Blog-o-ween 2022: "A Day at the Dentist"

Well, well, well...we meet again. It is time for another month-long celebration of the strange, the spooky, and the just plain weird. If you're asking yourself, "Doesn't this blog do that the rest of the year, too?" then I can only answer with a definite...

While we are waiting for the tubes in the ol' Philco to warm up, let's drop the needle on a collection of some of the Golden Age of Radio's most terrifying tales. While there are scores and scores of radio programs that were recorded, saved, and made available for listening, the truth of the matter is that the majority of broadcasts are lost to us. Maybe some lucky sod on a rock orbiting Proxima Centauri got to hear them and was fast enough with the record button on their reel-to-reel (or whatever they got up there), but for us on Earth, we can only imagine what they sounded like. Because of this blasé attitude at the time towards "low" forms of media, some radio producers recreated their most famous programs decades later for posterity. Our first foray into Blog-o-ween 2022 is one such recreation. In 1962, one of the masters of radio horror, Arch Oboler, gathered a few friends together and recorded Drop Dead!: An Exercise in Horror! Let's start spooky season off right with a short, sharp story on side two of that Capitol Records LP. Let's go and spend "A Day at the Dentist."

It's a very simple story: Fred Houseman is in need of an emergency trip to the dentist. Unfortunately for Freddie, he is, like so many people are, a dentophobe - he is afraid of the dentist. He's chosen Dr. Charles's practice, because the good doctor advertises himself as "the painless dentist." Unfortunately (again!) for Freddie, Charles was bought out by a man who knows Freddie and his fear all too well. It seems that Freddie did something in the past to the new dentist's wife, something "very special...worth remembering, worth talking about, worth slobbering over." After the doc has strapped Freddie into the chair to keep him absolutely still - you know...for sake of keeping everything "painless" - the sound of the drill revs up and Freddie's frantics pleadings fill the air. Before you can ask "Is it safe?" the story ends.

We won't spend too much time right now discussing Arch Oboler and his impact on radio (Oboler will appear again later this month), but for now let's just say the man knew the power of suggestion and sound. In his book Danse Macabre, Stephen King singles out Oboler and his radio program Lights Out as the pinnacle of the genre. King says that

Oboler...utilized two of radio's great strengths: the first in the mind's innate obedience, its willingness to try to see whatever someone suggests it see, no matter how absurd; the second is the fact that fear and horror are blinding emotions that knock our adult pins from beneath us and leave us groping in the dark like children who cannot find the light switch. Radio is, of course, the 'blind' medium, and only Oboler used it so well or so completely.

Even though it is only a couple of minutes long, "A Day at the Dentist" is long enough for Oboler to use both of these tricks against the listener. Using sound and suggestion, Oboler first creates the most mundane of settings, a dentist's office, in the mind of the listener. Then, slowly, inexorably, this setting is turned into a theater of pain and horror.

Another strength of Oboler's work in general and "A Day at the Dentist" in particular, is that it forces the listener to consider a few important facets for him/herself. First off, what is it that Fred Houseman did to the dentist's wife, Mary, and what about it was "worth slobbering over?" Second off, where did the dentist apply his drill? Oboler does not offer any concrete answers to those questions. The mind of the listener, however, comes up with quite a few interesting possibilities, but mileage may vary depending on how well he or she understands ol' Freddie's trangressions. As Stephen King says in Danse Macabre,

My first thought was that the dentist had almost surely used the drill on one of Houseman's temples, murdering him with a little impromptu brain surgery.

But later, as I grew up and grew into a better comprehension of just what the nature of Houseman's crime had been, another possibility began to suggest itself. An even nastier one.

Hmmm...what could that be, I wonder? Why not listen for yourself and make up your own mind...