The Magnus Archives - MAG - Pod UK Horror Panel

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

Recorded live at PodUK 2020, Alexander J Newall, Gemma Amor (No Sleep Podcast, Calling Darkness) and David Ault (No Sleep Podcast, Shadows at the Door) moderated by Alasdair Stuart (Escape Artists Inc., The Magnus Archives) talk about the world of modern audio horror.Produced by Lowri Ann DaviesEdited by Maddy Searle and Alexander J NewallCheck out our merchandise at https://www.redbubble.com/people/rustyquill/collections/708982-the-magnus-archives-s1You 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: twitter.com/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. Hi everyone, Alex here with a short bit of context ahead of today's episode. This panel on audio in horror was recorded live in late 2019 at the Pod UK Festival, with raw audio kindly provided by Pod UK. That's all for now, we hope you enjoy the episode. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the Horror Panel.

This is less a panel, more a cartographic expedition, within which myself and my elite colleagues over here will attempt to map for you some of the more interesting and innovative elements of modern podcast audio horror. And the best possible thing we can do at the top of every doomed expedition is, of course, take the photo. You know, the one where people get crossed out as the polar bears eat them. See? Same wavelength.

So what we're going to start off with is introductions, and I'll have all of us explain who we are and what we do and what kind of shows we work on. I'll start. I'm Alistair, your moderator for this evening. I co-own the Escape Artists Podcast Network, along with my partner Marguerite Kenner. We produce four shows, Escape Pod, which does science fiction, Pseudopod, which does horror, Cast of Wonders, which does YA, and Podcast All That Does Fantasy. I host Pseudopod, the horror show, for a frankly horrifying amount of time. Seriously, I don't want to think about it. I think I'm on the Bayer tapestry recording episode 49. In addition to all of that, I also write about the genre a fair amount,

and I've turned up in several other voice acting capacities. Most recently as Peter Lucas, who is the unsung hero of the Magnus Archives. And I'm on film. I'm on film doing this this time. Unsung. Percy, who's queen, who, if everyone had listened

to, nothing bad would have happened. Not that anything bad happens at the end of the Magnus Archives season four. And speaking of the Magnus Archives, Alex. Hi, so I'm the CEO of Rustic World Limited, which is a podcast production company and podcast network, and we generate

a large number of shows, the most relevant of which to this panel is called Magnus Archives, which is a horror series that pretends to be an anthology, but it's not. And basically, I think that's as succinct as i can really get so i'll hand over uh hi i'm jemma i'm the ceo of nothing um i uh write for i write for a number of horror podcasts i write for the no sleep podcast

um i co-write and voice act in a horror comedy show starring Kate Siegel called Calling Darkness. I am also in a season two of Shadows at the Door, which Mr. Alt is involved in, and various other scary, spooky shows hiding on the internet. I'm also a writer. I write books and novels and various other things. That's me. This is David. Thank you very much, Gemma. As Gemma has said, I am David. David Ault. I am a voice actor in the No Sleep podcast. Just 48 hours ago, came back off tour for the European tour, so I don't quite know what day it is or where I am. But I'm also the co-host of Shadows at the Door with Mr. Mark

Nixon here. And we do ghost stories, M.R. James style horror with old stuff that has been adapted and new stuff from writers like Gemma Ramon. I'm also on The White Vault and various other things. So yes. You're also Byron. I'm also Byron and The Byron Chronicles, which has been going since 2006. That's amazing. I know. Wow.

Yes. I was fresh out of university and this American guy said, would you like a podcast? Yes. Everyone's free. Oh, yeah. Then they get you hooked. Oh, we're going to be fine. They're all free.

So, this is your elite team of completely doomed scientists who are going to walk up to the big Squamous Rougos blob of horror, poke it, and see what happens. And the first question I want to ask everybody, and I'm going to to start the other end and work back this time is what brings you to john to horror and as a genre in particular i think i arrived at horror via sci-fi probably um one of the reasons i got into voice acting all those many many years ago was doctor who um i was in the wilderness years between 1989 and 2005

where there was no Doctor Who on TV. It's a lot of years. It's a lot of years. It was. It was a long, long time. And the BBC started doing audio dramas with the old doctors, and I really enjoyed those. And I thought, oh, are there any other people

doing Doctor Who audio dramas? Found some people online, listened to their work, listened to others and then I've always liked ghost stories so yes, I got involved with Darker Projects then Pendant Audio and basically it's sort of gone from there but it's a deep-seated love of ghost stories

and coming in via sci-fi um i i think i came to horror probably via fantasy first i'm a my first and biding love is fantasy um i grew up on the diet of robert jordan and the wheel of time and the point horror books as well when i was a teenager and i've just always been um as a writer in particular I'm drawn to making up things because you don't have to follow the rules so which is why I will never write procedural crime drama because you have to know stuff and everything has to be based in an element of truth and with horror you can pretty much uh invent your own landscape invent your own wild so yeah that's me um i mostly came to horror through

convenience that is the single most you sent okay so um for me and horror i i suppose i have most experience on the sci-fi side as well actually but in terms of horror as as a medium it is one that's interested me because I think it simultaneously people think it's the easiest one to get into because, you know, it's just like, oh, the tropes. They're there. You do the tropes and you've done a horror. But at the same time, it also leaves you very little wiggle room between good horror and hot garbage, which I quite like that that like operating in that space but i have recently been made aware that the things that i make that aren't horror are still nightmare fuel and which is news to me i wasn't aware that's a thing now i know and so as a result i can i can work with that um i i came to horror in a slightly weird path one very similar to David's in many ways in that most of my entry point

was science fiction coupled with the fact that I was from a relatively young age perpetrating an elaborate genetic con I was about six foot by the time I was 13 and my voice broke really early and

that was useful, especially in a small rural community with a single screen cinema and the nice old lady behind the counter who at no point went, you're 18, aren't you, Sonny? Yes! And she just kind of assumed.

