How "Welcome to Night Vale" sparked a Golden Age of horror podcasts

A counterexample to claims of "stuck" culture.

Katherine Dee, of default.blog fame, recently published a provoking post on Wisdom of Crowds, arguing that culture isn’t stuck, it’s just that a lot of cultural evolution is happening in new forms: TikToks, memes, internet personalities. Living up to its name, Wisdom of Crowds has now gone on to publish an equally provoking post from Matthew Gasda, arguing the opposite.

The Vineyard and the Meth Lab

Gasda writes:

What matters is to analyze and critique the conditions under which culture exists. Is it easier or harder for originals to find an audience? Are the different regions of cultural production talking to each other? Is there cross-pollination? Is there curiosity? Are audience and artist pushing each other to greater degrees of cultivation and sophistication, or is the cycle inverted: are artist and audience making each other dumber? 

Presently, I think we are experiencing the latter: a race to a semi-literate, comfortable numb nadir.

Such a claim naturally invites counterexamples. For me, the first one that comes to mind is the distinctly new-media realm of horror podcasts. Conveniently, these developments are recent enough to be relevant to a discussion of modern culture, while also being old enough to perceive trajectories of artistic influence.

Welcome to Night Vale debuted on 15 June 2012. Expertly walking the line between horror and humour, it made ample use of narrator Cecil Baldwin’s deep radio announcer tones, which were somehow reassuring and foreboding at the same time. Podcasting proved an excellent medium for the surreal and disturbing. The best horror films hide the monster until the last minute, allowing the imagination of the audience to fill in the gaps. An audio-only format achieves this naturally, playing the limitations of the medium to advantage by allowing weirdness to be implied rather than shown.

Welcome to Night Vale was vastly successful, in part due to its large tumblr fandom, which latched on to its gay protagonist and swiftly began producing fan art and fan fiction. The podcast also had a prominent Twitter account. Word of mouth had it that many of Welcome to Night Vale’s Twitter followers were in fact unaware of the podcast, and followed the account because its main activity was to regularly tweet out darkly funny quips like this:

A running gag was that radio announcer Cecil would say “And now, the weather,” and this would be followed, not by the weather, but by a song from a relatively unknown artist. Co-author Joseph Fink had hipster tastes in music and provided a seemingly endless library of musicians you had never heard of whose music could slide easily into the quirky Night Vale world. Artists with a small following would allow their music to be used by the podcast and see a burst of attention overnight.

Podcasts are cheap to produce and easy to distribute. Back in the early 2010s, it wasn’t hard to break into the field with a new one. Welcome to Night Vale sparked many imitators of varying quality. A particular favourite of mine was The Hidden Almanac, which blended the comedy-horror format with author Ursula Vernon’s interest in gardening and lapsed Catholicism. Welcome to Night Vale also expanded outwards into a podcast production company called Night Vale Presents, which allowed its authors to try out new narratives and promote other podcasting artists. Alice Isn’t Dead evoked the eerie American world of truckers, always on the move. Within the Wires uses immersive “found footage.”

With comedy horror and atmospheric horror finding such success, it’s not surprising that many podcasts moved from there into straight-up classic horror. An interesting example of cross-pollination between formats may be found in The NoSleep Podcast, which is based on the reddit forum r/nosleep, and anthologises original horror fiction from a variety of authors.

Another prominent display of straight-up horror is The Magnus Archives, which ran from 24 March 2016 to 25 March 2021. The podcast started out as a horror anthology with a simple framing device in which an archivist finds that there are certain stories of supernatural events that mysteriously resist most forms of digitization, but that for some reason can be recorded on an old-fashioned cassette tape. This necessitates reading them aloud — thereby creating the podcast. An early stand-out episode is MAG 15 — Lost Johns’ Cave:

Welcome to Night Vale starts out strong in quality, and slowly decays over time as the quirky sense that anything could happen settles into a predictable set of weirdnesses. By contrast, the artistry of The Magnus Archives develops in its later seasons with increasingly elaborate storytelling. The final Season 5 met with a somewhat mixed reception because, for plot reasons, it branches out into full, unbridled surreality. Inevitably, there were those who disliked the change of format. I personally rather like the way that MAG 165 — Revolutions plays with metre, for example, but I can see why it might not be for everyone.

Season 5 also featured a controversial episode in MAG 172 — Strung Out. Perhaps it is unsurprising that a podcast that specialises in the disturbing would eventually find a way to provoke backlash from an audience that overlapped considerably with tumblr purity culture. The physical and psychological horror of Strung Out was sufficiently intense that Magnus Archives author Jonathan Sims was forced to disclose that its depiction of drug addiction had been written in part based on his own experiences, in order to stop people from claiming he’d been insensitive to write it in the first place. In many ways, this was a very silly controversy, but it demonstrates how The Magnus Archives was willing to challenge its audience. The show continued experimenting with format and ramping up the tension until the very end.

Horror podcasts have been a thriving genre for the past decade or more, with significant experimentation in tone and content. Welcome to Night Vale and The NoSleep Podcast display exactly the kind of “cross-pollination” that Matthew Gasda requests. Deeply original works like The Magnus Archives have easily found audiences.

It’s probably inevitable that any claim that culture is “stuck” will have a counterexample somewhere or other. Human beings are creative creatures. With horror podcasts, we see that Katherine Dee is correct to think that new and unusual internet formats can overlap with more standard types of storytelling in ways that would be surprising to someone who was only paying attention to traditional media.