The Ray Bradbury Theater: The Screaming Woman (1986).

If there was any downside to growing up as an 80s kid, then it would have to be the fact that you were living in a pre-Internet, analog era.  Granted, that's not a bad thing in and of itself.  It did mean, however, that you couldn't just log on like you do now, enter the name of your favorite movies, TV shows, or sometimes even the very commercials you grew up with, and then binge watch to your heart's content.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that the closest thing to a downside about having an 80s childhood is that you could never experience all of it at once.  There was always the risk that you might miss out on something important.  Maybe you were like me, and were so addicted to the cartoons airing on the Disney Channel that you didn't bother to realize you could also catch airings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Gremlins as well once Mickey, Donald, and Goofy had taken their final curtain calls for the day.  Or maybe you're thinking is so damned one-track because you're still just a kid that you never even realize that HBO might have been showing a George Lucas produced animated fantasy called Twice Upon a Time, and so you miss out on an obscure yet valuable gem.  These were the risks for 80s kids.  The good news on my side of the equation is that I wasn't that dense.  Sometimes I'd be smart enough to think, "You know, that Tom Hanks Big movie sounds like it could be a lot of fun.  Maybe I'll keep an eye out for whenever its on".

Still, even with these occasional moments of insight thrown into the mix, the sad fact remains that while most of us 80s kids were blessed with what I can only describe now as a resurgence of the Romantic Movement in the Arts , it still meant none of us had the kind of childhood were you were able to capture it all.  Even today, 80s media presents one of the richest cornucopias in terms of both viewing and reading material outside of the Golden Age of Hollywood.  It's an entertainment catalogue whose plethora is so vast that it makes perfect sense that a lot of its best offerings were unrecognized on their first initial run.  So that a lot of us are just now rediscovering what we missed out on when we were young.  That's sort of how it's been for me when it comes to the treasures offered by The Ray Bradbury Theater.  It's the kind of TV show that can only exist as the product of another time and era in the thinking of corporate media.  This was an era when everything was less commodified.  The original Hollywood studio system had come to an end, and the net result was a brief moment when artists kind of had full control of the car keys.  It meant they could assemble their little red wagons and not be afraid to install as many types of story engines as their Imagination could allow.  This applied to the realm of television as mush as it did to the now fading institution known as the movie theater.

It meant you were in for a treat if you were a kid in the 80s.  Because a lot of the big networks now found themselves sort of having to take risks on high concept Fantasy and Sci-Fi ideas.  Some of them were pretty obvious, like the staples we've all come to know and love such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Inspector Gadget.  Others, however, took a more daring approach to the kind of stories they could tell.  This was the case with the series that author Ray Bradbury wound up producing for HBO.  By then the noted Sci-Fi scribe was already something of a giant in the industry.  The kind of name with the sort of clout that no longer exists in the strictest sense of the term.  If Ray were still alive, odds are even he could never have managed to pitch a series which consisted of little more than adaptations of his most famous short stories and get it greenlit today.  It's also sort of an open question in my mind whether Hollywood in its contemporary form would be capable of doing his work justice.  As a character in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard once observed, "It's the pictures that got small".  That seems to apply to our ability to try and recapture all the worlds and characters we fell in love with so long ago back when we were kids.  Everybody seems to have had bigger imaginations in the 1980s.

It's in part because of this, along with the factor of the breakout success of films like Jaws, Star Wars, and E.T. that Ray was in a position where the idea for a TV show made up of nothing but his own words and characters was able to get that much coveted greenlight.  It didn't hurt his chances that HBO was also still just a fledgling network at the time, ready and thankfully more than willing to take chances on the kind of material it would broadcast in order to let itself stand out from what was then a very large and generous yet competitive pack.  It was an era when the Nielson Ratings ruled the roost.  Anyone who could get even a sizeable enough chunk of eyes glued to sets showcasing the network's products would guarantee it at least a good enough spot to begin with in the Ratings charts.  Hence the willingness of HBO to take chances with stuff like Lucas's almost forgotten animated feature, or Ray Bradbury's own collection of short stories.  The final results turned out to be pretty good, by and large.  At the same time, this was one of those programs that was ostensibly a part of my childhood  that I just never got around to seeing when it first aired.  I've been playing catch-up for a while now.

In that sense, it's like being given a second chance to recapture those aspect of your childhood that you may have missed the first time around.  When it comes to reviewing a show like this there's a lot of good offerings to be had.  Some of the stuff on that old anthology can surprise you with the level of their sophistication.  I think it's best to start out by keeping things simple, however, and focus for now on one of the more easily read episodes to feature on the program.  It's a nice little little bit of childhood thrills and chills, and it goes by the title of The Screaming Woman.

The Story.    

If I'm being honest, I'm lucky to have a daughter like Heather (Drew Barrymore).  She's all I could have hoped for, and yet the best part is how she's let her mind develop since I was able to just hold her in my hands.  Perhaps the greatest way she's been a blessing to Marguerite (Janet Laine-Green) and myself (Roger Dunn) is just this.  She took to the written word from an early age like a pro.  Perhaps its possible that some folks every now and then are just born as natural readers.  The kind of person for whom a good book is the same as a duck taking to water.  There's plenty of reasons to count that as a blessing to my way of thinking.  Highest on that list is pretty simple when you get down to it.  Book readers tend to grow up smart, more often than not.  The good news on our front as parents is that seems to be the direction Heather is headed for.  I'm not real sure how possible it is to convey for a dad like me.  I was never that smart to begin with, and knowing that my little girl is busy making more of a future for herself can take a load of stress off.  If there are any complaints to be had with the kiddo, then it's the fact she's got a big imagination.

