[This is part of a future follow-up to my forthcoming book Gothick Meditations at Midnight: —Esoteric Commentaries on Classic Horror Literature and Film. In this addendum to material found in this book I make an exploration of other works that fit my interpretive mode. One of those will be “It Caught on in a Flash… The Craze for Things Uncanny in American Television Programming in the 1950s-1970s.” What follows is an excerpt from that material.]
Case Study: “Pigeons from Hell” by Robert E. Howard
For the most part some of the best of television in the 1960s was written for the television by genius writers such as Rod Serling and Richard Matheson. Occasionally, we get an example where the original story was written in the realm of printed literature and adapted to television. One such story found its way into the corpus of one of the better anthology television series, Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff which only ran from 1960-1962. It was often preempted by local programming which hurt its ratings. One of the most celebrated episodes was entitled “Pigeons from Hell” based on the Robert E. Howard story of the same name. Howard’s story has been published many times since its original posthumous publication in Weird Tales in 1938. He originally wrote the story in 1934. Besides the Thriller adaptation by John Kneubuhl the story was adapted to graphic novels and radio programs and is widely praised (by Stephen King, for example) as one of the best horror stories ever written.
Howard’s story tells of two young men from New England, named Branner and Griswell, travel in the piney woods of the South and while there happen upon a deserted plantation mansion and decide to spend the night there. Griswell wakes up form a dream in which he saw an entity with a yellow face and watches as Branner is walking up the stairs as if in a trance. Soon Branner comes back down the stairs with all the appearance of an animated corpse holding a hatchet but his own skull was split open as an animated corpse gripping the bloody axe that had split his skull. In terror Griswell runs out of the house into the woods. There he encounters the local sheriff named Buckner. They return to the house to investigate. The sheriff suspects Griswell of murdering his friend. Buckner does not entirely discount Griswell’s story because he is aware of the reputation of the house which had belonged to a family called the Blassenvilles who had come from the West Indies, had brought strange beliefs and were also known for their cruelty. In the aftermath of the Civil War in which the menfolk had been decimated the Blassenvilles became impoverished with only four sisters surviving. They were soon joined by their aunt, Celia, from the West Indies accompanied by her servant, a “mulatto” named Joan. Celia was cruel to Joan, whipping her frequently, so when she disappeared people thought she had run away. Three other of the Blassenville sisters disappeared over the following three months. Then one night in 1890, the last of the Blassenvilles, Elizabeth, fled the house and went to California. She claimed that she had discovered the bodies of her missing sisters in a secret chamber in the house. She also told of being attacked by a yellow-faced creature claiming she had found her sisters' corpses in a secret room and that she had been attacked by the shape of a woman with a yellow face. The house has been deserted and shunned since then. Sometimes numerous pigeons can be seen roosting in the house. These birds are thought to be the souls of the departed Blassenvilles— the pigeons from Hell.
The next night, Buckner and Griswell go to the hut of an old local voodoo man named Jacob to find out more about the Blassenvilles. He tells them that he is a maker of “zuvembies” but says he cannot talk about such things to white men under threat from Damballah, the “Big Snake” sending a little brother to kill him. The zuvembies live forever, can only be killed by a lead or steel. They have no sense of time, possess hypnotic powers and exist only for the joy of killing. Jacob mutters about some woman who came to him to get the “Black Brew” that turns women into zuvembies. Finally, he tells how “she” participated in voodoo rites and that "the other" came to Jacob for the "Black Brew" that makes a woman a zuvembie. As Jacob reaches his hand out for some firewood, one of the littler brothers of Damballah strikes him dead. The investigators conclude, wrongly it will turn out, that Joan had herself transformed herself into a zuvembie in order to wreak vengeance on the Blassenville family. They intend to spend the night in the house to discover the truth. There they find Elizabeth’s diary in which they read of her fear that there is “something” that has killed her sisters and will kill her as well.
During the night Griswell is drawn up the stairs against his will. Bruckner secretly follows him. When Griswell is confronted by the yellow-faced thing wielding a butcher knife a shot rings out as Bruckner has used a lead bullet to hit the zuvembie, which scuttles off though a secret passage into the hidden room. There they find the hanging bodies of the Blassenville sisters as well the now-dead zuvembie.
It is then that the sheriff suddenly recognizes the face of the zuvembie from a portrait he has seen— it is Celia, not the servant Joan. Joan, as an act of ultimate revenge gave the Black Brew she had acquired from Jacob to Celia Blassenville before making her getaway.
Bruckner declares the case closed by indicating that a “madwoman” had killed Branner, as no one would ever believe the actual truth.
[A couple of notes are in order: Damballah is an important loa in Afro-Caribbean religion. He has serpentine form and is seen as a creator god and is present in many regions of the Caribbean. The word “zuvembie” has an interesting genesis. It is an invented word to avoid using the word “zombie,” which had been banned under the Comics Code Authority, which were only made more lax after about 1971. Howard most famously used the term “zuvembie” in this 1934 story.]
The Thriller 1961 adaptation of Howard’s story written by John Kneubuhl was quite faithful to the original tale with only a few shortcuts for time and some small changes in the role of the characters. The episode was directed by John Newland who was at the time well-known as the host of another weird anthology television program called One Step Beyond. The episode itself is perhaps the most legendary of the series.
As a final note, I wish to alert those interested to the body of serious Robert E. Howard scholarship and the existence of Project Pride in Cross Plains, Texas, the Robert E. Howard Foundation and the annual Howard Days festival.