Appreciations: Ray Bradbury’s Tale of Irish Halloween Terror, ‘Banshee’

“It was one of those nights, crossing Ireland, motoring through the sleeping towns from Dublin, where you came upon mist and encountered fog that blew away in rain to become a blowing silence. All the country was still and cold and waiting. It was a night for strange encounters at empty crossroads with great filaments of ghost spiderweb and no spider in a hundred miles. Gates creaked far across meadows, where windows rattled with brittle moonlight.

“It was, as they said, banshee weather. I sensed, I knew this as my taxi hummed through a final gate and I arrived at Courtown House, so far from Dublin that if it died in the night, no one would know.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), “Banshee,” originally published in Gallery, September 1984 issue, reprinted in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003)

I suspect that my readers will want to explore the rest of this story, based simply on this ominous opening by Ray Bradbury. But I came to the tale by a different route: from watching a few years ago a nearly 40-year-old adaptation on the cable TV series Ray Bradbury Theater.

As I noted in this blog post from August 2020, it struck me that the plot of the story—a meeting over a potential project between a meek screenwriter and a veteran Hollywood director—reenacted, in a fictional setting, the rocky collaboration between Bradbury and Hollywood legend John Huston over the 1956 adventure movie Moby-Dick. 

While preparing a recent talk on Huston, his daughter Anjelica and father Walter, I was struck anew by how this tale of Hibernian horror provided unexpected insights into his complex personality.

Bradbury came from America in 1953 to meet with Huston—first in London, then Dublin, and finally the Georgian manor outside the Irish capital that the director was renting.

Late in life, Huston complained that his reputation for sadistic dealings with film personnel stemmed from a single figure: Freud leading man Montgomery Clift, who, in this telling, had presumed on his host’s tolerance by engaging in a late-night encounter with another male guest at his Irish home.

Huston was gilding the lily, however. At least two other people who worked with him accused him of the same misbehavior, albeit under different circumstances.

Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Edna O’Brien declined to speak to Huston biographer Jeffrey Meyers in significant detail about their work adapting A.E. Ellis’ novel The Rack. 

But a few years later, in her 2014 memoir Country Girl, she was more open, accusing Huston of insulting her screenplay as “half-baked rubbish” after praising it earlier in their discussions. Following a crying fit, she blurted out to Anjelica Huston that her father was “a terrible man, a cruel, dangerous man,” according to the actress’s A Story Lately Told.

O’Brien’s anger was so pronounced that she felt the need to vent twice in print. 

The first time was expressed more obliquely, in the title story of her 1990 collection Lantern Slides. Alluding several times to James Joyce’s novella “The Dead,” which Huston adapted into his final feature film, O’Brien depicted him as a dinner party latecomer called “Reggie,” “obviously a man of note” with “something of the quality of a panther.” 

For all his charm and attractiveness there is something ruthless about him, conveyed nowhere more devastatingly than when the female protagonist, “Miss Lawless,” discovers that he has been “chasing young girls, his wife hardly cold in the grave.”

That same callousness towards ex-lovers and prospective new ones becomes the principal count in Bradbury’s indictment of “John Hudson.” The author hinted far more bluntly than O’Brien had about the source of the character. 

Not only do the transparently “fictional” and real-life characters have similar-sounding surnames, but each is working on a film where the hero is “plowing the sea,” with wife and children off in a foreign land during the screenwriter’s visit. Even the locale of the meeting, “Courtown,” is the name of Huston’s home at the time.

The story is not merely “autofiction”—a genre in which the author and the protagonist are deeply similar but not identical—but more like an autofictional revenge story.

Bradbury, still smarting three decades later over Huston’s condescension and practical jokes at his expense, gave the director’s fictional counterpart a grisly end delivered, appropriately enough, by a ghost of one of the many women he seduced and dumped. 

(A “banshee,” for those unfamiliar with the term, is, according to Irish folklore, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death.)

Ray Bradbury Theater lasted six seasons; this adaptation was the season one finale, indicating how close the author felt to this material.

