Scary! A Horde of Halloween Podcasts
Oct 31st, 2007 | By Elisabeth Lewin | Category: General 
In the midwestern (US) city where we live, there is a sixty-year, very goofy tradition of not sending the children out to beg for treats on Halloween. Fearful of what might happen if 1940’s era trick or treaters mixed with older “hooligans” on October 31, our community decided to sugar-ize the little ones on “Beggars’ Night,” October 30.
This leaves the Podcasting News staff a quiet Halloween evening tonight — without the responsibility for answering the doorbell, handing out candy, or traipsing through the chilly neighborhood in the dark. We’re looking forward to some scary podcast listening and viewing.
Here are a few treats we came across:
Project man Bre Pettis has a MAKE magazine weekend project with Eric Skiff: making well fitting, realistic vampire teeth. Not a project to be attempted by little kids (stinky plastics, dremel tools, and gag-reflex diy dental molds), the end result looked really, really cool. This week they also have a video on convincing zombie makeup. Very gross.
Final Taxi‘s Ron Nasty is telling real-life stories about the scary, creepy, and deadly all week, a variation on his usual tales of real-life (not so scary and creepy) notables. A far cry from last week’s entries about the late Deborah Kerr and the actress who was 007’s Miss Moneypenny! Not suitable listening for small humans, but you probably already knew as much.
A favorite TV show of our misspent youth, MTV’s Headbangers’ Ball, features this week a special Halloween podcast with scary Danish metal musician King Diamond and his scary latest solo album.
Cool As Hell Theatre has a half-hour audio adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Mad Decent Radio has a frightening “Kill Yourself Again” Halloween hip hop podcast featuring, among other artists, last year’s music Oscar winner 3 6 Mafia.
Expert storytellers Brian and Gene over at Hometown Tales often have chilling stories to tell (or sometimes to demystify), regardless of the season. They have a wonderful discussion of werewolves that’s more thought-provoking than frightening. For super scary stories, take a listen at Pseudopod, all year long.
Finally, while many cultures celebrate some kind of festival of all souls (or all saints) at this time of year, many western traditions have grown from very old pagan observances of Samhain. The podcast A Darker Shade of Pagan has a Samhain-themed podcast this week (mostly of themed music). Stacy Simmons’ The Witching Hour has an excellent overview of Samhain, “the veil of the year.”
If you’re doing something special for Halloween, let us know in the comments!
Photo by Hellga
Here’s another one for you: I did an episode of Boston Behind the Scenes last year that looked at what it is like to run a costume shop during the lead-up to Halloween.
Ask and you shall receive!
We’ve been running a handful of Halloween shows all month. Two classics (aka repeats from last year), and two fresh. Our shows are How-To, or DiY shows, so with the exception of one show, we’re chock-full of handy Halloween tips, like Jack-O-Lantern carving, Halloween light shows, snacks, icky looking, but yummy tasting brain jello molds, decorating ideas, and even costumes.
For our non-DiY show, we visited the only US manufacturer of latex Halloween masks and costumes, and got arm deep into the whole mask making process, as well as checked out a luscious “haunted” pastry competition, with 100% edible desserts shaped and baked into truly frightening creations. Click the website URL to find the shows (or go to howtogirl.com and click on “How-To,” and “Taste of How-To” in the menu bar). We’ve even thrown in a scary Halloween skit!
Happy watching!
Eric
Ooops — just found this one: WBFO in Buffalo (NY) has a podcast about “vampire electronics” — that is, appliances and devices that suck your power (bwa ha ha ha).
http://publicbroadcasting.net/wbfo/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1175192§ionID=1
I put out a couple of Halloween themed podcasts this past week on Podcast Ping (http://podcastping.blogspot.com).
Yeah, The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd has done a Halloween Themed show for the past two years, but you wouldn’t read about it here on PodcastingNews.com because of them embargo on all things Dr. Floyd. Remember that whole “Pirates & Podcasting a surefire way get a mention on PN.com”? Not true.
It’s okay though. Dr. Floyd marches on with over 50,000 downloads a month and more real live celebrity guest stars than any other podcast out there. Since November 2004, the longest running Family Friendly Podcast on the web. Legally we can’t say we’re the greatest podcast ever made…but, well, you know.
Grant – thanks for the comment.
We really don’t have a No Dr. Floyd rule. Not sure where that came from…..
if you really want to shit youre pants go to americanfolklore.com and then click on podcasts or ghost stories at the top bar then choose a story called “dont turn on the light” and it is flippen scary .
They should play the song (#3) called FRANKENSTEIN on future pod casts. It’s relatively dark, yet has a cool groove. Spread it around. http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/davidh3
My friend Sean McBride’s book has just been released as an audio podcast as well and it makes for a good Halloween listen (or read.) http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/sean-mcbride/id470078144