Podhero Picks: The Spooky Scary Edition
Around the world, the arrival of fall comes with festivals and celebrations to celebrate the spooky, the scary, or the supernatural. There are podcasts that embrace this tradition year-round, and we want to share some of our favorites with you. We’ve combined some Podhero HQ favorites with some recommendations from our users — add these picks to your list…but be prepared to listen with the lights on!
“45: Halloween Traditions” from GraveYard Tales (1 hr, 17 mins)
Recommended by user Shaun
While Podhero is based in the United States, celebrations of Halloween and other similar festivals span the globe. This episode of GraveYard Tales takes listeners on a world tour, providing insight on how the holiday is observed all over. Thanks for putting this episode on our map, Shaun!
“Ep 181: Tiny Terrors” from Horror Movie Podcast (2 hours, 24 minutes)
Recommended by Podhero user LonelyBob
The tagline for this podcast is “dead serious about horror,” and the hosts of this deep-dive podcast do exactly that with films in this growing genre. We’ve selected a recent outing recommended by Swoot user LonelyBob, featuring conversation around a particularly terrifying facet of scary movies: the aforementioned tiny terrors. Dolls, space invaders, and demons are all discussed through their presence in films like Dolls, Brain Damage, Annabelle: Creation, The Cleanse, and many more. Thanks for the tip, LonelyBob!
“Dracula/Transylvanian Hefeweizen” from Pop Culture Brews (52 minutes)
It’s easy to draw a connection between our extreme preferences for and against candy as kids, to particularities in our love for beer and wine. Pop Culture Brews brings that concept to a whole new level by pairing homemade brews with pop culture phenomena. They’ve done TV shows like Scrubs, musicians like Tom Petty, and movies — which include this episode on Dracula. We recommend pairing this episode, with a brew of your choosing. You’ll love it.
“Sisters in Death” from Stranglers (39 minutes)
Recommended by Podhero user Meg
Content Warning: This series discusses a number of sexually explicit murders, and the podcast describes these events in detail. Those sensitive to, or traumatized by, such events may want to skip this recommendation.
For 19 months in the early 1960s, Boston was plagued and mystified by a rash of murders, made all the more mysterious by the odd stagings of the female victims’ bodies. While a confession was eventually given, doubt remains: did he really do it? And did law enforcement really do all they could to stop the killings? Meg recommends you start at the beginning and listen the whole way through for the harrowing true story of the largest police investigation in Boston’s history.
“The Perfect Tenant” from Snap Judgment Presents: Spooked (28 minutes)
Snap Judgment is a well-established narrative nonfiction podcast that regularly tells true and fascinating stories. After a fantastic response to a one-time outing of ghost sightings, they expanded the offering into a separate series, Spooked. While the latest season of the show is only available on Luminary, we selected this season 2 episode — featuring two stories about the scary things we see in places we call home — as a prime example of the show at its best.
“S6E13: Christmas 2015” from The No Sleep Podcast (2 hours, 50 minutes)
Recommended by Podhero user David
NoSleep is a fiction horror podcast dedicated to sharing short stories. While they’re sharing these tales year-round, and they do have Halloween editions of the show, David recommended the sextet of spooky tales from the 2015 Christmas edition as a must-listen. The runtime may seem daunting (nearly three hours), but you can work in stages with timestamps available on the NoSleep website. Enjoy, and thanks for the tip David!
“Episode 21: Unicorns” from Unspookable (20 minutes)
Halloween, for all its scary origins, has become a holiday dominated by phenomena that are decidedly too terrifying for kids. And given how much kids look forward to the holiday, we wanted to make sure we had an offering for your trick-or-treaters. Unspookable is a kids’ podcast dedicated to looking at the history and mystery of myths and legends. To brighten up a spooky space, we’ve picked their episode on the delightful myth of unicorns :)
“#52 | The Theremin” from Twenty Thousand Hertz (26 minutes)
Spooky has a sound. It’s hard to explain, but I’m willing to bet we’ve all imitated it..we may be able to hear it in our heads right now! This episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz dives inside the story of the instrument that we’re all thinking of: the theremin. Would you believe it’s an instrument you play…without touching? You’ll hear about how the instrument was developed and how it became synonymous with all things scary.
“Universal Monster Music” from The Soundtrack Show (45 minutes)
Some of the most ubiquitous characters of the Halloween season — Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Wolfman, and the like — took their most recognizable form in the 1930s through the films of Universal Studios. Along with these indelible images, came an indelible sound. In this episode of The Soundtrack Show, host David W. Collins talks about the scoring process and how this music has permeated into our general memories of the Halloween holiday.
In the very nicest way, we hope these late October listens will provide some spine-tingling scares for you, all while bringing you closer to the origins of some common Halloween traditions. Are there any selections we missed? Feel free to let us know on Twitter.
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