“Reading novels from the 19th century, there might be clanking suits of armor and cobwebs, but were invested a lot in describing the sound of a distant wolf, or the scream of someone, or the heartbeat in the ears, or the whisper - those kinds of things are really central.” You hear that,” says Richard Hand, author of Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America and professor of media practice at the University of East Anglia.
“The churning teeth and tongue - that’s really creepy. “I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck,” he writes. As Stoker illustrates a feasting vampire’s scarlet lips and bloody mouth, he engages the other senses. Look to Poe’s 1839 short story The Fall of the House of Usher, in which he describes an entombed woman’s reanimation within a cavernous castle by citing the “distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation” and “the grating of the iron hinges of her prison.” More than 50 years later, Bram Stoker found inspiration in Poe’s auditory descriptors, embedding them into his 1897 novel Dracula. Sounds permeated his gothic storytelling - filled with black cats screaming and hearts beating - and preyed upon readers with their detailed and chilling force. Throughout the last decade of his life, his poetry and prose bristled with words and phrasing so colorful they could practically be heard.
Long before radio became mainstream entertainment, Edgar Allen Poe was already writing for the airwaves.
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