Can't say I'm all too surprised, for what it's worth.  I guess you could say it's one of those things that just comes with the territory.  If reading a lot can lead to an expansion of the mind's powers, then it makes sense that also includes the ability to imagine your way around all sorts of corners of life that you didn't even know were there.  Sometimes our little girl will come up to us at the breakfast table and regale us with what she's read the day or night before.  Sometimes its the kind of real life information that's so fascinating you can't believe they never taught it in school.  On other occasions it's to ask us about help with a passage in a story she might be having trouble with.  Then of course, there's the age-old question of who do Margie and I think would win in a speed race, Superman or the Flash?  You know what, perhaps I should correct myself here a minute.  The fact that Heather's got an outsized imagination isn't really the problem, in and of itself.  It's just that this means our daughter sometimes has a too-convenient outlet for whenever she's in a bratty frame of mind.  H is a sweet girl, any of the other kids in the neighborhood can testify to that, especially her best friend Morgan from a block or two over.  He seems to like her enough to the point where he's willing to let her call him by a nickname.

Heather just likes to call him "Dippy" (Ian Heath) for some reason.  He's a lot less keen on reading than she is, being more content to plop himself in front of the Idiot Box and a glare away to his heart's content.  It's not the healthiest lifestyle out there, and he's already got he makings of a gut.  I suppose you could say its good news for the boy that Heather and him are such good friends.  Anyway, the original point I was trying to make is that H is a growing girl with an imagination big enough to fill whole galaxies in.  So of course that means whenever she's in a mischievous frame of mind, the most natural course of action for her to take is the kind that'll end her up in some sort of trouble sooner or later.  It drives Margie half up the walls sometimes, and if she's not careful, Heather's libel to drive me half sick with worry for her safety.  The one thing the wife and I are both thankful for is that our daughter has never had any close calls, so far.  I've heard she's been caught lounging around constructions sites on one or two occasions.  To her credit, she's never been near any of the dangerous equipment, and she's always come home from whatever exploits get into her mind unscathed.  Aside from that, a lot of her wanderings fit neatly into the kind rough and tumble hijinks of childhood.

This is something else that bothers Marguerite, though here I've got to admit I tend to be a lot more relaxed about it.  After all, like I point out to the wife, it's just the kind of stuff me and my own peers got up to when we were young, and we all turned out fine.  The worst any of us ever got out of that was the usual round of scraped knuckles and knees.  There's about as much harm in that as, well, all the rituals of a childhood summer.  And I know for a fact that's something I can't describe right there.  It's either a life experience you've known at first hand, or not at all.  The best layout I can give you of that long gone terrain is to say that it teaches you about all the undiscovered countries that life has tucked away within its folds.  Knowing that my own kid is busy exploring all those same hidden avenues for herself leaves me perhaps more than just a little proud of her.  The one thing that tends to get under Margie's skin on that score is the type of reading material Heather's gotten into recently.  If I'm being honest, I don't quite see what there is to get upset about.  When I was her age those old Tales from the Crypt comics were like a right of passage.  You might say it taught me that reading was fun.

I think that's the most important lesson Heather is learning for herself right now.  She's discovered the joy of reading, if that makes any sense.  Apologies if that sounded like the dullest slogan for a school book fair that you've ever heard.  I suppose it really is impossible to explain what it means to be able to enter the world of the written word.  All I can say is that it's a constant recurring truth that H has discovered for herself.  Her overactive imagination seems to be the thanks we're getting for it, by and large, and yet it's always easy to tell from the look in her eyes that she's always been grateful to us both for it.  What's got me and my wife troubled about Heather just now is the latest bit of fancy the kid's got in her head.  Before today, the kind of tall tales she liked to spin out of whole cloth for us is explaining that the reason she was late coming home from school was because she discovered an Native American arrow head buried on vacant lot somewhere, when the truth was she just wanted to go off and paly with her friends.  Or else the reason she was home late from a chore as simple as fetching ice cream that had almost melted was because she was busy fighting off a vicious zombie biker gang when in truth she wanted to time to herself so she could finish reading her copy of the latest EC Comics issue.

This new bit of make-believe has a different tone to it, however.  Heather claims she was out exploring her way through the fields and pastureland owned by Old Man Kelly (Ken James) when she heard what sounded like cries for help.  Only trouble was there was no one else for miles around in sight.  I mean that area is wooded, yet it's not an American jungle like the Pacific Northwest.  You can still see someone if they're within earshot, especially if they're in some kind of distress.  Even a mile out the sound of your voice should be able to carry pretty well across the distance to anyone that far away.  H maintains that this voice at first was just a few feet away, though it sounded a bit muffled, like someone was trying to speak through wet cloth.  Then, as she approached the direction the voice came from, Heather discovered to her own amazement and growing horror that the noise was coming from right underneath her feet.  She claims there's a woman buried alive somewhere under the ground of Mr. Kelly's property.  Now, I'll admit, it's easy enough to see where H got such an idea from.  That kind of thing happens all the time in the sort of yarns our old friend the Crypt-Keeper liked to showcase for our impressionable young minds.  The thing is, Heather insists on acting like it's not an elaborate game.

She maintains that she is telling us both nothing but the truth.  This happened just this morning.  It's almost nightfall now, and earlier this afternoon Heather's little fancy took a turn that's...well it's sort of got me worried is all.  H tells me she knows the identity of the buried screaming woman.  It's the wife (Mary Ann Coles) of Ralph Nesbitt (Alan Scarfe), or at least that's what she claims.  It's the specific nature of her claims that's got me concerned, is all.  I knew the girl Heather is talking about, you see.  In fact, I suppose you could say before Marguerite entered my life we were something of a high school item.  Well, I mean, you know how it is, right?  You're going along in the same lane you've always run in, and then just like that, a pretty face catches your eye.  I can't think of a single person for whom that didn't happen to back in my day.  Sometimes you get lucky and find Mrs. Right.  In my case, it was the familiar routine of the one that got away.  The good news in our case was that it was a very amicable, even logical parting of ways.  For Helen and me it turned out to be a riff on the old narrative.  We were the type of summer lovers whose brief encounter managed to be a benefit for both of us, while at the same time we were each wise enough to how far to go without causing complications for each other.

