The Magnus Archives - MAG Commentary - Retrospective #2

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

In the second of our retrospectives, Jonny and Alex look back at 5 years of the show with commentary on choice clips selected by the cast and crew of The Magnus Archives.Content WarningsSpoilers for show to dateBody horrorClownsGraphic description of dermatillomania (skin-picking)Mentions of: worms, heights, spiders, patricide & dismemberment, eco-horror, darkness, apocalypse, pandemic, cults, stress, violenceTranscriptsPDF: https://cutt.ly/NjtJxGsDOC: https://cutt.ly/IjtJbazEdited this week by Nico Vettese, Jeffrey Nils-Gardner & Alexander J Newall.Produced by Lowri Ann DaviesCheck out our merchandise available at https://www.redbubble.com/people/RustyQuill/shop and https://www.teepublic.com/stores/rusty-quill.You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast software of choice, or by visiting www.rustyquill.com/subscribePlease rate and review on your software of choice, it really helps us to spread the podcast to new listeners, so share the fear.Join our community:WEBSITE: rustyquill.comFACEBOOK: facebook.com/therustyquillTWITTER: @therustyquillREDDIT: reddit.com/r/RustyQuillEMAIL: [e-mail] Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill Ltd. and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International Licence Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Magnus Archives. I'm technically your host today, I guess. Well, yeah, we're co-hosting. We are your hosts. Okay, we are your hosts, I guess.

So this is Alex and Johnny, and what we are doing today is we are going to be giving some commentary on a number of clips that have been selected by members of the company as their favourites for being either weird or funny or whatever. We don't know what they are. It's a director's commentary with me the writer and whatever Alex is. Also here that's me. What will be interesting is we're commentating on a podcast to ourselves commentarian tating thank you yes so we'll we'll see how this goes we have no idea what these clips are so these are going to be quite cold opens from us and i suspect i probably won't even recognize a couple of them at first so i'm relying on your encyclopedic knowledge johnny you are misinformed about your complete how often I have actually listened to these episodes. On my third knock, the door swung inwards ever so slightly,

and I realised it was not locked. There is little in my life that I regret quite as much as going inside. So which episode is it, Johnny? I pushed the door open as much as I could. I don't know, there's a lot of knocking on doors in this series. So which episode is it, Johnny? I don't know. There's a lot of knocking on doors in this series. There seems to be some sort of resistance behind it. The smell would have been overpowering,

but by this point, I was almost used to it and fought down the nausea. There was no light. Must be about Tim then, right? And I fumbled on the wall. Oh, she's just popped with all the worms. Is that him? Yeah.

Yeah, it's number six squirm. Is it not Meat Guy? Oh. No, you're right. She hasn't popped. It's Meat Guy. You were right. I can't believe this.

It's fine. Right off the bat. Okay, okay, so Meat Flat for me. Okay, okay. It's called Meat Flat, right? Yes, but I need you to say Meat Apartment because it really sounds like you're saying Meat Flap. Okay, Meat Apartment then. Meat Apartment. So that's season one, right? meet apartment because it really sounds like you're saying meet flap okay meet apartment then

meet apartment so that's season one right yeah that's early season one in fact i think it's like episode i want to say 16 or 18 the man upstairs okay so at this point we realized that we might have a show that a few people might listen to this was still one of the very early ones that i conceived of and i know this because i definitely came up with it when i was actually living in a flat which i actually moved to my current house shortly after the series started which is weird because you then moved in just across the road from where i had been living always like ships in the night never in a convenient way i was really quite pleased with this idea in the sense that i really liked the idea of leaning on like processed animal meat because so often it's like oh it's human bodies like no it's just meat where meat shouldn't be so this was definitely

you were still in yurt 1.0 i think at this point so oh yeah classic yurt so for anyone who doesn't know johnny is recording this episode holding a lapel mic if i remember correctly i think we attached it right from the off but the attachment broke don't you remember for a while i had to tape it basically to you and we were holding it at various points because we had to do like away from mic stuff and you were under a blanket on a sofa with a clothes horse basically on your lap I think to record this episode was this one in James Ross's apartment or was it yeah it was it wasn't in your flat pre-asbestos gosh no no no we'd already recorded this come launch give or take and launch was happening while I was homeless right i just remember that like this being the first episode

where i was like oh alex is gonna let me be as gross as i want as long as you don't swear how to yeah with this episode i'll confess some of them speak more than others this one spoke to me it was a really good example of the horror where yes technically the pile opens its eye at one point i think and gives a bit of a blink yeah there is technically a monster yeah but that's what i mean it's like technically but you could have had exactly the same story without that and it would still be super scary it just wouldn't have that one extra tiny little element but it's always that one extra little element that codified so many of early magnus episodes listening to it now there is just the smallest hint of just disappointment in myself that i didn't return to meat pile

you know because like i set up that monster but like a lot of hooks in the early season it didn't actually get picked up it didn't actually end up going anywhere no meat pile did meat pile grew up big and strong and ended up in a hole eating everything that came along. Oh, no, yeah, no, no, no. Like, I mean, hole full of meat was like an evolution of Meatpile, but like Meatpile as monster. I don't know.

