A Radio Horror Revival In The Podcast Age

Spine-chilling new radio drama. Scary stories are back on the air waves. We’ll listen.

In the golden age of radio drama, it wasn’t all Amos and Andy chuckles and Grand Old Opry. There was plenty of mystery and horror, too. The Fat Man, the Thin Man, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, The Green Hornet, The Shadow, Johnny Dollar, The Weird Circle.

Real spine tinglers. Without a single visual image, they made Americans scream. A new generation of podcast-era creators is reaching back for inspiration. Hold onto your ear buds. Hellboy’s here. And Tales From Beyond the Pale.

This hour On Point: radio horror returns.
-Tom Ashbrook

Larry Fessenden, curator and producer of Tales from Beyond the Pale. Filmmaker of dozens of horror films including The Last Winter, No Telling and Satan Hates You, with his production company, Glass Eye Pix.

Glenn McQuaid, curator and producer of Tales from Beyond the Pale. Filmmaker and producer, such films include, I Sell the Dead and Stakeland. He is also part of Glass Eye Pix.

Ron Perlman, a film and television actor. Played title role in Hellboy. He plays Captain Marsh in the Tales from Beyond the Pale’s “This Oracle Moon”

Angus Scrimm, actor in many horror genre films such as Phantasm, Witches Brew, I Sell the Dead and most recently, Satan Hates You.  He plays the title role in the Tales from Beyond the Pale’s “The Grandfather”

Wall Street Journal "Windshield wipers slapping, a car wooshed to a stop at an old schoolhouse in this coastal city, now home to a theater company. Letting the car door slam as he got out, Bill Dufris, playing a cop in Brattleboro, Vt., said, "I'll do my best," and crunched up the wooden steps to a make-believe crime scene."

Slate "In retrospect, the most remarkable thing about Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938 wasn’t the mass hysteria and panic it caused, but the fact that anyone cared about a radio drama in the first place. These days, radio drama is as dead as disco, kept on life support mostly by the BBC. But it shouldn’t be this way. Sound has a way of slithering into our ears and burrowing deep down into the folds and wrinkles of our brains in ways that sight does not."

http://vimeo.com/16216540