Director's Notes – Episode 110

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Often, listeners of Welcome to Night Vale call our show "Lovecraftian." Often, I bristle at that because I don't love H.P. Lovecraft as a writer or a person. Always, I take it as a compliment, though.

The flipside of this are the concerns from listeners that Night Vale began as a Lovecraftian podcast but now it is not, and they miss the Lovecraftian feel of earlier episodes. 

Lovecraft was never an intention nor inspiration for Welcome to Night Vale, and I think what makes something Lovecraftian is not necessarily components of Eldritch horror, or creepy scene-setting. What made Lovecraft's short stories so unsettling is how little detail they give. To wit, there's a being of such abject evil that to look directly at it would cause madness. We're scared because we don't know wtf is going on with that creature.

And that's awesome.

But what kind of feelings does that creature have. Sure sure, it's evil. It has evil feelings. And in the course of a short story (in the case of H.P.), or in the course of a single podcast episode (in the case of, say, the Night Vale pilot episode), having one-dimensional characters who represent a single emotion, monolithic idea, or literary device, I think this makes for great Lovecraftian horror: frighting because it's confusing.

But Lovecraft didn't write long-form. Over the course of a 400-page novel, or a serial podcast that runs for 5 years, or even a television show, characters have to develop. Readers/Viewers/Listeners learn more about what those characters want, why they behave a certain way, who they really are. And it makes them less scary in the Lovecraftian (or creepy) way. Perhaps it makes them scarier, but not because we don't understand them. (I think Twin Peaks is another comparison to make here - a short-lived TV show that didn't let you in on what was going on, and thus our minds quiver.) 

With Night Vale, we were never interested in keeping listeners in the dark about the characters. Obviously we can't spell it all out at once because that would be boring. Plus those characters need time to respond to their environments. 

We love these characters, because they live in a world so incredibly similar to our own. I know there are no dragons, or two-headed quarterbacks, or hooded figures in dog parks in our world, but just like Night Vale we live our life under threats. Threats like climate change, cancer, government and corpocratic conspiracies, warfare, etc. 

But underneath all of it we have friends and family and neighbors and music and art and food and life. And we participate in all of those things. And we grow older and we change as people. And our world is no less scary than a Lovecraft story, only differently scary. Think about how frightening and despicable a figure Walter White is in Breaking Bad, but only because of the power he craves, a power we can see clearly through character development. That's the kind of horror we're interested in - human characters with flaws and desires that sometimes help and sometimes hurt others.

With Night Vale we've always wanted our characters to grow up (even if in the cases of Cecil Palmer, Jackie Fierro, and Earl Harlan, they don't age at the same rate as everyone else). If a time traveler showed up from 2022 with our 10th anniversary episode and played it for me, I would want to be shocked at how different this show is. 

I want to evolve artistically, and I want our characters to evolve as people. I hope this fifth year of our podcast has shown some of this change in an entertaining way. Thank you everyone for five great years. I have the best job in the world. 

- Jeffrey Cranor
June 15, 2017