Hello, I'm Geoffrey Meatpile, that kind of thing. Yeah, I feel like it could have gone further. When I went to the classroom shortly after what should have been their final tutorial... Oh, yeah. I found something on the desk. It was an apple. Next to it was a handwritten note that said... Oh, an. Oh!

Bone apple teeth! Yeah. I figured we'd get this one. Season one music. Do I look like an idiot? Of course not. I cut it in half first to check if it was off. And human teeth. Great performance. Inside were human teeth. I assume you're talking about me, so thank you.

Oh, sorry, yeah, great performance and you're there. I brought you the two halves to see for yourselves. Oh, good lord. That's deeply unpleasant, yes. You can keep it if you want. As a proof, we do not want it. I'm afraid it isn't really proof. Gosh, season one, you're so arch. Stuck those teeth in after the apple had been cut.

You think I would do that? The actor for Dr. What's-His-Face what's his face yeah dr what's his face i remember dr is a very good friend of mine called martin in fact the character martin is sort of lazily half named after really fun recording because obviously martin does acting voice acting and that sort of thing yeah yeah and he's great to work with but i just remember bringing him in and like we did a recording and alex just looked so dour and said we can't use any of this and we were like what did we do something wrong there are performances not up to scratch and alex was like when you are recorded the two of you sound identical oh yeah it was almost like there was speech jamming happening you could not tell the

difference at all because his slightly dour voice was your archivist voice yeah it was so weird because like to hear us in person you wouldn't have said that we sounded like we're both middle class young white guys and we don't sound massively dissimilar i guess but it certainly doesn't feel like the same voice. But apparently when recorded, just the specific tones that get stripped out. It's because as well in the early days of Magnus, we were using a slightly different EQ.

And that's because, here's a trade secret. So for Magnus, we actually just use the default telephone EQ for Audacity, but we add like extra compression and blah, blah, blah. But what that meant is it strips out the extreme bass and extreme treble and for the two of you that just meant there was nothing left that wasn't just the archivist yeah it's actually one of the reasons that martin's pitched up at my end is because i end up getting lost in the shuffle as well if i don't pitch up a little bit but you got to remember that this is early days and those defaults have shifted and so on which is why it's a little bit of a fuller sound now i just remember feeling a bit sorry for martin because he was having to put on this sort of weird slightly

higher voice than he normally would i did ask him to up register didn't i yeah and like periodically throughout the recording you'd have to just stop it and be like we just need to reset the voice because it would gradually like normalize as he got more comfortable with the lines better that than slowly creeping upwards right and then i found an apple the problem was him getting comfortable with the line so every time he got comfortable you were like you need to stop doing that i mean that's directing vocals for magnus 101 i'm sorry you seem to be you know anything other than uncomfortable let's go again He was such a good sport as well. Oh, he's great.

Because he was an early guest. An early guest. It really was like, cool. Yeah, thank you so much for coming. We're really, really happy to have you. Get under the blanket. Yeah, well, there's a reason that all our early guests were just our mates. It's largely that.

And also, we couldn't pay them back then. I forget. It's easy to lose track of how far it's come yeah like so many of those early vas are just like i did some improv with or like we acted a bunch in uni it's great a few of writers i shared a course with her in here as well dotted around yeah i used to pick at my skin there was a compulsion. I would spend hours in the bathroom staring as close as I could get to my face in the mirror, searching for darkened pores to squeeze and watch the congealed oil worm its way out of my skin. Often I would end with swollen red marks where it had become inflamed with irritation or infection. Did I hear the song then? with swollen red marks where it had become inflamed with irritation or infection. Gross.

Did I hear the song then? Was it when I was a child, such a clear memory of a classmate telling me a blackhead was a hole in my face, and if I didn't keep it clean it would grow and rot? Did I hear it then, as that image lodged in my mind forever? Or was it last year, passing by a strip of green they call a park near my house after the rain and watching a hundred worms crawl and squirm to the surface perhaps i've always heard it i do remember telling you on that recording enjoy it more i am i am enjoying it no no no no like sound like you're enjoying it more there was a hard limit actually to how much i could enjoy this one but it kind of

is also the reason that it works as it does this episode was written roughly three hours before it was recorded uh it was finished roughly three hours before it was recorded at about four in the morning and i had not slept for a long time because I hadn't learned to manage my writing time properly in season one so often I would be like finishing up the episodes just before leaving to go to recording you have no idea how hard it is to direct a script blind yeah I know I know and I you know the other hand, sometimes it did work. Like, I don't think Hive would have been as good if I had been fully rested. There's another one that did well by that,

and it's the one where I can't sleep with the billboard on. Yeah, that was Fatigue. Yeah, Fatigue, that was it. That's not me condoning it, by the way. That's just me saying Fatigue is another one that had that feel to it. To be fair, for Fatigue, that was actually kind of of a deliberate thing i'd kind of put myself in that position intentionally to get that slightly dreamlike sense yeah this one was let's call it a happy accident see i really miss the jane prentice stuff because so we changed how we did the music at first in season one we had a slate of music done

and then we cross faded between them but there was too much progression in it it swells up and blah blah built in which at first was great because it was built to last at the standard runtime but unfortunately as things went on we ended up having to bend and stretch and scrape it and cross fade so much that actually became a headache but later seasons are a bit more static drones so they're as complex but they don't have the progression. But for Jane Prentice and for the Piper, I got to use two of the tracks that we rarely get a chance to use anymore. One which has a real dirty sort of vvvvvvvvv to it. And the other one is the creepy one, because they all have these names where it was just like,

