Have you watched Bride of Frankenstein (1935) more times than you can remember? I have. It's a wonderful film, an acknowledged classic which many people over the years have probably skipped on account of the title. All silver and shadow, and civilized horrors graced with wit.
I've always felt the pull of the uncanny. A teenage fling with a Ouija board disconcerted my favorite teacher, who apparently had thought I had more sense. About the same time, I took a rapt interest in strange phenomena that "could only be" extraterrestrial spacecraft and acquainted myself with some of the literature on that subject. One or two of the other kids were all-out UFO buffs who talked as though they had special knowledge of alien technology, but I viewed them as poseurs.
Later came a more respectable curiosity about extrasensory perception. In remembrance of the days when I pursued the uncanny outside of books and movies, I've kept a pack of ESP cards developed in the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University. I met J. B. and Louisa Rhine themselves and interviewed them for radio as professionally as can be expected when the interviewer is star-struck.
One summer evening, three young men set out to investigate the paranormal phenomenon of a light that was said to appear over a certain remote stretch of railroad track, the scene of a nineteenth-century train wreck. It did appear. Some light did, at any rate. However, as it seemed to be very far off, and as the only approach was along the dark track with its plague of freight trains, we wrapped up our investigation at the crossing and went home. Our empirical evidence was compromised by the fact that although the pinpoint of light showed up in photographs, nothing else did. Still, I was satisfied that the fun we'd had on that lark was all that anyone could have had.
Now I dimly perceived what I had always felt, that the value of fantastic notions lay in the fun to be had with them. As I lost the capacity for half-belief in the supernatural, I laid hold of something I need never part with: a taste for it. The chill darkness of late October in North America would be the same without the tradition of Halloween, but the tradition fills it with pleasures made possible first by wide-eyed belief, then by furtive half-belief, and at last by the luxurious suspension of disbelief. With that, the Halloween aesthetic carries everything before it.
The atmosphere of Bride of Frankenstein is consistent with the Halloween aesthetic, though it has nothing to do with the celebration. Bram Stoker's novel Dracula partakes of that aesthetic in certain details, but there's something else that lifts it above its defects and higher, to the threshold of literature: the corruption of reality. For example, the diurnal rhythms that lull us in God-governed nature take on alarming significance under the profane influence of the vampire. Then, as Stoker's protagonists make a study of those rhythms and of other unnatural laws governing the vampire's actions, they build up a dark science replete with a typed compilation of notes and transcribed voice memos (using the actual technology of the 1890s) to guide them in destroying him. They learn the secrets of dusk and dawn and the time just before dawn when the vampire is in mental communication with his helpless servant; and they lay a plan to use that knowledge against him. They learn to estimate the time when they're safe and to foresee the time when they must act at the risk of their lives and souls. Stoker has them set the story down by turns in their own words. This peripatetic chronicle — water-lapped and sun-streaked, now calm and now urgent, about a little band of moderns coming to grips with a curse made flesh — is peculiarly hypnotic.
When fiction takes another step back from credulity without escaping it, we get the kind of supernatural fun I like best. A choice example is Dorothy Macardle's The Uninvited (originally Uneasy Freehold). Here, sophistication asserts itself outright.
While the rest danced a foxtrot I stood with her in the door of the greenhouse, telling her the stories of my friends. And, in the telling, what vital, gifted, dramatic individuals they became! And so they were; so were Pamela and I, myself: we were free, clever, friendly, and fortunate people, living changeful, progressive lives....
When strange things begin to happen, and psychology must stand as a barrier against superstition, we find that psychology is itself adrift.
She was obstinate: "I feel that there are spirits in the place, Roddy. I can't put up a case against you, but it is what I believe."
"Well, what I believe is that the place is saturated with passions and emotions, inexpungeable misery and despair, so that no sensitive person can be in it and not be overcome by hallucinations or depression or both."
The pleading of invisible forces just this side of spirits by the novel's voice of reason is not a lapse, but a shift. It marks the permissive intellectual setting in which we're invited to enjoy what we couldn't enjoy in a well-ordered one: a genuine ghost story. Macardle's supernatural fiction is of that genre in which abundantly literate people may speak of "the true medium" as opposed to the many charlatans, or adduce one paranormal claim in support of another with moves like "After all, it's known that...," and always be taken seriously.
A fictional world infused with erudite credulity is a happy place for a lark, I think. However, the reactions of society's gatekeepers to the 1944 film adaptation of Macardle's novel were decidedly mixed on that point. The film was well received as a whole. It's thoroughly civilized entertainment that builds suspense with things like a planchette séance. It gives us just a couple of brief looks (and even those against the director's preference for suggestion) at a nebulously ghostly face in the dark. Nevertheless, in 1944 it provoked questions about the advisability of treating ghosts as real in a basically serious film and of depicting one so convincingly to boot. Among the many critics who found the film genuinely scary was James Agee, who approvingly wrote, "I experienced thirty-five first-class jolts." Most viewers today would be hard pressed to feel anything so rough as a jolt, but the ghost effect was actually excised from the first British release.
Years later our children were exposed to The Uninvited, along with Astaire-Rogers musicals and other old movies, at an early age. They loved it, ghost and all. They were choosing it to re-watch almost before they had mastered the name of Edward Everett Horton (whom they also loved). Now, that's a puzzle. These children didn't bat an eye at things that had once struck sophisticated adults as frightful, but it can't have been due to changing times. After all, babies in every time and place are born into a culture-free personal world and proceed to acquire cultural tastes and tolerances from scratch. It's not as if our children could have become jaded in the modern womb; and they hadn't been immersed in harrowing sights since birth.
It seems that we find a thing shocking in entertainment because we've learned to expect certain circumscriptions, and then something violates them. Our reaction (and mine is intense) against shows of make-believe slaughter is not a reaction against violence, but against the jostling of our long-nurtured sensibilities. Certainly a realistic simulation of violence or pitiless cruelty can be horrifying in any case, but the premise of make-believe makes a crucial qualitative difference in the horror. Our children knew they were watching make-believe and watched it in a largely unconditioned state. A bit of ectoplasm didn't register above the "spooky fun" level on the make-believe scale of horror, though I'm sure it would have given them a nasty turn if they'd run into it on the way to the bathroom. Anyway, they didn't grow up to be callous members of society or disturbed personalities.
I must admit I fled the contemporary horror scene before the children were born, when the scales tipped from gothic to gory. Other moviegoers went on being conditioned, and before long I found that many didn't even get why the term horror was applied to the Universal classics of the 1930s, which I love for their eerie aesthetic and their immanent civility.
For me the silver and shadow. Place me in the company of people who know better than to believe in the supernatural but who come to believe all the same, perhaps led by some sort of professor who understands these matters nearly as well as the hobgoblins themselves. Lower the lights and raise the wind. Then send in the spirits. And, please, let it be fiction.