And so I saw a frankly ridiculous amount of movies I had no business seeing at least five years early and it left marks in very much a good way horror, it horribly traumatizes you but in a good way this explains so much

oh and it's also partially Paul Daniels fault those of you who don't know Paul Daniels was kind. Those of you who don't know, Paul Daniels was kind of the avatar of TV stage magic in the UK for a really long time. And he is one half of a very curious binary experiment with horror that the BBC carried out, which went very well. And as a result, they were terrified and never did it again.

Was this Whizbit? Yeah. Whizbit is a thing of the demon realms and not to be brought forth like youtube whiz bit

and we're not sorry we're not sorry okay um paul daniels famously did a halloween special in the very early

1990s where he finished with an elaborate escape which was supposed to be him getting out of an iron maiden which is not him having the band fired at him at high velocity, but rather a very large

spiky cupboard, which shut on him and apparently killed him. And they just didn't mention anything about it for like two hours. And of course, being terribly British, my family and I watched this and went, I'm fairly certain we've just seen a man die. Do you want a cup of tea?

And this landed in a very similar kind of period of time to ghost watch ghost watch for those of you who haven't seen it is terrifying terrifying and it's terrifying in an insidious and really evil way it is presented as a terrible early 90s live tv event it's presented by the exact people you think would present a terrible early 1990s live TV event. And then about half an hour in, very slowly it starts to go to hell. And the final sequence, which involves these words in various stages of combination, TV studio, flames, demonic voice, talk show host, seared themselves into my brain.

So the whole time I'm going along going, obviously I'm a science fiction guy because I like spaceships and nuns from hell. And pseudopod finally let me realize that I was a horror guy wearing a spacesuit. And that's kind of where I am. So I'm going to jump around a little bit in order and ask Gemma my next question,

which is what keeps you in horror? I think the license to be as imaginative as you can, you can do anything with horror. And I love that. And I was talking to somebody at the stand earlier on today. So my jam is people-based horror. I write about people first and foremost. And my main concern when I sit down and write anything is is how the character's feeling what are their main motivations how do they go through their lives and why and the decisions and the stories grow up around the people and sometimes the horror is almost incidental it's something that happens around them but with horror you can just it's just free license to let your imagination run riot and i think that's what keeps me there and i do dip into sci-fi and i do dip into the more kind of um psychological thriller

side of things but i like ghosts and ghoulies and monsters and things that go bump in the night because you can just let your imagination go and yeah that keeps me keeps me firmly grounded absolutely well everything that jemma just said um but also i the thing with uh horror and especially with ghost stories is that they are timeless they they don't have they can be absolutely present day but they can be so yeah timeless which i don't need to explain the word. But horror, and especially audio horror, I love the audio medium simply because it leaves all of the details to your imagination.

It is all there, and you are painting your own pictures, and you can scare yourself as much as you want to with what you're listening to, or if it's on a book what you're what you're reading and so that that's that's what i like it it becomes a lot more personal to you as the as the the devourer of the horror if you like that's that's my yeah yeah for me i'm gonna give a sort of shorter term answer which is that for reasons beyond my understanding but i'm happy to to know uh cosmic horror is currently basically getting in vogue which is phenomenally useful but um what that also means is

oh god alex has just had a had a brain, like, 10 years ago. Okay, cool. So we have emergent culture, we have dominant culture, and we have residual culture. As Lovecraftian horror shifts from emergent to dominant, one is left wondering, what is emergent next? No, what I'm getting at is... Yeah, I just channeled a 10-year younger version of me who was a pompous arse.

I'm very intimidated so what what is interesting to me is we all know now what's currently interesting what's kind of in vogue and what's going there but for horror we are due something new and the same way that sort of the the zombie trope came in and then kind of faded and so on we are now due one and a lot of the time what is due next is defined by what leaves public domain because that is what allows uh sorry what enters public domain because it allows experimentation within the space so it's like okay cool this thing has become public domain it's fair game and in podcasting what we are as an industry is one

enormous playground where people get to make things that no one in their right mind would ever option for anything else right up until it's successful and go oh yes we were definitely thinking about that oh yes but what that means is we're due right now we are due a big new thing and i don't know what it is for horror combined with an industry that's still able to just suddenly have 10 000 people go i think it's this 9 000 to be wrong and everyone to still be having a good time and not care you know like that's why i'm here right now if you know what i mean i'm i'm in horror because i really like jfc with windmills um especially cultural ones i firmly believe horror is one of the most fundamentally hopeful

