a little over a year ago I made a spooky podcast rec post – here’s the updated, even spookier version 🕸🕷🎃
* for extra quality spook
Short and Spooky
Finished, 6-10 episode stories that are perfectly encapsulated for a relatively short listen.
Limetown* – 6-episodes. Ten years ago, a small scientific community disappeared. Our intrepid reporter asks, “what happened to Limetown?” There is, allegedly, a season 2 coming down the pipe, but if you don’t mind not having all the answers, the 6 episodes already produced are of top-notch sound quality, writing, voice acting – the works. The mystery of Limetown is a great one.
Six Stories Told At Night – 6-episodes. When Sam’s best friend Joëlle disappears, Sam follows her into Faerie, paying her way with stories. Specifically focused on Canadian folktales, which is very neat.
The Deep Vault* – 7-episodes of an almost-post-apocalyptic drama about a group of longtime friends searching for a mysterious bunker that was an urban legend in their hometown
The Call of Cthulhu Mystery Program – Live tabletop roleplaying with some 1930s radio serial flavor. 8-part miniseries of unknowable horror and black comedy, as five housemates of dubious moral fiber band together to solve a murder most foul and risk their very sanity.
Deadly Manners – A 10-episode dark comedy murder-mystery. The wealthy Billings family is holding their annual dinner party, but with a snowstorm outside and a murderer (murderers?) inside, the bodies are starting to pile up. (Kristen Bell! Denis O’Hare! Alona Tal! RuPaul! LEVAR BURTON!!)
Serial Horror
Each season is a different (though often connected) story, for when you’re craving a particular flavor.
Within the Wires – part of the WtNV umbrella [note from me – THE BEST PART]. The first season is set up as a series of instructional tapes, but it soon becomes clear that the tapes’ narrator is speaking to the patient very specifically. the second season is a series of museum audio guides from the artist Roimata Mangakāhia regarding her fellow artist and lover Claudia Atieno – including Claudia’s disappearance. the third season is told through a series of dictated notes from a bureaucrat to his secretary regarding the trials and tribulations of building the New Society. S3 is currently ongoing, but WtNV always churns out on time.
Archive 81* – the first season follows an archivist starting a new job cataloguing recordings made by a historical society; unraveling ensues. the second season is a… futuristic horrific fairyland? the third season centers on two siblings as they try to perform a [redacted] ritual, perhaps following in their estranged father’s footsteps. while the seasons absolutely have shared characters + a shared universe, you could start at whatever season sounds most to your interests.
Liberty, Tales from the Tower* – the Liberty podcast is excellently scripted sci-fi – also alarming, and worth the listen – but Tales digs deep into the “myths, legends, and horrors that haunt the Citizens of Atrius.”
Longform Horror
Finished but longer stories.
The Black Tapes – intrepid reporter wants to believe; curmudgeonly paranormal investigator says no, but things are WEIRD AND SPOOKY. imo does not stick the landing, but a lot of the journey was pretty fun.
Our Fair City – podcast in a future dystopia. after a climate change-related disaster, humanity lives in subterranean cities powered by lightning rigs above the cities. mole people! mad scientists! algae bars! the first “episode” is very long and a bit rough, tbh, but after that it is ONE OF MY ALL TIME FAVES.
Ongoing Horror
Series that are currently ongoing – at the moment, none of these are abandoned, they are simply unfinished, though some have good stopping points.
The Darkest Night – horror anthology narrated by Lee Pace that all ties together in the end. some stories better than others, imo. Season 3 just started.
Mabel – ladies who love ladies, fairy tales, haunted houses, disappearances, magic, horror, DELIGHT. Season 4 and a bonus season currently completed; season 5 coming in the new year.
SAYER – scifi/horror podcast set on Earth’s man-made second moon, Typhon. SAYER is the self-aware AI designed to help new residents adjust to their new lives – what would go wrong? Things start tying together in the third episode, and it turns into a jumbly horror ride you never want to stop listening to. Last season currently ongoing.
The Magnus Archives* – Weekly horror podcast from the archives of the Magnus Institute, an organization devoted to researching the esoteric, supernatural, and terrifying. The stories seem unrelated until you realize they have come together like a trap sprung shut around you. Season 3 just finished.
The White Vault* – The collected records of a repair team sent to Outpost Fristed in the vast white wastes of Svalbard. Unravel what lies waiting in the ice below. Season 2 just started up again.
REVIEWS FOR VENOM JUST CAME IN AND IT’S A 28% ON ROTTEN TOMATOES!!!!!! THIS MOVIES GONNA BE SO FUCKIN FUNNY IM SO EXCITED. GOD I LOVE TERRIBLE SPIDERMAN MOVIES
“If you replaced Tom Hardy for Steve Martin in “All of Me,” and switched out Lily Tomlin for a wad of chewed-up black licorice, you’d have “Venom.”“
“When a major fight scene resembles a pair of black pants caught in a white wash, it’s fair to say you haven’t taken the audience with you.”
“It’s a train wreck of a movie, mixing and matching wildly dissonant tones, bizarre plot contrivances, and a truly unique lead performance.”
