With Halloween right around the corner a few of you might suddenly feel the urge to experience some good old fashioned horror. Some of you might take in a slasher film or maybe read some Clive Barker, but if your like me you might be interested in experience some theater of the mind. Radio plays to be more precise. In the golden age of radio horror was still in its infancy and didn’t have the over reliance of tricks that horror films today uses, as effective as they might be. Instead they counted on the imaginations of their listeners to bring about horrors that modern films are still trying to replicate. Maybe I’m giving those old radio shows too much credit. Maybe. However, if that isn’t true about the old radio fiction, it is definitely true about Tales from Beyond the Pale.
Tales from Beyond the Pale is described as Radio Plays for the Digital age by co-creators Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid. The pair had previously worked together on McQuaid’s feature directorial debut I Sell the Dead in which Fessenden co-starred and produced through his company Glass Eye Pix. Glass Eye Pix should be recognizable by all horror fans as the production studio that has put out tons of great genre fare over the years including the critically acclaimed The House of the Devil. Now Tales from Beyond the Pale is also under the Glass Eye Pix banner, in which Fessenden acts as host with a murderers’ row of talent behind each episode
Fessenden and McQuaid themselves contribute episodes, but so do people like Joe Maggio (Bitter Feast), Simon Rumley (Red, White and Blue), JT Petty (Hellbenders), and Jeff Buhler (Writer of The Midnight Meat Train) among others. And the hits don’t stop there as they also bring in performers like Vincent D’onofrio, Kevin Corrigan, Ron Pearlman, Doug Jones and various other genre veterans.
The series has three major things going for it: The Writing, The Acting, and The Sound Design. The writing manages to switch it up from episode to episode with different genres of horror: Psychological, torture(both psychological and physical), monsters, pulp, and mythological among others. Because of that, each episode feels fresh when you listen to it and you legitimately don’t know where your going to end up by the end of each thirty minute episode.
Just as important as the writing is the acting that brings it to life, and with each episode the talent behind the microphone is fantastic. Each actor embody their roles and in a few cases go above and beyond what they are expected to do. So much of audio drama requires a great deal of exposition and in lesser hands it can sound forced or contrived, but these actors make it work and make you believe that these characters would actually say these things even if no one is around to hear them.
Speaking of hearing, lets talk about the sound design. As with anything that deals with audio, sound is very important (hell its what the word means) and that’s especially true with audio drama. Audio dramas don’t just use sound as background noise, they use it to set a scene. Every creak of a floorboard, every crash of a window and every sharpening of a knife is just as important as any piece of dialogue or character. They create the setting and mood; aiding the visual that will ultimately appear in your head and as such the sound is what really makes the horror work.
The only criticism I could have is that your mileage will vary from episode by episode. I would love to say that each episode is of the same quality each and every time, but I cant. Not due to any actual flaws but rather to personal preferences, and I’m pretty sure that will carry over from person to person. You will no doubt find a few episode that will hit your individual sweet spots, but dont expect all of them too or you’ll just set yourself up for disappointment.
If you at all interested you can download individual episode s from the Tales from Beyond the Pale website where you can also buy a very cool box set of the episodes with beautiful individual episode art by the art director of Rue Morgue Magazine Gary Pullin. You can also buy episodes from Amazon and iTunes. So get out there horror hounds and prepare to go Beyond the Pale!
Pros
- great horror alternative for the season
- top tier talent
- phenomenal sound design
Cons
- enjoyment of individual episodes may vary
Final Verdict