genres of fiction there is and it's hopeful i think in two very different ways there is the schadenfreude element which is well at least that's not happening to me yes and there's also the survival element and i mean i this this is a this is kind of an easy get but i i think an awful lot about cabin in the woods and about the moral dilemma that breaks down very starkly in the final 15 minutes of that and where various characters land and that idea that kind of visceral interaction with ethics is something which i think horror does i wouldn't say no other no other genre does it because i know lots of other people in those genres and i know where i live um but i think horror engages with it in a way that very few others do and I really respond

to that and I've my dark days I've found tremendous strength in horror stories I think yeah to add to that I think for me personally as well I have been very open about mental health issues and my own experiences with them and I feel like horror

is a safe space a safe space to explore that and I think a lot of horror fans are drawn to the genre for that reason they find actually scary stories quite comforting for their anxiety issues I know I do but also you can there is a lot of horror to be found in the everyday and in your own struggles and in your own story so I think that also keeps me in the genre because i write about those things those things interest me and i explore my own issues through the things that i write so yeah i think you're yeah i want to pick up on something which alex mentioned which is the idea of the thing that's coming um but two reasons firstly because my favorite definition of horror is will William Friedkin's one of how true horror

is seeing something approach. And secondly, because I'm curious, it ties very neatly into one of the things I wanted to talk about, which is why do we think the horror audience is growing? Because it is. I'd be happy to take a stab. Please do.

Take several. I think certainly one element is picking up on what Gemen was just saying which is that horror is a very useful space for you to literalize uh issues both of the time and of a personal nature and stab them repeatedly um by which i mean yeah it's really useful to have a space where allegory is not only encouraged but accepted and a bloody useful tool but what that means is shocker um in times of uncertainty horror tends to do well and it's because what you are doing is at least what you can do this is not the only answer by

any means is you can take the big questions you know are we all doomed maybe a bit smaller and you know like um questions about economy questions about mental health genuinely anything that's really gnawing at people the thing that you wake up in the morning and you have that thought again and go and then what it does is it allows you to transcribe that onto a landscape that has, A, a set of rules that you can navigate. Don't open the door. If you open the door, you deserve it. Come on. Don't split up.

But my point is these are knowable rules which help you codify this weird, scary idea that you've got into something that you can navigate because we all know how stories work. So when a character is navigating that space, you are navigating it with them. And then the additional thing is it makes them conquerable like um alice was saying about survivable is if your world is trying to kill your characters and your world is an is an allegory for whatever you want to explore if your character is surviving that you're taking that journey with them you're surviving the thing that you're afraid of um i should stress that's not the be all and end all of horror in fact that's often not the way that i personally engage with horror but i think sort of culturally speaking that probably strikes a note with a decent number of people cool why don't you two want to jump in i'm just trying to think of a way of phrasing it i want

to use the term humanist but i'm not sure that's the right expression. That's good to me. But it's the idea that, you know, we're all human and there are certain things in our lives that drive us from the day we're born to the day that we cease to be. And they're quite basic things. And I think in times of hardship, for example, you know, we've been having a bit of a shitty time in this country lately. And in times of hardship, for example, you know, we've been having a bit of a shitty time in this country lately. And people revert back to those humanist principles as things to sort of comfort themselves with. Does that make sense? It does, absolutely.

I'm gabbling, I gabble. It makes you noble. Yeah, and it's about something that you can relate to, I think, as a reader or a listener or a watcher or a consumer of any kind of media media and I think the popularity increases particularly in conjunction with things like Netflix streaming and and looking for content and they want so much content that we're now seeing much more prevalence with horror on things like TV and I think that that goes hand in hand with podcasting and everything else so I feel like like it's a human-driven thing. Like we want to watch and listen and consume things that remind us of ourselves.

Which sci-fi perhaps you don't. It's grander, isn't it? The scale is grander with sci-fi. It's almost the payoff between pragmatism and realism. You said that much more efficiently than I did. But yours was better though. I couldn't have got there without you thought that took me 10 minutes of going around the houses and you got there in like one second and i think it also it also gives people control over um what is what is going on in in the horror uh because as we've been saying we've not been having a fun time recently

because as we've been saying we've not been having a fun time recently anywhere in the world really and that can be very it can give a lot of people a lot of anxiety about especially where you you can't do anything about it we're fed news with with a theme tune which is like a heartbeat and we're conditioned to take in this news and be filled with this horror that is happening out there and we can't do anything about it. We're given the option once every, well two years for the last four years, but once every

five years to even have a go at doing something and that puts us in a really... It's a bind, isn't it? It is. It's a horribly helpless place. So having the opportunity either to write horror and externalize

or to watch it and go along with it, but also be able to stop it. Yeah. Gives us that control over some aspect of this emotional stimulus absolutely absolutely um yeah those are all amazingly great answers i'm actually just letting all that sink in for for a second all of this seems to be building up to something which we've all touched on, which is the sense of there is something coming next in the field.

And I'm curious, before we get into the kind of nitty-gritty of the logistics of voice acting and kind of soliciting work and script writing and being the arch-lich nemesis genius child and all of that. That's not looking at me. You were given a cloak today i really don't i've never had a cloak before what do we think is next for the field i think you'll see more genre blending i think say for example cosmic horror folk horror folk horror. That kind of genre crossover. Stop. Cosmic folk horror. That's the answer. I really love that.

