Blind Terror

Radio is well appreciated as the perfect medium for terrifying stories. Since the listener does not have pictures to help form the images in his mind, the mind works even harder. The images become even more vivid and horrific.

• One of radio's greatest masters of terror brings us one of the most powerful anti-war dramas of all time: "Johnny Got His Gun" on Arch Oboler's Plays. The great James Cagney takes us into the mind of a soldier who has lost not only his limbs, but his face, eyes and ears, as well. Completely cut off from the world, he struggles on the edge of madness, and we are along for the ride.
• In the 1935 serial Moon Over Africa,  we follow Professor Anton Edwards as his little expedition travels through a tunnel under a mountain. There they find an old blind woman who gives the party an ominous warning about The Daughters of the Moon.
• A good indication of how frightening a topic can be is the number of times in turns up in episodes of Suspense! One of the strangest is "World Of Darkness", in which a murder is committed in a show people's boarding house. The only witness is a blind musician. Or is his seeing eye dog also a witness? In the story "Footfalls", the blind cobbler has a son whom everyone believes is no good. When a foul murder is committed, can the blind cobbler prove that his son really is "a good boy"? In "Two Horse Parley", Johnny's blind aunt thinks she has been bankrolling his studies at the conservatory. He is, in fact, going into debt at the track. Will having his girlfriend play for the blind old lady keep the money coming?
• In "Symphony in D Minor" on Quiet, Please!, tough guy Ray has a plot to steal the pretty wife of blind psychiatrist Johannes. Ray thinks that he is a very smart guy, but is he smarter than Johannes? Probably not, especially since Johannes has learned how to hypnotize Ray using sound. Can it end well for Ray and Carol?
• Although there have been and will be marvelous advances in medicine, even in the future sight will be a precious and fragile gift. On X Minus One,  we have an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's "The Green Hills of Earth". "Noisy" Rhysling was blinded in a radiation accident and spends the next decades bumming around the space ways, living off his songs and dreaming about his birthplace in the green hills of Earth.
• "The Marvelous Barastro", performed by Peter Lorre on Mystery In The Air, tells the story of a hypnotist who fell in love with a blind girl, Anna. When our story opens, Barastro has murder in his heart for the rival magician whom plots to steal Anna away using Barastro's own voice.
• H.G. Wells was a master of terror. His pen gave us "The War of the Worlds", which helped to catapult Orson Welles to fame. Another of Wells' best known stories is "Country of the Blind". Nunez the mountaineer stumbles into a valley where all the people have been blind since birth. Thinking that a sighted man is superior, Nunez tries to make the best of things, but the people do not realize that their affliction is a handicap. In fact, Nunez must be unwell because of his insane notions about this thing he calls sight. "The Country Of The Blind" is such a powerful story that it appears in five different version in this collection, twice on Suspense, once on Escape, from the syndicated British anthology program Theater Royal, and Ronald Colman's literary program Favorite Story.

Please note: With a wonderful macabre sense of humor, a fellow listener with visual impairment helped OTRCAT compile this collection of mystery and horror shows over the last several years.

See also: Blind Drama Collection, George Shearing, Fred Lowery, Sounds of Darkness, and Helen Keller Collection.