcast that made is so much scarier to the people of its time than these god-awful torture movies that masquerade as horror today. The direction that horror has taken since its early days is to the extreme, and therein lies the reason why horror films of the past twenty years, American horror films at least, have been boring rather than horrifying. The direction that horror needs to take to become the dominant cinematic genre it once was needs to be in the other direction. Instead of making the unreal the norm, it should make the norm unreal.
The hoax known as Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938 reveals this better than anything. What could be more normal during a radio broadcast in 1938 than an orchestra playing, commercial breaks, and a reporter rushing to Grover's Mill to cover breaking news as it happens. At no time during the War of the World's broadcast does unreality seem to intrude on the carefully constructed normality. Nothing is scarier than thinking that something is real and that is why everything from Friday the 13th to Saw fails to terrify anywhere near the number of people totally scared out of their wits by the War of the Worlds broadcast. It all seemed real, from the music to the commercials to the actual broadcast of the Martians arriving. It was, perhaps, the greatest entertainment hoax of all time.
Or then again, it may be in second place behind the nightly hoax called the Glenn Beck Show.
Published by Timothy Sexton - Featured Contributor in Arts & Entertainment
Timothy Sexton was named this site's very first Writer of the Year. Today he has several columns on Yahoo Movies and a weekly column on The Simpsons on Yahoo TV. He has published over 8,000 articles coverin... View profile
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10 Comments
Post a CommentI remember Welles saying that he intended the beginning to be boring so that when something did occur it would be surprising and shocking. I listen to it often and it still gets to me because of that authenticity you mention, from the presentation to the way that the characters react.
If you listen to it carefully, though, it is not too long before Welles started summarizing events and going way beyond the limits of what could actually happen in the duration of the program. But, it still has power.
Where there is no imagination, there is no horror. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study In Scarlet"
Similarly, with a scarcity of television channels, children's recordings were similar to radio shows, long playing versions of film or other stories. I STILL think the best ones played to kids' imaginations and were (in some ways) better than the films themselves (depending on the quality of the original film).
I think this is so accurate. I've always believed that War of the Worlds got people to use the best technique in creating a scary horror broadcast - the power of their own imaginations. Film producers and directors may not give that enough credit. I can't help thinking of the "bloody" shower scene in Psycho. It seems so graphic and yet it...isn't. It is simply imagination that does it. If you've done an article about the advantages of LISTENING to radio broadcasts rather than seeing them on tv, I'd like the link.
This reminds me of the great effect of 'stillness' used by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. He understood that a calm maniac, one who could be passing you the sugar in a restaurant, was more frightening than a raving one. It's the shadow of the picthfork on the barn door that seems scarier than the special effects of modern movies which arouse curiosity but keep the viewer focused on the technical rather than the primal.
Truth spoken, I am a firm believer that truth is stranger than fiction.
You've got this right. And I'm with Betty about "The Birds", too. By the way, the BBC has a TV series called "Survivors" which is really very scary as well. I've only seen the first season, but WOW!
:), I think Glenn Beck is way scarier than War of the Worlds, but I love listening to War of the Worlds. Hitchcock was scary in the same way, Those damn birds! Of course the short story the Birds was based on was even scarier! but yeah, you got this one nailed. And thanks for the comment on the Beck article, it tis amazing to me what people will swear is the gospel truth!
Timophy Nice piece I listened to this brodcast while visiting the science museum in Ottawa and your right even knowing that it was a hoax still scary. it was also niceto see the reactions of my children who had never heard it.
Kind Regards
Steve Simmonds