We met first as casual, then parted later as close friends, if you take my meaning.  To tell you the truth, it came as a welcome relief to us both when we realized that we just couldn't give each other what we were looking for.  We were able to have a love for each other, and I suppose in a sense those old affections still remain.  However, we could never could manage to generate the true kind of love that each of us was looking for.  Our intimate moments were all very real, yet we could never manage to discover in each other the actual type of affection that comes from finding your true soulmate.  That's got to be one of the rarest accomplishments out there, and in that sense Marguerite and I are the luckiest couple alive so far as I'm concerned.  Still, for a time, Helen Leary and I were "Intimate Friends".  We got together in order to find out if we were the right ones for each other, and when that proved to be not true, we still kept up seeing each other for a brief span of time.  Because we knew that while we could never be able to fulfill the titles of husband and wife together, we also realized that we'd been good for one another.  We'd been able to do a genuine service for to each other.  We were smart enough to realize that all our times together were good training for us both.  Apologies if this next bit sounds crude.

It's the truth, however, that we each found the right way to break ourselves in.  We did it together in such a way that we each got the best enjoyment out of our time together, while at the same time finding out all the ways in which we liked being together while also taking the upmost care to minimize the potential risks involved.  As a result, we taught each a lot about how to care for any potential future partners in a way that was able to leave our respect and hence whatever love we did have for each other intact.  Let me tell something dead serious now.  That is one of the hardest balancing acts to over achieve in this crazy plain of existence that we've chosen to call life (whatever that word is supposed to mean).  It's very rare for two opposites to meet as friends, come together as lovers (for however brief a time), and still be able to part as well loved friends.  And there, by Heaven, is one hell of a life lesson to learn as you grow up.  And boy I wonder just how many others in what used to be our situation have ever been smart enough to learn that.  Anyway, that's how it was for Helen and me, once, long ago.

For a brief time we each taught the other with any luck something about knowing what it means to treat someone that you care about right.  When we each knew the time had come to move on we did so with the kind of experiences that served us well later on.  At least I know it did for me.  Marguerite and I met up after college, and this time we were amazed to discover the spark was the real one.  It was true enough to give us Heather, at any rate.  That's got to count for something, don't you think.  Well, doesn't it?  Helen, meanwhile, met or hooked up with Al Nesbitt, and they've been together ever since.  Now my daughter comes along and tells me the girl I used to know when I was just a boy for all intents and purposes is the victim of a crime.  Not just any bad act, however.  If true, H's little tall tale paints a very grim picture of the girl I used to date in senior college.  It tells the story a girl who either learned a lot in her formative years, or else thought she did.  Yet whatever the case it wasn't enough to keep her from falling for the charms of the wrong sort of guy.  Then one day she snaps to her senses and realizes she's made one of the greatest mistakes of her life, somehow, and it's an open question of whether she even knew when it happened.  She was in a partnership without love, and she knew it and wanted out.

For whatever reason, Al Nesbitt had begun to sour on her, and while I can only make the wildest of guesses here, the nature of Heather's story paints the picture of the husband starting to feel the same way.  The difference in Al's case is that here's a guy with a much shorter temper, and one hell of a less than reasonable frame of mind if Heather is to be believed.  When Helen threatened to walk out on in him then and there something must have snapped in Al Nesbitt's mind as well, only this break left him in the kind of mood that turns a domestic situation dangerous, real fast.  He must have tried to grab Helen to keep her from leaving, she fought back, and Al started letting his fists settle the argument.  He knocks Helen senseless, and then, fearing he might have killed her, drags the woman I used to know as a friend and lover out to the woods that borders the Kelly farm.  There he buried the body and made a quick disappearing act.  The trick in the tale comes with the realization that he didn't kill Helen, however.  He merely stunned her.  And so Helen woke up surrounded by silence, Earth, and darkness.  The only sounds to be heard would by the faint sound of footsteps as strangers passed by above.  Supposing one of those footsteps belonged a little girl who likes books and horror comics? 

What then?  For starters, it would mean someone in this quiet little neighborhood of ours is a cold blooded killer.  The life of someone that I used to know and care about is in mortal danger.  There would be no telling how much time Helen Kramer (nee Nesbitt) had left before whatever oxygen she has left runs out.  Then her ex-husband will have really gotten away with murder.  It all sounds like something out a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, or the kind of yarn the Crypt Keeper would enjoy spinning from the pages of one of those old comics Heather always likes to keep tucked in the folds of her jacket pocket.  And so my little girl comes to me with the story of how one of our neighbors is a criminal and there's only so much time left before he might very well get away with it.  Well, after all, it is just a case of Heather's imagination running away with her.  There's no way that's all true, isn't it.  Well, isn't it?

Conclusion:  A Classic Gothic Fairy Tale.

I can never shake the fear that sooner or later there's going to come a moment when I'll mention the author's name in passing and no one in the group I'm with would have a clue who I'm talking about.  The good news right now is that still doesn't seem to be the case.  The life and, more importantly, the art of Raymond Douglas Bradbury seems to be more or less alive and well enough if the tracker on a site like Google Trends is to be believed.  With ratings in the 50 to near 80% range, his legacy still seems to be in good hands.  It's comforting to know, yet even great artists need a bit of a first introduction, however brief.  All Bradbury amounts to is just this hayseed nerd with a natural gift for tapping into the Imagination, who grew up in Waukegan, Illinois.  He was lucky enough to have a welcoming family made up of parents and relatives who were willing enough to indulge the future writer's imaginative streak by letting him read just about whatever he wanted.  Later on, the former Waukegan native would immortalize his own family as these quasi-mythical recreations within his own fictions.  Almost from the start, then, Bradbury was the product of the written word.  From the first, he was a natural reader.