Creepy 1, Threat 4. And Creepy 1 was just the Piper's tune, which is a sort of like and i just i missed the season one ones i occasionally have sneaked them in where i can but for season five they've just not really been appropriate but i sneaked them in elizabeth's too good for them now like brock does the music the monster here's the weirdest pet peeve ever i don't understand how brock does what brock does which is we give him the track and say brock we need the music and then he turns it around in

about four hours and i don't understand how because i know the tool that brock is using and i know the materials that brock's working from and i can't do it and brock won't tell me what the secret sauce is but i'm now in a situation with brock where i'm like cool brock this might be a long one and brock's like oh yeah that's three and a half hours or whatever i don't understand to be fair maybe he's sparing your feelings because if you pushed and we're like what are you doing like you'd just be like you just need to be better mate like yeah alex just down. You're just very extra and it doesn't need to be all that. What's the phrase, get good?

You know what, I fear you might be right on that one. God, what a damning indictment. In my determination to chase a young man stealing a book, I had apparently completely forgotten my age, which returned all at once and i collapsed slightly on the stairs i began to climb then this is towards the top my crew yeah bell tower i have never been afraid of heights but as i got higher and higher up those stairs my head started to swim and my heart was beating so fast i was honestly worried that i was

in danger of a heart attack this wasn't an episode that was recorded in situ, was it? This was an in-the-office recording, right? I do not remember, to be honest. Alex is very unhappy with the reverb he's hearing here, if that's the case. I think this might have been a corridor recording. If it's a corridor recording, fine, Alex is doing his job. If this is meant to be in the office, I am deeply ashamed to have really held the book before him like a protective ward. In the office of different Martinsflats, Martin with a wise flat.

Oh God, I think you're right. That's a deep cut on early Alex. I think that might be real reverb instead of artfully crafted. Yeah, because there were only so many sleeping bags we could duct tape to the wall. Okay, so there was a phase where we had to record Martin RCTO. Martin with a Y. Yeah, we recorded in his, not the one that Martin's named after. That's a different Martin, obviously.

Keep up. So this was recorded in a corridor at the one that Martin's named after. That's a different Martin, obviously. Keep up. So this was recorded in a corridor at the very, very top of, like, I don't think they were ex-council, but effectively ex-council flats. So, like, think city centre, but super, super, super high up. And they had a corridor that had no windows or anything that we could record in. And every day to make the recording work, because the scheduling and so on,

I would start my day, like, i would be up and going at 4am because i had to lug all the equipment there because we couldn't store it there so i'd get there for something like 6am then do setup and do all of the tech setup and testing and so on so that we could start at nine then i'd arrive and we'd finish the setup because it was still going yeah and then normally we'd finish by 12 because then was still going yeah and then normally we'd finish by 12 because then we'd bounce straight onto gaming so i'd finish at 6 wrap down till 8 and then be home for like 11 because the trains would change and that was my just that was just a recording day 4 a.m till 11 i remember that corridor the light bulb that martin had put in his corridor

was like this disco rotating thing the one that martin had put in his corridor was like this disco rotating thing the one that martin deliberately put into his corridor it was great i know if this is martin corridor there were good chunks of this season recorded where people would deliberately put the disco light on and then record scary magnus with like it was proper night fever disco light yeah it's great also i really liked this flat because out the windows you could see all the way to like the city of london and on a clear day well not on a clear day in inverted commas you just see this aura of smog around it it was grim god i forgot about those recordings i was so extra i put in so much.

The amount of things that we have solved over the years with just brute force, just pouring time and effort in instead of being able to use anything else. I forget how much a difference the studio makes now. We've become content and lazy. You're right, we should get lean. We should be gone with all this frippery.

Absolutely. Go back to recording into a polystyrene cup and some string the way the way god intended i liked writing this episode as well just because it's one of those like old school kind of classic mr james style ones where it's just like oh he is a bookseller who finds a sinister tome and a young man gets embroiled in this sinister tome and he doesn't know exactly what happens but he sees some strange things that he cannot explain and it's just one of those like it's classic it's okay this sounds like a compliment and it's meant strictly as a factual statement johnny it It's a good example of timeless horror. Well, in as much as it is possible to have timeless horror.

Okay, fair point. But all I'm getting at here is some of our stuff will date terribly, because it'll be a reference or it'll be just a manner of speaking or a slang, whereas that one, I think, if I remember correctly, holds together quite well. But I'd have to re-listen all the way yeah i think of it as old school well no need to rush me oh yeah i knew this one was coming in the world besides look at this dusty old thing spect it needs time to warm up. You don't use it much anymore, do you? Tea? God, no.

Hate the stuff. Why are you here? To make my statement, of course. I know the Institute and me haven't always seen eye to eye, as it were, but I thought it was the least I could do. Why now? Why not? Big changes are coming, Gertrude, and I have to think about leaving something for posterity.

