Bradbury Speaks by Ray Bradbury

Author:Ray Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

THE HUNCHBACK, THE PHANTOM, THE MUMMY, AND ME (UNDATED)

My favorite horror films have haunted my entire life. They have inhabited me so that when I wrote A Graveyard for Lunatics some years ago, The Hunchback, the Phantom, and Kong dominated the novel.

Why have these films lived on in me for seventy-seven years?

Obviously because they are stories about love. In some cases unrequited love: The Hunchback and The Phantom. And in the case of the Mummy, he comes to life seeking his dead Egyptian princess. With King Kong it’s in the finale, when the character called Carl Denham says, “Oh, no, it was Beauty killed the Beast.” So love is central. Consider the Bride of Frankenstein’s search for love and the terror that ends the search. Two other fine examples of a special unrequited love are The Man Who Could Work Miracles and The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. The metaphor in each is simple: The love of power, which as could easily be predicted, didn’t love back but only corrupted.

When I was nineteen, selling newspapers on the street corner, with the very first money I made, I went to a recording studio in Hollywood and there ranted and raved one afternoon, playing out the roles of The Invisible Man, as done by the superb Claude Rains, and the hero of The Man Who Could Work Miracles, played by Roland Young. Both plays have to do with a kind of lunacy that occurs when men become tired of tolerating humanity and the universe. There’s a hidden strain of this in most men that never comes out, but which is revealed to fine effect in these two pictures.

The second great truth about these films and later similar films is that they are pure metaphor. Simply, they declare a metaphor and dramatize it without complication. When a metaphor is acted out, it’s easy to recall it in tranquillity outside the theater.

When I saw the Hunchback for the first time, I was three. It convinced me that there was something wrong with me. I was crushed down when I left the theater with my mother. Fifteen years later, I saw the film at the Filmart Theater in Hollywood and told my friends I remembered everything about it from the age of three. They laughed; nobody could possibly remember all that. I replied, Well, there’s this scene and that scene and a third scene and a fourth and the finale goes like this! We went in to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and there were all the scenes that I remembered from 1923. Metaphor had done its work!

The problem with our latest horror films is that they think if one metaphor is good, then two dozen are superb.

The current version of The Mummy is a dumb example. If the original Mummy scared you with less as more, why not load up on bodies to prickle your spine? So many mummies hurl themselves at you, gibbering, that you laugh and cry, What? Am I

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