Perhaps its neither too much of a surprise, nor an accident that the first Text to ever leave an impression on him was a children's anthology collection with the somehow fitting title of Once Upon a Time: A Book of Old-Time Fairy Tales, by Katharine Lee Bates.  If the author's own testimony is true, then the first writers to become a shaping influence on his Imagination were Charles Perrault, along with Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.  Considering the nature of today's story under review, it's probably best to keep the latter literary partnership in mind for when we get to exploring the heart of The Screaming Woman.  For now, let's just note a few more of the elements that went into the shaping of the artist's mind.  After Bates and the Grimm siblings, a bare catalogue of the author bylines on the books Ray poured through as a youngster reveals the usual gang of expected suspects.  It didn't take long for Bradbury to graduate from the world of fairy tales to what was known then as the "Scientifiction" of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.  There was also, of course, what I'd have to describe as the influence of the Pulp Tradition in American fiction.  This came in the form of the lad's exposure to characters like Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon, and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, in the pages of his city's local newspaper comic strip.  So far, it all sounds like what you'd expect of a guy who would go on to write Science Fiction.

The influence from books didn't end there, however.  In addition to the folklore of ancient myth, or the slam-bang action packed universe of the Pulp Magazine, Bradbury also seems to have been open to influences such as the French Romanticism of author's like Victor Hugo, in particular the latter's most famous novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Ray was inspired to pick up the Gallic writer's work after catching an adaptation of it in what turned out to be the first movie he ever saw.  It was a silent film version of Notre Dame, with former Man of a Thousand Faces Lon Chaney in the title role.  Such exposure seems to have awoken in the young artist's developing mind a taste for the elements of Classical Literature.  It wasn't long after reading Hugo that Bradbury went in search of any text that could supply the same kind of aesthetic response as the ones he got while reading about the exploits of Quasimodo and Esmerelda.  He found it soon enough within the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle.  When you put all these influences together, what you get is what I'll have to term a compilation mindset.  A mixed brew of an Imagination that comprises elements from Folklore, Popular Fiction, and what might be described as the Classical Literary Aesthetic.

The net result of all these influences is that it left Ray Bradbury with the kind of mental outlook that somehow wound up being ready as the one to ultimately become the key shaper of all the Fantastic modes of creative expression as we now know them.  What I'm about to say next will sound like either blasphemy or a welcome relief, however, I think that even more than writers like H.P. Lovecraft, the truth of the matter is that it was Bradbury who wound up placing a lot of the major defining stamps on all of the most famous Romantic genres as we know them to day.  In other words, it was all thanks to just this four-eyed, hayseed geek from Illinois that the formats of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror all take on all the trapping that we are familiar with now.  This is not to deny the influence of other shapers like J.R.R. Tolkien (if you want to get technical about it, the English teacher from Oxford beat his fellow Midwest fantasist by about a year when The Hobbit was published in 1937.  Ray's first major publication never came till the year of 38).  It's just that in addition to the imaginative power exerted by places like Middle Earth, it seems to have been Ray's efforts that wound up accounting for all the rest.

With this in mind, I think it makes the most sense to describe Bradbury's legacy as that of a forgotten architect.  He's one of a handful of writers (including the likes of Tolkien) who were responsible for setting out the sort of parameters that we've come to expect from all the popular genres.  They helped create, in other words, kind of like the modern faces, plots, and expectations that we now have about things like Fantasy Adventures, the Journey Through Space, or Encounters with Monsters and Ghosts.  The way they did that is pretty simple when you stop and think it over.  All they had to do was create a series of stories that were of such an artistic quality that, taken together, they more or less created the modern Fantastic paradigm.  This is the fundamental shared accomplishment between writers like Tolkien and Bradbury.  Their achievements in this realm have, in essence, given us our current idea of what counts as entertainment.  Now, this is what ended up happening.  Is it the same as claiming they set out to do this on purpose?  Well I think best answer out there is to compare their works with that of their closest cinematic contemporaries.  George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are another pair of artists who have more or less set the paradigm for Fantastic storytelling by taking up where Tolkien and Bradbury left off.  In doing so, it all really was just a case of being inspired by writers like that, and wanting to either create something in a similar vein, or else they wanted to find their own ideas.

It's this drive to either create within or carve out your own space in a greater artistic tradition which is probably the real answer to what all of these talents were up to.  These were just a bunch of nerdy kids who were smart enough to allow the stories they loved to determine what kind of storytellers they would become.  In that sense, I think the vast majority of it was a case of the artist being smart enough to get out of the way and let the Imagination do its work, more than anything else.  They all seemed to have been smart enough to know that you don't mix work and play.  Writing and directing for them was all about continuing the games they enjoyed in childhood, and that seems to have been enough as far any conscious strategy was involved.  Call it luck of the draw, or what have you.  I'm just thankful all these nerds turned out to be good at their jobs.  In Ray's case, the way a story like "The Screaming Woman" counts as a trend setter is all to be found in its textual DNA.  A close look at its make up reveals a series of component parts that don't just come together to create a greater whole, but also sort of help to pioneer a few other familiar plot trails and tropes, each of which got further explorations of their own.

Perhaps the most familiar and relatable aspect of this story and its dramatization is the one with the most appeal not just to kids of the 80s era, but also of multiple generations.  This is the time honored trope of a child protagonist going on an adventure that often takes them into conflict with their adult world surroundings, often learning a bit about what it means to grow into something like maturity (if such a thing even exists (and it probably never did), while also experiencing any variety of incidents and encounters that can range from perfectly normal, slice-of-life moments, to run-ins with characters and situations which run the entire gamut range of the Fantastical from the horrific to the enchanting.  The fact that this is one of those fictional scenarios that every kid, father, mother, and grandparent knows about tells you something about its evergreen quality.  If you can trace an outline such as this all the way back to the era of the Greek Myths and even further, then something tells me its just a perennial archetype.  The kind of story for all seasons that's bound to crop up sooner or later wherever there are people to weave stories in general.  That's because this is one of those narrative setups that is always tapping into universal growing experiences, and even Bradbury's story is no real different.

