A Halloween shocker: Radio drama not dead
Long Beach's 562 Live will put aside the tunes for a hellishly old-school broadcast
Normally, Long Beach's 562 Live Radio plays hiphop, R&B, pop and danceclub music.
But once a year, on a terrifying night when the monsters and other creatures come out to play, the internet station pauses its usual programming and becomes “Haunted Radio.”
“I want people to imagine being around the campfire, around a radio with the lights out and listening to spooky stories,” said Alex Exum, the station founder and narrator of the annual Halloween-themed show dubbed “Haunted Radio,” which will air online from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Oct. 31. It will also be available on demand after its original air date. Tickets for the show are $9 and can be purchased at 562live.com/halloween.
“It's all family-friendly,” he said. “So it's going to be a spooky Halloween event for the whole family that they can enjoy by listening to audio and using theater of the mind.”
The two-hour program is an homage to the classic radio dramas that were among the main forms of entertainment from the '20s through the '40s, as people gathered around their radios to listen to plays created for the medium.
“I was an actor before I got into radio and I always loved old radio theater of the '30s and '40s,” Exum said. “And I'm now trying to just get anyone interested to keep the art of radio theater alive. It's a dying art.”
For the Halloween show, which he launched in 2019, Exum does things as old school as possible, using a cast of more than a dozen Long Beach actors as well as sound effects and music to tell a handful of original scary stories. Of course, people aren't going to be sitting around the radio, but instead can listen on laptops, phones or whatever devices they choose to stream the pre-recorded show over.
“We have twist endings, shock scares and some amazing sound effects,” Exum said.
This year's lineup has six original stories that include “Bigfoot Speaks: Interview With a Sasquatch!” It's about a jaded talk show host who doesn't believe in Bigfoot until he is approached by a man who claims to have captured the creature, and brings him in for an interview.
“He has a Bigfoot translator device, which can translate the grunts and groans of the Bigfoot and at the end, you can imagine what will happen,” Exum said.
From there, the show digs into Long Beach's frightful history with “Scary Mary,” about a ghost that is said to still haunt the Queen Mary. There's also a terror-themed love story dubbed “Dead Again,” and a murder mystery will then unfold with “Manor of Death” — that is, if you dare to sonically step into the forsaken halls of a malevolent mansion.
If you survive that, the story of “The Diabolical Doctor Stein” awaits you, with the nefarious experiments of an unhinged scientist that come to life.
But perhaps most terrifying of all, there's a Karen in the mix.
With the tagline “Do You Know Who I Am?” the final story of the night, “Karen,” centers on a bored suburban housewife trying to find excitement until she loses it and turns her life into a living nightmare.
“Karen is not only a caricature, she's all of us,” he said. “We've all been Karen, and she loses her marbles toward the end of the play.”