31 October, 2011

Aural Terror

Slate has an article today about horror radio drama, specifically Tales From Beyond the Pale.

Just released as a five-CD set containing all 10 episodes, Tales from Beyond the Pale looks backward into nostalgia while offering glimpses of futuristic ambition. Some of the episodes are content to ape old-fashioned radio dramas, only with better production values and more cussing, offering fun twists and turns on a narrative level, but staying literal-minded in terms of sound design: Doors open and close, footsteps are created by a recording engineer with a shoe on each hand, and actors describe sea monsters that viewers can’t see for themselves. They’re a lot of fun and offer a kick of straight nostalgia, especially in the case of “This Oracle Moon” by Jeff Buhler (writer of The Midnight Meat Train) and featuring Ron Perlman (Hellboy) and Doug Jones (the faun from Pan’s Labyrinth). Its cannibal cavemen on the moon, insane androids, and grizzled spaceship captains are ripped right out of an old-school EC Comic.

Going retro has its charms, but a handful of these episodes push the state of the art to the next level. In Sarah Langan’s “Is This Seat Taken?” the old-fashioned declamatory style of line-readings is abandoned for a creepily intimate dialogue between two repressed psychopaths who meet cute on the Long Island Railroad. Him: “My parents thought I was too shy for college and that made it hard so I dropped out and the only job I could get was stringing telephone lines? Along the West Side Highway? I rode the train, like, ten times a week dressed as a construction worker, smelling terrible. It’s like something snapped and I started writing about shooting up all these people. You know, like the fancy people, with lucky lives? And friends? And inch-deep souls? I picked the 5:38 to Mineola and I even got the gun and bullets. And the morning I planned to do it I showered, shaved, brushed my hair and I slit my wrists. My parents found me.” The actors wisely underplay their lines and it sounds so natural that the unfolding drama sucks you in the way eavesdropping on the subway does.


I've never heard of this outfit but it sounds like good stuff. The author, Grady Hendrix, makes a good point.

But with podcasts and audiobooks surging in popularity as more people don earbuds and spend more time in their cars, the radio drama should be primed for a comeback. Except it’s not happening. The image of the traditional radio drama is one held over from the ’30s: attenuated organ music, tinny sound effects, and actors speaking in a kind of non-naturalistic sportscaster’s voice (“It’s a bear! Look out! He’s coming right at you and—what’s that?—he has a gun!”). They’re as comfortably old-fashioned as your grandfather’s cardigans, but they shouldn’t be.

Radio drama does have a reputation as being something purely retro – I've noted this here in Madisonpreviously. A lot of the time the idea is to reproduce an experience from the 1940s by dressing in period clothes or replicating Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast. All is not lost, though. This article on radio drama in Madison shows some signs of artists looking to move beyond pure nostalgia. Still, it's time to move beyond the notions of what radio drama was like 70+ years ago. Even the Friends of Old-Time Radio Convention had its last go-round.

Anyway, here are some of my favorite horror audio dramas. All of these scared the bejeezus out of me.





One of the first audio dramas I ever heard was The Mummy by Monterrey Soundworks. It's an adaptation of Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars. "All at once the gates of Sleep were thrown wide open…" I love the Victorian English ("gums, spices, and bitumen"!) and how the story starts in media res with Abel Trelawney unconscious, his body being attacked in the middle of the night with someone or something trying to get that bangle off of his wrist. The voice acting is great. I can just picture Sergeant Daw's sideburns when he speaks.





For more chills and spills in a Victorian/Edwardian way, check out Atlanta Radio Theatre Company's The Shadow Over Innsmouth or any of their H.P. Lovecraft adaptations. Everything has a pall over it. People losing their sanity, cultists running amok, and words like "hideous" and "eldritch" get used a lot.





Set in Antarctica in the near future, Simon Bovey's Cold Blood will make you freeze your ears off in the middle of summer. It's not horror per se but you will feel cold listening to it and there are some good scares such as when a couple characters are chasing the villain through a deserted research base and when someone gets stuck out in a blizzard and nearly freezes to death.





There are a few incredibly spooky Doctor Who audio dramas from Big Finish. For example, Chimes of Midnight is chilling in a very Sapphire and Steel kind of way while Night Terrors' name tells you all. I recommend all the Big Finish adventures but I'm going with Embrace the Darkness today. You've The Doctor and Charley wandering the corridors of an isolated scientific base in total darkness with creepy noises off in the distance, creatures that have lost their eyes, and an approaching ship that will spell doom. A classic.

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