You’ve probably seen this album over the years. Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House is the cornerstone of the horror soundtrack/sound effects genre; from what I can tell it’s been in print the longest and is perhaps the only horror LP relic to live on—undead—in the digital age. If you’re as old as me, or older, you probably had a scratched-up, dog-eared copy of the LP that Dad would dust off every year and blast from an open window to unsuccessfully frighten trick-or-treaters from your front porch.
Released in 1964, Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House contains all the requisite audio chills, thrills and spills of a Halloween record. There are dragging chains, howling winds, baying hell hounds, groaning monsters, creaking doors, blood-curdling screams and more. On side one, a narrator sets up each scary scenario before letting the sound effects take over to illustrate the protagonist’s imminent demise. It’s all pretty hokey and predictable—and low-budget.
But how is Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House racist? Glad you asked. At the end of side one is a track titled “Chinese Water Torture.” The narrator opens the track with an explanation of the torture method’s origins and then shuts up to let the water droplets do their trick of undoing the protagonist’s mind. With ten seconds remaining, the narrator returns one last time and, under the spell of bad taste, speaks in stereotypical, monosyllabic fake Chinese, rather exaggeratedly, too. “Ming, my, ywai hoi….” She goes on like this for a few moments before catching herself and feigning surprise, “What am I saying? I’m not even Chinese.”
Indeed, Chilling, Thrilling Sounds… was a product of 1964, a time when perhaps few considered such xenophobia to be, well, xenophobic. In the ensuing 50 years, attitudes have changed. We’re hypersensitive about race and culture—as we should be. We even go out of our way to out-PC one another. There’s no chance in Disneyland that anyone would let something of this ilk into today’s marketplace. (South Park’s another story.) Remember Song of the South? Disney pretends not to. So one might think that Disney would keep "Chinese Water Torture" forever buried in its storied haunted vaults (along with the bones of Walt). Song of the South it ain’t, but it’s still racist.
Curious, I decided to see if Chilling, Thrilling Sounds… has made the leap to digital. It has. It’s currently out of print on CD (though not hard to find), but it’s readily available for download on iTunes. Spotting “Chinese Water Torture” in the album’s sequence, I paid a buck to download it and see if the original piece remains intact, fake Chinese and all. I skipped to the track’s final seconds and to my surprise, “Chinese Water Torture” hadn’t been edited. Everything’s still there just as it was in 1964, a stupid, undead relic of Cold War xenophobia. Chilling, indeed.
