RAY BRADBURY’S EARLIEST INFLUENCES
By Terry Pace
Ray Bradbury was a
32-year-old writer on the verge
of life-altering national renown
when a movie studio he had long
loved and revered hired him to
develop an out-of-this-world
concept for one of the groundbreaking science-fiction thrillers
of the Cold War era.
“Sixty years ago, in 1952,
Universal hired me to write a
screen treatment for the film that
became known as It Came from
Outer Space,” Bradbury recalled.
“I was so thrilled to be working
at the same studio that had made
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The
Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, The
Mummy, and The Invisible Man—
movies that changed my life in
the 1920s and ’30s. As soon as I
moved into the studio bungalow
and started work, I went over to
The Phantom of the Opera stage
and stood in the middle of the
theater where they had filmed
the opera-house scenes. It was
so glorious to be there in person,
standing at long last with the
ghost of Lon Chaney, my childhood hero. I felt like I was five
years old all over again.”
The lingering specter of
Chaney—silent cinema’s mythic “Man of a Thousand Faces”—
has inhabited Bradbury’s soul
and psyche throughout his
long, fruitful, and vastly influential literary life. The famed author of
Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The
Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, Something
Wicked This Way Comes, The Machineries of
Joy, The Halloween Tree, From the Dust Returned, Farewell Summer, and other cornerstone works of science fiction, fantasy, and
the macabre credits Chaney as the earliest
and most profound inspiration for his childhood fears and anxieties and the development of his flourishing young imagination.
“Lon Chaney has been the central
metaphor of my life all the way through,” the
92-year-old Bradbury insists. “I saw Chaney’s
performance as the bell ringer Quasimodo
in The Hunchback of Notre Dame when I was
three years old, and a very strange thing happened: I wondered, at that very early age, if
I wasn’t a hunchback myself. I worried that
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MONSTERS FROM THE VAULT #30
Author Ray Bradbury saw The Hunchback of Notre Dame when
he was just three years old, and he wondered at the time if he was
a hunchback himself. (Courtesy of Photofest)
I might grow up to be just such a misshapen
outcast. That’s a very strange fear for a child
that age to have, isn’t it? But I remember that
feeling quite vividly—Chaney’s performance
in that film affected me so deeply. The very
next year I saw Lon Chaney again in He Who
Gets Slapped, with all the circus clowns and
the lions—again, Chaney provided more
metaphors that left a lasting impression on
me. In the ending of He Who Gets Slapped, the
clown played by Chaney traps these people
in a room with a lion. That lion and that room
turned up 25 years later in my science-fiction
story ‘The Veldt,’ where two children are sent
into a virtual-reality playroom in the future
and encouraged by their parents to play there
together and leave the grownups alone. At
the end of the story, the children trap their
distant, uncaring parents in the room to be
eaten alive by lions on the African veldt that
they’ve created through their own wish fulfillment in the virtual reality of the future. That
story was made possible by Lon Chaney.”
When Bradbury was only five, he
experienced Chaney’s iconic performance
as another tragic cinematic grotesque—the
disfigured, mysterious, and occasionally
murderous musical genius Erik, a mad, lovelorn composer and organist lurking in the
dark catacombs beneath the Paris Opera
House. Universal’s lavish, big-budget 1925
movie adaptation of French author Gaston
Leroux’s gothic melodrama The Phantom of
the Opera made its first-run big-screen visit to
the Academy Theatre in the author’s sleepy
Midwestern hometown of Waukegan, Illinois.
“That particular film has stayed with
me forever—it’s just so perfect in so many
wonderful ways,” Bradbury maintains. “I
went to see it on opening night with my
older brother Skip, and we walked to the
theater from our house. I think the performance was at seven that night, and by nine
o’clock we were on our way back, haunted
by the memory of Chaney’s Phantom. To
get home, we had to walk over a bridge
that ran across this big, dark ravine that
divided the town. On the way down the
long steps that led down the slope to the
bridge that ran over the ravine, my brother
suddenly ran ahead of me, without a word,
and disappeared into the darkness. He ran
all the way to the other side of the ravine
and hid himself underneath the bridge. So
here I was, at nine o’clock at night, crossing
this big ravine, surrounded by darkness and
silence and terrified because I thought my
brother had run home and abandoned me
jumped out and frightened me
after we first saw The Phantom of the
Opera all those years ago. That’s a
memory you never forget.”
The deep, dark, fearsome ravine that terrified Ray Bradbury so
completely in his childhood later
worked its sinister and mysterious
way into several of the author’s enduring literary works, most notably
his quasi-autobiographical novel
of magical fantasy and a child’s
first bittersweet taste of mortality,
Dandelion Wine (1957), along with
that book’s belated sequel, Farewell
Summer (2006). Set in the Midwestern hamlet of Green Town, Illinois
(Bradbury’s fictionalized version of
his Waukegan birthplace), during
the fateful pre-Depression summer
of 1928, Dandelion Wine features an
unseen serial killer known as the
Lonely One, who lurks near the
dreaded ravine late at night, terrorizing the citizens of Green Town and strangling several of the town’s sad and solitary
spinsters. More than half a century after he
penned Dandelion Wine, Bradbury believes
the lethal figure of the Lonely One represents
one of his first attempts to re-create Chaney’s
to a fate worse than death. When I reached
the far end of the bridge, Skip jumped out
in front of me and screamed and scared the
living hell out of me. I ran screaming up the
hill and all the way home. My father was so
mad when I got home and told him what
had happened that
The deep, dark, terrifying ravine (left) young Ray Bradbury (and brother
he beat the hell out
Skip) had to cross during nighttime walks between his house and first-run
of my brother, which
theatrical screenings of Lon Chaney’s silent-movie chillers (including The
Phantom of the Opera) is now part of Ray Bradbury Park in the author’s
made me very haphometown of Waukegan, Illinois. (Ravine Photo Courtesy of Ray Bradbury/
py at the time. That
Phantom Photo Courtesy of Photofest)
ravine is still there
in Waukegan, in the
center of what’s now
called Ray Bradbury
Park. The bridge is
still there, too, and
the far end of the
bridge is where my
brother hid and
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