Campfire Radio Theater · Haunted Air Audio

The War of the Worlds

October 27, 2013·37 min·3 clips

A news crew captures 100-foot tripods unfolding from meteorites near Baltimore, signaling an alien invasion.

The fire opens politely. A Wells line sits next to modern emergency language, so the invasion feels literary for a minute, then ugly and current. NASA confirms an impact. The asteroid report starts to wobble: quarantine lines, radiation fears, fires, and an intact space rock near Baltimore. Then the war stops sounding like a war humans can fight. Survivors describe alien machines knocking fighter jets out of the sky and crushing an armored division near Philly within minutes. Hope does not get a clean entrance. A character with a phone keeps recording because documentation is about the only useful thing left. The park gives up worse proof. Red alien growth appears overnight, seeding the ground as if occupation has gone botanical along with military. Then comes the pit. The bodies shift the whole piece from spectacle to record, and the scene keeps pressing the point: people need to see this. The count rises. Hundreds may be thousands, and the horror tightens when something moving in the grave is not human. Then the aliens are seen. Spiky tentacles, bodies being worked over, no tidy explanation needed. One survivor is still alive, which makes watching feel less detached and more guilty. The credits finally pull back. Wells, the cast, and the crew get named, and the catastrophe lands as radio drama with the weight of testimony.

As heard by us

Classic invasion dread, driven by news-bulletin panic and old-school radio menace.

Campfire Radio Theater's The War of the Worlds treats alien invasion as a public emergency first and a horror story second. The result is all urgency and rising panic, with ordinary people trying to make sense of something far larger than them as it unfolds in real time.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want alien invasion panic with radio-drama urgency, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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