Well, now that the holiday season has wound down, it’s time for me to get back on my horror movie bullshit, but I spent the last few weeks not really watching much in the way of horror film. The occasional break helps to keep me from feeling burned out, and under more normal circumstances, I would have been traveling anyway. What I have been doing is listening to horror podcasts, having been made aware of a few more by some of the fine folks who follow Old Gods Of Appalachia, and having devoured two - The Lovecraft Investigations and Archive 81 - over the last couple of weeks, I’d like to look at what they each do well (which is quite a bit), and what they each do not so well (which isn't too much)..
The Lovecraft Investigations
This is a production of the BBC, and as you can probably tell from the title, it’s a series of audio adaptations of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Now, there’s certainly no dearth of Lovecraft adaptations out there, but the hook here is, I think, a reasonably clever one: These adaptations are set in the modern day and presented as episodes of a modern true-crime podcast called The Mystery Machine, hosted by plucky, enterprising journalists Justin Heawood and Kennedy Fisher. They report on unsolved crimes, the usual cold-case fare, but as the podcast begins, they’ve been drawn into a rather unusual case, that of a young man who apparently vanished from a locked room in a mental hospital without any assistance. This is, then, the Lovecraft story The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and soon enough what starts as a simple attempt to put together the details of a years-old mystery turns, as it does, into something much larger and much more sinister. Which is your standard true-crime podcast template, but here “larger and more sinister” means immortal body-hopping sorcerers, creatures that we can’t see clearly because our brain isn’t equipped to perceive them, and much worse.
It’s followed by adaptations of The Whisperer In Darkness and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and as a whole they’re presented in convincing fashion - the actors playing Heawood and Fisher have the easy conversational style of people who are comfortable with each other and with telling stories, but who aren’t professional broadcasters. For the most part, they sound like they could fit quite neatly next to something like Serial, though some of the supporting actors are a touch too theatrical at times, which can make it a little tougher to get really immersed. It’s sort of a similar problem to that of found-footage films that veer away from naturalism - it’s presenting itself as real-world media, but when the dialogue gets a little too arch or contrived, the illusion is broken for a bit and its power diluted some. But in general, it strikes a nice balance between faithfulness to podcasting convention and faithfulness to the original text, which preserves events and plot beats while updating them to modern settings and sensibilities.
The bigger problem, I think, is that the creators of the show attempt to create a single overarching narrative across the three stories, as if the things the protagonists discover in the beginning are leading them even further and further down a rabbit hole. This by itself isn’t bad, necessarily, and it’s handled well and pretty seamlessly even though the original stories weren’t really connected to each other, but the net effect is one of changing the scope and subsequent focus of what’s going on - the rabbit hole isn’t so much deep as wide, with Heawood and Fisher hopping continents and getting involved with clandestine government agencies and uncovering conspiracies both supernatural and natural, and so over the course of the three stories, things start to get more and more overstuffed, feeling less like cosmic horror and more like the
X-Files. Make no mistake, it’s entertaining throughout, and to my mind just provides
more evidence that Lovecraft’s work can be adapted effectively without including any of his awful racism, sexism, classism and pernicious xenophobia. His stories work in spite of those things, not because of them, so the more people find ways to bring them into the modern day and leave their egregiously backward aspects in the past, the happier I am. I wish that this podcast had been better able to preserve the sense of dread and menace of its first episodes throughout, but it’s good fun.
Archive 81
This one is a much stranger beast than The Lovecraft Investigations - it’s presented as a podcast hosted by a young man named Mark, who has obtained a bunch of recordings related to his friend Dan, who has gone missing under mysterious circumstances, and is publishing them as a way to try and solicit help in finding him. The recordings are audio-verite, set (at least to start) in a mysterious archive belonging to the LMG Corporation. They’ve hired Dan to listen to and catalog a very large number of audio recordings in the archive. He has been given very specific instructions to not attempt to fix or clean up the recordings in any way, and to in turn record himself as he goes through the process of listening and cataloguing these tapes. So we’re listening to recordings of someone listening to recordings as they record their reactions to the recordings, It’s not as difficult to follow as I’m making it sound, but it does set up a narrative through-line of audio recording as a form of alchemy, as something both process and product in creating a big, strange audio universe.
There are three broad phases to the show to date - the first concerns Dan’s introduction to the archive and a series of recordings about a very strange high-rise apartment building in Manhattan. These work generally well as discrete vignettes and are consistently unsettling, as little details build up and paint a picture of a building full of people somehow drawn to and contorted by the building itself. The second shifts focus to recordings made by an expedition sent by LMG to someplace very, very different from any world we would recognize, and the efforts of that expedition to find their way home again. This broadens the narrative scope considerably, and though there are definitely moments of body horror (Dan especially is…repurposed…for the expedition), as this phase of the story moves on it starts to take on more of a feeling of dark fantasy, the expedition concerned with learning the rules of this place and how to outwit the corporation that sent them there.. The mood is still uneasy on balance (they are someplace very strange, and very far from home), but what made the first part so effective was the way something would start off normal enough and then as the episode progressed, more strangeness would creep in around the edges, and it was the contrast between the two that made those episodes work well. In the second part, everything is strange, so it’s less acutely felt - it’s a lower-intensity, but more pervasive uneasiness stemming from an utterly alien world.
The third part is concerned primarily with a pair of half-siblings, Nicholas and Christine Waters, and their attempts to complete a magical ritual left to them by their late father. If the first part was a modern take on cosmic horror and the second was dark fantasy, the third splits the difference pretty neatly, as the action moves between our world and others, and characters from the span of the series reappear, sometimes at unexpected times or in unexpected places, and the story is as much about the relationship between these two siblings, about forgiveness and connection and friendship, as it is the increasingly bizarre and dangerous things they have to do. It’s not as consistently creepy as the first part, but it definitely has its moments, and it serves to gather together what appear to initially be disparate smaller narratives into something grander, and at its best it reminds me of Clive Barker’s ability to create worlds filled equally with horror and wonder. Or, to use a more contemporary example, at its best it feels like the people who made
Resolution and
The Endless decided to try their hand at
SCP-style stories told as episodes of
Radiolab. If that sounds like a lot to take in, it is, but though it has its weak points, it’s remarkably well-handled and evocative. A series based on the podcast is in the works at Netflix, and I have to say, I’m curious.
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