While never reaching the level of prestige that contemporaries like Norman Corwin and Orson Welles enjoyed, writer/director Arch Oboler had a run of brilliantly made radio dramas that anyone else would have killed to have made. Best known these days as the inspiration for Bill Cosby's "Chicken Heart" routine, Oboler's relatively brief [about three years, with a number of later revivals] run on LIGHTS OUT is still one of the rare examples of horror entertainment that can genuinely be scary. And revolting, incredibly revolting for the late '30s and early '40s. Here's the Cos talking about listening to "Chicken Heart:"
Oboler also made the fine anthology series Arch Oboler's Plays for NBC and later the Mutual Network.
The WFMU blog had a great vinyl rip of the long out-of-print but ideal Oboler/LIGHTS OUT sampler, titled DROP DEAD, but the post seems to have been deleted. Here's a download for a ZIP file of the album, which must be public-domain like everything else in Oboler's creator-owned oeuvre has become. It's a short LP, and the brevity of the pieces shades them more comedic than macabre, but it still gives a taste.
Now, the actual movie: Like Welles, Oboler went on to make movies for RKO, but unlike Welles, he never quite translated the genius of his radio work to the screen. Occasionally, as in the following movie, you can literally see flickers of what made him so great with the lights out. FIVE is the first and -- I might argue, with a few caveats -- the best of the post-WWII movies to ponder the idea of Atomic annihilation. It could be considered a godfather of independent filmmaking -- Oboler wrote, directed and produced it largely on his own dime and filmed it in his house -- granted, that house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but still.
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