Behind the Curtain of The Phenomenon’s Horror Audio

An interview with Jared J. Smith about adapting written sci-fi horror into audio

I spoke with Jared J. Smith about his work creating The Phenomenon, a horror audio drama adapted from a written work about what happens when aliens arrive on Earth that no one is able to look at without disastrous consequences. In our interview below, I was especially interested in how he coordinated a large cast and production, how he built a soundbooth in his own living room, his approach to inclusivity in his production, and whether his approach to the cinematic audio came from his previous and current work in film and television networks.

Credit: The Phenomenon

Was the interest in audio fiction always present in the scope of your creative endeavors or was it a transition inspired by something else?

I’ve always been into audio storytelling, especially fictional audio, and I think that was something there wasn’t a lot of until podcasts started taking off. When podcasts started becoming so popular, I thought to myself: Wow, this would be a great time to do a narrative story. I eventually discovered this story, The Phenomenon, which started as a series of Reddit posts that the author, R.K. Katic, published himself into a book. As soon as I started reading it, the wheels started turning and I said, this is it, this is the story I’ve been wanting to create in an audio medium. I loved how the characters are only able to experience these creatures through sound — they can’t look at them, they can only experience them by hearing them. This lets the audience of the audio drama experience the creatures the same way the characters in the story are.

What aspects from your film-based career did you bring over into producing audio drama?

From a technical perspective, we approached this like it was a TV show — there weren’t cameras or anything on a screen, but we wanted to produce it the same way. I told our cast and crew that I want this to be like you’re watching a television show and you closed your eyes, so you’re just listening.

Creatively, I decided I didn’t want there be any score in the scenes themselves. My co-producer and sound designer, Andrew, is an incredible composer himself — he would have written fantastic music for this but we decided to not do that. There’s music during the credits, but during the actual scenes, it’s only sounds of what are actually happening on scene. To maximize the creepiness of the story, you could score, you could use jump scares, you could use other scare tactics, but we thought that leaving it there without those things could get the horror across.

The other decision we made was no narrator. Narrators can serve an awesome purpose in a lot of different shows and there’s nothing wrong with having a narrator, but we wanted all the information to come across via dialogue or sound design. A narrator can be helpful in imparting information to an audience, but we wanted to impart information through sound design, dialogue, and other ways rather than exposition.

What else was involved in the process of adapting this particular written work to an audio medium without a narrator?

One layer of the adaptation process was, “What do I need the audience to know to understand what’s happening?” Doing that without seeming like an information dump was a challenge; I had to keep going through the book asking myself if I was missing anything, if there something I was leaving out that would leave everyone confused. I think I was able to connect those dots enough to have people follow along.

But another decision I made when I was writing was that I felt like it was okay to let people be confused a little. In a story like this, you don’t want to force feed everything to the audience. It can be a bit of risk sometimes; you’re risking alienating people if you aren’t giving them what they need, but leaving them a little confused, to ask “what exactly is happening here”, is a way to get an audience attached to what you’re doing and they’ll want to come back to see if they get more information in the next episode. You try to get the audience to trust you enough to be confused, and also to trust that if they keep listening, this stuff is all going to be cleared up. That’s a fine line to walk because if you confuse listeners too much, you could lose them. But if they trust you that they’re going to get where they need to go story-wise, you’ll keep them hooked.

I love this talk about getting your audience to trust you. We’ve heard time and time again about the intimacy of the audio medium, from producers and writers and critic. Do you view The Phenomenon, a horror podcast, as intimate audio?

It definitely is! Audio dramas are by design and by technology an intimate thing. You’re not in a big theater, you’re probably not watching it on TV with your family, you’re probably listening by yourself and experiencing it by yourself. It’s definitely a one-to-one relationship and I think how people tend to listen to podcasts is an advantage to us and the story we’re telling. The story we’re telling when you’re listening to it in an intimate wa­y amplifies the creepiness and the feelings of isolation. I imagine people listening by themselves in the dark and those creatures crawling on the outside of the building and that’s just the best way to listen to it.

The Phenomenon has a really big cast! Why did you go for such a large cast?

When I started writing, I didn’t want to put any barriers on what I was doing while I was writing it or how many characters I was writing for; I just wanted to write the season telling the best story I could tell and figure it out from there production-wise. When we saw we had a 40 person cast in the first season, we said, well why can’t we do this? There’s so many talented actors we thought would want to be a part of this. It gave us an opportunity to work with people that we had a great time working with and get a lot of different voices in there and who would bring their own approach.

One of the things we wanted to do, looking at what the cast was going to be, was to use a wide variety of voices. We used a variety of accents and backgrounds for a couple of reasons, creative and technical. Technically, different voice types and accepts helps you as a storyteller to convey different characters to the audience and the audience doesn’t need to remember names that well and it’s not as confusing as when you have voice actors who sound very similar. From a creative perspective, having a wide diversity of voices felt like the right approach, because that’s what the world sounds like. The world isn’t only one kind of accent or voice, it’s so many different things, and when we saw how big the cast was going to be, we saw that as an opportunity to represent that.

I’m glad you started talking about this diversity initiative you took in your casting. I’ve heard such things like “there’s no need to cast diverse people in audio because you can’t see them”.

I definitely don’t agree that diversity is just a visual thing. It’s in everything. It’s the word we live in. I think if you’re honestly looking at trying to represent what the world is and be honest about it — not even approaching it in trying to be diverse, but trying to be accurate to the world, and the world is diverse. Aiming to be accurate to what the world is and the society that we live in felt natural. I wouldn’t say at all that it’s a visual thing either because actors bring to their character’s voices their own life experiences. And whether it’s an audio performance or a visual performance, an actor is bringing themselves and their experiences into that performance, no matter what, making it not just visual.

In one of our conversations, you mentioned that you had built a soundbooth in your living room, one that’s big enough to hold multiple people! Tell me about that process — the reasoning behind it and the construction.

It was very important to me that our actors were doing these scenes together. It’s easy to record people by themselves and edit them together into a scene, but having worked with actors in the past, I know that people give the best performances when acting off of other people. Recording people alone was sacrificing something that I wasn’t willing to sacrifice. In some cases, it’s unavoidable to have people record their lines separately, but I wanted a space that was large enough for the entire scene to take place in.

Now having a recording space that big in New York is expensive, so my partner Andrew and I thought, why can’t we build something here in my living room, get equipment to be exactly what we needed it to be: large enough to record multiple people and still sound like a professional recording space. It was an 8-foot long, by 4-foot wide, by 8-foot tall room in my living room that we built out of materials we got at Home Depot — plywood and 2x4s and soundproofing material that we put on the inside. There were two opening on each side so about 4 actors to come in each side of the booth and a series of microphones down the middle. It sounded wonderful, gave us the clean audio we needed to manipulate this dialogue, and it was big enough to fit a bunch of people at the same time so that people would truly go through scenes together.