Blog-o-ween 2022: Knifepoint Horror

Today feels like a good day to throw a joker into the deck, so to speak, and talk about the "New" Old Time Radio: podcasts. The concept of "asyncrhronous radio" was developed in the early-1990s, but it wasn't until the early-2000s that the artform we know as the podcast (a portmanteau of the words "iPod" and "broadcast," natch) began its rise to ubiquity. Unlike radio, which required listeners to tune in to a specific station on a specific day at a specific time to enjoy programming, the internet allowed listeners to grab any episode they wanted, anytime they wanted it, in the form of audio files. According to recent data, as of August, 2022, there are around 2.8 million podcasts (well over three-quarters of which are true crime related, I'm sure) with nearly 140 million episodes (none of which will play from oldest-to-newest on Apple's podcast app).

Now that I have the "boring details and stats that a child could look up" portion of this entry out of the way, let's jump right into one of the best horror podcasts out there, Knifepoint Horror.

Like yesterday's entry, The Black Mass, Knifepoint Horror consists of stories whose power and influence are mostly derived from the immediacy of their first-person narration and their sparse, yet effective, background sound design and music. Knifepoint Horror, like The Black Mass, gives the listener the sense that the narrator is spinning a yarn off the cuff by the campfire at night. This style of narration allows the story to cut through everything and stick in the listener's imagination.

Knifepoint Horror is the brainchild of writer Soren Narnia, who, except for an episode here and there, takes care of the narration duties, as well. Narnia's deadpan, matter-of-fact tone gives each story a dreadful life of its own. Narnia speaks as though the events he is recounting are still unfolding, as if the dark things he discovered are nipping at his heels. In a way, Knifepoint Horror's stories give me the same sense of utter weirdness as the songs from Slint's 1991 album Spiderland. Narnia's prose, like Slint's sounds, seem to come from some other, alien world. The cover to Spiderland could even serve as artwork to a Knifepoint Horror story. Maybe one called "quarry?"

The single-word, uncapitalized titles of the majority of the episodes also lend a layer of the uncanny to the proceedings. With titles such as "corpse," "eyes," "outcast," "rehersal," and "tunnel," each episode feels as though they are from a moldy manuscript found in the basement of a haunted house.

You can find all of Knifepoint Horror's episodes at their LibSyn page here. Feel free to dive in anywhere. Because Narnia releases Knifepoint Horror under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA licensing agreement, you can probably also find many adaptations in many other formats -- short films, ASMR videos on YouTube, and graphic novels, for instance.

My choice for today's entry is one of the first stories I heard when I discovered Knifepoint Horror: "school." There's not much more I want to say about it except: wait until it gets dark, throw on some headphones, and let Soren Narnia's voice transport you to a different, haunting landscape.