Fine. Subject is Mary Key, recorded 3rd July 2008. What is it regarding? What a question. I wonder. Plenty to choose from, I suppose. Take your time. Was this my mum's first recording? Of course, this was before he was collecting them, so back then it was just a strange book. God, I adored this recording session. I can't remember if it was your mum's first.

I don't think it was. I think it might have been her second or third. I think her first was actually in your house, but it was shoved in a corner because you'd just moved in. I think her first was the one about the sinister circus yeah yeah this was in the post-homeless phase yes you are correct but this one was still in martin's flat and i remember yeah because we had them in the corridor and this was carrie cohen who plays mary yeah oh she's right carrie just turned up and like we'd

done the casting we're like yeah this this seems like someone who could do a good job. She played a few witches in TV series and things like that. Then we start recording, and it came from nowhere. It was just like, oh, right, should I sit down and give this a go then? Oh, yeah, if you would. Hello. Just like, oh! There it is.

And it was just every take was gold with these two. Absolute gold. I've always enjoyed every time Mamam has to record with someone else, she's always just in awe of them. And it's like, no, you were really good too. And I remember she came out of this and she's like, wasn't she good? Wasn't she good? Isn't she good?

Yeah, I remember. It's like, so were you. You were very good as well. But it was just, you see, there was an issue as well that not many people know is that we used to have all of the raw stored on basically an external hard drive that long story short as part of the whole everything went to awfulness like a few things got lost in the shuffle i've still got hope that i could recover them but there was a bunch of raw audio which is just your mum and carrie shooting the breeze whilst we were doing all the tech setup and they got into competitions of like cackling and things like that that sounds about right absolutely gorgeous and it was i was actively distraught when we lost that audio i still have

like i said hopes to bring it back but this was genuinely one of my favourite. But we were... Oh, God, we were still recording using Big Bertha. Big Bertha is a... A Lesus Multimix USB 2.0. It was a massive, massive mixing desk. And for a while in the podcasting sphere, it was the mixing desk. Like, I started the entire company with a 600 quid investment,

which was in that mixing desk, and that was it. I just had to save up for so long. Basically, it was was the mixing desk and they'd even discontinued it when we started but i managed to get hold of it and we had to stop periodically because as with all tech in my life at the time if it ran too long it started to melt i remember how proud you were of the fact that you'd like you've gotten like the last of this discontinued mixing it was so hard to get a hold of and it was worth every penny but it was the fact that like we i just punished the poor until summer here yeah i just punished the poor thing and then it was just we had to take breaks and it was like oh is this so that your actors can rest it was like

they don't need rest no actors no it's so the equipment can rest my I was like, they don't need rest. Actors, no. It's so the equipment can rest. This is for my poor mixing deck. I've actually still got it. It is still our backup, although I think now it's the backup of the backup. I could not part with it. And you say you're not sentimental. I'm not sentimental about all these flashy humans

wandering around the place, but Bertha, like Bertha, I fully intend to put in a glass case somewhere as the reason that we exist. She's going to be buried alongside you. It can't be on top. I'd get crushed. When he reached the entrance, he held up the book and placed it on the front door.

What are you? I saw that cutaway panel of Mr. Spider's stained and bloody right-hand door. Yeah. And he knocked on it twice I saw the words clearly in my mind almost more than I heard the sound feels like we made this like a few months ago knock

I think there is this feeling of real distinction between season 2 and season 3 against that darkness I could see the thin grey strands wrapped around the limbs of my former bully. And then, from inside, stretched two impossibly long limbs, bony and covered in coarse black

hair. Into the new music, we'd started recording at the studio. For a second there was almost the start of a scream. But the legs wrapped around him too quickly and he disappeared although you'll also notice that the actual total volume is lower because there's a thing in the industry where basically it's called the like war on loudness which is where advertisers want to come in super super super loud so that they grab your attention but it can lead to issues at distribution wasn't it the old joke that like our opening and closing was

like 400 louder than our actual episodes it was and it was meant to and it did a good job at first bridge the gap between these ludicrously loud ads versus the content but then over the time we've changed the way that we compress and the way that we do the audio so that now the vocals if you compare season one vocals to later if we were ever to do a remaster season one would change radically just by virtual processing because i listened back to the early ones and i'm like yeah they're nice but we cheated so much it's stuff like we have a tape deck why do we have a tape deck yeah it sounds good it also covers all manner of sins in the earlier seasons why do we have the tape eq so that i can strip out frequencies that at the time we could not record i remember when i was first pitching magnus and i mentioned like i really

wanted this like tape hiss tape recorder aesthetic and i could see your shoulders like visibly sag in relief oh yeah we physically were unable to do what we do now for audio it was possible we didn't have the tools or equipment or time or anything like that and so much of and this is just art in general isn't it so much of the creative decision making will be tied to not just what's cool but you know what's feasible what works what can we do yeah you're actively creating not very well if you don't you've got to play to what you can make and magnus is so much not just determined by its time but i truly believe that magnus was a thing that anyone could have made from ground zero like you know what i mean like yeah we didn't have anything really in place but they didn't we did so suck it but you know what i mean though like it's

