Lights Out
The Midnight Show That Started with a Kitchen Raid
Lights Out was not subtle about what it was doing. When it premiered on WENR in Chicago on January 1, 1934, the show aired around midnight on purpose — the theory being that a horror program worked better when the house was dark and the neighborhood had gone quiet. Creator Wyllis Cooper ran it as a 15-minute weekly slot at first, then expanded to 30 minutes by April of that year. When NBC picked it up for the nationwide network hookup in April 1935, it was billed "the ultimate in horror" — and the audience responded immediately. Newsweek reported that month that one listener fainted from excitement after a broadcast, and another called police to her home, telling them, "I was frightened out of my wits."
Cooper was around 36 years old when he created the show, working as a staffer in NBC's Chicago studios. His methods were low-budget and direct. He built horror out of what he could find in a kitchen. A butcher knife dragged through raw pork with screams laid over it simulated murder. Real spareribs snapped with a pipe wrench stood in for breaking bones. Bacon frying in a pan became the sound of a body being electrocuted. Cabbages split with a cleaver suggested a skull being opened. Carrots snapped cleanly to imply fingers being cut off. A critic at Radio Guide singled out one particular effect as "the most monstrous of all sounds, human flesh being eaten" — which was accomplished by having an actor gurgle and smack his lips while eating a bowl of spaghetti. Newsweek described Cooper's approach as "raiding the larder," and that phrase captures it perfectly.
How the Show Became an Institution Under Arch Oboler
Cooper left the show in 1936 to pursue a screenwriting career in Hollywood — he worked on Son of Frankenstein and some of the Mr. Moto pictures — and his replacement turned out to be transformative in a different direction. Arch Oboler took over as writer, producer, and director, and between May 1936 and July 1938 he wrote and directed more than 100 Lights Out plays. Historian Ray Stanich, writing in 1974, credited Lights Out as the place where Oboler developed his much-copied stream-of-consciousness technique, along with an unusual command of sound effects, sharp dialogue, and precise timing.
Oboler's first episode as writer was called Burial Services, about a paralyzed girl buried alive. His approach, which he described as "underwriting" the situation, relied on leaving silences for the listener's imagination to fill. The episode generated more than 50,000 letters to NBC. Boris Karloff arrived in Chicago in April 1938 to appear in four consecutive Oboler productions — the last of these was Cat Wife, about a man whose wife transforms into a human-sized cat. Other Oboler scripts became standards: Revolt of the Worms, in which a scientist's formula causes earthworms to grow larger than houses and the characters are suffocated in a wall of wet flesh; and Chicken Heart, in which a laboratory heart continues growing — accompanied by an insistent thump-THUMP sound — until it consumes the world. Both played the same note: something ordinary becomes immense and unstoppable and terrifying.
Oboler also wrote what he called "message" plays — he aimed for two of them for every straight horror script. One involved travelers thrown back to prehistoric times, where they meet a Neanderthal who cannot be reasoned with and must be shot, an allegory for confronting tyranny by force rather than appeasement. For all his success with the show, Oboler later acknowledged that horror as a genre had always left him cold, and that he wanted to write more serious radio work. By July 1938, he left Lights Out and headed to New York and Hollywood. NBC staffers continued the Chicago run for another year before the original network run ended August 16, 1939.
The Sound of the Show
The signature opening evolved over the run but settled into something memorable. In the 1930s, twelve somber chimes of churchbells and a gong opened each episode. Later versions featured an announcer building to a full invocation: "This is the witching hour!... it is the hour when dogs howl, and evil is let loose on the sleeping world. Want to hear about it? Then turn out your lights!" The instruction to turn out your lights was not decoration — the show was constructed around the idea that the right listening conditions made the difference.