In a sense, therefore, the main character of Heather is nothing all that unique in and of her self.  She really does qualify as the Child Hero of a Thousand Summers.  That's not the same as calling her a cliche, though.  The character Ray presents to us comes off as not just surprisingly well constructed and well thought out.  From a shallow perspective, I suppose it could be easy to dismiss her a just another example of the 80s child adventurer.  Another staple of the time period that got lost in the shuffle of similar protagonists due to the obscurity of the show she appeared in relative to films like E.T. and The Goonies.  The trouble with this line of thought is the inherent limitations of its logic.  For one thing, Bradbury's adventurous young girl character didn't see the light of day until way back sometime in the year 1952.  Her first ever appearance was as a short story sale Ray made to a long defunct drug store newspaper rack periodical by the rather uninspired name of Suspense Magazine.  I haven't been able to find out what monthly issue it was, yet the classic pulp thriller art style of a scantily clad femme fatale in white being pushed from a moving train seems have been rediscovered in all its schlocky glory.

This is what I'm getting at when I call Bradbury something of a trend setter.  In other words, it's not as if Steven Spielberg got the character of Elliott Taylor totally out of thin air and memories of his own childhood.  Those latter pieces of inspiration definitely went into the final product.  However, the DNA of the protagonist of E.T. stems from the narrative traditions that writers like Bradbury created with stories like "The Screaming Woman".  In fact, it's even possible to imagine Elliott meeting up with Heather one day, and having her lead him on towards further adventures.  In terms of real life chronology, however, Ray's heroine came first, and beat Spielberg to the finish line by about three whole decades.  That's because our favorite narrators of childhood enchantment couldn't have gotten far if Bradbury wasn't there to be the one to chart the initial set of modern 20th century parameters for this type of setup and its characters.  Even then, odds are even Ray wouldn't have been able to create the modern face of the questing child hero as we now have them all if it weren't for the combined efforts of older writers who came before him, such as Edith Nesbit, Jane Austen, and the Grimm Brothers.  Bradbury was just the one who figured out what kind of appearance this archetype would have to take in order for it to gain traction in the 20th century and beyond.  The fact that none of this ever seems to have been intentional is a testament to Ray's gift for using his Imagination.

Instead, like any writer worth the title, all that happened is the Creative Idea sent up a flair, and some part of Bradbury was smart enough to let it catch his attention.  As for any ultimate meaning to the text, I think we have to go back what I said about Ray being an unsung pioneer, and that this story consists of a number of tropes being brought together for the first time in a modern form of expression.  So far we've discussed at least one aspect of the plot.  These might be termed its proto-Spielbergian elements.  We've seen how Bradbury takes the trope of what might be termed the Child's Own Adventure format and finds some of the best ways to give it a modern face lift.  That's just one ingredient in the Cauldron of Story here.  The next question to ask is just what type of story is the format working in service of?  I think Stephen King goes a long way toward answering that.  In the pages of his Danse Macabre study, King draws our attention to what appears to be the second element that power's Bradbury's story engine.  He frames it as a very specific way of telling Scary Stories.  He starts with the following:

"And now this word from the poet Kenneth Patchen.  It comes from his small, clever book But Even So:

"Come now,

my child,

if we were planning

to harm you, do you think,

we'd be lurking here beside the path

in the very darkest

part of

the forest"?

"This is the mood which the best...mythic "fairy-tale horror" summons up in us, and it also suggests that, below the level of simple aggression and simple morbidity, there is a final level where (the work of Horror fiction, sic) does its most powerful work.  And that is well for us, because without more, the human imagination would be a poor, degraded thing, in need of no more in the way of horror than such things as Last House on the Left, and Friday the 13th.  (The well told Horror story, sic) is planning to harm us, all right, and that is exactly why it is lurking here in the very darkest part of the forest.  At this most basic level...horror...isn't fooling around: it wants to get you.  Once it has reduced you to a level of childlike expectation and point of view, it will begin playing one or more of a very few simple harmonic melodies - the greatest limitations (and therefore greatest challenge) of the horror form is its very strictness.  The things that really scare people on a gut level can be reduced like fractions to an irreducible handful.  And even when that has finally happened, analysis such as those I've given...become(s) impossible...and even if analysis were possible it would be irrelevant.  One can point out effect, and that must be the end of the matter (187-88)".  I think the author is right and wrong at once, here.

It's kind of easy to understand the mindset in which King writes his words.  His concern is with the kind of criticism that exists not so much to explain why any given work of fiction fails or succeeds, but rather why the audience should dismiss certain types of Art as beneath them.  This is a form of snobbery that disguises itself as criticism.  It isn't meant to help explain Horror to the reader, but rather to explain it away.  It murders through dissection under the pretense of legitimate critical evaluation.  That's the basic gist King is worried about, and it's the distinction I'd like to introduce into his musings on the subject.  

I'd argue its more than possible to give at least one possible valid enough explanation of this Fairy Tale aspect of Horror fiction as King describes it.  All that needs to be kept in mind is that the type of magic spell that the Gothic mode of expression likes to cast upon its listeners is just as legitimate as that of a well told drama by Shakespeare.  It's the problem of legitimacy that seems to trouble King the most.  Horror seems like it will forever be the black sheep of the popular genres.  Even when it manages to carve out a place for itself in pop culture, there will always be enough faces in the audience who will look at it the genre askance.  It seems to be more or less a perennial problem for Gothic fiction, and so it's always having its artistic merit questioned, long after its quality has been proven time and again.  For whatever reason, I seem to have less of an inferiority issue about it the way King does.  It's the best explanation I have, anyway, for how I'm able to tell the difference between legitimate examination of a story, and murdering the narrative to dissect.  It's with the assurance of nothing but proper criticism in mind that I'm therefore able to turn my attention to the Fairy Tale aspects of the Gothic format, and how they apply to "The Screaming Woman".  The first thing to note is that it really is Horror story, proper.