later magnus yeah is a thing that you can listen to and go god i don't really know how they did that wow but early seasons of magnus really was just a labor of love and it's like okay alex we need to have this sound effect i don't know how to do that i guess i'll go on google and look up foley or something to a certain degree what i pitched to you originally was something that i'd kind of been intending to try and get made regardless so there was an aspect where it was like oh sorry i just i just heard sasha sorry georgie at the end oh yeah a bit i mean i can't exactly pay you anything i thought it's fine to be honest it's nice oh gosh yeah because uh he was in the flat wasn't he at that time yeah but so like i think a lot of the initial concept was me thinking like well if i have to actually just go away and like find a way to just make this what is like the simplest thing that i

could possibly make and i honestly think that's one of the reasons when I went, I want to do a huge number of episodes, you didn't go, piss off. Oh, yeah, absolutely. We had a big talk because you wanted to make a bunch and was like, that's a lot. I remember actively saying, I want a long-running show. That's a lot, like a lot, a lot. But it was because you'd already done your legwork. I've heard over the years a lot of people pitch stuff. Yours is still high up there in, this isn't a very sexy way of describing it most sensible yeah well where you just rocked up and

went okay we could do this because of this I've got this because of this this because of this and it was just like okay yeah like that makes sense we can do that yeah I don't think I've had anyone pitch it as such a oh it'll be much as you did. Love to be a sensible creator. Right. Right. Keep saying it's not meant to trip whenever one bulb goes, but no, John, I don't want to bother the landlord. Oh, Jess is coming!

Oh, Jess is coming! You don't want to do that! There she is. I mean, you can if you really want to, but you're not going to like it. Sometimes not being able to see something is actually quite a good thing. Who are you? Well, my father called me Nicola and then I killed him. So I thought I rather deserved to have his second name too. Which makes me Nicola Orsinov.

Pleased to meet you at last. You, um, you killed Gregor Orsinov? Yep. He got really boring and I'm a monster. I mean, what do you want me to do not pull him apart oh jess i remember when i pitched the character you're like oh this might be a tricky one to cast and i was like tricky one to cast and you went i've already cast it i was like no mate i know he's playing this actually interestingly i don't know if you're aware of this this episode specifically the

segments from it got really big on tiktok with the clown core crowd sorry there are some assumptions of baseline knowledge you're making of me there that i i don't have okay i now have a decent number of people in the company whose job it is to make me aware of things like this so clown core is a subculture of people who basically do the like scary clown thing as like an aesthetic, whether it's cosplay or events or whatever. Right. Right. Right. A bunch of our audio is now circulating on TikTok because it's a good one for people to lip sync to and cosplay to and things like that. Yeah. I've never really got the whole lip sync to audio on TikTok thing. I know it's just me being like an old man, but.

I'm Johnny Sims. I'm one of the few people who makes more podcasts than TikTok but no in all seriousness it's because a fairly prominent clowncore like costumer very good actually really really good basically used a bunch of Magnus audio with no idea of context and just said I found this really cool audio on TikTok and it was just perfect and it was the knock knock, knock, you know, I am plastic, and blah, blah, blah. And then off the back of that, this entire sub-community kind of stumbled onto Magnus. That's fascinating. But it's just such a good example of, like,

the ways that I have heard people become aware of it are becoming increasingly tangential. Like, just the ripples and the tides of the internet are fascinating but yeah i'm not doing enough justice to jessie it was a fabulous performance and it was another one where she just rocked up and did it i'll be honest there are a few there are sometimes characters that i've written and then like i'll realize part way through that i am writing for someone yeah and like to a certain degree that was actually gertrude like it was that yeah we were having trouble casting her and i was like

oh no hang on i'm reading this in my mom's voice yeah let's get her into like give it a shot i forgot we really did struggle to cast gertrude because honestly it wasn't intended it wasn't like oh and i'd really like my mom to play no like we didn't even broach that until we'd actually with my dad playing lightner like yeah in both cases it was after like maybe a month month and a half of like trying to figure out well who can we get to play and logistically it was just really tricky and blah blah blah but retrospectively obviously i'm really glad it panned out like that the idea that it's gertrude's your mother and uh lightness your father is really nice it's fun on a meta level as well but no jess is one of my absolute favorite people brilliant friend and i've been working with her creatively in one degree or another for like must be going on 10 12 years

now so it was very much like i first met her through mechanisms yeah fundamentally i was writing this and like as soon as through mechanisms yeah fundamentally i was writing this and like as soon as this character came up i was like yeah that one's for jess yeah god sorry i'm just having a bit of a blast from the past jess actually also has a uh uncredited part in magnus which no i don't think many people know i'm not sure i do i probably do coffin song we did we had to do a sequence where it was you singing me singing but we all had to do the oh yeah i remember she got very irate because she is a professional singer and was uh and it was quite a slapdash recording well the issue is if she was too soprano as well i was like you're

coming in real big and it smelt awful on the floor and as the pink form began to move towards me, my resolve started to waver. It was far too heavy to be supported by its skinny, twig-like legs, but something still propelled it slowly forward, inch by inch. That familiar pink drool leaving a thin path for the enormous body to follow until it was right on top of me I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth waiting to feel the pain of it starting to

tear into my flesh monster pig I felt it settle next to me the meat of it sinking into the spaces left by my position. It was pressing up against me and let out the most contented sound I have ever heard from a pig. The message could not have been clearer.

