Tuesday, October 4, 2022

OTR Halloween Day 4: Columbia Workshop

Today I'm looking at the Columbia Workshop, the legendary CBS series where creators delved into what was frequently unusual and experimental techniques in radio drama. For our purposes, this also includes the horror genre!

This program is the story "Double Exposure" from March 7, 1940. In 1940, horror on radio was still very primitive but on the verge of breaking out in a big way, as Lights Out had indicated. Compared to the rather juvenile writing in the Witch's Tale, "Double Exposure" is much more adult and more indicative of where radio horror was headed.

The reason for that is that "Double Exposure" is an adaptation of a play from Paris' Grand Guignol theater. Although the theater ended in the early 1960s, the Grand Guignol has held a special place in horror history for being a theater who only produced horror plays. To this very day, critics of horror films call the very theatrical and bloody horror films "Grand Guignol" whether they've heard of the Paris theater or not.

"Double Exposure" is similar to many other Grand Guignol plays I've read about, but it opens very slowly. A man's wife has just died and he's mourning her. The first third of the program comes across as pure melodrama - but then, he learns his wife had a secret lover and he's on his way to the man's house.

You can hear "Double Exposure" on the Old Time Radio Researchers Library.

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