Horror Podcasting

Horror Podcasting argues that podcasting, as an aural medium, is about the mind. Horror is an inward-style of storytelling, and yet the reception of the podcast can be an embodied form of listening. This intersection creates conditions for a subject/listener collapse (which results in immersion) as well as a potential listener/creator collapse (listeners move into the roles of creators).

The texts (2006- ) discussed in this book generally originate in independent podcasting or public service broadcasting, and their modes of narrative vary between ‘stripped-back storytelling’ and the ‘Theater for the Mind’. Titles like the post-Serial dramas (Limetown, The Black Tapes, Tanis, A Scottish Podcast, Video Palace, The Lovecraft Investigations) leverage the ‘found footage’ mode, collapsing frames through audio media’s lack of a quotation mark and its time-based qualities, while Welcome to Night Vale plays on generic hybridity and horror’s fixation on technology-based fears, including the fear of surveillance.

The last part of the book uses cultures of production and Practice as Research frames to investigate processes of monetization and platformization and the impact of community in horror podcast dramas. The tensions between experiment and professionalization are explored through a series of interviews with fourteen creators involved in the 11th Hour Audio Drama Challenge as well as the author’s own podcast drama series. The praxis of horror podcast drama is ultimately informed by the book’s themes: technology-based fears including surveillance, generic hybridity, and the collapse between listener/creator engendered by the podcast form.