Larry Fessenden's Tales From Beyond The Pale is coming to haunt your earbuds weekly
After eight years as a series of standalone audio dramas, like a restless poltergeist graduating from knocking ashtrays off of coffee tables to full-on supernatural mayhem Tales From Beyond The Pale is stepping up its efforts to haunt listeners’ earbuds with a new weekly podcast. The first episode, Reappraisal, launches tomorrow, October 10, and spins a tale of a “mysterious stranger determined to buy a property from an unstable seller,” as a press release puts it. That’ll be followed by the snowbound creature feature In The Wind on October 17.
Billing itself as “radio plays for the digital age,” Tales From Beyond The Pale is the brainchild of film directors Larry Fessenden (Depraved, Habit) and Glenn McQuaid (V/H/S, I Sell The Dead) through Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix shingle, and keeps alive a tradition of aural terror that goes back to the days of Orson Welles and Boris Karloff, but with an updated, genre-hopping modern twist. The A.V. Club saw both Reappraisal and In The Wind performed live at the 2017 Overlook Film Festival, where we wrote about the simultaneously cozy and chilling experience:
Fessenden, who’s done just about everything there is to do in the indie-horror world—writing, directing, acting, producing, you name it—clearly relished his role as a diabolical gentleman who gives a fed-up family man a way out in the EC-comics style first story, “Re-Appraisal.” The second, “In The Wind,” had sort of a Stephen King-meets-Fargo vibe, telling the story of a folksy female cop who encounters winged monsters at a snowy mountain resort. (How apropos.) Both stories were engrossing, and watching the foley artists clink glasses together and stomp empty shoes on pieces of wood was a treat.
Following the premiere episodes, Tales From Beyond The Pale: The Podcast will release episodes weekly, mixing together archival recordings and new stories written by horror screenwriters, authors, and filmmakers like Graham Reznick (Dead Wax, I Can See You, Until Dawn) and Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, From Beyond). A wide variety of actors, including Vincent D’onofrio, Barbara Crampton, Ron Perlman, Doug Jones, Amy Seimitz, Kate Flannery, Leon Vitale, Lance Reddick, Tony Todd, Dominic Monaghan, A.J. Bowen, Pat Healey, and many more lend their voices to the recordings.
You can subscribe to Tales From Beyond The Pale: The Podcast on your podcatcher of choice, and read more about it on its website.