Radio show: Fear you can hear

For Cheryl Cluff, some of the most frightening moments of her childhood were spent sitting in the back seat of her parents' car.

Her father was driving toward the family's vacation spot. Rain splashed along the road and on the car's windshield. Cluff wasn't looking out the window, but into her imagination as E.G. Marshall welcomed her to CBS Radio's "Mystery Theater."

The show's signature creaking door and deep, descending bass lines introduced the classic story of "The Monkey's Paw."

"All I had to do was hear something, and I could visualize what it looked like in my own way," Cluff said. "The imagination is so much more powerful when you're not being fed everything."

A cautionary tale about interfering with fate, the monkey's paw of the title granted three wishes to its owner. Mr. White, whose son served the British empire in India, first wishes for 200 pounds. When his son dies in a gruesome machinery accident, he receives that amount in insurance compensation. Wishing for his son's return to life at the behest of his wife, the couple hear a pounding on the door. Recalling how disfigured his son must be, White makes a third wish. The knocking ceases.

"You didn't have to see it to freak you out, and the fact that the knocking went away after his third wish was pretty mesmerizing stuff," Cluff said.

In the current era of blood-drenched horror such as the "Saw" series of films, where nothing is left to the

imagination and the human body endures all manner of assault and abuse, Cluff's sentiments might sound a bit quaint.

Along with other radio buffs, however, Cluff knows that sound can open up landscapes of thought and sensation unique to each person.

No less a figure than Orson Welles recognized its potential when he mixed convinced thousands that Martians were invading Earth during a 1938 Mercury Theatre radio broadcast. It was Welles' stealth mixture of radio theater with the tone of a news bulletin that did the trick.

"Thousands took it to be the real thing," said John Greene, general manager of KUER. "Sound is second only to smell as the most evocative sense of taking control of your thought processes, establishing a sense of place, or pulling you back to your past." "Fear you can hear." That was E.G. Marshall's catch phrase for CBS Radio's "Mystery Theatre," which aired from 1974 to 1982. Radio's spine-tingling tradition reaches back further to the medium's "golden era" during the 1930s, with programs such as "Inner Sanctum Mysteries," "The Mysterious Traveler," "The Whistler" and "The Adventures of Nero Wolfe."

For contemporary listeners, some of those programs have been preserved for posterity online in the form of downloadable files.

For Cluff, "The Monkey's Paw" and other radio shows helped propel her into a theater career. As co-founder and managing director of Plan-B Theatre, Cluff, 44, has overseen production for radio-hour productions, beginning in 1995 with an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Macbeth." In 2005, she oversaw production for Plan-B's "Radio Poe," and last year worked to present "Frankenstein," a live radio show. The run of "Radio Hour: Alice," which Cluff directed, concludes with live shows tonight and tomorrow.

While it's possible to scare yourself by reading a short story by Poe, for example, fright goes better with sound, Cluff says. And the trick for radio actors is fidelity to the role, without resorting to melodrama.

As every horror fan who's thrilled to the slashing violin's of Hitchcock's "Psycho" knows, music is also essential. Next time you're at a horror film, notice how many audience members plug their ears, but keep their eyes open.

"'Jaws' is the classic example," Cluff said. "Maybe the first time you heard that music you weren't sure what it meant, but it bumped your adrenaline. Then when you heard it again it really bumped up those emotions of dread -- and you really got scared."

Four years ago, Cluff visited an old-time radio site online and gave "The Monkey's Paw" another listen. Does the effect still hold?

"Yes, I got scared," she said. "I can't remember if I was freaked out by my lucky rabbit's paw [after first hearing it], but it definitely had an impact later in my life."

bfulton@sltrib.com