Imaginary Worlds - Monsters in the Static

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

In the subgenre of analog horror, there’s something sinister or supernatural lurking in the horizontal lines and vertical holds in those old VHS tapes. Filmmaker Chris LaMartina explains why he wanted his movies WNUF Halloween Special and Out There Halloween Mega Tape to seem like live broadcasts taped off local TV news in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I talk with podcasters Perry Carpenter and Mason Amadeus from the show Digital Folklore about how The Internet became our new campfire to tell spooky stories. Plus, we hear from Alex Hera, director of the documentary The History of Analog Horror, and folk horror lecturer Diane A. Rodgers of Sheffield University about why people born in the digital age want to tell horror stories set in the distant yet familiar era of VCRs. In this episode we also discuss The Mandela Catalog, Local 58, and The Backrooms. This episode is sponsored by Birds of Empire, and Brilliant. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Visit brilliant.org/imaginaryworlds to get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Have you ever been to a thrift store and noticed that there's a little section of VHS tapes? You think to yourself, do I even have a VCR machine? Oh yeah, I think it's in the closet. You go over to check out the tapes, you know, just for nostalgia's sake. It's kind of fun seeing those old boxes for Nightmare on Elm Street or Terminator 2. And then you come across what looks like a

generic tape, you know, the kind that people used to use to record stuff off TV. And there's a white label on it. And somebody wrote WNUF Halloween Special 1987. This looks like a personal tape. It's not supposed to be here, right? You ask the salesperson, is this a mistake? They say, no, that's for sale. Now you're really curious. You buy it. You go home, dig out the VCR, plug it in, and pop in the tape. It looks like someone taped a local news broadcast in the 80s. The WNUF Evening News. And it's so 80s. I mean, the clunky filmmaking, the clothes, the commercials are so vintage.

We've got it all. Pizza and video games. Right here at Tokens Video Arcade and Pizza. The news anchors are hyping their local Halloween special, which is going to come after the newscast. And they keep cutting to a reporter who's balding with a mustache. And he's standing in front of an old, spooky house. But tonight, WNUF TV 28 is going to take you inside for the first time in 20 years. We've actually assembled a team of paranormal researchers and we're going to be going in the house with them

to unravel the mystery and figure out if this house is, in fact, haunted. And from what I understand, there will be a seance where viewers can call in? Right-o, Gavin. Absolutely true. The seance in the haunted house starts out pretty cheesy. But then things start to go wrong. Can you get the cameras in here so we can get some light? Can you get in here, Tom? Very, very wrong. What the hell is going on up there? I won't say what happens next, but it's pretty shocking.

You're left wondering, what the hell was that? Was that real? Not at all. The 1987 WNUF Halloween special was made in 2013 by the filmmaker Chris LaMartina. The newscasters were actors. The commercials were all fake. If you got that tape at a thrift store, you were caught up in his viral marketing campaign.

And he just released a sequel called Out There Halloween Megatape. It's supposed to be another Halloween special put out by the same fictional news station. And Chris was actually at a horror convention recently, promoting the sequel, which takes place in the 1990s. And this kid comes up to the table. I mean, I don't know if he was a kid. He was probably in his 20s or 30s or something. But he's like, oh, yeah, I remember this one. I saw this on TV when I was a kid. And I sort of like, I just sort of looked at him like, really? He's like, oh, yeah, yeah. I'm like, I don't I don't think you did. And we had a little

bit of conversation, but he didn't back down, which was bizarre. Chris's movies can be categorized as part of a larger subgenre called analog horror. Analog horror stories take place in the age of VCRs and VHS tapes, but they're made today, and they're looking at the past through the lens of the present. But before we look at analog horror as a whole, I want to focus in on the WNUF Halloween specials and why they stand apart from the rest of analog horror. Because Chris didn't start out trying to make an analog horror movie. He wanted to make a found footage film. There have been a lot of movies like that since The Blair Witch Project. I started with writing a list of all the things I hated about found footage movies, right? And one since the Blair Witch Project. point, right? Scary things happening is the point of doing a live broadcast from a haunted house, right? You want that. You're inviting horror. And the idea of ad revenue and really the capitalism

