A petrifying podcast…
I am in a real sweet spot with podcasts right now. I can’t sleep very well, I’m pretty fat and in many respects my life is falling apart, but my podcast situation is golden.
What this means is that I don’t have much time in my meagre existence for new podcasts. I appreciate this is very much a first world problem but it is a problem nevertheless. Despite this, because of my commitment to providing Halloween content, I dived straight into the No Sleep Podcast like Winnie the Pooh getting stuck into a big goddamn pot of honey.
It almost goes without saying that my extensive research in choosing a Halloween podcast involved Googling ‘horror podcasts’ obviously. By all accounts, The No Sleep Podcast is the place to be in terms of podcasts and, indeed, horror. Starting life, as so many terrifying things do, as a subreddit, The No Sleep Podcast has grown into a podcast behemoth with over 2 million weekly listeners.
I listened to the grand total of one whole episode for this review and it was… pretty good. Each episode has five standalone stories with an overriding theme that links the whole thing together. Stuff like ‘supernatural stalkers’, ‘automotive angst’ and, in this case, ‘the insanity of insidious inhumans’. Lovely stuff.
You have to subscribe to get all five stories per episode but the version on the iphone app still provides two complete tales of terror. On the ep I listened to I was treated to a story of David Cronenberg inspired body horror and a slightly less effective narrative involving a jaded cop, a stroppy teenager and some murderous teddy bears. It’s all a bit derivative but both stories were well written and effectively produced.
It’s all good Halloween fun and while it isn’t as bone chillingly brilliant as Welcome to Nightvale, it did help get me in the mood for Halloween 2018. Spooky.