Everything is peaceful in the small town of Havoc, New Hampshire, until one day, a man goes on a rampage with an axe. He whacks, bites, and scratches, severely injuring two others. Soon after, an illness tears through the town, turning its victims into raging animals… Some might even call them vampires. No one knows what caused it or how to stop it.
Except that two hundred years earlier, in exactly the same spot, the same thing happened. Corinne Abbess (Jewel Staite), owner of the local watering hole, happens to be several branches down the family tree from Josiah Abbess (Ray Wise), the priest who led the fightback during that earlier outbreak. Corinne finds a diary recounting the horrors of life during that time, and desperately hopes it will provide her and her fellow citizens with a way out, before they all succumb.
There is something deeply, elementally satisfying about witnessing genre tropes done well. How’s that for foreshadowing?
By and large, Havoc Town follows the conventions of supernatural horror. You have your vampires, your family lore, a priest who battles the evils of the occult; there’s no great genre-bending (at least, as of the halfway point); no surprises to the formula.
In fact, though you don’t need to have heard the others to enjoy it, Havoc Town is actually the third in a universe of podcasts from Grim & Mild’s Aaron Mahnke (the others are Bridgewater and Consumed), which adds a further layer of familiarity for those in the know.
But the thing is, these tropes have endured for a reason. When they’re executed with the care and attention they are in Havoc Town, such tropes are a pure pleasure to witness. It’s nice to feel like you’re in safe hands, even when the story is as scary as this one.
It starts with Nicholas Tecosky’s writing. When it comes to both pace and tone, Havoc Town is full of a bracing confidence. Although it’s a horror podcast first and foremost, there’s a rich vein of comedy throughout too – especially in the rapport between Corinne and her best friend Sylvie (Felicia Day), and Corinne’s early banter with the enigmatic Jury Havoc (James Callis). Thanks to the attention paid to the characterisation, these are people that you want to come back and visit, week after week.
It helps, of course, that these people are voiced by a skilled cast, many of whom are familiar with the genre territory, like the legendary Ray Wise (aka, Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks), Felicia Day and Misha Collins of Supernatural fame, and Jewel Staite (best known as Kaylee from cult sci-fi hit, Firefly).
The ensemble is all on top form, but it’s Staite’s show – much of the dialogue in Havoc Town is delivered via her narration directly to the audience. Staite gives Corinne a wonderfully warm, sardonic tone; as soon as we meet her, before any of the vampiric shit hits the fan, she already sounds world-weary. The podcast gives her a whole spectrum of other emotional beats to play too, from flirty to terrified to downright furious, and she plays them all with precision, creating a performance as nuanced and rich as the world that Corinne inhabits.
Although that world is the age-old small town locale of a typical horror story, there’s something timely about it, too. In one of Corinne’s monologues, she talks about the last regular days in Havoc, the joy of experiencing “normal life, tedious and lovely”. While Havoc Town isn’t overtly political (there are fleeting allusions to the Covid pandemic, however), the feeling the show evokes – the slide into something terrifying and inescapable, formerly pleasant neighbours suddenly possessed by a vicious, snarling hate – is perhaps what makes the podcast feel especially of the moment. That Tecosky’s script and Staite’s narration are both grounded in such a recognisable humanity gives the show an unusually vivid edge.
Though it is beautifully written and performed, funny, thoughtful, and all sorts of other good things, that’s not to de-emphasize the primary function here: Havoc Town, like all the best of its genre mates, can be really, really frightening. The sound design is the real star in that department. When the show is at its scariest, scenes can move from skin-pricking fear to throw-your-headphones-across-the-room horror in a matter of seconds. Rather than being hamstrung by our inability to actually see these all-too-human monsters, Havoc Town embraces the intimacy of the audio format, leaving you with the kind of unnerving spinal chills that are difficult to shake.
And each installment seems to be ramping up the terror; with five of them to go at the time of writing, it’s hard to imagine how terrifying the final one is going to be. Fittingly, that will drop in Halloween week, so there’s plenty of time to catch up before then.
If you dare, that is.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.