The Dark Side Of

The Dark Side Of is a Spotify Original from Parcast built on one question it asks of almost anything: what was going on behind the familiar version? The episode titles sort subjects under plain labels. 'Horror: Edgar Allan Poe', 'Horror: Hollywood Movie Mayhem' and 'Horror: Haunted Houses' sit beside 'Fashion: Fashion Week', 'Fashion: Fast Fashion' and 'Dating: Dating Game Shows'. That spread is the point. A nineteenth-century writer, a runway show and a television stunt all get the same treatment, and most of the stories begin at a specific date and place. The Poe story opens at a boarding house in Richmond, Virginia, on May 16, 1836, when the 27-year-old writer married his cousin Virginia Clem. A witness swore the bride was 21, the age on the marriage certificate, and that claim did not hold up. Another stretch covers his court-martial and expulsion from West Point in 1831 and his break with his foster father, John Allen, who cut him out of his will. The Hollywood story describes a 1980 family film shoot where a director named Marshall also played the lead, his wife Tippi Hedren and her daughter Melanie Griffith co-starred, and 150 wild animals, many of them his own, shared the set. On the first day he goaded two pet lions into a fight, hoping for footage that would attract investors. The same episode's cold open is somewhere else entirely: a man named Lyle in a Chicago emergency room in early 1974, convinced his five-year-old daughter could be possessed by a demon. Haunted houses get similar handling, with the rise of 'extreme haunts' in the early 2000s and Blackout, an immersive horror experience in New York City developed in 2009 by the artists Josh Randall and Chris Thor. The fashion stories swap gothic scenery for supply chains. One sets a Yves Saint Laurent menswear show at Paradise Cove in Malibu, with Keanu Reeves walking for the label. Another starts inside the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh on April 24, 2013, the morning after workers pointed out cracks in the walls. It also follows donated clothing that thrift stores cannot sell as it is bundled up and shipped to India, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The dating story goes back to February 15, 2000, when Fox aired 'Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?', a two-hour special in which 50 women competed for Rick Rockwell while he stayed hidden behind a wall. The narration is measured, with dry asides; Poe, it notes, was happily expelled. Content advisories open several episodes and name child marriage, incest, addiction, injury, death and staged violence. Individual episodes credit writers such as Ryan Lee and Mackenzie Moore, with writing assistance from Kate Gallagher, and name Kate Leonard and Richard Rosner as stars. Max Cutler is credited as executive producer. For a listener who likes history with a clear scene and a clean line of narration, it offers a favorite subject from its least flattering angle.