Blog-o-ween 2022: The Black Tapes

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."

Blog-o-ween 2022: Video Palace

Ahh, the good ol' days of picking up a few friends on a Friday night, heading on over to the videostore, and spending an hour or two judging movies by their clamshell case covers. Most of the time, what was happening in the artwork rarely happened in the movie, but the pleasure was in the hunt for that rare movie that gave more than the $5.00-for-three-days rental fee was worth. Usually, you just considered yourself lucky if you got a shot or two of topless ladies gallivanting around and a kill scene that was gory and imaginative enough to get you to rewind it a couple of times. Every once in a great while you stumbled upon a Re-Animator, a Phantasm, or a Pieces.

I suppose I should just count myself lucky that my friends and I never stumbled upon a mysterious white VHS tape like Mark Cambria did in the excellent horror podcast series Video Palace. Getting stuck with a crummy movie is one thing. Getting sucked into dark machinations of a cult is quite another.

Produced by all-horror streaming service Shudder, Video Palace lasted for a single season. Over ten episodes and five bonus minisodes, we follow Mark (Chase Williamson) and his girlfriend Tamra (Devin Sidell) as they dig into the story behind the white tape and its connection to a long-out-of-business video store in Vermont called...Video Palace. What Mark and Tamra uncover is, of course, scarier, more disturbing, and more nefarious than what you found behind the beaded curtain in the "Adult" section of your neighborhood video store.

Video Palace, like many other horror podcasts, is concerned with physical media and the archive. Mark is a VHS collector and exudes all the hallmarks of that obsessive subculture. In his set-up for the series, Mark talks about the history of video cassettes, and how there are tons of movies that sat on the shelves of video stores that will never see a modern DVD or Blu-ray release, will never stream on the internet unless people like him do the work of searching for them. Mark buys old VHS tapes in huge lots, digs through them, and hopes that he may find that one tape that everyone is looking for. The one tape that everyone thought was lost for all time. The archive isn't what is on the shelves of your local library or museum or historical society. It's in the basement and attics and living rooms of obsessive collectors like Mark.

Video Palace also shares another characteristic with other podcasts: it's a podcast that knows it's a podcast. Mark may not be an investigative reporter for NPR, but the story he tells is put together in much the same way. He records everything (much to Tamra's chagrin) then edits it all together. Mark says that Tamra insisted that their podcast have "real music," so he tells us their friend Kat wrote everything we hear. Everything about Video Palace is knowingly constructed, and that structure points to it being a real story, like the aforementioned NPR stories. This layer of verisimilitude gives Video Palace an extra layer of creepiness, much like the shakey, hand-held camera interviews with the townsfolk in The Blair With Project help us believe that the story we are seeing is possibly happening for real. Mark interviews many people about the mysterious video store and the white tape, and those interviews fairly drip with dread, but they also give the story a patina of plausibility.

You can find Video Palace on Shudder's website, as well as on YouTube and the usual podcast streaming sites. Here's the first episode...

Blog-o-ween 2022: Limetown

Many years ago, in a small town in the United States, a crime occurred under mysterious circumstnaces. The tragedy bubbled up to the top of the 24-hour news cycle, then quickly lost steam and became an urban legend -- if it was remembered at all. Ten years later, a headstrong reporter opens an investigation into the event. The reporter sifts through various media formats -- VHS tapes, CCTV security footage, audio cassettes, photographs, written reports, first-hand, eyewitness accounts. The truth, it seems, is out there, but is a lot more complex than was originally thought. As new evidence is found, new questions are formed, until the reporter isn't sure what the truth really is.

Sound familiar? That's because the above is essentially the plot of every non-fiction, true crime podacast made in the past ten years. It is even the formula of many fictional podcasts that are written and recorded to sound just like a story on NPR. The line between fact and fiction is blurred more now than ever before -- if it ever existed in the first place.

For today's Blog-o-ween entry, we are going to take a trip to the mountains of Tennessee, to a company town of sorts called Limetown.

Limetown made its bow in July, 2015. Two-Up Productions released six episodes and five minisodes over the next five months. Three years later, Two-Up was at it again, releasing the second season of Limetown in October, 2018. Over the next three months, five more episodes and three minisodes -- including the series finale -- were made available. The following year, Facebook Watch aired one season of Limetown starring Jessica Biel. (No second season was ever made.)

The story of Limetown, as noted above, is a familiar one. Ten years ago, in a town that was built virtually overnight in the wilds of Tennessee, over three hundred men, women and children suddenly disappeared and were never heard from again. American Public Radio reporter, Lia Haddock, is obsessed with the case for professional and personal reasons. She promises to dig into the known records and reveal the truth behind the terrible events of that final night in Limetown. As she peels the layers of the onion back, she discovers the reasons for Limetown's existence, and in doing so exposes herself to the powers-that-be who don't want that truth known.

The genius of Limetown is in its construction and delivery. It sounds very real, and because it sounds real, its premise becomes plausible. Each episode is put together from disparate sources. Newscasts, telephone interviews, audio recordings, video all come into play, and holding it all together is the voice of Lia Haddock. As played on the podcast by Annie-Sage Whitehurst, Haddock is your typical intrepid reporter who will stop at nothing to get her story. While we do get captured audio of spooky things that happen to her, none of these events is "outside" the story, so to speak. Everything that we hear has been edited by Haddock and her team -- which only adds to the verisimilitude and the creepiness of it all. This would change in the second season (to the detriment of the story and its effects), but for that first season -- wow! -- it works like gangbusters.

Do yourself a favor this Halloween and make a little time in your schedule for a listen to Limetown. The third episode, "Napoleon," is alone worthy of your attention. It is one of the most heartbreaking, terrifying podcast episodes I've ever heard. Then give the TV series a chance. It is streaming on the Peacock app. Jessica Biel is incredible in the role of Lia Haddock.

Listen...watch...whichever you do after one episode you'll be hooked and begging the answer to the same question as Lia: "What did happen to the people of Limetown?"

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.

27 October: The Black Tapes

 

Today’s movie challenge topic for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Blogoween is “Shot on Video.” I’ll be honest, I don’t know many shot-on-video movies. So, I thought I’d switch things up again and talk about one of my favorite shot-on-audio stories: 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.

I can’t help but think of driving to work when I think about this podcast. In 2015, I was living in Wilkinsburg, PA, and had to make the trek to Cranberry Township five days a week. Podcasts made that drive a lot better. The Black Tapes, in particular, made that drive spooky as heck. 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. The podcast sounds exactly like an NPR show. Bae and Miles also 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 line between fiction and nonfiction is always blurred in The Black Tapes.

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. Listen at your peril here!