I loved listening to Icebox Radio Theater’s The Woods, even though it freaked me out
considerably. I vacillate on whether I
enjoy new audio podcasts that defer or exploit a connection to retro/OTR radio—sometimes
it can feel like we are looking backwards rather than ahead, celebrating and
even fetishizing a style and form of content from days gone by. However, sometimes a production can takes
some elements of this OTR tradition and still create something new, making one
feel as if they’ve experienced something timeless. In this sense, Icebox Radio Theater uses some trappings
of OTR but still manages to come out from its shadow. For example, this production company, based
in Minnesota, feels in many ways different to any other independent production company
out there. Its advertisements, mostly
for in-house or community promotion, hearken (unconsciously or not) to the days
of real soap sponsors for soap operas (or serials as they preferred to be
known) as well as any pledge drive run on PBS.
I wouldn’t say it irks me, as good audio doesn’t happen for free, but it
is a different experience to listening to monologues-with-effects, such as Saya’s Last Gasp, or what the BBC powerhouse
continues to churn out.
The Woods has
elements of thrillers from the days of War
of the Worlds through The Twilight
Zone to The X Files, yet it had a
very strong suggestion, for me at least, of the Mark Gatiss The Man in Black series for BBC Radio 4. I guess what I loved best about The Woods, other than the fact it scared
the pants off me, was its ambiguity. It
set up an atmosphere of total confusion for two ordinary people on their way to
a wedding, brilliantly evoked by an over-chirpy cell phone ring contrasting
with the worn motifs of a horror story:
the lone house by the side of the road, the country road itself devoid
of any other signs of civilization. It
worked extremely well for audio without resorting to a postwar era script. Not only could something like this happen in
the present day, I felt, its stunningly ambiguous ending suggested it could
happen at any time.
I love when audio allows the use of imagination to fill in
the blanks, to create a terror more horrifying than anything you could ever see
in film, but it also creates very potent foreboding!
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