Ironically, the TV version of “Banshee” starred Peter O’Toole, who had visited Huston’s estate when they both resided in Ireland’s County Galway. 

I’m not sure if Huston even heard about the episode in the year and a half between its airing and his death; his emphysema had grown so bad that he needed to be connected to an oxygen tank, so he might have been beyond caring about his portrayal by then. 

In contrast, Bradbury continued to care very much. Like O’Brien, his disenchantment with his former cinematic hero remained so intense that he needed to exorcise it a second time.

The title of his 1992 novel, Green Shadows, White Whale, echoes another roman a clef about a thirtysomething screenwriter’s creative tension with a director closely modeled on Huston, White Hunter, Black Heart.

(Jennifer Dale, pictured here, played the troubled, wailing supernatural spirit in "Banshee," while Charles Martin Smith was Bradbury's alter ego, the young, much-put-upon screenwriter Doug.)

Photo of the Day: All-Out for Halloween, in a Big Way

Over the last 30 to 40 years, Halloween decorations have increasingly filled the lawns where I live in Northern New Jersey. It’s been a way for baby boomers Gen Xers (and, I guess now, Millennials and Gen Z) to relive their childhoods, and on a scale that their budget-conscious ancestors, after being raised during the Great Depression, would never have dreamed of embracing.

Recently I took this photo several miles from my home. What you see here is only half of all of the figures on the lawn and front porch of this suburban house.

Nor does this photo convey the sounds coming from this ghoulish assembly. Just passing on  the street—not even stepping on the lawn—is enough to elicit the witch on the right-hand side, for instance, to cackle, “Lost your way? Don’t be afraid—I’ll show you! Heee-heee-haaa-haaa!”

This year, Halloween splurging on decorations, masks, makeup, costumes, and candy has continued, despite the threat of tariffs. According to the National Retail Federation, Halloween spending is expected to reach $13.1 billion this year, breaking its prior record of $12.2 billion.

Omar Villafranca’s CBS News report from a month ago indicates that consumers are hitting discount stores and merchants are absorbing as many of the tariff costs (5% to 19% on costumes manufactured overseas) as possible, but there’s only so much they can do. A fog machine sold by a Fort Worth merchant mentioned in the article, for instance, sold for $58 last year but $74 now.

And chocolate candy? The price of the cocoa used for this has more than doubled since the beginning of 2024, a casualty of changing weather patterns (heavy rains followed by El Nino-induced droughts leading to black pod disease and crop rot, according to a USA Today report earlier this month by Betty Lin-Fisher and Carlie Procell).

Quote of the Day (Washington Irving, on Ichabod Crane)

“The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.” — American fiction writer, biographer and diplomat Washington Irving (1783-1859), “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, edited by Charles Neider (1975)

The image accompanying this post shows Will Rogers as Ichabod Crane and Lois Meredith as Katrina Van Tassel, in the 1922 silent film The Headless Horseman.

At five feet 11 inches, Rogers was not the beanpole imagined by Irving. But the lovable humorist was already well launched on a career that would make him one of Hollywood’s most highly paid stars before dying in a plane crash in 1935, so that made him a box-office draw.

Photo of the Day: Weehawken Home Halloween Décor

This past Saturday, while taking a local bus into New York, I took the image accompanying this post. Though this house is located in Weehawken, NJ, I suspect that similar sights could have been seen throughout the state these last several weeks—and, indeed, throughout the nation.

Photo of the Day: Halloween Décor, Downtown Englewood, NJ

I took the photo accompanying this post last week. This bit of seasonal decoration was erected outside an eatery on Palisades Avenue, the shopping district of my hometown, Englewood, NJ. 

