Welcome to Welcome to Night Vale: First steps in exploring the horror podcast

This article seeks to open discussion on the steadily developing horror podcast genre, working to articulate and demonstrate the properties that new media offers to the horror genre. This is done by focusing on the highly successful Welcome to Night Vale (2012–present), a podcast that takes the form of a ‘community radio show’ for a community both disturbing and homely, and which offers unique insight into new audio media’s potential for Gothic and horror works. Through an exploration of the podcast’s narration, structure and live theatrical performance, it is argued that Night Vale is not simply a drama developed through audio means, but rather one that is based entirely in notions of audio mediation, consciously based in bringing to light the uncanny properties of both podcast and radio form, and offering a work that self-articulates the rich potential of new audio media for horror production.