While it may be true that Bradbury's short story first saw the light of day within the pages of a crime thriller pulp magazine (and even further back it was a script for a radio program called Suspense), it's in the key detail of the type of aesthetic effect that the narrative has on its readers or viewers that helps to delineate Ray's efforts here as a work of Horror.  It may have seen the light of day in the thriller genre, scholar Jonathan R. Eller even saw fit to include in a collection entitled Killer Come Back to Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury, yet the dramatic effect it produces is the same as the one you get from watching films like Psycho, or John Carpenter's original Halloween.  The overwhelming stock response that the story produces is not one of suspense, but of fear.  They all share the same type of creepy vibe that comes from the threat of having to share the same confined space with another character who might very well be a cold-blooded killer.  It's the Stalker-Slasher story reduced to its most basic outline.  What Ray has created here amounts to the first rough draft sketch of this sub-genre of Horror in embryo.

I'm willing to stand by the conclusion that the Slasher tale belongs more to the realm of the Gothic more than anything else.  The reason for that is the further you cast your glance back, sooner or later you reach a point where the Crime Suspense Thriller and the Supernatural Tale of Terror become indistinguishable.  All the major tropes of the sub-genre, in other words, reach a point where there's not much difference between Bradbury's spunky young tomboy trying to outwit a killer in a modern day small town setting, and John Milton's nameless heroine trying to free herself from the clutches of an evil necromancer in Comus.  If the main ingredients of Ray's story can be traced that far back in time, then the only major difference between the killer at the heart of "The Screaming Woman" and the cannibalistic witch from Hansel and Gretel is just a gender swap along with the lack of any ability to perform dark magic.  Taken together, it all amounts to an important yet often overlooked distinction to keep in mind as one either reads or watches the tale.

It's a sign that the author has a pretty good idea of which particular literary branch office he's working in, however nascent.  The author seems to be working from a similar understanding as that reached by Paul Meehan in his later study, Horror Noir.  According to that book, "There is an interzone," according to critic Paul Meehan, "A twilight realm that exists somewhere between mystery and imagination, murder and fate, flesh and fantasy.  This nightmare world is inhabited by criminals, murderers, and monsters of many kinds, human and inhuman: phantom ladies, brute men, wolfen, cannibals, vampires, magicians, and serial killers.  It is a world of shadows and depravity, madness and obsession, cloaked perpetually in the gloom of night.

"The macabre has been an element of the mystery story since the inception of the genre.  Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," first published in 1841, is considered the first example of detective fiction.  Poe's eccentric sleuth M. Auguste Dupin cracks a multiple murder case in which the perpetrator turns out to be a homicidal ape.  Conan-Doyle's most memorable Sherlock Holmes adventure is surely his 1901 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Holmes squares off against a phantom hound and a ghostly family curse.  The Victorian writer Willkie Collins incorporated the trappings of the supernatural into his seminal detective novels The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868).  All of these writers (and Poe in particular) are also known for their horror fiction.

"Morbidity has always been a prime feature of...mystery fiction, where ghastly murder and dire plans constitute the soul of the plot.  The noir fiction of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich and Raymond Chandler, although realistic in nature, is populated with characters who are monstrous grotesques (3)".  Like Meehan, then, Bradbury evinces the same type of instinctive awareness that in cases like "The Screaming Woman", the blurred line between Noir and Horror soon comes to mean nothing at all when the Big Bad Wolf comes shambling out of the shadows with the intent to invite a little girl in a red hood for lunch.  The very reaction of dread those lines are able to evoke on their own are probably more or less the same effect that the story was reaching for, even as Bradbury was letting it have its voice through the keys of his typewriter.  While I've been discussing the fairy tale aspects of Bradbury's story in terms of their generic nature and literary origins, it wouldn't do to forget the dramatic effect that all of these Gothic tropes are meant to serve.  This is the area where King directs most of his own focus when discussing the "mythic" qualities of the Horror story.  In terms of the narrative's visceral qualities, while Bradbury's story elements can trace their way back to the likes of Edmund Spenser, the final result that Ray ends up giving us is very much in line with your classic Brothers Grimm scenario.

What the author has composed here amounts to a narrative told in two voices.  For a tale with such a dark and dire subject matter, it almost starts out on a lark.  The opening tone of the story carries this eerily light-hearted quality, as befitting an account related to us by a pre-teen girl.  "I'm ten years old", the child protagonist tells us, "and in the fifth grade at Central School.  I haven't any brother or sister, but I've got a nice father and mother, except they don't pay much attention to me.  And anyway, we never thought we'd have anything to do with a murdered woman.  Or almost, anyway (179)".  Right off the bat, the narration is a balance of tones that almost surprises us with the skill of its success.  Heather's diction is the kind of simple and direct form of expression you'd expect to hear from a kid who is still just learning her way through the higher communications skills required of someone who isn't even yet on the cusp of adulthood.  It's this ability to capture the simplicity of the child's outlook that makes us willing to allow ourselves to be drawn into H's narrative as she relates it to us.  It's when the child's voice tells us that she's had dealings with a murder victim that the first off-note is sounded.  All of this takes place in just the opening paragraph, and it's a useful example of the conservation of detail.  The main gist of the story is laid out in just a few words, and the result packs a punch.

The author gets our attention right out of the gate, and the good new is that he never lets the pacing flag for a minute.  One of the many notable achievements of this piece is the way Bradbury is able to utilize this simplistic child's vantage point to relay all the necessary effects the story has to rely in order to reach its goals.  Here, for example is how little Heather is allowed to set the scene for her entire drama.  "When you're just living on a street like we live on, you don't think awful things are going to happen, like shooting or stabbing or burying people under the ground, practically in your own back yard.  When it does happen you don't believe it.  You just go on buttering your toast or baking cake.  I got to tell you how it happened (ibid)".  It's that last line that kind of seals the deal for Ray's skill at capturing the kind of street level poetry that children often talk in to one another.  Heather doesn't phrase her description of either the stage or its events in the manner a full grown adult would.  Instead of something like, "I've got to tell you how it all happened", or "This is what I know, as I was there", or even "This is what happened", the message is delivered in a phraseology that is both clear and somehow off in a way that still manages the charming feat of being endearing rather than stunted.  Instead, it's just the perfect snapshot image that reminds us of the way we all used to talk once upon a very long time ago.  