“Tom Hardy seems to be trying to be the first actor to win an Oscar and a Razzie for the same performance.”
“A film that feels like what you’d expect from a below average superhero flick circa 2004, like Ghost Rider or Fantastic Four.”
^ some of my fave critic review excerpts. i have never been more excited
some more
“The movie is so ridiculous that many viewers will at least be entertained in a dumbfounded way.”
“Think Affleck Daredevil. Think Ang Lee Hulk. Think Halle Berry Catwoman. That’s… I mean, that’s really all there is to be said, I think.”
“This is a movie that somehow slipped through a wormhole from 2004. That’s my biggest take. It’s a movie that spilled from the pre-MCU era through a crack in time and space… The humor, the story beats, everything right down to the Eminem theme song feels like it emerged Kimmy Schmidt style from a sealed off early ‘00s bunker.”
“Sorry to say that Venom is pretty much a complete failure — a tonal mess that feels 15 years old, ignoring the storytelling strides that the superhero genre has made in recent years.”
“Not sure I had the intended reactions to some scenes, but fun is fun — even when it’s totally ridiculous, right? It’s too bad they didn’t go for the R rating, though.”
“The cast seems to all know they’re in a darker superhero movie, except Tom Hardy who is basically remaking Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar.”
IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN: Hadestown is on my speakers, my fav pumpkin beer is in my paw, my fav pumpkin bread is fragrant and warm from the oven, and the only thing that matters is the urge to curl up in a cozy burrow, light a bunch of candles and SPOOK MY OWN SELF OUT. Here are some of the books that, for me, have that chilly magical dreaminess about them: perennial fall re-reads that I would recommend to anyone.
The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson. When it comes to the fall spooks I have no interest in gore, but i L O V E creeping, overwhelming, suffocating dread. SHIRLEY is the hands-down world-beater when it comes to that sweet spine-tingling action. Her women are dreamy, imaginative, isolated, terrifying. I love the audiobooks, too: Bernadette Dunne has an eerie, shivery voice that’s as perfect for tight-wound Eleanor and the inexorable omniscient narrator of Hill House as it is for spooky, sharp-toothed Merricat.
The Secret History, Donna Tartt. Have I talked about this book enough yet? Have you figured out that I love it? You probably have, but just to confirm, i do. I really, really love this book. You know the whole “mystery” from about page 2, but the horror of it ebbs and flows, nightmarish and captivating. There are so many moments of loveliness and so many moments that are chilling and the whole thing feels suspended, like a spiderweb or a dream. It’s not as generous as The Goldfinch and a lot of people find Richard irksome, but who cares. I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke. This book is so expansive, so vivid, so – well, magical – that it transcends the usual prerequisites of an autumn read (viz., Be Creepy). Not that it doesn’t have its creep factor moments – Childermass turning Vinculus’s cards, Stephen in Lost-Hope, Lascelles at the castle of the plucked eye and heart – but they are scary mostly because you are wound so breathlessly in the spell of Clarke’s world. This book is like 900 pages long and I’ve read it, estimating without exaggeration, probably 6 times all the way through and way more than that in snippets. I LOVE THIS BOOK.
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James. The Turn of the Screw is a classic for a reason. It will take you about an afternoon to get through, and it doesn’t matter where you are during that afternoon – an office, an airport, a cozy room, a crowded metro car – there will be a moment that catches you, a trickle of ice water down the spine that you’ll remember just when you’re trying to go to sleep. In the best way.
What about you guys? What do you read when it starts to get cold? Have you read Le Fanu or Wilkie Collins? I keep meaning to but I always just read these instead.
There’s a nip in the air and a sweater wrapped around my shoulders and I am SO PSYCHED to bring this post back. Here are some more Fall Reads, fiction and non-, for the coziest of creeps.
Deathless, Cathrynne M. Valente
Fingersmith, Sarah Waters
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
White Is For Witching, Helen Oyeyemi
Eileen, Otessa Moshfegh
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and Other Lessons From the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Sabriel, Garth Nix
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken
Dare Me, Megan Abbott
Artists In Crime, Ngaio Marsh
The Raven Boys, Maggie Stiefvater
The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
Dark Entries, Robert Aickman
Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers
The Prestige, Christopher Priest
Rebecca, Daphne DuMaurier
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
The Diviners, Libba Bray
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, M.R. James
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Shadow in the North, Phillip Pullman
Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch
Ghosts I Have Been, Richard Peck
Enduring Love, Ian McEwan
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara
In The Woods, Tana French
A Morbid Taste for Bones, Ellis Peters
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
Got more? Tell me your favorites! Feed my insatiable hunger for creepiness!!!
We did! On Tumblr no less. It was unceremoniously abandoned due to a lack of interest from certain people who shall not be named (Voldemort) but I WANT TO RESURRECT IT.
Here’s how it works: send us your questions! We’ll research the answers and provide advice based on scholarship of the same. Be forewarned that not all topics have viable research on them, but we’ll do our best! Send us a message and start it “Dear JSTOR.”
kototyph 