Coming soon from Rusty Quill. That's a really good pitch. You can't have that. That's mine. This is copyrighted now to me. But you know, I think people are getting much more adventurous and also unique ideas are kind of few and far between now

in the field there's no such thing as a unique idea everything's been done before that's why we have tropes and tropes are enjoyable for that reason and we'll be getting to them yeah but uh you can do uh have a new take on an old-fashioned trope and one of the ways of doing that is by blending the genre and i think that's where we'll go I think we'll see a lot more crossover between like I said those kind of sub-genres if that makes sense I'm certainly thinking Armageddon just in general

and possibly also in fiction and also yes, possibly yeah I think that with films like Midsommar and what was the other one hereditary hereditary that's the one uh sort of bringing back wicker man style idea yeah i'd go along with the folk horror but i'm just thinking what's in what's out there in the world today how can that be reflected

because it was about 10 years ago that there was that huge swell of of um like weather films and suddenly everything was being destroyed by cold or wind or tornadoes or something and there's just a huge swell at the time and I'm just yeah as we look at the world today I think probably

more personal horror plague stories but yeah I think personal slash folk slash but everything cycles as well friends cycle and you'll have

like David said you'll have a spate of disaster movies and then a spate of something else I think we'll all just go through the various cycles and then come back to slashes probably in about 10 years' time. If you're talking movies, yeah. There is one thing I've seen a little bit of evidence for, and I think that this will be fascinating,

which is we might actually be in the time period where Lovecraft has successfully contextualised his corpse separated from its bones, those bones salted and buried in multiple locations across the Earth, lest it rise again. Lovecraft is successfully contextualized. His corpse separated from its bones. Those bones salted and buried in multiple locations across the earth, lest it rise again. We are a couple of weeks out, I think, from the release of a movie adaptation of The Color Out of Space,

which is one of the genuinely very good Lovecraft stories, directed by Richard Stanley, who directed Hardware, which is a film which feels like you have contracted a fever while you're watching it and starring Nicolas Cage we might be off to the races here my friends all joking aside there are multiple projects we seem to be approaching Lovecraft in a

very kind of clear eyed or in Cage's way wild eyed and hasn't slept for two weeks way which are engaging with the very negative elements of his past and his beliefs and finding something positive that they can tear off those bits to get to and I would as one of

the core frustrations of this field I often find is that it's tendency to feel the very strong gravitational pull of Lovecraft in particular. And I like new things. I like things which have been created by people who don't look like they could conceivably be my brother or the uncle that we really don't like to talk to. I like old stuff as well. I just like new things a lot too. And I would be really interested and very hopeful to see the field kind of go in that direction i think that's a good point as well to mention

representation in horror yes um and horror diversifying through for example women in horror much more um obvious movement now of women writing horror doing very well um and all sorts of different diverse voices latinx horror, the full works. And if you hang out on Twitter at all, you'll see various different hashtags and things trending. And I think that will influence the genre as well, hugely, as we move forward. And even better, because there's always a tendency with foreign language material to assume it's terribly worthy, and it's not. There are just as many greasy cheeseburgers with foreign language subtitles on them as there aren't there's a netflix show called diaboleros which is literally supernatural

just in mexico and is exactly as much fun as that sounds so there's so much great stuff out there and one of the upsides of the late stage capitalist consumer culture we are all trapped in is it's much easier to get to so yeah if i may i know we want to move on but you know me i can't shut up um i think with at the risk of sounding like i'm trying to devalue horror i'm not that there is a reactionary element to horror as well which is one of the ways that you can see the shape of things to come in terms of horror is you look at the way of the shape of yeah what's what's big at the moment and horror is going to deliberately try and do something different to that or underwhelm that or break it apart into little bits so take a look around at you what

what are you seeing a lot of at the moment what's that disney owns the world and it's all superheroes as far as the eye can see my instincts say that as much as i would love a brand new monster it's not gonna happen that's not the way it works but what we're realistically i think you're gonna start seeing is the more that we lean into this homogenized model of storytelling where um people rejected stuff like the dark universe you know the tom cruise one where basically where they went cool we'll make horror the way that we make all the other stuff that we make and everyone went nope hate it don't do that and i think that as a result if you just take whatever's there and invert it you're at least going to start getting the shape

of things i think which means that i totally agree with you in that i think you're going to start seeing probably a schism if i'm honest where i think you're going to see a lot of people still pushing for the huge scale. Like, you know, I sneezed in the world ended explore. Um, but also that real nitty gritty grounded focused one and bringing in some of

the, the more older styles, like you said, things coming back into circle where it's like, it is a very tight family drama where one of the characters was dead all along or whatever. My point being that it's far more focused rather than the huge sprawling stuff which is everywhere all the time

i think less so perhaps with podcasting though and with audio drama you you have much more uh diverse material yeah that tends to reach your ears before things reach your eyes on the screen if that makes sense yeah definitely and further to that i'm curious as to what tropes in audio in audio horror make the panel kind of sit up and pay attention audio specifically audio specifically well i mean we are pod uk from my perspective probably from david's we we are no sleep people and we we are big lovers of the creepy pastaasta so creepypasta trope I guess is a trope Could you explain that just in case any of the audience don't know what it is

