Podcast Review
7 Spooky Fiction Podcasts for a Haunted Halloween
E very October, we gorge ourselves on horror movie marathons, haunted house attractions, and all manner of creepy stories. But if your Halloween regimen doesn’t include at least a few fiction podcasts , you are doing your creepy season a grave disservice. After all, ghost stories have long been a part of the oral tradition, meant to be whispered ominously on a dark, stormy night. With the modern audio fiction renaissance, that experience has moved out of the campfire and into our earbuds, and there’s a whole wide world of terrifying content for us to discover.
Fiction podcasts have one great strength over scary films: they take place entirely in your imagination. No hokey costumes to make a monster less scary. No shoddy visual effects to take you out of the story. It’s just you and whatever your mind conjures up based on whatever prompts the podcast gives you. (And chances are, your mind is going to be a real bastard .) It’s this trait that has made no less than Stephen King describe the radio as the ideal medium for horror.
Regardless of whether you’re reading this list at Halloween or not, turn off the TV, turn down the lights, and wave goodbye to that good night’s sleep you were planning on. Let’s go on a journey into the depths of podcast horror with these seven spooky podcasts to make your Halloween season a truly scary occasion.
The Black Tapes
If you are new to the world of fiction podcasts, you owe it to yourself to start with one of the titans in the field, The Black Tapes . Debuting in 2015 in the wake of genre-defining juggernaut Serial, this docudrama podcast follows radio host Alex Reagan as she embarks on a new investigative project, looking into the world of paranormal investigation. Things take a turn when she meets Dr. Richard Strand, a devoted skeptic who has made disproving supernatural phenomena his life’s work. For the most part, he has succeeded. Well, except for a few cases, cases he hasn’t been able to disprove yet, cases he documents in a set of black cassette tapes…
The greatest and most obvious strength of The Black Tapes is the way that it blends fiction with reality. It’s one thing to try to ape the style and feel of an NPR show; it’s another one entirely to meticulously recreate the sound of a public radio interview and carve out a full show in the structure of a long-form audio documentary. This show is a labor of love, and the enormous affection for these types of shows creators Terry Miles and Paul Bae have is infectious. But it’s also the thing that gets under your skin. When something sounds as real as The Black Tapes does, it’s that much harder to push away those niggling thoughts, those pangs of doubt that make you wonder if some part of what you’re listening really did happen. On lonely nights, as shadows grow long and strange sounds fill your home, you’ll find The Black Tapes lingering with you.
The White Vault
The White Vault , the brainchild of writer/creator K.A. Statz and producer/sound designer Travis Vengroff, is often lauded as one of the creepiest, most unnerving shows in a medium that prides itself on creepy and unnerving. And it isn’t hard to hear why. A glance at its premise – a team is sent to investigate some mysterious goings-on at a remote Arctic research base – is enough to evoke echoes of films like Carpenter’s The Thing and The Descent. (And that’s before we even get to the Lovecraftian horror waiting beneath the ice.)
Many podcasts feature stellar sound design and unnerving twists and turns. The White Vault has both of those and one more crucial element that so many others lack: interesting, appealing characters. Brought to life through the warm, charming performances of the cast (and Statz’s uniformly excellent writing) the characters are an absorbing, interesting, flawed bunch, made even more real by the found footage approach the story is told through. You really love these people and hope they’ll be alright — and it makes everything that happens all the more teeth-clatteringly awful. With six seasons out already, The White Vault offers a blizzard of excellent horror content waiting to send a chill down your spine.
Relatos de la Noche
Sometimes it’s the simplest things that most get to you. In many ways, Sonoro Media’s Spanish-language Relatos de la Noche is a very straightforward endeavor. In creator Uriel Reyes’s own words, the podcast intends to simulate the experience of having a friend tell you a scary story. Of course, it helps if your friend has a rich, sonorous voice, and an encyclopedic knowledge of legends, urban myths, and scary stories from all over Latin America. But simple components don’t always mean simple results, and Reyes’s steady, almost whispered delivery of these stories can quickly worm its way under your skin and sink its fangs right into your nerves.
Inspired by everything from creepypastas to Reyes’s own experience hearing classic Latin American short stories read out loud, Relatos de la Noche is a guided tour through a nightmare realm. Recent entries have covered tales of witches, wandering saints, evil curses, and possession. With over 450 entries in its catalog, Relatos de la Noche , has enough material to stretch the Halloween season throughout the entire calendar. And having topped charts and gotten its own English-language translation, (so you really have no excuse now, English monolinguals!), it’s a runaway success that shows no signs of slowing down.
