Four classic horror radio dramas for your Halloween cravings
These old-fashioned audio shows are perfect to settle down for late night frights and mysteries
From The Twilight Zone to Suspense, adjust your volume dials to some horror-themed radio dramas this Halloween season. (Unsplash/Olena Bohovyk)
The Halloween season has arrived, and it couldn’t have come any sooner. While buying costumes, pumpkins, and candy, there’s still your entertainment to consider. I’m sure your scary movie schedule is all set, but what if you want to cozy up to something else while treating yourself to those Reese’s chocolates you stocked up for your midnight cravings? My suggestion is try listening to horror-themed radio dramas.
A famous staple of entertainment since the 1930s, radio dramas provided families with immersive audio stories often adapted from classic plays. These shows were told in clear and simple ways, but they made genres startlingly compelling from Shakespeare to crime and horror. Radio dramas have survived as fiction podcasts in the digital age.
If you want to go back in time this Halloween by enjoying the ominous yet strangely relaxing atmosphere of horror radio dramas, adjust your volume dials to these four classic programs, all of which can be found on YouTube.
Vincent Price’s “Tales of Horror Halloween Special”
A personal favourite, Price’s Halloween Special features over 11 hours of gripping horror stories about crime and murder. The audio recordings are accompanied by an image of Price’s shadowy living room, containing his self-portrait above the fireplace in his haunted mansion. It all sets the scene perfectly for his unnerving yarns.
Every story has biting tension from the orchestral fanfare and fuzzy sound quality of character dialogue that deliver disturbing tones like any horror show. However, it’s Price himself that makes his accounts stand out so much. He has the voice of a classy gentleman filled with sinister pleasure and teasing dark humour. Price revels in leading us through the dreadful corners of human nature.
The Twilight Zone
If you’d rather watch Rod Serling’s classic sci-fi thriller series than listen to it, I certainly wouldn’t blame you. I still invite you to listen to the show’s radio drama version, since it honours everything about Serling’s show from its memorable intro to reality-bending scenarios.
The program emphasizes intriguing absurdities instead of overly scaring you with heart-pounding terror like the other shows in this list do. With over 170 episodes, The Twilight Zone will nonetheless satisfy your curiosity for the other-worldly leading up to Halloween.
Suspense
The 1940s series Suspense was created by William Spier and specialized in mystery and thriller genres until the show ended in the early 1960s. The show has over 900 episodes, where Hollywood stars from Humphrey Bogart to Orson Welles contributed dialogue recordings.
The radio drama has wondrously frightening music that creeps in during the most unsettling parts of the stories. Unlike Price, who narrates throughout his horror tales, this series is more character-led. You listen to an impressive audio mixture of heated exchanges, hushed whispers, and, of course, screams. It’s also more tonally diverse as it has not only crime and tragedy but romance and passion.
The War of the Worlds
One day before Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles aired his reading of H.G. Wells’ alien invasion book The War of the Worlds on his radio show Mercury Theatre on the Air. The broadcast remains an infamous event in audio history for causing mass hysteria across the United States.
Despite how polarizing it became, Welles’ show was evidently inventive by presenting what it would be like to learn about a Martian attack from only a radio and nothing else. His gruff and hypnotic voice truly gets under your skin as he describes how helpless we are in the face of extraterrestrial destruction. Tune into this program if sci-fi horror is your go-to genre blend for Halloween.