Sound effects were credited personnel, not afterthoughts. During the NBC Chicago run, Bob Graham, Ed Joyce, and Ed Bailey handled the effects work. Oboler's infamous inside-out man story — involving a character dissolved and reformed by a demonic fog — was realized by soaking a rubber glove in water, stripping it off at the microphone, and simultaneously crushing a berry basket. These were practical solutions to theatrical problems, worked out in real time in a Chicago studio at half past eleven at night. The atmosphere infected the players themselves: Sidney Ellstrom, a regular member of the Chicago ensemble, was reportedly put to death on the show more than a hundred times — "skinned alive, boiled in oil, devoured by a man-eating plant, strangled by a vampire," as the Chicago Tribune recounted in March 1935 — and the future film actor Macdonald Carey, who passed through the cast in those years, later remembered the spooky charge the show generated even behind the scenes.
The CBS Run and the Best-Remembered Year
In 1942, Oboler resurrected Lights Out on CBS, running from October 6, 1942 to September 28, 1943. The CBS run aired at 8 p.m. on Tuesdays — a real prime-time slot — sponsored by Ironized Yeast, originating first from New York and later from Hollywood. Oboler served as both host and writer-director, and announcer Bob LeMond opened each episode with a new signature gong sequence: the gong chiming once per word as Oboler intoned, "It... is... later... than... you... think."
The CBS run recycled some of Oboler's best Chicago scripts, including Revolt of the Worms, Cat Wife, Chicken Heart, and Valse Triste. The cast included Irene Tedrow, Lou Merrill, Gloria Biondell, Wally Maher, Ted Maxwell, Earle Ross, Tom Lewis, Theodore von Eltz, and Templeton Fox — Fox had also worked on the original Chicago run. Because this was the version most listeners heard at a reasonable hour, with professional production and network reach, it became the best-remembered year of the entire Lights Out run. Many of the 1942–43 episodes survive on tape, and they were later repackaged from 1970 to 1973 as a syndicated series called The Devil and Mr. O, with Oboler again as host.
Later Runs and Two Creators
After the CBS run ended in September 1943, Lights Out returned for a summer run on NBC in 1945 — Saturdays at 8:30, broadcasting from New York — featuring new productions of old Wyllis Cooper scripts billed as "Fantasies from Lights Out," with a cast that included Will Geer, Mason Adams, Lon Clark, and Alexander Scourby. A second summer run followed in 1946, also on NBC, Saturday nights at 10, with Boris Aplon narrating and Albert Crews directing — a mix of Cooper stories and adaptations from Dickens. The final run was a brief ABC series in the summer of 1947, Wednesdays at 10:30 from Hollywood, sponsored by Schick, with music composed by Leith Stevens and Cooper himself back as writer along with Paul Pierce.
The summer runs of 1945 through 1947 were largely built on Cooper's old scripts, which raised a question the show's history makes unavoidable: the two men who made Lights Out great were very different writers with different ambitions, and the record treated them unequally. Oboler is the name most listeners recognize, and most surviving Lights Out recordings are from his 1942–43 CBS run. Cooper's original Chicago work — which is where the show's foundational methods were invented — had not, as of the time detailed accounts of the show were compiled, been widely unearthed.
Cooper himself had not gone idle after leaving Chicago. Hollywood led to scripts for The Campbell Playhouse, the sponsored successor to Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre on the Air; during the war he served as consultant to the Secretary of War, producing, directing, and writing The Army Hour, the weekly propaganda series carried on NBC. In 1944 he joined the radio department of Compton Advertising in New York, and it was from that desk that he supervised the 1945 and 1946 NBC summer revivals of Lights Out — using his own old scripts, reworking them, working out new ideas in stream-of-consciousness and first-person narration that one surviving episode, "The Haunted Cell" from July 1946, shows him exploring well before such techniques became identified with Oboler or Welles. After Lights Out he built Quiet, Please, which ran on Mutual in 1947–48 and ABC in 1948–49, and on which his modern reputation among radio horror specialists largely rests. Oboler himself called Cooper "the unsung pioneer of radio dramatic techniques," and historian Gerald Nachman, writing in Raised on Radio, described him as "a magnificent spook master, pioneering the use of stream-of-consciousness horror." But it remained Oboler's voice that most people associated with the show, and the CBS year that most people meant when they said they knew Lights Out.
