Monsters in dark forest. Illustration contains transparency and blending effects, eps 10

Wired Magazine made a point that horror and sci-fi has given a new rise to Podficts– fictional podcasts. The idea that people are doing effectively narrative audio stories (even going as far as audio drama) to tell stories to their listeners. We’ve listed many in the past two years, but the number seems to be growing!

From the article:

DAN POWELL VANISHED in January 2016. Before he did, though, the audio archivist sent his friend Mark a set of tapes, chronicling his attempts to organize a series of audio interviews that had been recorded at a creepy apartment building 20 years earlier. The podcast chronicles each approaching footstep, each rat scurrying by—and each realization that dawns as Dan learns more about the sinister song that affected the lives of the building’s eccentric residents back in the 1990s. If you want to see what he saw, though, you’ll have to imagine it yourself: Dan is the fictional protagonist of Archive 81, a found-footage horror podcast.

The real Dan Powell is also an audio archivist, although he denies any haunted recordings or horror experiences. Instead, he spends his days reviewing different sound effects for Soundsnap, an online commercial sound library. “I listen to thousands of different door slams,” Powell says. “I thought, is there a way to take a work environment of listening to weird sounds, and put a horrific twist on that?”

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