It's six days until the BIG day, and we are coming to the end of our month-long celebration of spooky old time radio here at LARPing Real Life. Not to say that everything that has come before has been run-of-the-mill -- far from it! -- but what we have planned for this week is pretty special, if I do say so myowndamnself. We'll have Vincent Price stuck in a lighthouse surrounded by rats, Robert Taylor wondering what the blood oozing out of his new house's closet will do for its resale value, and a trio of tales based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. You're gonna wanna stay tuned as we get down to the nitty and the gritty.
Not that Gritty!
Today, we are going to look at the last of a quartet of podcasts that I think are prime examples of modern audio drama: The Black Tapes.
The Black Tapes is a fictionalized nonfiction podcast best described as “Serial meets The X-Files.” Created by Paul Bae and Terry Miles, The Black Tapes ran for three seasons from May, 2015 to November, 2017. The podcast follows the exploits of radio host Alex Reagan (Lori Henry), who sets out to explore the world of paranormal investigation for the National Radio Alliance show Pacific Northwest Stories (not a real thing). While interviewing people for her story, Alex meets the enigmatic (and stuffy as all get out) Dr. Richard Strand (Christian Sloan), a man dedicated to debunking all things paranormal. Strand keeps records of all his cases on VHS in white boxes. There are, however, a series of tapes in black cases. These are cases that Strand was unable to prove or disprove. Alex becomes intrigued, and she and Strand begin to go through these black tapes.
Like some of the other podcasts we've looked at for Blog-o-ween (Limetown and Video Palace), The Black Tapes sounds exactly like an NPR show. The line between fiction and nonfiction is always blurred. Bae and Miles do a really fine job of creating verisimilitude by creating realistic backstories and folding in real people and real events into the overall story. The soundscape that the show’s producers created is absolutely pitch perfect. The in-the-field recordings have the feel of actual on-the-spot interviews.
Alex’s and Dr. Strand’s reactions to what they see and hear also seem very realistic. Alex, like Mulder on The X-Files, wants to believe, while Strand, the Scully of the two, is always undercutting what we know to be true. It does begin to get tiring to hear Strand continually debunk the reality of what they are witnessing, but like The X-Files, this incredulity on Strand’s part does evolve.
The first season in particular makes for really great spooky listening. “The Unsound,” about a mysterious piece of audio that was supposedly created by the Devil himself, and “Turn that Frown Upside Down,” about a Maine town with a local legend - the Woman with the Upside Down Face - that can kill you if you see it, are two of the best episodes of audio drama that I’ve heard. But like all great stories, you have to start at the beginning with "A Tale of Two Tapes, Part I."
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