behind entertainment is part of the narrative structure. So in a way, the advertisers are the real villains in his story. That's why he committed to making 30 minutes worth of fake commercials. The idea of doing commercials really came from a very practical standpoint. If our found footage approach was going to work, and if somebody taped it off TV, there would be commercials on the tape. And you never doubted that choice? I was never worried about if people were going to like it because I wanted to make this movie. It felt very like, it felt very, very something that I had to make, right? So I worked in local television right after film school. Working in local TV, the idea of

making local ad spots was really fun to me. And like making all the decisions as an editor, I never got to do. He mostly used stock footage from the 80s, but he had to create a few ads from scratch. Like there were a series of political ads, and they tell a cohesive backstory. I never wanted to be governor, but when I saw what our current governor, Mike Barlow, is doing to our beautiful state, something had to be done. I thought that was a great detail because when we think about Halloween, I thought that was a great detail because when we think about Halloween, it's easy to forget that the holiday comes before an election in the U.S. And I cannot count how many times I've seen a soundbite on the news where a politician says, the scariest thing this Halloween is if my opponent wins next week.

I mean, I remember when I was in film school, I would go down to the media library and just watch old political ads because I'm very politically minded. And I just found it fascinating what people use to scare up votes or to paint their opponent as someone else, the sort of the otherness, right? Like, how do I make someone else look like a monster? And I think that honestly, like, plays into the idea of making a Halloween movie, right? Like, in both WNUF and Out There Halloween Megatape, you have these movies that are about spooky things or weird otherworldly things. But the real monsters are very, very human. And I think having that conversation with a B story or a C story that is a political through line is pretty relevant. And his dedication to the analog experience went way beyond the production itself. We had an opportunity to make people part of the storytelling

before they even watched the film. I made VHS tapes. I literally dubbed the movie onto VHS tapes and gave white labels that just said, WF Halloween Special. And I left copies at horror conventions, in the bathroom, threw them down stairwells. My then-girlfriend, now-wife, we drove around and we chucked tapes out the window, left them at thrift stores.

Some people stumbled upon it, and it worked out kind of cool. But the other thing we also did was we put it on torrent sites with incorrect labels, basically saying, oh, my godmother taped this off TV for me back in October 1987. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen. It worked. They got coverage from NPR, Vice, the New York Times, and other media outlets. You know, maybe only 50 people got those original tapes, probably less. But the idea of that story and the idea of sort of like that initial whisper of what it could be really did have a ripple effect. He couldn't do the same thing with the sequel because everybody now knows what it is. So he created a different immersive experience, a 1990s style mail order catalog.

You're getting the movie from Trader Tony's tape dungeon. And that's the experience. Like literally when the crowdsource backers got their copies back in July, they got packages that said from Trader Tony's tape dungeon. So when you get it from Tony's tape dungeon, are you getting a tape or are you getting a DVD? You could do both. So this is the fun part. So you could get the DVD and the whole joke about it is Trader Tony went to prison for violating what's the FBI warning on the top of tapes.

But then there's a deluxe package where you can get the DVD, the VHS, and a 350 plus fake title catalog of movies you could order from Trader Tony's tape judge. I mean, it's fucking nuts. I mean, like it's, that was my COVID project. We wrote over 350 fake exploitation, like kung fu, non-exploitation, sci-fi, horror movies you could get from Trader Tony. And he's still using the medium as a way to critique the media. I've joked that if WF is about how we consumed media in the 1980s, the sequel is about how the media consumed us or started to consume us in the 1990s. And I think that's the transitional portion of the 90s is like, you know, all these mom and pop UHF stations started getting bought up by, you know, big parent conglomerates, right? Big

media companies. So in the sequel, how do you do that? Like, how do you explore the idea of the corporatization of media? Media is consuming us. Like, how do you how does that play out? So WNUF in the sequel is bought. WNUF has been purchased by the Ace Network. And Ace is this parent company that's brought a little UHF station. And the content they're producing changes, right? So you start seeing more ads for shows like Disturbance Call, which is essentially a ripoff of Cops.

The general programming, right? Like you start getting things that feel more like event programming based off of a company taking chances because they have more financial stake versus the idea of being a small mom and pop or UHF station that can do things that are more community interest stories. Now, Chris's movies are not typical analog horror. The WNUF Halloween specials are feature films with actors and screenplays. Most of the analog horror content that I've seen are short digital films, and they're usually pretty experimental and high concept.