So for anybody that doesn't know what creepypastas are they're short internet based stories and the no sleep podcast in particular started by adapting the subreddit so there's a subreddit with a load of very short creepy stories written by whoever wanted to upload one and it grew from there so i think um from my perspective i am very fond of a creepy pastor

i'm fond of a campfire story and i think that is a trope that will never die um and you can see it with the multitude of youtube channels dedicated to it hundreds of podcasts out there that all do that kind of let's tell a scary story around the campfire it's a lethal refusal to contextualize that i love about them it's just here is a horrible thing that's happened yeah the end yeah that's pretty much yeah and it's usually first person as well so i went to the store and somebody chopped my head off the end and it's like and that's that's actually really enjoyable because you can relate to it and it's very easy and quick to digest and and you can have fun with it so i think that's my favorite try that was was that a question my

favorite yeah there we go i got that on the flip side uh the long form claustrophobic atmospheric slow burn uh ghost story that or or horror that builds up over time uh which is definitely the jamesian style of shadows at the door that we enjoy but the white vault and things like that is is a very claustrophobic slow but it's a bit like the thing but even longer so that that's that's one of the things the long thing yes we're being filmed, Gemma. So, yes, that's... I was actually just about to say

I'm really glad you brought that up. Come again? Maybe later. I'm getting all hot here. It's been a long day there's actually a new version of the thing is there really yeah

another new one Blumhouse have it yeah which means one of two things it will either be the equivalent of a three minute guitar solo

which is what really good Blumhouse movies tend to be or it will be the equivalent of three minutes of lift music guitar solo which is what the other good bloomhouse movies tend to be or it'll be the equivalent of three minutes of lift music guitar solo which is what the other bloomhouse movies tend to be um very skeptical okay okay uh so tropes in audio that okay here's one that i i personally like playing to type a little bit which is on the sound design side so let's go let's go into the audio bit hard i really like so i don't it's easy to say what i don't like and then come back from there so what i don't like is grossly overproduced you know i went up to the

door i stepped across the floor and it's like great fabulous you found a foley kit cool what i Sorry. It just... I don't want that. Sorry. You're a month friend. Okay? There are no specific culprits I have to mind there. It burns. All I mean, though, is that people who feel that, it tends to come with jump scares.

You know? I opened the door and there was a monster. I like a good jump scare. See, I don't like... Especially with audio. But I like an artful scare. You know when you're... Okay?

What I don't like is, you know, welcome to the... Scare me like one of your French girls. Yeah, exactly. But what I do like a lot is when people put the effort in and make something very calm, very measured, very grounded, and they treat the audio

the same way that you treat the actual horror content itself which is the audio is perfectly normal in every way apart from this one little thing weird thing and as the noise hypothetically and as the story progresses that one weird thing grows more prevalent much like the ghost in the room you know the mr james thing of you take the thing in the background you slowly make the background overwhelm the foreground that in sound i love it where i listen to something and go that sounds kind of real and then i forget that i'm listening to horror for at least 15 minutes and then stuff gets weird and i realized it was weird for the last 10 minutes that's what i I like, I think. But that's a very me answer.

It's a good one, though. I mean, in terms of kind of horror tropes that excite me, any of you who are in the audience this morning know that any story which involves letters and a sea monster, I'm dying happy, frankly. In terms of stuff which audio podcasts do very well, honestly, everything the people on this panel produce has something in it which I really, really respond to. No Sleep's wonderful ability to not only commit to creepypastas

and aesthetic as an approach, and the way that they use that to filter the lens of old-school 1950s ec horror comics you know where again it's just that here's a horrible thing can we stop it no the white vault which is genuinely one of the best slow burn horror stories i've ever encountered where you get to the end of the first season and go i'm terrified five things have happened but i'm terrified it's an amazing show uh calling darkness which we kind of take all of those tropes and gleefully stuff them in to every single episode as many

as we can get in so that we can make fun of them you have a self-aware narrator as well and we do have a kid who grew up watching danger mouse self-aware narrators are are it for me did you never see the old school danger Mouse? I do. It's just of all the choices. We don't have time to explain how Danger Mouse is an archetypal piece of late 20th century horror. Leave it with me. Also, Emma James.

I know I was busting an old dead white guy earlier. Well, Lovecraft. It's Lovecraft. Screw him. Emma James says, if you're going to do horror stories, do M.R. James for Ghost Stories. Do M.R. James for God's sake, because he wrote hundreds of them, and they're all great.

And those four shows, and the one I do, because I also do a horror show, do a really, really good job of exploiting some of the really interesting and positive I do, because I also do a horror show, do a really, really good job of kind of exploiting some of the really interesting and positive elements of the field and doing it in fun

and varied ways. And I mean, I, if there are any of these shows that you don't listen to and you're remotely interested in the field, you really should, because you'll find something incredibly different to what you already encounter. And some of it you'll hate.

And some of it will lead you down roads you never thought you'd go down. And you'll find out much more about your tastes. And I love that stuff as a journalist and as a podcaster. It's an endlessly positive experience for me. And that leads me on to one of my last questions, which is I'm going to put my panel on the spot a little bit here and ask them to talk about one or two of the shows they listen to, but not all of them

and why they like them. And Mr. Newell has thinky finger, which leads me to believe he's imminent. Oh no, don't mind me. Okay. Audio specifically. Ideally audio specifically. And horror specific?

