It’s Halloween Eve, dear reader!  Which fills my heart with joy.  Had to kick on the heater last night, there’s rain in the forecast, and the nights are getting significantly longer than the days.  Tomorrow we get to get juiced and dress like dicks and menace the gentry for candy.  Then Sunday night we again abandon the foolish absurdity of Daylight Saving Time and return to Actual Time.  And I’ll have plenty to say about that when it happens.  I’m just glad it’s happening.  All of this to say that for a Halloween Eve, today was a fine day.

But it was a tad dull.  It lacked excitement.  It was certainly no 1938.

On Halloween Eve (October 30), 1938, Orson Welles scared the living shit out of the American public with his infamous radio broadcast.  Picture the scene: a nation teetering on the brink of war and uncertainty, suddenly pummeled into hysteria by Welles as he unleashed Martians upon the unsuspecting masses.

This was no ordinary Halloween prank, dear reader.  This was a full-scale assault on the fragile psyche of the American public, plunging them into the delicious pit of paranoia.  Broadcasting from the Mercury Theater on the Air, Welles and his band of mischief-makers adapted H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” into a radio play that would transcend entertainment and catapult itself into the realm of mass psychological experiment.

Seriously, picture it: families gathered around their radios, the dim glow of the tubes casting eerie shadows on the walls, when suddenly: news bulletins of Martian invasions!  Alien machines!  Death rays incinerating helpless New Jersey residents!  The more gullible folk sprinted for the hills, convinced that the apocalypse was happening.  Listeners fled their homes, the highways clogged with panic-stricken masses, and the telephone lines blew up with people calling each other, trying to figure out what was happening.

This was the birth of modern-media sensationalism, a flashpoint where fiction blurred into perceived reality.  Welles, ever the anarchist, shattered the comfortable cocoon of pre-war America, and it was amazing.

So tonight we drink to Orson Welles, the man who turned a lazy Sunday afternoon into a nightmarish ride through the cosmos.  His broadcast remains a testament to the power of storytelling, and a cautionary tale of the media’s impact on a gullible and uncritical public.  Perhaps the latter lesson is the one that contemporary Americans would do well to heed.

N.P.: “Thunder Cash ’69” – Cody Parks and the Dirty South