It might not reach for the kind of stylistic heights that Mark Twain achieved in Huckleberry Finn, yet it works just fine in selling us the idea that for all her smarts, H is still just a child whose outlook is mirrored in her vocabulary.  At the same time, it's clear that author doesn't denigrate the mindset lens through which the main character views the world.  In fact, there is a guarded sense in which he kind of endorses it up to a point.  The underlying meaning of the story's narration provides us with enough unspoken or unnoticed clues that there are still a great many other facts of life that Heather is still trying to grasp, and that she'll need to reach a more mature frame of mind in order to face a lot of it.  At the same time, the story as a whole is able to convey the wish that in growing up Heather also takes care not to make the mistake of letting whatever experiences she may have disenchant her, in any way.  The underlying desire of the fiction is the need to hold on to a sense of wonder that is still compatible with maturity, while still in touch with what it was like to be a child in some fashion.  It's a very Romantic type of notion as themes go, and its also one that crops up later in works like Stephen King's It.

Much like the Loser's Club of the later novel, it's clear enough that a large part of Heather's struggles stems from trying to figure out what it means to grow up.  These are all real heady themes for a simple short story, or TV episode to tackle, and yet somehow Bradbury is able to lay out the same set of ideas that guys like King or Spielberg will spend entire films and novels building upon.  This is not the same as saying that short is better, however.  Even Ray found it necessary to expand from short story to full-on book in order to give the seemingly shared themes of Innocence and Maturity the space needed to express themselves in full.  So it's useless to ask this kind of material to be able to cram itself into the confines of a Tik Tok post.  Such a greeting card approach runs the risk of hollowing out the notions Bradbury, King, and Spielberg are all working with, and turning them into something facile.  It's a risk that all three artists seem to have realized on one level or another, and so they let the stories have however big a canvas they needed to do justice to the Creative Idea.  In that sense, what we're dealing with here is the rough draft of a concept that Ray would later expand on in greater detail.  Through it all, he manages to keep up this balancing act of tone between the childlike and the Gothic.

Take this other snippet from when H is busy trying to dig the titular buried victim out of the ground.  While she's doing this, one of her friends from the neighborhood shows up, and the following exchange occurs.  "Hi, Dippy," I gasped.  "What are you doing?," he asked.  "Digging."  "For what?"  "I got a Screaming Lady in the ground and I'm digging for her," I said.  "I don't hear no screaming," said Dippy.  "You sit down and wait a while and you'll hear her scream yet.  Or better still, help me dig (185)".  The whole thing sounds almost like a parody of Nancy Drew.  Or better yet, it's the kind of exchange you'd expect to read issuing from the pages of a local drug store copy of Tale from the Crypt.  At the same time, it's impossible to deny the distinct morbid quality that undergirds entire conversations like this, especially considering these are kids discussing digging up a possibly dead body like it's just a normal boring afternoon with nothing interesting happening on TV.  Fast forward a decade or so, however, and Stephen King and Rob Reiner are churning out a heartfelt summer friendship movie revolving around this exact same concept.  It's all down to the story's Gothic heart beating just under the plot's surface.

It's starts out as this strangely muted background noise, even after the discovery of the Buried Lady is made in the first few paragraphs.  As the story moves along, however, that backdrop heartbeat begins to grow in volume, until the moment comes where Heather's story crosses the taboo line, and the full nature of her journey is revealed.  I've said that this is a story told in two voices.  The first is the simple note of childlike adventure as told about one summer on the cusp of being looked back on through the amber glow of autumn years.  The second voice, however, makes no bones about what it is or what it's trying to do.  This is the tenor of the classic fairy tale style Horror that was once most often associated with the Brothers Grimm.  Now, here it is again, with more or less the exact same cast of characters and settings.  Once more, Little Red Riding Hood is lost in the woods, and could very well find herself at the mercy of the Wolf, who has already taken Grandma and buried her six feet under, and time is running out for both of them.  In these final moments, the story has ceased playing games, and has delivered both the protagonist and us as audiences into childhood's darker side of the street.  This one is composed of all those moments when you knew there was something under the bed, or hiding in the closet, waiting for you to fall asleep so it could reach out and...It's also Hansel and his sister stuck in the darkest part of the forest, with no clear path of escape, and the Witch is out there, waiting to pounce.

I think this is the best I can do in describing the type of fairy tale that Bradbury has wound up composing for us here.  It's the sort of tale that hearkens and adheres a lot closer to the undiluted darker aspects of the Grimm siblings collection of Household Tales.  In other words, all Ray did was write one of those neat little thrillers that seems content to just be itself, and not much else.  In other words, the kind of story that gets treated as light entertainment on its first run.  It isn't until several decades have managed to prove the narrative's staying power that the realization sort of begins to creep up on you.  Strange as it may sound, the truth is that what Bradbury has written her amounts to a pioneering example of the classic Stalker-Slasher style of Horror story.  It's not the first of its kind by any means, the folklore surrounding characters like Jack the Ripper and the Hook predate this story by at least a whole century in some cases.  Ray was just the first artist who seems to have found the right way of taking all of these familiar popular tropes and giving them a respectable coat of paint for the literary marketplace.  "The Screaming Woman" is an almost textbook example of popcorn entertainment in its purest form.  In other words, it's really just a kind of glorified camp fire story of the type that little kids have spun out for their peers for years.  Bradbury seems to have remembered what it was like to be one of those kids, in that sense.

