There is a certain bit of irony in the fact that the producers at CBS around Halloween of 1938 were nervous about their radio star Orson Welles' production of H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. They felt that the teleplay was rather too dull and boring to capture the interest of listeners who could quite easily turn the channel to hear to something far more entertaining. In addition, the suits at CBS were also a bit concerned that the show was, well, silly and might make them look ridiculous.
It perhaps should be a vitally important lesson to those who wish to scare the bejebus out of American audiences that Orson Welles quite literally caused a panic without so much as showing anything, much less needing to show blood and gore and disgusting images of the human being torn apart. Do you know how Orson Welles conducted his radio show that has come to be seen, probably inaccurately, as the single greatest entertainment hoax in history? For perhaps the only time in history, the suits at CBS were right to be concerned. Reading the script to Orson Welles' War of the World broadcast is silly and ridiculous and boring. Heck, even listening to Welles' original War of the World�s broadcast is boring. And yet, it managed to scare the crap out of thousands of people, perhaps millions.
How did Orson Welles pull off this incredible hoax with such a pedestrian script? There are some say the greatest hoax in history, if it can even be called that, came about precisely because it was so pedestrian. What Orson Welles' War of the World hoax proved was that the scariest thing in the world is reality? What the suits at CBS called boring, Orson Welles would probably have described as authentic. There was an authenticity to the War of the Worlds broadcast that made is so much scarier to the people of its time than these god-awful torture movies that masquerade as horror today. The direction that horror has taken since its early days is to the extreme, and therein lies the reason why horror films of the past twenty years, American horror films at least, have been boring rather than horrifying. The direction that horror needs to take to become the dominant cinematic genre it once was needs to be in the other direction. Instead of making the unreal the norm, it should make the norm unreal.
The hoax known as Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938 reveals this better than anything. What could be more normal during a radio broadcast in 1938 than an orchestra playing, commercial breaks, and a reporter rushing to Grover's Mill to cover breaking news as it happens. At no time during the War of the World's broadcast does unreality seem to intrude on the carefully constructed normality. Nothing is scarier than thinking that something is real and that is why everything from Friday the 13th to Saw fails to terrify anywhere near the number of people totally scared out of their wits by the War of the Worlds broadcast. It all seemed real, from the music to the commercials to the actual broadcast of the Martians arriving. It was, perhaps, the greatest entertainment hoax of all time.