For instance, the Mandela Catalog is a series of videos which started appearing on YouTube last year. The first entry looks like somebody cut together old VHS tapes. A lot of them have the time code 1992. But it's very abstract. There's an educational film warning people about the rise of evil doppelgangers. If you see another person that looks identical to you, run away and hide. We see a video of someone driving. All right, I gotta go. I'm almost at the hospital. Thank you.

We cut to an image of a man's horrified eyes. We hear the sound of a murder in the background. And we see what's supposed to be an emergency training video. Here at the Mandela County Police Department, we thank you for viewing this instruction. You have to pay really close attention to piece together the horror story that's happening within the found footage. What I find really curious is that a lot of these projects are made by people who grew up in the digital age. And that's their audience, too. So why are they so interested in VCR machines?

We'll pop that tape out and put it back in after the break. This episode is actually a co-production with another podcast called Digital Folklore, which is hosted by Mason Amadeus and Perry Carpenter. We've been doing a lot of our research together and our brainstorming sessions have been so thought-provoking, I wanted to bring them on so we could discuss the genre of analog horror together. So why don't you guys introduce yourselves so we know who's who? Yeah, this is Perry Carpenter, and I'm one of the hosts of Digital Folklore. And I'm Mason Amadeus, and I'm the other host of Digital Folklore. And tell me, what is digital folklore? Yeah, so digital folklore is the evolution of folklore, you know, the way that we typically think about it. And folklore really is the product of basically anything that humans create that

doesn't have a centralized canon. But when we talk about digital folklore, we're getting into things like creepypastas, we're getting into memes, we're getting into things like creepypastas, we're getting into memes, we're getting into viral hoaxes. So I think the word creepypasta is probably not, a lot of people aren't familiar with it. It's such a great term. What is that? It originated from copy-paste. If you think of that, people copying and pasting big chunks of text on the internet and stories, but particularly creepy stories or otherwise engaging paranormal stories that were copied and pasted around became creepy pasta, just to play on words.

Because there's also copy pasta, which is just non-creepy copied and pasted pieces of text. So the first time I heard about creepy pastas was Ben Drowned. I think I came across it around 2015. It had already been out for several years. It's like a series of videos about this old Nintendo cartridge of Legend of Zelda that's supposedly haunted by an evil spirit. And I'm always interested in people's relationship to media, like in terms of how old they were. So, like, I can imagine if you're a college student around that time, a game from the early 2000s would seem like something from your childhood that's like a distant memory. You know, and any distant memories from your childhood are going to be kind of hazy and weird with some sense of mystery.

And as somebody who was an adult in the early 2000s, that's totally fascinating to me that somebody would have that kind of relationship to a work of media that I encountered as an adult. I mean, did you guys, that's the kind of thing you guys are covering, right, in your show? Yeah, it's, the internet is our new campfire

to tell these spooky stories around. And also what's interesting with the age difference between Perry and I is, for me, I was a child in the early 2000s. So my memory and recollection of that time is also very hazy. So I definitely have that perception of it. And yet the appeal, the thrall of it does seem to be somewhat universal. Yeah. So that's why I find analog horror so interesting because that's like, you know, it's my childhood,

you know, analog technology. And I remember, like, I remember as a kid, I mean, Perry, you must remember the emergency broadcast signals, you know? Like, I mean, they would interrupt. Like as a kid in the 80s, you're watching TV, the emergency broadcast signal comes on and they don't tell you right away if it's a test.

You know, you just just see the test pattern. You hear that like beep noise. And I would quickly switch channels because if it was on more than one channel, then that meant there was a nuclear war and I would die in 30 minutes. And if it wasn't on the other channel, then I knew I could go back to my cartoon soon.

You know, when they say this was a test. And then I came across an analog horror series on YouTube called Local 58. And it's supposed to be found footage from an old local TV station. And there's no actors or dialogue. The viewers are just seeing these like conflicting messages from the official station of like foreign contingency plans for a foreign invasion that may or may not be hoaxes. It's like a lot of announcement screens.

And they also use the emergency broadcast signal, which terrified me as a kid. Yeah. And I'm reminded, too, of even like some more recent TV shows like the TV show Lost, which isn't so recent. But, you know, these people get get lost on a desert island and somebody ends up finding an old kind of underground bunker. And what do they have? They have these, you know, really grainy tapes that they're looking at that are bringing clues in. And there's something other, there's something creepy, there's something mysterious about that. Yeah.