Horror specific, if possible. If we could stick to audio drama as kind of the outer boundary that would be great. Oh and we're going to do questions for about the last 10-15 minutes if anyone has them. I was a big Black Tapes fan before anything else. So Black Tapes

was a long form single story and you can really... Every episode had a new layer and a new scary element to it. We won't talk about the ending, but we will talk about the fact that they re-released the last series

and renamed the last episode the mid-season finale, so there is hope. There's more of it. There's like six more now. Are they out now? Yeah. They dropped through basically the announcement. Happy days. there's more of it there's like six more now are they out now? happy days

so I listen to so many podcasts it's impossible for me to talk about all of them but I'm a huge no sleep podcast fan actually I write for the show but I was a fan first and foremost and there's thousands of hours of content that I

wade through, I listen to Shadows at the Door I listen to The White Vault I listen to magnus i listen to pseudopod i listen to pretty much all those names that you know and love i also a non-horror one which really influences me which i know we're not supposed to talk about is a little show by uh ian chillag called everything is alive which is a series of interviews with inanimate objects and the first episode is about a can of coke called louis and his main desire in life is to be drunk he's been kept in the back of the cupboard for 20 years or something and it's the most existential stuff i think i've ever listened to and actually i i like to diversify because i

think horror should be informed by different genres and stuff as well so that's me getting myself out of the way i think i have like 1.1 bear with me on this one follow me um so for the one it's an easy one although it feels like a trite answer for a panel which is um pseudopod because i was listening to pseudopods before i'd ever made anything um and pseudopod does one thing specifically really really well better than anyone which is curation specifically and what that means is if you're interested in the field you can just tune in and pick a random smorgasbord of the pseudopod stories and go that's interesting i've not seen that i know that i know that oh what's that but my point is is that it is someone going out there and going you should see this you should see this it's like having your

own dedicated personal librarian for the genre that's cool i liked that I also enjoy making Alistair awkward so I will continue but it is what's useful is because of the very nature of the format that anthology of shorter fictions and the occasional slightly longer

is it exposes you to far more very quickly so if I'm being brutally honest in a way he doesn't know I learnt horror from him

and pseudopod the point yeah the trick is to look this way and my my point one is going to be one where i think people would be shocked to know this of me i found the very initial stages of welcome to night veil very interesting and i think as it progressed as any project does when it progresses over a certain length of time it begins to um what's the word uh like i'm trying to say in a way that doesn't sound horrible like fossilite that's not right like it's also thank you yeah what it does is it goes this works so that comes up again and then that comes up again but the longer that you run you run out of options unless you grab two things smash them together and hope that something comes out but very early night fail where it didn't really know what it wanted to be yet trot a far more

interesting line for me and it took some real hard turns where it's like i'm happy i'm happy i'm happy everything's terrible and it was just like whoa especially genuinely like the first five or so genuinely i was like oh what are you excellent and there was a british version of that called gallow tree welcome to gallow tree which is still going now but it's it is the british version of night veil certainly started that way i had to get my ipod out to just to look through my podcast list and the one that i've i've sort of zoned in on is called down below the reservoir which good choice it's beautiful it is horror and poetry smashed together with a gorgeous ir brogue. So it is the most poetic podcast that does horror. So that would be my suggestion.

The Caledonian Gothic was similar for the Scots, but Down Below the Reservoir would absolutely be my choice. Just having a look through Unseen Hour, which is horror plus the goon show which is fantastic yeah Darkest Night Darkest Night was brilliant

yeah blah blah blah Hidden Frequencies which is kind of yeah oh what's it it's Mick but what's the it's theick but what what's the oh it's yeah hidden frequencies like twilight zone twilight zone yeah yeah yeah yeah excellent i i have a couple um there are two produced by

the same company uh with this funny name zoom doom uh one is a show called mirrors which is initially a ghost story and it's a ghost story set in three different time periods with the 1960s, 2080 and 2019 with three different women being haunted by the identical ghosts. And the second season does one of the best jobs of unpacking and exploring and rebuilding a premise I've ever encountered. It's extraordinarily good. And Zoom Doom have this incredible capability to take a very simple premise

and do unbelievable stuff with it. The other show is a thing called The Six Disappearances of Ella McCrae. And it's about a young woman on a family holiday. And they go out for a hike. She steps up onto a rock and she dies. Or she disappears. Or suddenly they're in a desert and

she's walked off or she's abducted by someone or suddenly they're in a new york street and she's run over and killed and six people witness her disappear at the same time none of them can agree on what happened and it is the closest to a modern version of Picnic at Hanging Rock I have ever encountered. It has that monolithic sense of something completely supernatural and alien just under the surface. And I really respond to that. There's also a show which I've been frantically Googling for the last five minutes. And maddeningly that I can't remember the name of. I'll put it on my Twitter feed and hashtag it with the hashtags. Hopefully you folks can find it which is um a canadian series about a small town with a local monster oh is that blackwood

i believe it might be yeah now i listened to that that's really very good um superb production quality oh god yeah and again just unpacks itself so beautifully very nice it's a tale of local teenage journalists kind of exploring the local monster. And it's done brilliantly, but I don't actually think there's a second series. I'm not sure. I will dig in, because I might be thinking of another one as well, and we'll put them both on the feed.

