The Writer's Medium

Most horror radio scares you by describing something. Oboler's method is to put you inside the head of a person and then let the head go wrong. The famous grotesqueries — the chicken heart, the inside-out man — are remembered as gimmicks, but the technique underneath is a genuine formal discovery: interior monologue as a sound stage.

It is uneven, and the surviving transfers are variable, so approach the run as a body of experiments rather than a polished series. When it works, it is nastier than anything on television for the next thirty years.

Listen with the lights on if you must, but listen alone. It was built for one pair of ears, and it knows it.