So, okay, so we each did our own research. Like we each talked to our own different experts and um one of the people that i talked to was alex harrah uh he made a documentary called the history of analog horror and alex is in his 20s and some of the filmmakers he talked to are in their 20s and i asked him why are you guys so into analog horror? I would say there's three main reasons that people my age or younger are interested in analog horror. The first of which is obviously the fact that there's a very low barrier of entry for creators. So just off the bat, the idea of being able to just make a video really simply, you don't need actors, you just need like, you know, some pictures and

some text. And theoretically, you could make an analog horror video that appeals to a lot of people. And he says the second reason why a lot of young people do this is like basically the reason why anybody would make something and put it on the Internet. A lot of people are doing it just hoping to get fame or popularity. But there are also a lot of young people who are doing it just because they don't have a lot of resources and they want to tell a story, they want to make videos, they wanna make an alternate reality game. That's actually a key part of these web series.

You know, like there's a puzzle to solve. You know, the videos are dropped online with just enough breadcrumbs for you to follow and figure out what's the grand conspiracy behind these videos that are supposedly found after being lost for decades. The third main reason is that there is a sense of mystery about the analog technology that exists in analog horror because they didn't grow up in it or they only very vaguely remember it when they were very young. And obviously it's from a completely

different time period, a completely different world. Literally just the infrastructure of, you know, towns and cities, the idea that you couldn't instantly communicate with anyone you wanted to. You couldn't instantly find out where someone was. Yeah, so one of the people that we really wanted to reach out to when we were doing our research on analog horror was somebody we found named Diane Rogers. research on analog horror was somebody we found named Diane Rogers. She's located in the UK and has done a ton of work just about the intersection of folklore and the genre of horror. And we tried to ask her the same question as to why is this appealing? Why do people like this? What is the draw? I talk to my students about this because I teach alternative media a module there's I don't know if it's the same in the US but there's been a revival of vinyl buying records has come around

again and cassette tapes cassette tapes were never that good to start with this is like what I would call hauntological there's a there's a strand of study called hauntology. It's almost a nostalgia for lost futures is the best way to describe it. So almost, we were promised all this stuff that was going to happen and it never really came about. Did you say hauntological? Like haunt and illogical? Or illogical? What does that mean? Yeah, it's a combination of two words, haunt that we're very familiar with and ontology. And so when you think about hauntology, it is the fact that parts of our past echo into our present in the same way that we think about ghosts. And so when we're talking about technology or old videotapes or things like that. It is the memory of those kind of infusing itself and conflicting with the current world that we live in and showing the otherness of those things.

very directly related to the pre-digital age and thinking about why media from that time period is so creepy and haunting to people and one of the things that that I've talked about is the idea of fuzzy memory because you maybe saw something or heard some a radio play or saw a TV show or a film that you couldn't then instantly watch again. It's kind of your fuzzy memory of it and maybe it gets scarier because you can only remember bits and pieces of it. You can't fill in the gaps and you just remember some horrifying image or a feeling or something that made you feel in a certain way. And that only comes with not just physical media, but older media,

because it was a time period in which it was broadcast and then it was gone. Or it was only on at the cinema and then you couldn't see it again for three years until it was on TV. So, yeah, I think there are lots of different elements there going on. You know, one of the things that I think about when it comes to tape, videotape, audio tape, any of that is how fragile it is. I remember, you know, thinking about the be kind rewind thing and you'd go back and every now and then the tape would twist or it would break or I deal with old cassette tapes in my car and I would go to hit eject and it would come out

and this mangled mess of tape would come out and I'm like, oh man, now I got to come up with money. Or use your pencil and put it inside the spools to try to like redo it. There's a great thing that you'll see like on social media every now and then where somebody will have a picture of a cassette tape and a picture of a pencil. And it's like, if you know how to, you know, how these things go together, you're too old. But there's also something interesting to actually owning media

that we don't really have anymore in that it used to be, even with CDs, which I guess are a little bit newer, but already old at this point, you would use to buy a piece of media, a movie, an album and have it. And now we stream everything or we're leasing all