I would like to thank my incredible panel for being as exactly as erudite and articulate and perceptive as I knew they would be. And we're going to throw the floor open to questions if anybody has any. Is that one of those throw mics? Do you want to throw it?

I had those last year. Okay, for those of you who don't know, this is a throwable microphone. It's really hard and heavy. It's squishy. And I cover these things quite openly. Who would like to ask a question? I don't do horror.

My family would genuinely, when I said, oh, I'm listening to the Magnus Archives, my family went, what's that? And I said, it's a horror podcast. And they all went, who are you and what have you done with Kai? So what do you think, because I've spoken to other people as well

and they don't touch movies or TV that is horror, but they've found that they've really enjoyed things like Magnus Archives and Pseudopod and other horror podcasts. Do you think that there's anything that in particular brings people into this specific way of presenting horror? The number of people that have said that they fall asleep listening to the No Sleep podcast

is amazing even I fall asleep listening to the No Sleep podcast. It can be very chill It's very relaxing. Exactly and part of what you were saying earlier Alex about about the audio production not being too smash or too jarring, it's basically like going back to childhood and having a story being read to you as you go to sleep.

But yeah, it was just amusing that. I think there's a lot to be said for how much control you have as a listener. And I think when you're watching a film or you're in a movie, a cinema, watching a movie, there are no trigger warnings. There is no respect for your particular personal traumas or any of that. You're either in there or you're not.

With podcasting, with audio drama, you can choose to engage on whatever level you wish. And I think a lot of people are able to access and consume horror uh in audio format more comfortably than they can in other mediums if that makes sense i think i also think the community the audio community cares a lot more about those sorts of things i know when we we do calling darkness um we we have a an intro that sort of states that there are some certain themes it's a comedy show but there are still themes that you might not want to engage with and i think as a listener you should have as much control as you you need so that you enjoy what

you're doing instead of you know feeling unnecessarily unsettled or upset i think combined with that as well is and it's been brought up a few times today which is that podcasting as a medium is probably one of the most intimate entertainment products you can really engage with because it's happening yeah um so as a result building what you just said what you have is control of the situation so you can bail take a break or skip chunks and it'll be fine combined with the most one of the most immediate ways to engage in the genre and i think there's some interesting stuff being done in vr in fairness which hits the same boat where you can just go nope i'll go back to it and it's still immediate but i think podcasting does that in a way that is doesn't require an outlay of you know four thousand pounds um and i i think it a

combination of those factors certainly make it a lot more accessible. I'd like to build on all the other stuff the panelists have said and add in as well the fact that podcasting is, there's always a kind of very pleasingly subversive element to listening to a podcast because it's both intimate and passive. You can be doing something else as well. And more than once with certain shows I've got to it,

not sure I like this, I'm going to I like this and concentrate on the washing up and it becomes a as everyone said the control is very much in your hands all the way through I really dig that there's also an element because it is the audio media is uniquely visual in your own mind does your own mind provide its own filter mechanism whereby the visual film, et cetera, you get shock, horror, stabby, stabby, something that's possibly unwell and the kind of thing that you, you know,

it's being imposed upon you rather than you drawing it from within your own experience and your brain gives its own protections in. Hence, it gives you that level of protection to the point you love or just at the edge where you're as uncomfortable as you want to be the volume control is always in your hand

it's kind of great who's next? so bad at catching you said earlier about horror being kind of getting involved with other genres do you think in terms of audio drama there's a chance that

other mediums within the genre will kind of get involved like stuff like um rpg podcasts and like improv do you think there's a chance obviously there's a lot of uh horror elements in those especially to call gaming i guarantee i guarantee somebody is out there making that show right now there's or there's i am aware of i'm aware of at least one podcasting is so accessible it really really is you need a room full of friends or you can be a lone operator you need a halfway decent mic access to biff software as a starting point i'm not saying that those are the things that you should stay with throughout your podcasting career but it's incredibly accessible it's a lot easier to make a podcast than it is to go off and write a book trust me i know or to uh make a movie you know

in terms of initial outlay and how you can teach yourself to do things so i guarantee yes there will be it's because it's so much more accessible it's so much easier to experiment with those other mediums and and yeah there's got to be at least 10 of those out there now by now though to play devil's advocate on the flip side of the coin there is an aspect to consider which is i'm not a fan of horror okay cool so that means that let's let's assume i am not a fan of horror you're not going to listen to this thing i am not a fan of gaming therefore you're not going to listen to this thing the danger that always comes with the genre blend is the dream is are the fans of this will engage with the fans of this. Great.

There is a dark side to that, which is that your horror fans don't like gaming, so they don't listen. And your gaming fans, they don't like horror, so they don't listen. And then you're left with Gary. And Gary is lovely. You know, the joy of podcasting is not everyone has to like it.

