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The next time you watch a horror movie, try putting it on mute. More than likely, it will lose its edge and may even appear comic. As much as horror media is visual, sound plays an outsize role in its ability to terrify. This is partly an evolutionary adaptation: sound can trigger a startle response in humans within ten milliseconds – 30 times faster than the blink of an eye.
Preeminent ghost story scholar Julia Briggs argues that the details of scary stories can reproduce the same effects in the reader – reading about a protagonist’s frenzied heartbeat, your heart is likely to race, too. The same is true of horror audio.
Indeed, unexpected or unidentifiable sounds may be even more unsettling. As sound researcher Isabella van Elferen puts it, sound without source suggests something ghostly.
There are nearly 100 years’ worth of radio and audio dramas that tap into the sound of fear. Here are just a few to get your heart racing.
Classic and contemporary horror audios
The long and storied history of horror drama on BBC radio and BBC Sounds owes a large debt of gratitude to the “Man in Black” – the mysterious host of the long-running horror audio series Appointment with Fear. The storyteller was originally played by Valentine Dyall in the 1940s, and more recently by Mark Gatiss.
For a taste of the series, I recommend a 1988 episode of Fear on 4, a revival of Appointment with Fear. Here, Edward de Souza plays the Man in Black, introducing The Snowman Killing, a terrifying drama of Thatcherite suburbia in which Imelda Staunton gives an unforgettable performance as an increasingly unsettled mother of unnerving twin boys.
More recently, To the Moon and Back (2018) is a satisfying twist on the werewolf story. This single-episode horror tale was written and directed by Faith McQuinn of Observer Pictures, an American independent production company, and features a terrific score by Amy Balcomb. Amari and Mae are cousins on their way back to the family farm when they are kidnapped. The question of their escape, and a dark family secret, make for a haunting listen.
The Canadian government funded Nightfall, a contemporary radio horror series, in the early 1980s. With stories set across the country, the drama was recorded in multiple Canadian cities. While American radio drama of the period was frequently nostalgic in outlook, Nightfall embraced a thematically adult, nihilistic vision of the present, complete with electronic score and stories featuring slashers, evil children, possessed dolls and cross-species sex.
The Porch Light is the episode of Nightfall that scared me the most. The combination of haunted house, murders and terrible weather – a Canadian snowstorm – creates fertile ground for heart-stopping suspense and terror for protagonists Bob and Carol, who have just moved from Toronto to a remote farmhouse.
But for sheer audio terror, you could do much worse than listen to the most famous radio drama of all time, the Mercury Theater on the Air’s adaptation of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. Broadcast on October 30, 1938, many listeners who tuned in partway through were convinced that aliens – or Germans – were invading New Jersey. This adaptation’s realistic framing of drama as radio news is still highly effective.
As a companion piece, Jack J. Ward’s modern story One by One reworks the familiar story of radio as humanity’s last bastion against invasion.
True horror
There are hundreds of other, fabulous fictional horror audio terrors to listen to – but nothing is scarier than reality. I will finish my recommendations with two nonfiction aural frights.
Nikesh Murali has written, presented and produced fiction podcast Indian Noir, which alternates between dark fantasy, crime and horror, since 2018. Murali also presents Indian Noir X, a strand of the podcast featuring urban horror legends (also known as creepypastas) and listeners’ “real life” paranormal encounters. The Bus Trip (2021) describes a terrifying bus journey between Bangalore and Cochin that purportedly really happened to one listener.
The scariest thing I’ve ever heard, though, is The Night Watchman, made for DR (a division of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation) by Stephen Schwartz and Knud Ebbesen in 1971. A factual interview with a nightwatchman in an anatomy museum, it’s a beautifully recorded piece. The interviewee sounds young, preoccupied with his new baby, and very ordinary – yet the things he reveals about his rounds patrolling the museum at night are increasingly bizarre. This is chilling sound at its very best.
Leslie McMurtry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