Janus Descending
If you like your Halloween thrills served with a bit of sci-fi frills on the side, look no further than No Such Thing Productions’ Janus Descending . The limited-run podcast (just one season and then it’s done, with a sequel series waiting in the wings for those who simply must have more) tells the story of Chel and Peter, two xenoarcheologists – scientists who study long-gone alien civilizations — who set off to investigate the remains of a civilization a small world that orbits around a distant binary star. Sure enough, it turns out there’s a very good reason why that planet is now a dead world, a reason that’s still around. It isn’t long before our heroes are at its mercy.
The story is told through alternating perspectives that move in opposite temporal directions. One chapter is told by Chel, and it takes place at the start of the story. The next is told by Peter, taking place at the end of the story . The next one is hers, taking place a little later, the one after that is his, taking place a little earlier, and so on.
The suspense comes not from wondering how everything will end (Poorly! We find out right away it ends poorly!) but from the details of how everything went wrong getting filled in along the way. It’s this “Swiss clock narrative structure”, along with tremendous character work and some absolutely stomach-turning set pieces that make it a perennial favorite among indie fiction listeners. For those who want more of Cobb’s work, she has gone on to make the oceans terrifying again with her later project Primordial Deep.
Few American fiction podcasts have as much experience, as much audio storytelling muscle, behind them as Unwell does. Having been pivotal figures in seminal fiction podcast Our Fair City (which premiered all the way back in 2008 and ran for eight seasons) it’s safe to say that series creators Jeffrey Gardner and Eleanor Hyde know their way around a podcast.
Unwell tells the story of Lillian Harper, who moves to a small town in Ohio to care for her estranged mother as the latter grapples with the early stages of Alzheimer’s. As Lillian gets used to life in the boarding house her family has run for generations, it soon becomes clear that she and her mother are haunted by past events in their history… as well as being haunted in a much, much more literal sense. Throw in some dark conspiracies, some woods filled with wolves, and a darkly charming villain who you can practically hear smiling through your headphones, (how did the producers pull that off?) and you start to get a sense of the midwestern gothic cocktail that Unwell is serving up. It may take a bit of time for the tensions in the show to get to a boil, but once they do, watch out. The show’s final episode premiered last fall, which means that there’s a full, five-season story ready to be your next spooky binge-listen.
The first moment of Cryptids will make the hairs on your arm stand on end. It’s rare for a show to unnerve quite that quickly, but the droning, otherworldly music that opens the show is perfectly calibrated to unsettle on a visceral level. It’s apt table-setting from writer Alexander V. Thompson and director Devin Shepherd, and the rest of the show more than lives up to this early promise.
Over seven episodes, they tell the story of Trevor, a late-night talk show host who can’t wait to tell you about how there’s something sinister happening on the moon, and Eve, a pediatric hospice nurse who often spends her nights listening to Trevor’s broadcasts. Together, they embark on a journey that sees them encountering creatures beyond belief, eerie mysteries, and maybe even the true nature of death itself.
It’s heady stuff, which makes the way that the cast and crew keeps the proceedings grounded and genuine all the more of a testament to their abilities and smart storytelling instincts. There is little scenery chewing or big melodramatic bombast to be had here. The characters are treated like real people with real emotions and real questions – they’re written smartly, played subtly, and given the space to grow and develop. They’re what sucks you into the story of Cryptids , and even as things go to delirious, out-of-this-world heights, the show keeps the focus squarely on them. With seven episodes in its completed short season, you could blitz through all of Cryptids in a single night… though you might sleep better if you don’t.
The Battersea Poltergeist
“I’m Danny Robbins, and I don’t believe in ghosts.” So begins the BBC’s The Battersea Poltergeist. It’s a story, of course, about how Mr. Robbins comes to maybe doubt that stance, courtesy of a mysterious box that enters his life one day. The contents, he tells us as he opens the parcel in the show’s very first scene, hold the keys to what he considers Britain’s strangest-ever haunting. Given the competition, it’s a bold claim, but with a story that delivers on the chilling and the unnerving, it might just have the goods to back up its promises.
It’s all helped, of course, by the fact that the podcast is based on a true story. In 1956, young Shirley Hitchings and her family started being terrorized by… well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Just what mysterious unexplained force was wreaking havoc in their life? If The Black Tapes uses the artifice of reality to tell a fictional story, The Battersea Poltergeist inverts the formula, using actors (particularly the terrific Dafne Keene) to recreate and dramatize the events around the Hitchings family, interspersed with Robbins’s own investigation and commentary on the matter.
The story is creepy enough on its own (and it’s lavishly brought to life by all the resources of the BBC) but it’s the knowledge that this all really did happen — in one form or another — that will really gnaw away at you as you listen to this excellent nine-part series.
Gabriel Urbina is a fiction podcast writer and director. He is best known as the creator of Wolf 359, a science fiction show whose horror episodes have been keeping people up past their bedtime since 2014. His new show, Dracula: The Danse Macabre , is a radical new reimagining of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, with the timeless story of the vampire count told as a dialogue between two of its characters. For those who want to keep the spooky season going past October, the first episode debuts on November 13 th
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