Our Illuminated Box of Horror

When I was a small child my family owned a bizarre box that served as a brightly-lit portal to dark and remote places where dwelt monsters as well as the most startling and stark-raving-mad episodes of fear which often blossomed into sheer horror, filled with zombies and demons, not to mention spooky high angelic voices and the unhinged muttering of absolute blithering madness. We called it a “television.” Our pretense was that we controlled it, right? I mean, in some ways yes, we controlled the whole damn experience, the finding of the TV, turning it on, selecting a channel, and then sitting down. But in actuality it controlled us and was central to my experience in ways that were just as impactful and sometimes devastating as a window to eternity, or a strong bad dream. 

But these were bad dreams we shared with several million other people, because it was broadcast from a high tower probably on the Empire State Building, and we happened to have antennae and were in the direct broadcast beam, so to speak, making it all but inevitable that we would pay close attention to it on a daily basis once we decoded the interface and descended down into this vault of insanity, where the madness was clearly of our own volition, just as grim and clear as any E. A. Poe story. We wanted to be horrified. That’s why we watched. As a counterweight, Groucho Marx said he found television to be educational because whenever someone turned one on he went in the other room and read a book. What did he know that we didn’t? 

We certainly had books, and had read most of them after a few years at home, and several of them were quite frightening and seemed to share forbidden knowledge of fantastic realms where magic was real and almost anything could happen. You know that kind of place that you can find in books? H. P. Lovecraft could help you with that. You built most of it yourself inside your head from the words and descriptions and nuance of the writing, which may amplify the impact of a given text if one has a particularly vigorous imagination and very few checks upon the sorts of things that could be imagined. 

But the television felt different. It was sometimes more vivid and occasionally twice as thought-provoking as an ordinary book, depending on the script and how the teleplay was acted. To be fair, there was certainly sufficient programming for the addled and simple, such as Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo and Bozo the Clown and Soupy Sales and Cecil & Beanie and the Banana Splits and Speed Racer and whatever slop could be found to fill the hours. There were always dreary sporting events and the news from Vietnam, making sure we were shown the horror of boredom as well as the horrors of war. Our illuminated box was simple and bright, except when it was complex and dark. Gumby & Pokey were boon companions. Napalm was used on villages. Nothing made sense. 

There was also The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and later a soap opera called Dark Shadows, and in watching those there was no mistaking their purpose and intent. By golly, those shows meant to seriously bother you, whether by incidents or ideas or passionate speeches of various types, from the forlorn to the menacing to the mystical, and we very much felt we had entered a new reality which unfolded into a vast universe of throbbing oddity and pulsating dread. Imagine our surprise at learning what this illuminated box could do. It could show us death. 

Many of the shows touched upon death, but there were still other exhibits in this museum of fear, and some of them were of the type that would bother small children who would come in time to realize by watching just how terribly weak and vulnerable they were, and how close they were to stepping off the wrong curb at the wrong time and being struck by a cab and thrown into the air to land on the sidewalk and eventually surrounded by cops looking down and saying “He’s dead.” Needless to say, the more one pondered this idea the stronger it became. And the more one thought about ghosts the more one was on the alert for them, suspecting they were schooling about in the night air and might without warning slowly emerge through a wall next to your head for no reason other than to make you lose your mind.

The illuminated box taught us that fear could be felt in your feet and your fingers, and that the human body can light up like a pinball machine under the right circumstances, flashing and pinging and bursting with emotion and new-found knowledge, most of it dreadful and dire. But there was some weird joy to the horror, despite how it made you feel, that somehow saved it a place in your mind and transformed such spectacles into some sort of brightly-lit terror carnival to which you could always return. Movies were the logical touchstone for that return, particularly the old Universal black and white horror features of the 1930s. We hadn’t met Jason or Freddy or The Terrifier yet. The old scary Universal movies felt like a legacy of fear being passed down to us, just as it had been received by earlier generations of shocked witnesses. 

So there we sat as children in small chairs, terrified of King Kong before he even appeared on Skull Island, and baffled by the perverse experimentation of Dr. Frankenstein upon stolen corpses, and frozen in place by the shuffling gait of The Mummy, and viscerally gripped and torn by the ravenous Wolf-man, and repelled by the suave unwholesomeness of Count Dracula with all his fine garb and courtly manners—they signaled death and despair. There was every flavor and nuance of horror, such that it might follow a man all his days and make his every nightmare come true. Ask me how I know. Did we feel better for being tipped off that all of this monstrosity and madness was loose in the world? Well, no, in a word. 