If you want to make a podcast for Gary, then go knock yourself out gary will adore you forever because you made the perfect show as far as gary's concerned right nobody makes a podcast to make money or be famous come on that's like that's the number right so you make it because you love it you make it because it's a passion project and that's why you should pretty much do everything creative i think and so if you want to make that super niche thing then you know somebody will make it and yeah yes is the answer if no one in this room is using the term using the hashtag justice for gary

poor gary Poor Gary. So the BBC have belatedly got into horror podcasts. Have you listened to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Whisperer in Darkness? And if so, what did you think of them? I've listened to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and I really liked it. Like I was saying earlier, my kind of entry level with

Lovecraft is are you doing something strange with it which would probably have pissed him off laughter laughter what the hell you know and I really liked its willingness to completely engage with a very modern

storytelling framework and with the kind of weird and lumpy bits of the story, so yeah my initial thing was, oh it's Charles Dirk's award again, great, and then I listened to it and was very pleasantly surprised, so yeah I really dug that I very much enjoyed it, but I also thought

we've been doing this for years Yeah, I haven't, and I think my I'm so invested in indie podcasting and in um yeah independent producers and genres that i i i consume so many podcasts that it's difficult sometimes to to go to the more commercially does that make sense like yeah i have to confess i also haven't listened to it but not for any reason beyond I didn't get around to listening to it

I'm quite disorganised in how I spend my leisure time It's also worth pointing out Alex sleeps 15 minutes out of every 37 hours I recently achieved a high score in Beat Saber so my work life balance is With the growth of things like the BBC Murmurs podcasts

where they're seeking out independence do you think there's a horror podcasting is influencing beyond the immediate genre outside podcasting or with the big publishers? Yes Alex I'm happy to say that I think or with the big publishers? Yes. Alex.

I'm happy to say that. I think what some of the bigger players are starting to notice is that the interest is there and if the interest is not catered to, it will cater to itself. And that's what has been happening. Gary really wanted that gaming horror show gary made that show turns out a lot of people wanted gary's show gary does well

and i think that it's reached the point now where not just in horror but in other mediums as well genre fiction in general i'd say is sort of hitting its stride really and certainly in terms of bouncing into into larger like production spaces um and i think it's a case of let's let's all be horrible cynical skeptical bastards like me people like money successful things are more likely to make money as a result you can expect that if the thing that you like has become popular larger entities are going to start getting more invested in it i should say that i'm kind of separating out bbc a little bit because it doesn't really have the need for money in the same way it kind of survives on its own but certainly on the um the private side you're going to start seeing more of like um bad example it's not horrible you know like wolverine the long night and all of that kind of thing because because they they know that yeah

they know the demand is there and you're going to start seeing bigger players starting to just make more of the shows that you would normally associate with indies and especially in podcasting and to some extent you've already seen that with luminary good example of a poor execution absolutely yeah yeah i agree i think i think if you're a statistician and you're looking at download figures and you look at some of the biggest shows out there and see that there are a lot of them are in the genre then it makes sense to cater to that in your own audience i don't again i i'm hesitant because i'm not as experienced with the kind of the bbc side of audio um as I'd like to be.

But that's, yeah, I agree. We are two minutes off the end of our time. David, do you have an answer for that? I was just going to say, yeah, it seems like we are, in a way, the sort of proof of concept stage for these bigger companies to come in and make their money off it.

So that was basically all I was going to say. Because you saw, that was it, remembered. Limetown made the jump from podcasting to the TV. To Facebook. Yes, to Facebook. To sell one soul for power, Richard, but for whales. But again, it's proof of concept. It works.

It gets taken up. Yeah, exactly. It fails. It gets taken up. Yeah, exactly. It fails. And lore as well. Yeah, and lore, yes, which is done spectacularly. So I think we have about 75 seconds left. So Ella, if your question is very short. I got to catch it.

How would you characterize the relationship between comedy and horror, please? I got to catch it. How would you characterise the relationship between comedy and horror, please? 75 seconds, okay. As a writer of a comedy horror show, the relationship is incredibly important. I think if you want to scare people, making them laugh within five-minute breath

of scaring them is really, really important. You take them to the top and then you smash them down um i i very much enjoy pointing my pointing poking fun at tropes um and littering rude jokes with squishy sound effects um it's very effective and i think it's an incredibly important relationship. Yeah, that's my quick answer. I think they are two genres that both rely on format, structure, and sort of theatrical grammar, as in, you know, set up a beat and so on. As a result, they are simultaneously compatible and incompatible in that if those two formats are layered on top of one another and synced up correctly, you will get something wonderful,

and normally a very black comedy will go really hit you however if you lay the knot poorly and that theatrical grammar doesn't line up what you end up with is set up set up beat beat beat set beat and it's just like this is a garbage mess um and i think it's one of those things where it's wonderful if it goes well but you have to be very um structurallyurally deft to make it work. I just say it's all about timing. That's a way better way of putting it. And for me, it's still a symbol crash if the symbol is covered in blood. Why am I even here?

Ladies and gentlemen, and everybody else, I'm delighted to inform you that not only have we finished on time, but we have finished the end of one of the absolute highlights of my day. Thank you so much to my remarkable panel of ridiculously talented creatives. This is where you applaud them, please. And to you, who are a fantastically receptive audience who've given us some of the best questions we've had all day. And Alistair, our fantabulous

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