We Are Watching You

About this episode

Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman explore unsettling artifacts from their past that evoke feelings of paranoia and lead them to discuss the film The Vast of Night.

During prep for Sound, Light & Frequency , Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman are digging through old Dark Skies  files when they stumble on two artifacts  they’d almost forgotten existed—objects so specific, and so unsettling, that they instantly revive a feeling they thought they’d outgrown: paranoia . Not the famous envelope. Not the party-crasher story. Something else. Something that arrives at exactly the wrong moment in their lives—right as a network series is being born—and seems to speak in a voice that doesn’t feel like fandom at all. Thirty years later, rediscovered in a file drawer, it still lands like a cold hand on the neck. To make sense of what they’ve found, Bryce and Brent take a sideways detour into the eerie Amazon cult favorite The Vast of Night , a film built out of sound, light, and frequency —and out of the creeping dread that comes when an ordinary channel suddenly carries an impossible message. If you’ve ever felt your brain “tune” itself toward the unknown—listening too closely, replaying a moment, wondering who else might be listening—this is the exact mood…

People in this episode

Hosts: Bryce Zabel, Brent Friedman

Topics covered

• paranoia
• artifacts
• Dark Skies
• The Vast of Night
• creeping dread
• unknown

Keywords

• paranoia
• artifacts
• Dark Skies
• The Vast of Night
• creeping dread
• unknown
• network series
• message

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Vast of Night

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