In unmistakable ways it seemed the illuminated box was telling us to get cozy with hearses and gravestones, because the utter abject death and complete physical dissolution of each and every human was our absolute destiny and predetermined fate, and who were we to question this fine system that ensured everyone you ever knew would die, as would you your very own self some dark night or perhaps at high noon on the street? Didn’t really matter. Death was coming, and everything else had to take a backseat to this awful knowledge. How could we affirm the veracity of this dire news? One only had to touch the illuminated box and some utterly insane scenario would be playing out, giant ants or giant crabs or actual goddam giants who lived on top of beanstalks and evidently ground human bones for their dietary needs. There! Proof positive! The world is creepy and strange and we are trapped within it, on this planet Earth, where aliens and space diseases and giant meteors can claim us at any time without so much as a by-your-leave. We’ll be eating a ham sandwich and wondering if Loretta ever thinks about us and bang—game over. The illuminated box said what could not be said, showed us rocket launches and helicopters overseas, and then spun out the most gruesome tales and showed them in the most appalling detail. 

One came to fear doors. Too much of the unknown. And dimly lit hallways—one never knew what monster might slowly hove into view, being revealed only partially and then more and more and too much, until the entire terrible truth was fully shown and just stood there on display as our hair stood straight up and we felt our toes curl inside our little slippers and a chill that easily penetrated our thin wrappers over thinner pajamas. Horror had a home. It was at our house. After a while we were the horror. 

Lugosi and Karloff play a deadly chess game in 1932’s The Black Cat, and I never saw a chess board again without remembering those painfully tense moments. Evil won that night. We moaned. But then to lighten our existence Lou Costello plays such a good fellow in The Time of Their Lives (1946) who is trapped for eternity near a well with a lovely companion after their bodies had been thrown down there, and somehow we laughed merrily at Lou’s clowning, and also cried at the sweetness of love and the endless stretch of forever. It didn’t pay to contemplate eternity as suggested in films at any great length, and yet the very concept seemed simply inevitable. The illuminated box of horror had roots in the ancient past and stretched forth unto an unknowable future, and the tangled electrons showed us things we never could have dreamed in any world without an illuminated box. Lucky us.  

The stark horror of Vincent Price in House on Haunted Hill (1960) was beyond comprehension for a child, but even a modest young person could see the problems in that place—the automatic pistols in tiny coffins, the self-locking doors, the weirdly dated Futurism of the house’s exterior design, the ghosts waiting to claim more victims according to Elisha Cook Jr., the witch in the basement, the marriage from Hell leading to homicide, the bars on the windows, the rope that moved by itself and hung people—there was no end to the madness. 

Or Carnival of Souls (1962), right? Why on earth would you broadcast such a malignantly imaginative monstrosity? It was cheaply made by Val Loomis and is almost brilliant in places, but the sheer horror of this dead woman on a bus with other dead people and she thinks she might be dead and she is indeed dead, back in the car in the river—it’s all just a bit much. Oh man. Night of the Hunter has a dead woman in a car in a river, her hair drifting languidly in the current, while Psycho places the body in a car in a miasmic muddy pool from which it emerges in a messy birth at the end of the film. You should not show such things to sensitive people. It might encourage them to be unstable, after all, because how are we expected to deal with all of this death and fear and monsters and night?

But try as they might, no mere Hollywood production could answer the eternal questions and make clear what our lives are about, and what happens when we die. Even self-referential and frightening films like Sunset Boulevard and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? failed to explain what the heck was wrong with humanity in person and on film as seen from the inside, other than vanity and hubris. The years came and went, and still those old strange memories lingered, reminding the highly sensitive of haunting vignettes even if one might more profitably be employed dealing with the world as it presents itself, and not slathered with the makeup of Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame or The Phantom of the Opera. But greasepaint is forever, even though our masks and disguises cannot hide our own terrible true nature. We are the sort of species that has wars and befouls nature, gaslights the lady folk and carpet bombs peasants, kills visitors with cleavers and rolls fake heads down the stairs to drive others insane. Now and then you’d catch yourself singing Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and come to a sudden stop. We ourselves are still the horror that we first spotted so many years ago, but now we’re all zippy and shiny and modern and appalling. 

Eventually we all got new and improved illuminated boxes of horror, and allowed them in their turn to warp and shift our perspective on our lives. Currently I have one that serves as a portal to the entire goddam world, every square inch and pixel of our unfathomable modern reality, and even though I still visit with the old horrors, they must make way for new atrocities. However, for the sake of continuity and dread, they all share the same themes, and all the old horrors are thusly made fresh and vivid. There are ways to follow every problem in every part of the world 24/7, nonstop, and worry about things that are very real along with things that are simply strange and unreal, and you can do it all in isolation and yet somehow linked to everyone else. We still die alone. No one makes it out of here alive. Plug in, log in, tune out and freak for days. Our entire plan seems to be maladaptive daydreaming along with mayhem and fear. Mr. Poe and Mr. Lovecraft are still standing by our side, faithfully tending the fires of literary horror. And our modern illuminated boxes are a gold-plated wonder. There is no end to how clever and comprehensive the horror can now be. Clearly an apogee of dread approaches. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. And death is still the great mystery, and our illuminated box is still where we search for answers, now replete with imaginary communities, online friends we’ve never met and glad-handing AI. We call it a “computer.” Our pretense is that we control it.