The Terra Nova expedition meets House of Leaves meets cosmic horror, but modern day and with women and people of color involved.
An international crew goes to an Arctic research station in Norway to do some quick repairs. They are trapped by a blizzard, and then weird things start happening. Followed by very weird things. Followed by extremely weird and also fucking terrifying things.
This is a fictional podcast made of found footage from the doomed expedition. The doom isn't a spoiler, as you can immediately figure out that if someone is reconstructing what happened from the crew's reports, recordings, etc, complete with notes like "This journal entry was found crumpled under a chair in the common room," it's because no one is around to explain things.
This podcast is spectacularly well-done - exactly what I wanted and didn't get from the terrible The Nox. It combines the best elements of horror, survival/exploration, and found footage/epistolatory fiction into a genuine tour-de-force. (I struggle with found footage movies as shakycam gives me motion sickness, so getting to enjoy this genre with actors was a treat.) It won me over even though I very rarely enjoy fiction podcasts - in fact this is the first I think I've ever enjoyed.
It did take me a couple episodes to get used to everyone's voices and catch up on who was who - I read transcripts for the first few episodes after watching them. But once it gets going, it REALLY gets going. I had to hurriedly turn off one episode because I was listening after dark and that was a mistake.
The multi-lingual cast is using their actual accents and languages. I really loved that aspect. The acting is extremely good, as are the sound effects. But the story is best of all. I ended up really liking the characters, especially Graham Casner and Dr. Rosa de la Torres, and feeling for them. Though the story is horror and everyone is probably doomed from the start, it's not the kind of horror where everyone and everything is terrible. It's the kind of horror - and also the kind of survival/expedition story - where basically decent and competent people try their best, but it doesn't work out because sometimes life is like that. Nature does not forgive, and neither does cosmic horror.
I really enjoyed going into this almost completely cold and I recommend it. Seasons one and two constitute a single arc. It doesn't wrap everything up as there's still a ton of mysteries which presumably continue into the next season, but it does complete the story of that particular expedition.
Content notes: Monster/horror-type violence. Body horror (within my tolerance levels.) Brief, non-graphic mention of sled dogs getting killed by a creature (they're not dogs we know.) No sexual or human-on-human violence. In general, it's more on the suggestive rather than graphic end of things.
( Spoilers! Spoilers! )
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
recessional, thank you SO MUCH for reccing this. I'd never even heard of it before.
The White Vault. There's lots of places to listen to this. I listened on Audible and also joined the Patreon to get bonus episodes.
An international crew goes to an Arctic research station in Norway to do some quick repairs. They are trapped by a blizzard, and then weird things start happening. Followed by very weird things. Followed by extremely weird and also fucking terrifying things.
This is a fictional podcast made of found footage from the doomed expedition. The doom isn't a spoiler, as you can immediately figure out that if someone is reconstructing what happened from the crew's reports, recordings, etc, complete with notes like "This journal entry was found crumpled under a chair in the common room," it's because no one is around to explain things.
This podcast is spectacularly well-done - exactly what I wanted and didn't get from the terrible The Nox. It combines the best elements of horror, survival/exploration, and found footage/epistolatory fiction into a genuine tour-de-force. (I struggle with found footage movies as shakycam gives me motion sickness, so getting to enjoy this genre with actors was a treat.) It won me over even though I very rarely enjoy fiction podcasts - in fact this is the first I think I've ever enjoyed.
It did take me a couple episodes to get used to everyone's voices and catch up on who was who - I read transcripts for the first few episodes after watching them. But once it gets going, it REALLY gets going. I had to hurriedly turn off one episode because I was listening after dark and that was a mistake.
The multi-lingual cast is using their actual accents and languages. I really loved that aspect. The acting is extremely good, as are the sound effects. But the story is best of all. I ended up really liking the characters, especially Graham Casner and Dr. Rosa de la Torres, and feeling for them. Though the story is horror and everyone is probably doomed from the start, it's not the kind of horror where everyone and everything is terrible. It's the kind of horror - and also the kind of survival/expedition story - where basically decent and competent people try their best, but it doesn't work out because sometimes life is like that. Nature does not forgive, and neither does cosmic horror.
I really enjoyed going into this almost completely cold and I recommend it. Seasons one and two constitute a single arc. It doesn't wrap everything up as there's still a ton of mysteries which presumably continue into the next season, but it does complete the story of that particular expedition.
Content notes: Monster/horror-type violence. Body horror (within my tolerance levels.) Brief, non-graphic mention of sled dogs getting killed by a creature (they're not dogs we know.) No sexual or human-on-human violence. In general, it's more on the suggestive rather than graphic end of things.
( Spoilers! Spoilers! )
recessional, thank you SO MUCH for reccing this. I'd never even heard of it before.The White Vault. There's lots of places to listen to this. I listened on Audible and also joined the Patreon to get bonus episodes.