Afterlife: Television, Records, and Two Long Shadows
The radio run ended in August 1947 when Eversharp, the sponsor of the ABC summer series (Dunning lists Schick), canceled after just three episodes — the company president apparently unwilling to stomach the gruesomeness — paying Cooper off for five unused scripts. By then the show was already migrating to television. NBC tried out the property in 1946 as four live specials broadcast over its New York flagship WNBT between June and October, all produced and directed by Fred Coe; Variety called the first of them, "First Person Singular," "undoubtedly one of the best dramatic shows yet seen on a television screen." Cooper was reportedly miffed — Coe had adapted one of his old scripts without consulting him.
The series proper ran Monday nights at 9 on NBC from July 19, 1949 to September 29, 1952, hosted first by Jack La Rue and then by Frank Gallop, produced by Herbert Bayard Swope Jr. and Coe, directed by William Corrigan and Kingman T. Moore. The musical staff stayed remarkably consistent: Arlo Hults on organ across the entire run, Paul Lipman on theremin in 1949, Doris Johnson on harp from 1950 onward. NBC engineers developed what they called a "newly perfected" split-screen technique for the show, used to carry both ends of a telephone conversation through scene changes — the New York Times reported it was the first such effort to maintain continuity of action on both sides of the frame — alongside first-person camera work, amorphous shadows used as lead characters, and effects of people walking through walls or vanishing outright. The writers' room mixed veterans with a young Ira Levin, working alongside Ernest Kinoy, Douglas Wood Gibson, Douglas Gilbert, and James Lee; in 1951 Swope bought stories from both Cooper and Oboler, including "Dead Man's Coat," adapted from a 1930s Cooper play and starring Basil Rathbone. The last two seasons drew an extraordinary roster of guest performers — Karloff, Burgess Meredith, Raymond Massey, Eddie Albert, Billie Burke, Yvonne DeCarlo, Anne Bancroft, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb, Anthony Quinn, Jessica Tandy, Veronica Lake, John Forsythe, Vincent Price, Eli Wallach, Jack Palance, Leslie Nielsen — and the show occasionally cracked the ten most-watched programs on network television. I Love Lucy, which premiered on CBS in October 1951, finally pulled away the audience; the final episode aired September 29, 1952. One installment, "The House of Dust," has been preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive from a 16mm kinescope. NBC attempted a revival pilot in 1972 called "When Widows Weep"; it did not go to series.
The show's cultural shadow stretched in both directions. Stephen King, in Danse Macabre (1981), singled out Chicken Heart as a memorable episode and declared that "no discussion of the phenomenon of radio terror, no matter how brief, would be complete without some mention of the genre's prime auteur — not Orson Welles, but Arch Oboler, the first playwright to have his own national radio series, the chilling Lights Out." Bill Cosby's Chicken Heart routine, recorded for his 1966 album Wonderfulness, described listening to the episode as a child and being so undone that he smeared Jell-O on the floor and set the sofa on fire.
Oboler kept building on the Lights Out foundation for decades. His Fourteen Radio Plays was billed on the dust jacket as the first collection of radio plays by a single dramatist ever to appear in book form. His 1939 play "Bathysphere" was later inducted into the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. He returned to the old material in 1962 with Drop Dead! (Capitol T/ST-1763), a spoken-word LP of abbreviated Lights Out thrillers — the only surviving version of "Chicken Heart," whose original full-length recording is lost, comes from that record. In film he wrote and directed the post-apocalyptic Five (1951), shot at his Frank Lloyd Wright–designed house near Malibu; Bwana Devil (1952), the first commercially released 3-D color feature, was a substantial hit. The Arch Oboler Collection at the Library of Congress runs to roughly 364 boxes and 127,000 items, including nearly every script he wrote for radio in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1986 a cache of previously unheard Oboler plays surfaced through Metacom in Minneapolis and was released as Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.
The radio run — from a Chicago local station at midnight in 1934 to a final Hollywood broadcast in August 1947 — is the record that matters. What Cooper started with spareribs and a pipe wrench, and what Oboler expanded into something that generated fifty thousand letters on a single episode, was genuinely strange radio, built around the specific power of what a listener's imagination does in the dark.