He also seems to have possessed this curious yet crucial knack for taking all of these fairy tale pulp tropes and finding just the right mode of expression that made it impossible for even the Ivory Tower to dislike.  The best way I can explain it is to say it was an early example of the same knack that guys like Lucas and Spielberg learned how to make work in their own favor later on.  Its finding the right form of creative expression that is able to elevate a work of Pulp and turning it into Art without ever sacrificing its fundamental identity.  In that sense, it's very apt to bring George and Steven into the mix.  As a TV episode, Ray's short story comes off very much like a Spielberg vignette, the kind of scenario you expect to find in one of his efforts.  Heather is the kind of child who seems to be almost made to fit into the kind of Suburban Fantasy mode that E.T.'s creator didn't so much pioneer as help popularize during the 80s.  That's because all Spielberg did was take the kind of setup established by Bradbury a long time ago, and then bring it to the big screen with the kind of impact and influence that can no longer be measured by words like mere success.  Through the efforts of men like Spielberg and Joe Dante, Bradbury appears to have achieved the kind of pop-culture osmosis reserved for those once in a lifetime names that are able to both shatter a previous paradigm, while also going on to create one of their own.

That's very much the case with the stage setting of the TV version of Ray's story.  While the story always maintains its focus on Earth-bound matters, the total ambience of the episode's setting makes it impossible not to believe that elsewhere, just out of sight, there's maybe a haunted house perched atop a lonely hill somewhere, or that one of Spielberg's classic era star children might be hiding out in the forest, waiting to lead some other child protagonist on a fantastic adventure.  It just seems to have been the shared background that Ray and Steve were drawn to, and it's obvious enough that Bruce Pittman, the episode's director is a big fan of both.  So it makes total sense that that classic Dante-esque, Spielbergian vibe would rub off on the production.  It also doesn't hurt when you cast Drew Barrymore in the lead role.  Folks expecting her to bring on the same charm she had from her role in E.T. will not be disappointed here.  It's like meeting up with Gertie herself a few years down the road as the precocious and rambunctious dreamer that we all knew she'd become.  Also, you just have to admire the taste of any kid who enjoys Tales from the Crypt.  Speaking of which, the fact that this episode has a Spielbergian vibe shouldn't be treated as an invitation believe it doesn't deliver on the fear factor.

Just as much as its possible for Suburban Fantasy of Spielberg to be able to enchant us at the drop of a hat, it also helps to remember that it can just as often be a scary place as much as it could be magical.  The exact same setting that gave us the gentle botanist from outer space also led us to an entire neighborhood haunted by the inhabitants of a graveyard.  So in other words, Bradbury's fiction (just like Spielberg's) is a secondary world containing elements of both light and dark.  Sometimes one element predominates, or else fear and enchantment can blend together in their own splendid phantasmagoria.  Here, Ray decides to lean into the more Gothic side of his repertoire, and let the fear factor predominate.  Just like Spielberg, however, Ray finds it impossible to let at least some glimmers of the lighter side come glimpsing in through the cracked window frame here and there.  In the show, most of this comes from Barrymore's spirited performance.  It's a mistake to claim that she carries the episode on her back.  Instead, it's more that Barrymore's classic childhood persona works to serve as a needed counterpart to what is otherwise a very dark Gothic murder story on the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, while at the same time tackling the dire subject of spousal abuse.  It's good to have her be the audience surrogate to help hold our hands as she leads us into this dark subject matter is the point.

The final result of all this effort is what might be described as a classic 80s children's Horror adventure.  It contains all the tried and true charms that come from a Spielberg film while at the same tackling the type of mature subject that tends to populate the work of Stephen King.  It is therefore a very winning blend of both worlds.  The kind of Gothic fairy tale that both children and adults can enjoy.  It's the type of show that young viewers will enjoy as a fun adventure romp with some dark elements.  Those same child audiences can then go back and watch the episode as adults and realize just how much of a serious topic Bradbury was trying to address with this narrative of a little girl discovering an attempted murder in her own backyard.  It's not the kind of narrative mix you are expecting in a story with a child protagonist, and so, strange as it may sound, there is a concluding sense of gratification to be found in how the the subject matter is handled.  It's in retrospect that the viewer becomes aware of the tightrope the author was always treading on this whole time.  In these circumstances, when dealing with a narrative about abuse in a marriage any real false step would have been notable the minute it was made, and it would have risked sending the whole thing either into bad taste, or the worst kind of misguided parody.

The fact that Bradbury manages to trip neither himself nor the narrative up, and stick everything all the way to a successful landing says a great deal about his skill as a writer willing to trust in the wisdom of his instincts.  In particular, Bradbury seems to be firm believer in the notion that the Imagination is often wiser than the artist, and so he gets out of the way of his muse, and lets it do whatever work is necessary.  In this case, it was able to deliver a final product that stands up well, even after all this time.  "The Screaming Woman" is one of those products of the television age that I'd have to describe as an overlooked mini-classic.  It deserves the kind of shelf space reserved for those moments when the small screen was able to provide examples of the best it can achieve whenever the people behind the camera were able to hit on a true piece of inspiration.  This seems to have been one of those times when everyone got lucky, and the entire cast and crew behind the production hit paydirt.  What we've got on our hands here is basically the kind of half hour narrative you could expect from an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  It's got that same artistry with suspense that you'd find in Hitch's work.

If anything, it proves to me just how capable Bradbury was at adapting his talents to the style of other genres.  However, a lot of that seems to be down to the fact that in the last resort, the Noir thriller is situated well within the Gothic wheelhouse where Ray always seems to have been most as home.  This results in a story with characters and the kind of landscape that the author seems to care about the most.  It's this love for the material that manages to elevate what could have been just a phoned-in, half-hour programming block of 80s cheese, and instead takes things in a more mature and well-handled direction.  This is the kind of TV episode that allows an 80s kid like me the chance to recapture their long cherished childhood self.  It's the type of suspenseful adventure yarn that guys like Spielberg, King, and Dante triumphed at back in the day.  In other words, this is a show that's able to have that kind of classical 80s magic to it.  This episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater is well worth looking into.