On the eve of Halloween, the world seemed safe from major threats. But it was a time surrounded by an environment conducive to imagined terrors, alien creatures, suspense and restlessness. From that moment on, the chronicle of the panic that followed became legendary: entire crowds confused the real with the fabricated, anguished by the fear spread over the radio waves. Or was it not quite like that? Or was it all just media hyperbole? What is certain is that this episode was not indifferent and remains to this day in the collective imagination of what mass manipulation is.
Resuming the suspense of the War of the Worlds, its characters, the noises and the music that CBS broadcast in that broadcast, Rui Tavares keenly observes the period between the wars, showing us how, in the most unsuspecting moments, something apparently trivial can become the unthinkable. And how, if there is a threat of destruction, most likely, it is we ourselves and not the Martians who are responsible.
But today, there is no reason to worry, this is just a special Halloween episode. As Orson Welles recalls at the end of the broadcast: remember, in the coming days, the terrible lesson learned tonight. That smiling, glowing, globular invader haunting your living room is just a pumpkin dweller, and if the doorbell rings and no one is there, it wasn’t a Martian – it’s just Halloween.
Photography by Tiago Miranda, graphic work by Vera Tavares and Tiago Pereira Santos
Listen to ‘Tempo ao Tempo’ here on Expresso, SIC and SIC Notícias, or subscribe to the podcast on any podcast platform. Every Thursday a new episode written and narrated by Rui Tavares.
The post If the doorbell rings and no one answers, it’s not a Martian: it’s Orson Welles and a radio broadcast in a world on the brink of war in 1938 appeared first on Veritas News.
