Inner Sanctum Mysteries

During a period from 1941 to 1952, which spanned the golden era of classic radio, this macabre anthology series invited listeners each week to pass through its famous opening creaking door into a world which provided a unique mixture of horror with the darkest of comedy. In its own era, Inner Sanctum was perhaps the quintessential radio program, using sound to produce effects which wove a spell unique to the medium. In a larger sense, the show's peculiar combination of chills and chuckles has influenced the American horror genre ever since and has found expression in everything from EC Comics in the 1950s to the self-referential works of Stephen King and Wes Craven in the 1990s. A listener today who has the nerve to step through the Inner Sanctum doorway (being careful not to bump into that corpse "just hanging around over there") will discover a world both historically distant and entertainingly familiar.

There were three principal ways in which Inner Sanctum used sound to horrify and amuse its listeners. First among these was, of course, the famous creaking door, an effect which radio historian John Dunning has said "may have been the greatest opening signature device ever achieved." The door was the brainchild of the program's creator Himan Brown, who once claimed that it was one of only two sounds in all of radio to be trademarked—the other being the NBC chimes. Regardless of its legal status, however, there is no doubt that the ominous squeak of the Inner Sanctum portal takes its place right along with Fibber McGee's overcrowded closet, the menacing chuckle of the Shadow, and the sputtering of Jack Benny's car as the most well-remembered sounds of old-time radio—causing Stephen King to recall years later that "nothing could have looked as horrible as that door sounded." Brown's second achievement in sound was Inner Sanctum's innovative use of the organ. While other suspense programs used the instrument in its musical guise, Jim Harmon reports that Brown "warned his organist never to play a recognizable song… or even an original snatch of melody." The man at the somber Hammond organ was to play sharp "stings"—a high musical note struck to emphasize an important piece of dialogue and "doom chords" designed to produce a sense of unease and foreboding in listeners. Dunning goes so far as to claim that "the organ became one of the star players … brooding, ever-present, worrying, fretting … the epitome of radio melodrama." Finally, Brown was grimly innovative in his creation of realistic sound effects to lend the outlandish goings-on the necessary believability to render them truly terrifying. Only on Inner Sanctum, for example, would the soft thunk of a man's skull being crushed be so deliciously captured in the sound of a small metal hammer striking a melon, a Brown favorite.

Presiding over this dark world of sound was the show's famous host, Raymond. Played most notably by Raymond Edward Johnson (1941-1945), Raymond was the source of much of the program's black humor as he ushered listeners in and out of the creaking door with a series of ghoulish puns ("Quiet now—no 'coffin.' We have 'grave' matters to uncover") and doubtful morals ("Careful the next time you ask your wife to 'pass' the knife. She may do it—right through you. Good Niiiiiight!") The tradition of the sardonic host to horror would find equally memorable expression years later in American popular culture in figures such as the Cryptkeeper in EC Comics and Rod Serling in television's The Twilight Zone, but the stories introduced by Raymond were unique in their ability to arouse and exploit audience fears of the supernatural before ultimately providing a "realistic" explanation. As otherworldly as the universe of the Inner Sanctum sometimes seemed for most of the tale, events were always finally shown to be the result of a very human combination of folly and foible—of greed, ambition, and just plain bad luck.The show's self-imposed need to create situations which were as outlandish as possible and yet capable of such "rational" explanation in the final moments led to some of the most wildly improbable twists and turns imaginable, and it is this element which makes the series both memorable and campish simultaneously. It is also for this reason that the creative peak of the program is usually regarded as the early series of episodes performed by Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre and based upon classic works by Poe and Maupassant, skilled practitioners of the peculiar art of "realistic horror."

In its unique mixture of horror and humor, classics and camp, the supernatural with the everyday, Inner Sanctum helped shape the face of popular horror in all media—even in its own time promoting a whole set of Inner Sanctum novels and occasional movies. And yet the series can also be fondly recalled today as a program which exploited the basic elements of radio perhaps more than any other show, taking an entire generation of listeners deep into the "inner sanctums" of their own imaginations.

—Kevin Lause

Further Reading:

Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. New York, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Harmon, Jim. The Great Radio Heroes. Garden City, Kansas, Doubleday, 1967.

Nachman, Gerald. Raised on Radio. New York, Random House, 1998.