Ambiguously Human
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Halloween has passed us by, which I always find a bit disappointing because I find the holiday spurns such interesting characters. Halloween is great at celebrating characters who blur the line between human and monstrous. Think of characters like Frankenstein, Freddie Kruger or further down the line into cryptids like Mothman. Halloween gives a spotlight to characters who live in that nebulous middle-ground of mostly human. Halloween may be over but ambiguously human characters live on, and they are particularly prevalent in the medium of horror podcasts.
best horror podcasts list by podyssey.
With no visual elements, auditory horror needs to get creative with sound effects and find other ways to terrify its audience. It’s not without its perks, though. Audio-based storytelling can get away with a lot more body horror because they don’t have to show it.
Welcome to Nightvale provides an early example of this with its protagonist Cecil, whose physical description has been left intentionally ambiguous. He’s interpreted as a human-shaped character but has certain characteristics that are decidedly not human. After all, humans aren’t omniscient. There’s debate whether he is human at all, but Cecil is one example of a character who lives in the foreground of ambiguously human.
Looking to more recent examples, The Magnus Archives has a whole host of characters that fit this trope. As a cosmic horror podcast, it’s built a brand off of characters who are a bit “off”. That internal alarm our bodies have for when something isn’t quite right, our over-active imaginations starting to anticipate a threat— that’s prime horror real estate right there. The Magnus Archives has a bit of a Metaplot going on with worldbuilding in the series centred around fourteen distinct fear entities.
Looking at the type of monsters that are featured in The Magnus Archives, there’s a pretty even distribution with plenty of diversity in the type of horror involved. They explore a lot of different types of primal fear as part of their plot and so the characters also vary in what makes them inhuman. The major conflict in the first season of the Magnus Archives shows the supporting cast being stalked by a worm woman. There are frequent appearances of the worms throughout the first season, which is feasible from a cost standpoint and only requires that the creator get creative with their sound effects.
graph depicting the 14 fear entities from the magnus archives. sorted by the percentage of episodes each entity was featured in.
Another example in the show is the introduction of a character named Michael who is described as looking human except his hands are described as “heavy, like a wet leather bag made of heavy, sharp stones”. An unnamed character who appears in season 2 is described simply as “human, but sharper” and having “too many teeth”. The main characters are themselves involved in a corruption arc, so while they are interpreted as vaguely human, sometimes fanart will surface of The Archivist as an eldritch monster with eyes all over his body and it’s still canon-compliant.
The willing suspension of disbelief present in horror podcasts makes it the perfect breeding ground for ambiguously human characters. When removing the factors of visual effects and their associated cost, there’s a chance to explore characters who couldn’t exist in horror movies. This puts horror podcasts in the perfect condition to take advantage of this trope and really have fun with it. I, for one, will always be in favour of characters who are a bit deranged. Humanity isn’t that great anyways.
