You could have been forgiven for thinking, a few years ago, that podcasts might have peaked, with the success of something like “Serial.” But instead, they just keep growing and growing — not just a way of repackaging radio, but a new form all of its own, one that’s still forming and changing in fascinating ways, and still finding new listeners.
As the podcast boom has continued, various projects have attracted the interest of Hollywood for film or TV adaptation — Lord & Miller were developing a “Serial” show, “Mr. Robot” creator Sam Esmail is working on an adaptation of the hit “Homecoming” with Julia Roberts — but so far, “Comedy Bang Bang” is the only one to really successfully make the transition, at least as far as we can think.
But “Lore” could be the one that changes that. Aaron Mahnke’s podcast has been running since 2015, picking up iTunes’ “Best Of 2015” award that year, examining various sinister folklore tales with the depth of a historian and the mood of a great horror picture. And now, it’s coming to screens, with Amazon debuting their series adaptation next month.
Interestingly for a streaming show, it’s taking a docudrama approach, investigating some key cases that Mahnke has examined on in the past with a mix of documentary footage and dramatic reconstructions featuring actors including Campbell Scott, Robert Patrick and Colm Feore,
The show comes from genre legend Gale Ann Hurd, producer of, among others, “The Walking Dead” and “The Terminator,” and the full trailer for the series that the streaming service just debuted suggests that it could be a lot of fun for horror fans AND for history fans. It’ll be interesting to see if this sort of video-podcast format takes off: we’ll find out when “Lore” debuts on the appropriately eerie date of Friday, October 13th.