Indiewire

Eric Kohn 10/13/17

Celebrate Friday the 13th With ‘Tales From Beyond the Pale,’ New Horror Stories From Some of the Genre’s Best Filmmakers — Exclusive

While horror movies continue to show life at the box office, some of the most innovative directors working with the genre on a smaller scale have found a more creative storytelling approach: audio. For three seasons, the radio dramas of “Tales From Beyond the Pale” have found a number of indie horror filmmakers channeling their talents into a series of gripping audio-based narratives, and you can listen to new installments of the fourth season every Friday exclusively on IndieWire, starting with two new episodes today, and concluding with a special presentation on Halloween.

Each of the 10 episodes in the latest season was recorded in front of a live audience, at special events in Los Angeles, Colorado and Montreal, between 2014 and 2015. The stories were told with a handful of actors, live music and sound design produced in real time.

“Tales From Beyond” is the brainchild of GlassEye Pix founder Larry Fessenden, best known as the director of nuanced, allegorical horror movies “Habit,” “Wendigo” and “The Last Winter,” along with Irish filmmaker Glenn McQuaid (“I Sell the Dead”). The stories focus on fearsome events ranging from ghosts to werewolves, vampires and possessed dolls. Voice actors involved in episodes for this season include Martin Starr (“Silicon Valley), Pat Healy (“Compliance”) and Barbara Crampton (“Re-Animator”).

All episodes of the fourth season will remain available on IndieWire until the end of the month. Below, listen to the first two episodes, “Cold Reading” and “No Signal.” Both episodes were recorded at the Stanley Film Festival in 2014, and feature casts that include Crampton, former Stanley Kubrick assistant Leon Vitali, and Fessenden. “Cold Reading” was co-written by McQuaid and April Snellings; “No Signal” was written by Fessenden. The first tale takes place at a séance set at the turn of the century; the second involves a trio of paranormal adventurers, a century later, exploring the same haunted setting.

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Entertainment Weekly

Clark Collis 10/13/17

Tales From Beyond the Pale Volume 4 gets a spooky teaser

How many scares does the just-released fourth volume of spooky audio drama series Tales From Beyond the Pale contain? We wish we could tell you. But the intern who was tasked with finding out fled the building midway through the second yarn in this latest collection from filmmakers Larry Fessenden (Habit, The Last Winter) and Glenn McQuaid (I Sell the Dead). Kids, today! They’ve just got no sand.

We can reveal that these 10 new tales were recorded live in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Colorado and boast a combined cast which includes Fessenden, McQuaid, Martin Starr (Silicon Valley), AJ Bowen (You’re Next) Pat Healy (Cheap Thrills), Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, We Are Still Here), Leon Vitali (Barry Lyndon), Tony Todd (Candyman), Shudder curator Samuel Zimmerman, directors Roxanne Benjamin (XX), Izzy Lee (Innsmouth), and author Clay McLeod Chapman (comic book Self Storage). The stories are written by Fessenden, McQuaid, Chapman, April Snellings, and Douglas Buck. Also? The two Tales your writer has heard — the Crampton-starring Cold Reading and its sequel, No Signal — are utterly terrifying. Hmm, maybe that intern wasn’t such a scaredy-cat after all.

The 10 Tales are being released in an illustrated hardcover book with a USB key containing the stories and will be available as digital downloads on traditional platforms. All Season 4 poster images have been illustrated by artist Trevor Denham.

“From the mayhem of taking the show on the road, to the dusting off and mastering, these tales represent five years of blood, sweat and tears,” said McQuaid in a statement. “This season was made possible by our friends at the various festivals who invited us out to play with them, and by the fans of the show who came out to hear us on tour.”

“This season has a great diversity of subject matter because Glenn and I were trying to respond to the specific locations we were traveling to,” said Fessenden. “We’ve assembled these tales to celebrate the live experience, and the season becomes a chronicle of our time on the road.”

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Indiewire

Michael Nordine 10/20/17

IndieWire exclusive: ‘Tales From Beyond the Pale’: ‘Barricade’ and ‘Speaking in Tongues’ Prove That Hearing Is Believing

Seeing is believing, but hearing can be too. The newest season of Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid’s “Tales From Beyond the Pale” has delivered audio tales about spooky goings on in such far-flung locales as the Stanley Hotel and the film industry itself, with this week’s two new episodes — which IndieWire can exclusively premiere — taking place in rural Pennsylvania and Montreal, respectively.

“Barricade” finds a just-married couple on their honeymoon, where the aftereffects of nearby fracking unleash something chthonic from the ground; Fessenden wrote the 23-minute tale, which features the voice talents of Roxanne Benjamin, Jeremy Gardner, Tony Todd, Samuel Zimmerman. It’s like a short film in sonic form, with the details of just what those beings look like left to the listener’s imagination.

“There’s an interaction involved that’s quite unique these days, you’re relying on the listener to bring their imagination to the party; to color the story with their own visuals, in a way,” says McQuaid. “What we do is a reaction to the overuse of CGI, of seeing too much of the monster — we’re turning all the lights out, it’s much scarier with the lights out.”

“I’ve written enough now that I can see my own approach is to have the story, and then have some sort of commentary above it, which feels like a literary technique,” adds Fessenden. “At the same time, I like to employ sound effects in the manner of a film, with hard cuts and closeups built into the rhythm of the piece; I often speak about where the ‘camera’ is when designing the sound. It’s an unusual medium and we make our own rules.”

“Speaking in Tongues,” meanwhile, tells of a man named Weyland Glas — that’s one “S,” not two — who feeds on memories in order to stay young and hires a translator in order to settle a few important debts. It features such translations as “he wants you to fuck the corpse of your mother” and no shortage of gallows humor. McQuaid co-wrote the episode with April Snellings, while Fessenden lends his voice to it alongside Tessa J. Brown, Alex Goldrich, Izzy Lee, and George Mougias.

More fanciful and ambitious than “Barricades,” “Speaking in Tongues is also more site-specific. “When we were developing ‘Speaking in Tongues’ and ‘Barricade,’ we knew we’d be performing them as part of the Fantasia Film Festival, and wanted to do something in celebration of our mad-hearted friends up there in Montreal,” McQuaid explains. “Stephanie Trepanier suggested I do something in French, and that sparked the idea of working on a bilingual piece, and I wanted to set it in Montreal because it’s such an interesting, multifaceted city. ‘Speaking in Tongues’ was also inspired by ‘HellBlazer,’ where the mob underworld sits side by side with the demonic underworld.”

“I grew up before there was VHS, so I would record movies off the TV onto audio cassettes and listen to them, no picture,” Fessenden says. “I gained an appreciation for the rhythms of dialogue and sound effects and music, and how the mind conjures the image. I always say in film, there is only one picture but myriad sound tracks, my way of illustrating how essential sound is in cinema. Well, we’ve taken that concept a step further with ‘Tales,’ turned off that one picture and left the audience with a blank canvas to build their own worlds based on sound alone.”

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