of the things we use for entertainment and increasingly other things in our life too. And it was sort of that last era in which you actually held something in your hands or felt like you owned it. When you get a piece of physical media in your hands, there is a sense of authenticity with that. There's a sense of this thing is real. It is part of my world. And I think that that kind of authenticity has a sense of authority that it carries with it. networks and there was a centralized sense of news and everyone living in the same reality, what we now call the monoculture. I mean, when we first started discussing this, the three of us, a couple of months ago, we were saying how like an analog horror, like the monster that's lurking in the static and the vertical lines and everything and the glitches and the tape is the disillusionment, you know, is like the fracturing of the monoculture. It's like this evil entity is about to like, you know, is infecting this sort of top-down

authority voices that everybody supposedly still trusts by this point in the 1980s or 90s, whenever these things take place. But even with all of the fracturing and disinformation and all of the negative stuff that is going on, it really isn't necessarily a bad thing that everyone can have their voice heard or have the chance to have their voice heard. We talked to Diane a bit about how the internet has changed activism and journalism radically.

And it was very optimistic at the outset. It was very democratizing. Part of the promise of that utopia is the internet. It's for sharing knowledge. It's for everybody knowledge it's for everybody it's all going to be free and lovely and it's not free in most part it's full of advertising and there are lots of voices shouting very loudly on there and is there has it created this freely democratic public sphere where everyone can equally have a say or is it actually

dominated by big businesses and corporations that we were supposed to be you know being liberated from it's fine what she said reminds me of like how you know every like anytime you're looking at a period piece or a historical drama it's always really about the time in which that movie you know or that show was made. They're just using the past to talk about the present. So in that sense, it's like analog horror is actually being made now. It may be set in the 80s or 90s, but it is in the end actually about the digital age. Well, and that's the cool thing about folklore.

And one of the reasons why Mason and I have really decided to focus on it is that when you look at any aspect of folklore, it really holds up a mirror to the society of the time in which that folklore first emerged. And so when we're looking at things like digital folklore, the reason that a certain meme gets created is a reaction to and a reflection of the people group that created that. They're trying to make a statement, or it is the product of the way that those people are thinking at the time. And so super, super interesting to study. Yeah, I mean, in fact, Alex Harris told me that he thinks the pandemic,

I mean, that analog horror really blew up, really blew up on the internet in the last maybe like three years. And he thinks that it's not a coincidence that that's, you know, it was over the course of the pandemic. I mean, first of all, you had a lot of young people that are home. And so they're online all the time. They've got time to kill. So they're making consuming analog horror.

But he thinks there's like thematic elements of the pandemic in this stuff. There is something about the fact that analog horror blew up in the pandemic that makes me think that that whole era of the media and the news and the government messaging and all that there's something about that you know obviously that made people distrust the media there was so much disillusionment with the media that obviously still remains today disillusionment with the media with the government and analog horror reflects that significantly uh a lot of those videos are about government organizations messaging and saying, you know, untruthful things that can't be trusted, that will harm you if you trust them. So another thing that Alex and I talked about a lot were liminal spaces, which I know sounds

like a really high concept term, but it's basically like a visual meme. Like if you look up liminal spaces on Tumblr, you'll get like a ton of images. And I assume that like liminal spaces must have come up a lot with you guys in terms of your studying digital folklore and creepypastas. So why don't you explain to us what a liminal space is? Yeah. So a liminal space is really this idea of a transition. There's a lot less defined elements in that you're really at the border between two different worlds or reality. They're often depicted as things like spooky office buildings or areas of a road or a city where there's no life. There might even be fog kind of rolling in through that. They tend

to symbolize a world in transition or a person in transition. And so when you see something like back rooms or an abandoned mall, maybe that abandoned mall represents the fact that the world is moving on. And now Amazon and online environments are the de facto way that people are getting their things. But you mentioned back rooms, so let's talk about that. So had you guys come across Backrooms, like now Backrooms is a video series, but had you guys come across it when it was like a creepypasta urban legend?

