Longworth’s latest season, which focuses on the history and legacy of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff’s early Hollywood monster movies, might be a better thematic fit with the whole Halloween theme, but I can’t recommend her Manson series enough if you’re looking for something genuinely chilling and evocative of how monsters can move through even the most glamorous rungs of society. I’ve returned to Karina Longworth’s rigorous, sobering, and absolutely excellent scholarship on Charles Manson for several repeat listens now, and it holds up every time. You Must Remember This, “ Charles Manson’s Hollywood” It’s a slight spoiler to say that the case ultimately gets solved, but every minute of the investigation leading up to its resolution situates the listener in a glorious sweet spot - the uncanny experience of being in an epistemological place where you simultaneously feel that a mysterious other world can’t possibly be real, and yet you still can play with the possibility of it. Where is this place? When is this place? Whose life does this belong to? Who is behind these phone calls? What’s happening? “The Case of the Phantom Caller” is a classic Reply All episode, where the team is tasked with getting to the bottom of a mystery. The glimpses are fragments too short to make much sense of, and you get the sense that you’re eavesdropping on the contents of another life. Imagine receiving a phone call out of the blue from a number that means nothing to you, and when answered, you’re treated to glimpses of a whole other world. Reply All, “ The Case of the Phantom Caller” “If a door to another world opens,” said an attendee of the séance, “you just charge in.” They remind us of a broad human fascination with the Other Side, in more ways than one. Both of these episodes embody the creepier end of its identity, with the former a somewhat anthropological dispatch from a séance that took place in Chicago, and the latter a dive into the archives of calls made to a Satanist hotline in Olympia, Washington. This KCRW show, by the duo Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman, has a classically attractive eerie hook, billing itself as a podcast for listeners interested in “pursuing their fears and facing the unknown.” I suppose that’s accurate as far as its creative mission statement is concerned, but the show ultimately functions as a collection of audio essays about things on the fringes and in the quiet corners of the world, which more often than not possess distinctly unsettling or dissonant qualities. Here Be Monsters, “ Spirits of the Past” and “ Call 601-2-SATAN-2” Here, that structure is deployed to prop up the feel of a person casually telling you an insane story in a bar, a story that happened to someone else, but one that involves a lot of blood and a severed … well, read the episode title. That uncomfortable truth is vividly illustrated in this early episode of the spectacular Love+Radio, which has built a legacy on artfully stringing together stories told with unconventional, surprising frames. But at the end of the day, we are also mere bags of flesh, bone, and blood. We believe ourselves to be biologically special. But the true horror story is about what comes after: Navigating the glacial, iron-caged hell of hospital bureaucracy when faced with an unstoppable, fast-acting, unforgiving disease. Death” with the first segment from This American Life’s Halloween special from 2006, called “ The Hills Have Eyes.” In that piece, Alex Blumberg, now of Gimlet Media fame, tells the story of a woman’s violent run-in with a rabid raccoon. While we’re on the subject of rabies: You might be interested in pairing “ Rodney vs. I remember when I first heard it, during a pre-slumber listening session a few years back. Few things are more chilling than the screams around the 9:40 mark. The overarching story of science, medicine, and mystery is discomfiting to begin with, but the real horror comes from how the episode drops in archival recording of a rabies patient in the throes of madness. In this Radiolab episode from 2013, the team lays out the story of a Milwaukee doctor who grapples with a case of rabies - then a malady with no known survivors - that has befallen a local teenager. Doing so as a consequence of a torturous disease with a 100 percent fatality rate is a whole other level. Being alive in the world is as horrific as it is pleasurable, and so it is only appropriate that, as Halloween season arrives, we provide a list of suitably creepy listens for your intimate aural pleasure. Ghosts, monsters, clowns, serial killers, and a wide variety of creatures with more than four limbs, yes, but also destitution, bodily decay, global warming, the ebb and flow of human extremism, and never being truly known by the ones you love.
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