When I was ten, me and my friends would make our own radio plays. None of us had a computer yet (this was the early 90s) so our means were entirely analogue. We’d grab an old cassette tape, stick it in a stereo and hit record. “The Temple of Gloom” was one of our first masterpieces. In the absence of a foley studio, we came up with a workaround for sound effects. My friend Lorcan had a copy of Disney’s Aladdin video game for the Sega Mega Drive and for some inexplicable reason you could navigate into the menu and play every sound effect the game had individually. Everything from ‘Camel spit’ to ‘Stones Crumble’. So we’d hold the stereo up to the TV and hit record. We’d just have to work a story around the sound effects available to us.Fast forward to over thirty years later and thankfully now when making audio dramas I finally have the luxury of matching the sound effects to the script and not the other way around! For several years now, myself and Peter Dunne have been making Petrified – an award-winning horror audio drama. That’s right ‘audio drama’ and not ‘radio play’. In the 1930s and 40s radio plays were the Netflix of their day, with families gathered round the wireless to hear the latest thrilling serial. In the 50s many of the big radio plays were migrating to television and taking audiences with them.It wasn’t really until the early 2000s when they made their well overdue return as ‘audio dramas’ in the form of podcasts.Myself and Peter spent most of 2025 working on our new season – our fourth. Peter writes and directs each episode, and I produce, edit and sound-design them. A gruesome twosome if there ever was. Eight new episodes. It’s an anthology format so each episode is its own little world. We’ve done stories set on misty mountains with howling wind, in remote radio stations with static interference and ghostly, eh, ghost estates with distant footsteps where there should be none.There’s a marvellous freedom to creating audio drama because you get to concoct all sorts of supernatural terrors but you don’t need a supernaturally sized budget to bring them to life. Actor David Dastmalchian (Late Night with the Devil, The Suicide Squad) is a guest star in our new season and he put it like this: “One of the most important keys to storytelling, especially in the world of horror, is through the ears. It’s the audibility of sound and voices telling story that leave the worst, most horrific feelings that we have to the imagination. I really wanted to be a part of Petrified because I really savour any opportunity to get to use my voice as an actor to try and creep into people’s ear holes and haunt their brains.”He’s not wrong. When I go to the cinema to see horror I find myself blocking my ears rather than covering my eyes. It’s the loud jump scares, the screams, the scratching on the wall that have me squirming in my seat. For us, to be given a direct route into listeners’ ears via their headphones where there’s no escape is, well, fiendish. Our fourth season comes with a full cast of fourteen incredible Irish actors and our wonderful guest stars this season in Dastmalchian and Dylan Baker (The Good Wife, Trick r’ Treat). You can expect a full immersive sound design and a little less of ‘Camel spit’ and ‘Stones Crumble’.Petrified Season 4 begins Feb 18th. You can follow wherever you listen to podcasts. More info here.
