Standalone horror dramas, each opened with a graveyard walk.
Tales From Beyond The Pale is a horror anthology in audio drama form, with different writers, voice casts and composers behind each standalone tale. Recent episodes open with a narrator walking through a cemetery at night, and the headstone the narrator stops at often matches the story that follows.
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Tales From Beyond The Pale is a horror anthology in audio drama form, made of standalone stories rather than one continuing plot. The credits change from tale to tale. Rigo Garay wrote and directed 'Super!', Joe Maggio wrote and directed 'The Slaughtered', and the music comes from a changing group of composers that includes The Gifted, Jack Fessenden, Graeme Resnick and Dave Egger, who wrote a cello score. Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid are credited as producers, and the two introduce the show by name at the start of 'The Slaughtered'. Some names come up again and again. Emily Bennett appears in several voice casts, Matt Rocker handles recording, sound design and mix at Underground Audio in New York on a number of tales, and Brian Lavelle is credited with the posters. Then there is the graveyard. Recent episodes open with a narrator walking through a cemetery at night, followed by a winged companion called Shape, who is warned not to choke on a clavicle. The narrator shoos off a bat, heads for the old cholera pit, and reads headstones along the way. The headstones often match the story that follows. Alexander Graham Bell, 'the man who disembodied the human voice', comes before 'The Next Voice You Hear Will Be Your Own', where a phone rings far out in the middle of nowhere and someone who claims to have altered the future admits, 'if I leave, death will find me.' The grave of the man who invented the difference engine leads into 'Orpheus', in which a voice system pulls up texts, journal entries and FaceTime videos during an argument full of blame and loss. Robert Moses, who according to the narrator parted people rather than water, comes before 'Super!', a story that moves from a heated argument about an apartment building to a dinner invitation on the night of the NFC Championship game. One opening has the narrator read a list of names off the stones, Larry Fessenden and Joe Maggio among them, before Maggio's own tale plays. The sign-off after 'Everything Must Go' praises the people who designed cemeteries and notes that you never see a graveyard going out of business the way shopping malls do. The stories don't stick to one mood. 'Everything Must Go' sends a bickering group through a closed mall after their flashlight dies, and one of them worries about an embarrassing obituary. 'The Devil's Share' follows a crew with a buggy transmitter who badly want a big story after a disorienting night at a factory. 'The Slaughtered' moves from a meeting where the head flies off a gavel to crude talk between two men. The graveyard narration stays dry, a little ghoulish and fond of wordplay, while the swearing and strong emotion come from the dramas. For a first listen, try 'Orpheus' and 'Everything Must Go' back to back: one is about grief and machine voices, the other is a panic in a dark mall.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants self-contained horror stories with full voice casts, their own scores and careful sound design. It also suits someone who enjoys a dry, graveyard-bound narrator between the tales.
What sets it apart: Rather than relying on one storyteller, it changes writers, casts and composers from tale to tale. It ties them together with a narrator's night walk past headstones, such as Bell's, Robert Moses's and the difference engine inventor's, that often match the story about to play.
Written and directed by auteurs and performers of today’s horror genre, these lavishly produced half-hour tales range from the gently macabre to the genuinely gruesome. Hosted and curated by filmmakers Larry Fessenden (*Depraved, The Last Winter, Habit*) and Glenn McQuaid (*I Sell the Dead, V/H/S*), this award-winning series, inspired by the vintage radio shows of yester-year, blends the familiar with a decidedly modern sensibility.
Larry Fessenden takes you from cemetery banter to a phone call nobody should answer.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A cemetery ramble gives way to a fractured conspiracy recording, where old graves and broken signals share the same dark joke.
The Devil's Share opens on a cheerful cemetery stroll, with the host chatting to his "bestie beastie" as exposed coffins, scattered bones, and Rob Barron's grave turn the setting into a joke with teeth.
A dark mall crawl turns retail architecture, stale crumbs, and commercial cheer into comic horror.
A shopping mall becomes the episode's haunted monument, a place where a failed flashlight, a leaking fish bag, and an argument over what to call the main stretch of the mall nudge a stranded group toward the building's hidden guts.
A graveyard meditation on urban planning becomes a foul-smelling descent toward a giant alligator.
Rigo Gouray's Super starts as a nocturnal walk through a cemetery of obelisks, then turns toward a city shaped by power, Robert Moses, and highways pushed through neighborhoods.
A telephone call from the future turns one night's detour into a wager against death.
Telephone terror slips in through a future that refuses to hold still. Emily Bennett's The Next Voice You Hear Will Be Your Own leaves Gretchen Duncan, Dawn, and Don in a strange nighttime refuge, where a call can warn of a death still ahead and a basketball game starts to look…
A sharp, graveyard-wry AI horror story about grief, guilt, and questions better left unanswered.
A cemetery walk past a difficult grave for the difference engine's inventor sets the tone for a story where grief, guilt, and forbidden questions gather around an AI built to answer too much.
Reddit nightmares, cleanly narrated and sharply turned.
The Devil's Share sends Randy Pritchard into Darrow Industries in Vernal Falls, where Hank calls the town "more rust than town" and tells him to stay away from the factory.
Tales From Beyond The Pale's "Episode 54: Everything Must Go" follows five teenagers recruited by Papa Jim to carry a rotten 15-pound pollock into a mall that is destroying local businesses.
Tales From Beyond The Pale's 'Super!' opens by comparing Robert Moses to a man who 'parted people,' then cuts to Ray's Queens building and Stevie's first day shadowing the super.
Tales From Beyond The Pale's 'The Next Voice You Hear Will Be Your Own' turns a roadside payphone near Nipton into a time-split horror setup, with each traveler hearing a voice that sounds like their own future.
"Orpheus" from Tales From Beyond The Pale follows Emily as she opens a Jeremy Clark session inside a Sterling Innovations smart house.
Tales From Beyond The Pale’s “The Slaughtered,” written and directed by Joe Maggio, follows William Baxter, an ethical investor whose personal decision to fund military-grade predator-drone technology leaves him morally divided.
Tales From Beyond the Pale’s “Game Night” follows four married friends who replace board games with an amateur attempt to summon Abra Itzak Fool during a snowstorm.
Glenn McQuaid and Larry Fessenden explain how Glass Eye Pix developed Tales from Beyond the Pale from a drive inspired by Boris Karloff and Alfred Hitchcock radio plays into a 10-episode audio series.
Larry Fessenden introduces a horror audio drama about the murder of Johnny Bernard.
A tennis pro trapped in a hospital room reflects on his lost life and the power of his own mind.
A horror story about a man who loses GPS signal while driving to an old house, exploring modern fears of disconnection.
A live double bill of horror stories exploring humanity's desire to communicate with the dead, starting with 'Cold Reading' about a skeptical medium during a storm.
Hosts introduce a horror tale written by Glenn McQuaid, blending vintage radio style with modern horror.