Short Stories: Walking Down ‘The Long Hallway’
Finding any random assortment of new podcasts on Spotify has become something of a hobby for me lately. Bless the wonders of media archiving, it’s the only way I could possibly stumble across some shows that have honestly caught my attention or were old favorites. The newest venture in my efforts to find something to scratch my itch for horror was Skylark Media’s The Long Hallway, a short-form thriller anthology that couldn’t have popped up at a better time.
Blame my short attention span perhaps, but there’s just something about The Long Hallway’s bite sized stories that was really up my alley. There’s just something so innately thrilling about “the anthology” as a story concept, the sort of blend of different worlds with different rules changing on a dime and knowing fully well we may only visit them once. Being able to pack only so much detail and world building into one until moving on to another has always satisfied the fiction writer and reader in me and this podcast has definitely made good use of it’s twelve episode run.
The Long Hallway with its reliance on ambiance and mood building makes great use of this aspect truly making the most of its runtime. It’s very dialogue heavy which if anything works in the show’s favor, and dialogue is definitely a selling point which is something I can’t say often. It’s the kind of podcast that’s obviously recorded in a shared room, granting this really authentic vibe to the acting. And if not, it did a great job of convincing me.
Simplicity is obviously a policy with The Long Hallway with its short but punchy stories, all thanks to a nice flow and blending of exposition with everyday chatter. You really get the vibe and general history from the character interactions in just a few short minutes and though we only know them for so little time, it does make all the difference when our temporary protagonists land in peril or do something very questionable.
I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much the episodes managed to pack into such little time though I suppose some are inevitably too broad a tale to fit in such a small space. Some short stories get the airtime to fully flourish while others are just long enough, or perhaps short enough to mark their landings.
And that part of it is what makes it so fascinating. One single episode feels like a base level prompt in any other podcast and I could definitely imagine a handful of these being stretched into a full series. Perhaps that’s the point, leaving the ideas up in the air with a deliberate reliance on staying vague and brief.
I subscribe heavily to the “less is more” ideology and some things thrive purely off being open to interpretation. Episode five’s “Fiona” definitely rings in the back of my mind the most with its melancholy tone that says so much with so few words.
I was prepared for horror when listening to The Long Hallway, but instead I got a creeping suspicion of dread and curiosity with each passing episode. Unnerving nonetheless but certainly aiming for better than just using cheap horror tropes. All around, it’s a decent way to kill an hour of your day and you’re sure to find an episode that’s especially compelling to you. Go ahead, you’ve probably got the time.
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