Tomorrow, I am betting, parents will be escorting youngsters up and down the avenue, maybe even past this point. Hopefully, the little ones won’t be too scared by what they see.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Office,’ With a Problem Posed Often This Time of Year)

Stanley Hudson [played by Leslie David Baker]: “How many freakin' vampires am I supposed to care about these days?”—The Office, Season 7, Episode 6, “Costume Contest,” original air date Oct. 28, 2010, teleplay by Justin Spitzer, directed by Dean Holland

Halloween Horror Treat: Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Thrawn Janet’

“The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon on 1st Peter, v. and 8th, 'The devil as a roaring lion,' on the Sunday after every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened into fits, and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day, full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself, where it stood by the water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish hilltops rising towards the sky, had begun, at a very early period of Mr. Soulis's ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued themselves upon their prudence; and guidmen sitting at the clachan alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by that uncanny neighbourhood. There was one spot, to be more particular, which was regarded with especial awe. The manse stood between the high road and the water of Dule, with a gable to each; its back was towards the kirk-town of Balweary, nearly half a mile away; in front of it, a bare garden, hedged with thorn, occupied the land between the river and the road. The house was two stories high, with two large rooms on each. It opened not directly on the garden, but on a causewayed path, or passage, giving on the road on the one hand, and closed on the other by the tall willows and elders that bordered on the stream. And it was this strip of causeway that enjoyed among the young parishioners of Balweary so infamous a reputation. The minister walked there often after dark, sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers; and when he was from home, and the manse door was locked, the more daring schoolboys ventured, with beating hearts, to 'follow my leader' across that legendary spot.”—Scottish fiction writer, poet, essayist, and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), “Thrawn Janet,” in The Complete Short Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Charles Neider (1969)

Some readers are likely to have encountered Robert Louis Stevenson in their childhood, as a poet. Far more people will experience him secondhand, through the many Hollywood adaptations over the years of his adventure novels like Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae.

But I was delighted to find, in adulthood, that he was also a master of short fiction, especially in the horror genre. I blogged previously on “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “The Body Snatcher.” Equally remarkable in its way is a story I discovered only recently, “Thrawn Janet.”

The quote leading off this post also begins Stevenson’s tale. In its tense sense of atmosphere, it is as powerfully foreboding as anything to be found in the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

It is also, in a sense, a trick—written, unlike the rest of the story, written in conventional English. But the atmosphere of evil is so densely concentrated that readers are dying to know what will occur next.

For the majority of readers unfamiliar with Scottish dialect, much of the ensuing tale requires patient, intense concentration. Some translations exist, but I read it slowly—an experience that reminded me of encountering Canterbury Tales in Chaucer’s original Middle English. But dispensing with a translation can be done and is worth the effort.

The unfamiliar verbiage in this short story starts with the first word of the title, a strong but necessary hint about the nature of this tale. “Thrawn” is Scottish for “twisted,” indicating the sinister force in this story.

Just as Stevenson produces a change in narrative direction after the opening, he also effects a change—a “twist,” if you will—in characterization and voice.

The Rev. Soulis, who sounds initially like a Scottish fire-and-brimstone counterpart to one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan divines, was, we learn shortly, a rationalist of Enlightenment bent in his younger days, disbelieving the belief of his congregants that the woman he wants to hire as his housekeeper, Janet, could be a witch.

Horror is about altered mental states after an encounter with the inexplicable. By this standard, the horror of “Thrawn Janet” lies less in Satanic possession of Janet than in the haunted, demon-obsessed minister that Rev. Soulis becomes through his encounter with her.

The image accompanying this post, illustrating Stevenson’s story, is an 1899 etching by the Scottish painter and printmaker William Strang (1859-1921). 

Quote of the Day (Ray Bradbury, on Halloween)

“The wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows' Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked.” —American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), The Halloween Tree (1972)

Halloween Horror Appreciation: ‘I Am Legend,’ by Richard Matheson

I Am Legend was, of course, not the first vampire novel, nor even the first popular entertainment revolving around those other undead creatures, the zombies.

But the publication of the novel by Richard Matheson in 1954 catalyzed fears of an apocalypse gathering force in that early nuclear period. It told readers they were right to be afraid, because monsters were right outside their door. 

The premise of I Am Legend is fiendishly clever: the last man on Earth holding out against vampiredom. But the source of the horror is not a Dracula-like single powerful figure, but a horde of them, as much victims themselves as victimizers. Bacteria spread in the fallout of a cataclysmic war has led to a plague, and, consequently, a need for blood. 

