Thursday, June 07, 2012

RIP Cosmic Ray

I was chatting about Ray Bradbury with someone just the other day. When I mentioned that I was thinking of including discussion on his work in the horror section of my genre course, the inevitable question arose.

"I thought he was just a sci-fi guy."

"Well the Mars tales are famous," I said, "But then there's Something Wicked This Way Comes."

And The October Country and scores of tales that fall on the darker side plus the haunting The Foghorn, technically SF but poignant and chilling. 

Many of the Ray Bradbury Theater episodes reflected the chilling side, of course, but adaptations  came long before that. 

Some of my class prep is immersion, so I watched The New Alfred Hitchcock Presents version of "The Jar" the other night. It's on You Tube at the moment at least.

It recasts the original backwoods setting to the modern art world, an interesting re-tooling, though I think the original, which can be found adapted in black and white on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour is a bit more eerie. 

As I've mentioned here before, I was fortunate enough to meet and interview Mr. Bradbury for a newspaper article in the '90s

It was one of the highlights of my journalism days, and I'm very sad to see one of the world's true visionary talents passing.


2 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

He will be missed!

Sidney said...

Most definitely.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...