Inner Sanctum, excerpt from Episode 8

Inner Sanctum is a stand-out example of an American horror program that Aussie radio artists made their own. Originally airing in 1941 as Inner Sanctum Mystery in the United States, Inner Sanctum found its way to Australian shores on Sydney’s 2GB in 1952. The program was retooled for Australian audiences and performed by the nation’s preeminent radio talent, including Alan Trevor, Lyndall Barbour and Neva Carr Glynn. Inner Sanctum’s signature sound effect, the slow opening of a rusty-hinged creaking door, would usher listeners into host Raymond’s carnival of terrors. Moray Powell served as the Australian show’s Raymond, where the actor mastered his grim and gallows-humoured framing of mystery thriller plays.

The series is noteworthy for its sympathetically-crafted heroes and the trials they endure to ensure that justice prevails. Sydney writer William Matthew Moloney’s The Stain on the Tombstone, for example, adapts a New Zealand legend about a murdered woman’s gravestone which seeps blood until her killer goes mad and confesses. The Australian adaptation of Tomorrow is a Two-Edged Sword uses the spectre as an instrument of retribution against the Nazi war criminals of the Third Reich.

In a 1952 publication of The Mail, Adelaide radio critic John Quinn stated the program was 'too horrible' for his taste: 'it has about it the malevolence of ghosts'. His contemporary James Crammond disagreed, saying he wouldn’t miss an Inner Sanctum episode 'for all the straitjackets in the world'.