It’s possible, then, to read this as a dystopian horror tale, as if George Orwell had written a horror tale. Like Orwell’s Winston Smith, Matheson’s Robert Neville becomes a rebel against the established order; and, feeling terribly alone, he latches onto someone who is seemingly like himself, a secret sharer—as Smith did to Julia and O’Brien in 1984. 

Even while it brought apocalyptic themes to vampire fiction, Matheson’s creatures bear more than a little resemblance to the zombies that populate George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead as well as the current TV series The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead. He is, then, a huge part of the American cultural landscape, even if many viewers are unfamiliar with his name.

Though set in the mid-to-late 1970s, roughly 20 to 25 years after its composition, the novel alludes to the by-now-distant American past. One of the avenues named here is “Cimarron Street,” as if Southern California is reverting to its Wild West origins—one that is, literally in this case, survival of the fittest.

Matheson masterfully sets the scene in the first half of the book, revealing Neville’s all-too-necessary self-sufficiency (he makes stakes and boards up his house every night, but must take extra care with his teeth, as there are no more dentists) and loneliness (he not only mourns the death of his wife and daughter, but has taken to drink to blot out the memory of killing his wife to keep her from turning into one of the undead). Likewise, Matheson sympathetically depicts Neville’s attempt to befriend and save a stray dog. 

However, the novel weakens when Neville encounters a female for the first time in three years. I suppose that loneliness and the physical need for a woman are enough to make him put aside his normal suspicions, but a reader can guess where this is leading in no time. (I found it in interesting that this woman, Ruth, bears the same name as Matheson’s wife!) 

Moreover, Neville’s attempt to explain the scientific sources of the horror besieging him inevitably slow down the narrative, even as it thrusts horror fiction in a new direction.

Still, Matheson’s style is lean and athletic without being schlocky, and he thinks through how the quotidian nature of human life is thoroughly upended by these apocalyptic events. And in Neville, he has created an all-too-human character—not a superhero, nor even a scientist, but an ordinary man afflicted with anguish and remorse even as he comes face to face with the existential nature of the horror that confronts him daily (“How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough”).

One of the novel’s late, indelible scenes finds Neville in a library, alone, reading up on the biological disaster that gave rise to the howling beasts who constantly scream for his blood. Matheson pays tribute here to literature, the ultimate—and precarious—zenith of civilization: 

“He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.”

Few greater tributes to his work were offered than by Stephen King, who cited him as the great influence on his own work. That tip of the hat is especially noteworthy when one considers that Matheson (who died in 2013) was part of a celebrated group of midcentury fiction and screenwriters who made a wide impact on horror and science fiction, including Robert Bloch (Psycho), Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, and Harlan Ellison.

It was a golden age made possible by two divergent but welcoming media—pulp magazines and network TV—and Matheson made his mark with sharp-eyed observations on the sterility of midcentury American culture and the fragility of human life in the atomic age, through teleplays for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Night Stalker, and Steven Spielberg’s 1971 TV movie thriller, Duel, as well as short stories such as “The Creeping Terror,” a biting satire on the spread of the culture of his state, California, around the country. 

Originally, I bought I Am Legend over a decade ago, in anticipation of the Will Smith adaptation about to be released. Partly because of poor reviews, I never got around to seeing the movie, nor the prior version of the novel, The Last Man on Earth, released in 1971. 

Perhaps it’s just as well: for all his own skill in writing for the large and small screen, Matheson allowed readers like me, through the magic of his own words rather than images, to create horror in their own imaginations.

Tweet of the Day (‘Two Sapphires Blu,’ on ‘That Magical Time of Year’)

“Ah yes! It's that magical time of year when the cobwebs in my house suddenly become decorative.”—Blue (@TwoSapphiresBlu), tweet of Oct. 3, 2016

Joke of the Day (Jimmy Kimmel, on Halloween and Lady Gaga)

“I wonder if Halloween is the one day of the year Lady Gaga wears sensible slacks.”— Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Oct. 31, 2011

Is that what she wears on Halloween?