Friend. Monster Pig was weird. Monster Pig was such a weird episode pitch. I love Monster Pig. I remember one of my housemates at the time who was listening to magnus after that one dropped he talked to me i was like you do know that's really funny and i was like no mate i wrote a horror story about the world's biggest pig and no idea it was going to be comical although like i think it was one that i was

quite deliberately trying to like ride that line because fundamentally comedy is a failed state of horror and horror is a failed state of some comedy it's a really interesting line to try and thread to try and keep it so that like something is funny but also grotesque i think like which side it falls is almost entirely down to the listener like i know that some people have been like oh that pig freaked me right the hell out this is a blast from the past i actually did a bunch of academic work on this so i did a master's with the central school of speech and drama for writing for stage and broadcast media. Very good course, I'd recommend.

It was wonderful and is the only reason I got this far because a lot of it was just like, you've got to actually write. If you don't write, you're not a writer. That was a significant chunk of the course that sunk in. But part of it was I had to do a bunch on the grotesque in comedy and how it interacts with horror so there's a lot of stuff like blue jam and things like that oh blue jam yeah blue jam's weird and brilliant but also like very hard and so as a result yeah pig pig definitely hits that note for

me where at the end of it it wasn't like oh no what have we done or anything but it was just like this is an odd one yeah but in a way that was good because part of magnus as well is you can't i mean podcasting 101 everyone wants infinite amounts of the same content that's also consistently fresh and new every week i mean all you have to do is give exactly the same thing you lose audience if you change you lose audience if you stay yeah it's just it's the eternal struggle and pig was a really really nice one because yeah you've got piper and things like that which are just like straight down the line this is scary stuff and then pig or episode

100 and mr spider as well scary as anything but i also count as an unusual one well i i don't know like i always feel the fact that mr spider is so consistently up there in terms of everyone's like favorite episodes when i'm just like it's a scary kids book it's horror on easy mode like i would have really struggled to not make that one really scary you know whereas i feel like pig i'm like no this one's this is me calling an expert level horror run and i don't think i'll land everything but like i'm like no this one's this is me calling an expert level horror run and i don't think i'll land everything but like i'm proud that i gave it a go you have been good at giving me fair warning where it's like hey fyi i've got one coming up it's going to be difficult to stick the landing

because you've set yourself challenges before because the door one as well was one where you're on where you're just like i just want to do a scary door with no addition just a scary door that's my challenge so pig was always hitting that note i really did toy around with is there a way to work pig into season five as a giant like kaiju striding across the landscape but it just was not to be yeah i wish we could have got it together though just the idea of monster pig just striding around, not actually doing anything, just there. Just vibing. Always appealed to me. Five, six, four, eight.

Oh, interesting. Six, four, seven, four, eight. It's the extinction. Two, seven. With each new number, my blood pounded and my heart raced. It's the extinction. Yeah. Who's this guy? Don't know. Get rid of him.

This isn't me reading a scary story. No wonder the waveform's horrible. I hadn't even clocked that maybe I was spotting that your voice looked different on the waveform you are and so part of it will be that I deliberately pitch up to hit the EQ better so I actually come out consistently a little bit louder for you but we kind of compensate for it to realise how late it was and how sunburned I had gotten in the process. Everything ached and my heart pounded as I limped home.

I'd been out easily twice as long as any time before. I'm really surprised this one was selected, actually. It's the first one that, like, really grabs the idea of the extinction, which, like, landed a lot stronger

than I think either of us expected you know what that's fair actually yeah it is an early extinction one because everyone knows this at this point that i dive down like research rabbit holes occasionally just fall deep and i'm like oh same same number stations for me was a real fascination for a long time admittedly prior to this recording i have a suspicion you might have actually like not exactly asked but I suggested number stations I don't remember if I was like yep already got it planned or like yeah I can definitely do a number station one I don't remember I remember suggesting it because I really wanted to do a number station one and I'm glad how this one came out yeah number stations just odd there's a few

things that I just fell down the rabbit hole of because I just find them inherently creepy number stations water towers there's find them inherently creepy. Number stations, water towers, there's just something inherently creepy about water towers. They're just scary. They're like these massive tripods that just loom everywhere and everyone ignores. I really enjoyed this because it's nice to

experiment with the format occasionally. And I like this one because it gave a little bit of homework because I used basically the world's simplest crypto code, the world's simplest code with the numbers. And like eventually some people decoded it. And it like, I think it was like the world is always ending or something like that. Oh, I don't know that people decoded it.

I never got that message. Yeah, people decoded it. Like it was a very simple cipher. It's one of those things where, like, it's not in and of itself a particularly, like, terrifying message, but actually putting in that work always makes it hit harder.

And so I was very gratified to see that coming out. Well, it makes me think, actually, we did for a while, and this is something that I can talk about now because we know it's not a thing, is we talked about whether we should do, like, ARG stuff tied to this. Oh, yeah.

