Co-creator Liam Geraghty introduces the new season of award-winning Irish horror fiction anthology podcast Petrified, which returns for a new season this February.
When I was ten, my friends and I would make our own radio plays. None of us had a computer yet (this was the early '90s), so our means were entirely analogue. We’d grab an old cassette tape, stick it in a stereo, and hit record. The Temple of Gloom was one of our first masterpieces.
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Listen: The Petrified team talk to RTÉ Arena
In the absence of a Foley studio, we came up with a workaround for sound effects. My friend Lorcan had a copy of Disney’s Aladdin video game for the Sega Mega Drive, and for some inexplicable reason you could navigate into the menu and play every sound effect the game had individually - everything from "Camel Spit" to "Stones Crumble." So we’d hold the stereo up to the TV and hit record. We just had to work a story around the sound effects available to us.
Fast forward over thirty years and, thankfully, when making audio dramas I finally have the luxury of matching the sound effects to the script — and not the other way around. For several years now, Peter Dunne and I have been making Petrified, an award-winning horror audio drama. That’s right - "audio drama," not "radio play."
In the 1930s and ’40s, radio plays were the Netflix of their day, with families gathered round the wireless to hear the latest thrilling serial. In the ’50s, many of the big radio plays migrated to television, taking audiences with them. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that they made their long-overdue return as "audio dramas" in the form of podcasts.
Watch a live episode of Petrified, recorded in 2023: The Rictus Grin
Peter and I spent most of 2025 working on our new season - our fourth. Peter writes and directs each episode, and I produce, edit, and sound-design them. A gruesome twosome, if ever there was one. Eight new episodes. It’s an anthology format, so each episode is its own little world. We’ve told stories set on misty mountains with howling wind, in remote radio stations with static interference, and in ghostly - eh - ghost estates, with distant footsteps where there should be none.
In the 1930s and '40s, radio plays were the Netflix of their day
There’s a marvellous freedom to creating audio drama because you get to concoct all sorts of supernatural terrors, but you don’t need a supernaturally sized budget to bring them to life. Actor David Dastmalchian (Late Night with the Devil, The Suicide Squad) is a guest star in our new season, and he put it like this:
"One of the most important keys to storytelling, especially in the world of horror, is through the ears. It’s the audibility of sound and voices telling story that leave the worst, most horrific feelings that we have to the imagination. I really wanted to be a part of Petrified because I really savour any opportunity to get to use my voice as an actor to try and creep into people’s ear holes and haunt their brains."
He’s not wrong. When I go to the cinema to see horror, I find myself blocking my ears rather than covering my eyes. It’s the loud jump scares, the screams, the scratching on the wall that have me squirming in my seat. For us, being given a direct route into listeners’ ears via their headphones - where there’s no escape - is, well, fiendish.
Our fourth season comes with a full cast of fourteen incredible Irish actors, along with our wonderful guest stars this season: Dastmalchian and Dylan Baker (The Good Wife, Trick ’r Treat). You can expect fully immersive sound design — and a little less of "Camel Spit" and "Stones Crumble."
Petrified Season 4 begins February 18th - find it wherever you listen to podcasts. More info here.