I was in the subreddit as it was sort of gaining popularity. One of the posts from r slash Backrooms made the front page and I was like, what is this? And so I dove into it before we even started this digital folklore podcast. And how would you describe backrooms? If you imagine a stock room or a hallway that just goes on forever and every door you take leads to a near identical, but just different enough space. And here's the thing. Do you remember those screensavers from probably Windows 95, where it was that brick wall maze and it would

just go forever, turning corners, never finding an end, occasionally finding a dead end and turning around. It's like that. So there was a high school kid. This kind of blows my mind. A high school kid. His name is Kane Parsons, although he calls himself Kane Pixels. He took this urban legend and he made an analog horror set of videos about it. It starts with this kid in, I think it's like the 80s or 90s, who is like, he's videotaping something at his high school and he gets magically or sci-fi wise transported back to the back rooms. Hello? Then there's more videos from different periods of the 80s or 90s

explaining the whole conspiracy, the corporate conspiracy that created the back rooms. Here at Async, we believe we have found the solution. The low proximity magnetic distortion system. And like the first video in that series has over 40 million views on YouTube. And Alex, Hera totally sees a connection between the backrooms and the pandemic. Because obviously, like in the early months between the back rooms and the pandemic. Because obviously, like in the early months of the pandemic, essentially the entire world was a liminal space. Everything was empty. All these places you'd expect to see people and life just were completely devoid of it.

And it was very unsettling in the same way that images of liminal spaces are unsettling. The connection between liminal spaces, the back rooms, and the way the world looked during the pandemic is brilliant. That is a very, very on point piece of insight because we got to see in real life for a little while what it would be like if all of these familiar spaces were surreal. There are some back room stories where there is something pursuing you and chasing you. But I think my favorite ones are the ones where there isn't. And it's you are just wandering aimlessly. Well, what do you think about the future of analog horror?

Like, I mean, it's really popular among this subgroup right now. Do you think it's going to burst like the bubble? Do you think that people are going to get tired of this stuff? It's going to start feeling cliche? going to get tired of this stuff? It's going to start feeling cliche? I don't think so, because I think it's going to be an extension of what we see as Gothic. When we think about Gothic literature or movies, you think about old castles and things like that. I think there's always going to be a version of Gothic literature and media that looks back on the analog age as the epitome of that thing. So I think that the new version of a castle is a computer surveillance room or something where you've got a CRT monitor or something like that.

Well, I was thinking too about like Westerns. or something like that. Well, I was thinking too about like Westerns, you know, I mean, eventually there'll come a time where the idea of the analog era will have faded so far into the past. And I was thinking about, you know, like Westerns were very, very popular in the early to mid 20th century

when the Wild West wasn't that much of a distant memory. But then, you know, as the century went on, I mean, there's a lot of problematic elements with Westerns anyway, but one of the reasons why Westerns started to fade was because the memory, the collective memory of the Wild West went further in the past. But all the ideas in Western stayed, or they kind of migrated into science fiction and other genres. And so I wonder if analog horror will just kind of eventually mutate or migrate to something else,

because it's ultimately about this question of whether the idea that the authority figures in the media that you trusted are no longer trustworthy, that's universal. That's timeless. Yeah. I think all of these come back to, when you think about Westerns, when you think about some of the other historical periods that are there, it seems like a lot of the literature and media collects around the inflection points. It seems like a lot of the literature and media collects around the inflection points. And within each of those, there are the series of tradeoffs, both positive and negative, that happen within society. And people kind of celebrate the positives that come with that, and they find ways to mourn or demonize the negatives with that. And so I think that these inflection points are always going to be super important to think about. That's a great point. Because I mean, I think that's why there are so many stories set

in like the 60s or the 20s or the turn of the century. And so I guess like the transition from analog to digital is like another one of those historical inflection points that people are always going to be interested in. You know, the funny thing about this episode is that I feel so I feel like describing and analyzing and analog horror is so not in the spirit of analog horror. You know, like it's so the opposite of what analog horror is all about. There is a certain amount of stuff that needs to be unexplained and only implied for it to work. And now we're, yeah.

Yeah. We're taking a beautiful hopping frog and cutting it open. You know? Biological horror. Yeah. That's a different genre. All right. Thanks, guys.

Thank you, Eric. Yeah, thank you. Special thanks to Mason Amadeus and Perry Carpenter. Their podcast is called Digital Folklore. It launches in January.

They have a trailer up, which I link to in the show notes. Also, thanks to Chris LaMartina, Alex Herra, and Diane Rogers. I put links to Chris's WNUF Halloween specials, Alex Herra's documentary, and all the other projects we mentioned in the show notes. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like Imaginary Worlds, please give us a shout out on social media.

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