I feel like I've always been just on the edge of making an ARG. Yeah. You know, like every creative project I do could theoretically include an ARG, but they never have. Oh, sorry, for anyone who won't know Augmented Reality Game it's one where like I don't know there's a code and if you call that number in the real world you'll get access to a recording that'll tell you

to go to a GPS location in the real world blah blah blah but they were huge in the noughties. Yeah we discussed it and logistically we realised that we could do that but it would actively negatively impact the podcast because it would be such a heavy draw on time yeah and i think at this point we realized that just from writing alone putting

it together it just wasn't feasible i know since that someone's done it actually there's been a couple of podcasts that are doing quite well that really heavily tie into the arg element and have a reactive story based on how far people get more power power to you. That's a very impressive achievement. That's been a trend in internet horror. I've been not exactly following, but periodically encountering that's really fascinating for a while. It goes, I mean, the earliest versions of that, I'm aware, that were widespread were a lot of the early Slender Man things, like Everyman Hybrid, Twelve Tribes, all that sort of stuff,

they leaned very heavily into this ARG element with, like, viewers getting packages and all this sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maxwell told me it is in our nature to fear the dark. And I could not disagree. For all my intellectual reverence of it, I could not deny that those few occasions

I had found myself in full and proper darkness, my heart had trembled. And rightly so, he said, for our creatures bore the light, contemptible and corrupt. Surely then this fear of confronting the pure nature of the universe is right and good. I don't remember this one. It's Manuela's statement, the one before they actually meet her. That is words I felt afraid. And my heart soared in terror and elation as my eyes brimmed with tears. For I knew he spoke the truth.

So we began to work together. To worship together in his church. the only church i've ever felt i truly belonged to yeah i confess a lot of the dark ones blur together for me pun intended like yeah it's i think always been the power that we've struggled the most to properly make as scary as it should be it's just so frustrating because it's so easy in cinema unsurprisingly perhaps in an audio medium the fear of the dark is harder to convey but i love going on a weird off-kilter cultish religious screed love it i'm sure i never noticed that before johnny yeah this one specifically i can lay almost entirely down to the excellent podcast Apocrypals getting me massively into Gnosticism.

There's a period, there's like a stretch of like 20, 25 episodes. That's such a use statement, Johnny. Oh, you're still on Catholicism. No, I've moved on to Gnosticism now. It's all the rage. There's a run of like 20, 25 episodes in season four where you could see that I was just going down this massive gnostic rabbit hole research wise so here's a question then do you remember when you stopped

being afraid of the dark i've never asked this question of you as in uh like in my actual life life like was there a formative experience yeah because there's some of the powers that I know, like, from our chats or whatever, like, this speaks to you on this level or whatever, whatever. But for the dark, I've never actually asked. Like, is there anything that the dark formatively attaches to you in any way? I mean, I definitely was afraid of the dark as, like, a child child. Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, you are, aren't you?

At some point, it swapped from being afraid of the dark to being not exactly afraid of my thoughts in the dark. Oh, more like a solipsistic thing. Yeah, like if I got into like a particularly scary or weird thought cycle, I found I had to like turn on the light to kind of dispel it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. to dispel it oh yeah yeah because it was that thing of like without any visual stimulus my brain would just sort of go on these like almost like low-key panic attack not actual but like that sort of loop i wonder if that comes out in the writing actually because now i'm thinking about it i can't think of any shared victimhood in the dark i know that there's been like multiple cult members at once but has there ever ever been more than one victim simultaneously suffering to the dark?

I don't think there has. Not really. There was the shadows that tore that dude's head off under the church. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forget the name of the surviving witness there, but there were two people there and one of them got their head off.

It's just thinking, because like some of them obviously lend themselves to like more people and less and so on. It was just, yeah, I've just realised with the dark, I never asked you. I never dug in on that specific one i think it is one of those things that at this point i find the dark to a certain degree of comfort in a lot of scenarios and like i don't know something about working night shift it does change years you know you just kind of get used to it it is still odd it is still odd thinking back to you and me knowing

each other pre-magnus just having met randomly at the night work that's so odd to me it's one of those things where it's like it's not as random as it sounds because like james ross i think was the reason that we'd both gotten this like weird night shift gig yeah it was a good gig for creatives we were already in the same sort of circles hello john apologies for the deception to make sure you started reading so i thought it best not to announce myself i'm assuming you're alone you always did prefer to read your statements in private i wouldn't try too hard to stop reading. There's every likelihood you'll just hurt yourself. So just listen. Now, shall we turn the page and try again?

Statement of Jonah Magnus regarding Jonathan Sims, the archivist. Statement begins. I hope you forgive me the self-indulgence, but I have worked so very hard for this moment, the culmination of two centuries of work. It's rare that you get the chance to monologue through the voice of another, and you can't tell me you're not curious we're listening to for everyone's benefit you're listening to johnny okay reading the character john oh is this me i'd completely oh yeah bear with me what a channeling ben meredith playing elas bearing in mind that Ben Meredith's Elias is Ben Meredith's

impression of Johnny it's such a looped recursive nonsense such a recursive mess yeah this was a nice pitch I remember you pitching this this was a nice idea for an episode

really really clever it was the the that's me it's the biggest compliment i can give you mate yeah no i'm absolutely aware that sensible is the biggest compliment you can give and i am also deeply amused by the implications of that but yeah no i remember that the like how we were going to do this drop, this change, was something we'd been going back and forth on for like three and a half seasons before we finally settled. Oh yeah. My original idea was actually that this happened 12 episodes into season five.

