[ChronoGrl]

Part of what makes Welles' broadcast of War of the Worlds so iconic is that it actually inspired mass hysteria in the American listeners of that 1938 Halloween evening. What was science fiction on the page translated to earnest reporting on the radio waves, and the atmosphere of tense, paranoid, anxious anticipation of World War II, the American public was horrified of the unknown and ready to believe that the next big horror was coming from the skies.

In order to replicate the impact of this broadcast, we have to consider horror that is relevant to this day in age and is also believable. While we've come a long way since 1938 (I doubt that creatures from outerspace would be within our real of believing now), there are some events that still strike terror in the hearts and minds of the masses.

What seems to be relevant in terms of mass hysteria and horror is the horror that hits close to home: Natural disasters, terrorism, xenophobia, and illness. With the panic and distress following the spread of Avian influenza and SARS in 2002, it’s clear that the horror of the spread of disease is quick to terrify the masses.

I propose that, to create a pure horror radio broadcast that could convince and terrify the world at large, we should adapt Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War into a series of faux eyewitness reports of a mysterious “illness” ravaging the impoverished nations of the underdeveloped world. The believability factor would come with not only the eyewitness perspective, but also America’s predisposed xenophobic nature (particularly in the feared Communist China) toward third world underdeveloped countries.

The first “report” would begin with Brooks’ first “eyewitness report”: Dr. Kwang Jing-shu.


The following is from Max Brook’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (New York: Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., 2006), 4 – 10.


A sample of the broadcast:



Reports continue coming in describing the unidentified illness.Our first latest report comes from Dr. Kwang Jing-shu of the Chongqing province of China.

(Dr. Kwang Jin-shu begins to speak in Mandarin. An English translator is heard over his voice)

The first outbreak I saw was in a remote village that officially had no name. It was known by its villagers as “New Dachang.”

The villagers were keeping their sick in their communal meeting hall. There were seven of them, all on cots, all barely conscious. I asked the villagers who had been taking care of these people. They said no one, it wasn’t “safe.” I noticed that the door had been locked from the outside. The villagers were clearly terrified. They cringed and whispered; some kept their distance and prayed.

I knelt to examining the first patient. She was running a high fever, forty degrees centigrade, and she was shivering violently. Barely coherent, she whimpered slightly when I tried to move her limbs. There was a wound in her right forearm, a bite mark. As I examined it more closely, I realized that it wasn’t from an animal. The bite radius and teeth marks had to have come from a small, or possibly young, human being.

I examined the six other patients. All showed similar symptoms, all had similar wounds on various parts of their bodies. I asked one man, the most lucid of the group, who or what had inflicted these injuries. He told me it had happened when they had tried to subdue “him.”

I found “Patient Zero” behind the locked door of an abandoned house across town. He was twelve years old. His wrists and feet were bound with plastic packing twine. Although he’d rubbed off the skin around his bounds, there was no blood. There was no blood on his other wounds, not on the gouges on his legs or arms, or from the large dry gap where his right big toe had been. He was writhing like an animal; a gag muffled his growls.

The boy’s skin was cold and gray as the cement on which he lay. I could find neither his heartbeat nor his pulse. His eyes were wild, wide, and sunken back in their sockets. They remained locked on me like a predatory beast. Throughout the examination he was inexplicably hostile.

His movements were so violent I had to call for two of the largest villagers to help me hold him down. Initially they wouldn’t budge, cowering in the doorway like baby rabbits. I explained that there was no risk of infection if they used gloves and masks. When they shook their heads, I made it an order, even though I had no lawful authority to do so.

The two men knelt beside me. One held the boy’s feet while the other grasped his hands. I tried to take a blood sample and instead extracted only brown, viscous matter. As I was withdrawing the needle, the boy began another bout of violent struggling.

The man holding the boy’s arms decided it might be safer if he braced them against the floor with his knees. But the boy jerked again and I heard his left arm snap. Jagged ends of both radius and ulna bones stabbed through his gray flesh. Although the boy didn’t cry out, didn’t even seem to notice, it was enough for both assistance to leap back and run from the room.

I instinctively retreated. The boy began to twist in my direction, his arm ripped completely free. Flesh and muscle tore from one another until there was nothing except the stump. His now free right arm, still tied to the severed left hand, dragged his body across the floor.

I hurried outside, locking the door behind me. I began to hear banging on the door, the boy’s fist pounding weakly against the thin wood. It was all I could do not to jump at the sound. I prayed they would not notice the color draining from my face. I shouted, as much from fear as frustration, that I had to know what happened to this child.

The boy’s mother came forward. She admitted that it had happened when the boy and his father were “moon fishing,” a term that describes diving for treasure among the sunken ruins of the Three Gorges Reservoir. The boy came up crying with a bite mark on his foot. He didn’t know what had happened, the water had been too dark and muddy. His father was never seen again.