The idea that there was like a false resolution at the end of season four, and like the first ten or so episodes of season five were just this entirely dead end not exactly a waste of time but like a complete fake out and then this happens a third of the way through the season and then the rest is just what the whole of season five ended up becoming because yeah we did so many permutations of what season five could look like we had season five is all the apocalypse which is obviously what we ended up with we had season five is a halfway fake out and suddenly it's there we had season five is gonna be all apocalypse but only 12 episodes like we tried a few yeah i think it came in at 15 or something

yeah so i mean fundamentally a lot of it came down to the fact that we weren't sold on being able to maintain an interesting apocalypse for a full 40 episode season. It's a tall order. It's difficult. Yeah, and to be fair, I think some audience might say that we haven't managed it. I think enough would say that we've done a decent job. It's given us permission to go experimental in a new way. I'm glad of the attempt and i know that sounds like a cop-out but i am i would have always wondered what if if we'd picked any other option than just doubling down because we really had to compress the story structure in season four

a lot to make apocalypse happen at end of season four well there's so much plot in season four but at the same time like i don't think it actually feels rushed yeah i think there were i'm trying to remember i remember there were elements that we considered exploring that we deliberately lifted out but i can't for the life of me remember what they are which says a lot it's a weird one because of how the like the overall structure works with like each season being more and more character driven and less and less about the specifically the statements themselves as it goes on more story goes less far you know until we hit season five where it takes a sideways leap and suddenly it's focusing at least for the

first light half it's focusing a lot on the hellscapes with like character moments to contrast but yeah it was an ambitious change and I'm very glad that we did it so what's the deal with you two anyway? it's an odd situation but not a complicated one shortly after I decided to stay here

she arrived, wandered in from the chaos out there and told me she was going to stay with me I didn't get this far by pitting myself against the web wandered in from the chaos out there and told me she was going to stay with me. I didn't get this far by pitting myself against the web, so I welcomed her in. And? And sometimes she cooks.

She cooks? I don't know what you want me to say. It's a big house and I don't see her much. Can't even say which corner she's made her nest in. Whatever she's doing, all I can do is hope it doesn't wreck my little oasis. And if it does, then I hope that by keeping her in good graces, she'll at least do me the courtesy of killing me first. Anyway, let us talk of happier things, or perhaps just take a moment to enjoy not being out there. You are, of course, welcome to stay as long as you like. Took ages to land on a voice actor for Selesa, but Ray was such a joy to work with.

Lowry really came through finding Ray. weirdly so laser in this oasis was one of my earliest solid ideas i had for the season five apocalypse i am so happy with how that came out i am so happy because it was really difficult to get the casting through and then there were equipment problems we had to ship it out to australia and then the timing problems and just from a logistic standpoint, that episode should not exist. And certainly it was hard work, but I'm so happy with the end result. It's really one of my favourite bits.

I think even by the time we were recording Peacemail, which is Selesa's first appearance, and you were telling me that I had to make it like 100 less sweary it was all f bombs all the time first draft of piecemeal u.s markets they don't like it i was just like he's he's a very sweary man alec but like right from the start i like i had this idea of selasa is this like just very practically minded character and like as soon as we started talking about the apocalypse and i was like well we need to have like this rest in the center yeah absolutely and like as soon as i was like so this is going to be in there well structurally as well like you have

to remember in mind is that season five was written then pandemic hit selasa was originally meant to be they basically dropped to the floor in front of him, mid-season break. Because originally we were just, we were trying to toy around with,

yeah, just have the mid-season break and go for it. So from my perspective it was the wonderful landing on the lap, oh hello, and then off we go

for the break. So it still feels slightly odd to me structurally. I can't complain because we don't deserve it to have come out as nice as it did. Yeah. With all of the struggle, with all of the fight to make that episode happen.

And Ray was an absolute stunner to work with. For me, it was all secondhand stress. But I remember how much stress there was for Laurie and you, like trying to get everything set up and finding the right actor. And once we found ray like getting the equipment and getting everything sorted and like every time we talked it was like oh stress stress stress stress stress stress this new like little disaster and then i like i got on the call and ray started talking i was like ah brilliant bullseye we've got it and it was another one where it was literally i think the only note was stuff like it was either like speed up or slow down on a couple of bits that was it ray was just great

straight out the gate it was genuinely one like you say where the stress levels were so high going into that recording because it needed to be grand and the second that ray started talking it was just like ah i'm in an oasis good yes yes take us into the oasis yes please and on that nice chill oasis now i actually think i think we've come to the end of it is that it there's not yeah you're right there are no more coming that flew by that really did but they were like oh we've got a blast from an hour of clips i was like oh that's gonna take a while but no it's it's been a delight i'll tell you what then we'll just sit and just listen listen to all of them right once we're

done we'll just listen okay well let's let's just let's just let's uh let's maybe i gotta go to dinner all right yeah you go you go to dinner we'll see what we've got coming up next week but i think we'll call it there then thanks everyone for joining us on this little retrospective obviously we've got more uh hiatus content coming up but uh thanks for your time anything you want to add johnny before we bounce off not really i'm still like it's weird to hear like five years of your life and writing like condensed into an hour it's disorientating but i think i liked it well either way we'll talk to you all later bye we've overvoiced the archivist probably should have picked someone else this episode is distributed by rusty quill and licensed under a creative commons attribution

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