The White Vault – A Podcast Review

Title: The White Vault

Created by: Fool & Scholar

Website: The White Vault

Seasons: 2 (as of this writing). 3rd season due out in October 2019

My Rating of ‘The White Vault’: 5 out of 5

 

Review:

For anyone who is a fan of John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ and wants a good, punchy little horror podcast that keeps you gripped through the medium of found evidence … well, your luck’s in, as ‘The White Vault’ is all of the above rolled into one delicious listening experience.

The basic premise is that a repair team is sent to Outpost Fristed in Svalbard, Iceland, and, after their departure, they are not heard from again. The medium of the podcast is ‘found evidence’ which includes: E-mails, phone messages, letters, voice recordings etc … There is an overall narrator but her job is to simply introduce each piece of evidence and give tiny little bits of info regarding some of them. Her part becomes more and more interesting as the series progresses and I can see her being a huge part of ‘The White Vault’ going forward.

Found evidence is becoming more and more popular (I have recently read a novella and have come across several short stories and now this podcast) and for fans of mystery documentaries, this should be the kind of listening experience that you live for. As you are literally listening to all the available evidence from a missing persons case, essentially (not that this is treated as a police thing, that was just a wild link I was making to the kind of thing it can be treated as).

The frozen depths of anywhere, be it the arctic, Antarctic or where have you, are always a popular location in horror and conjure up some incredibly vivid, bleak pictures of what could await you if you were unfortunate enough to get stuck there. What could be more frightening than finding yourself trapped in the snowy wilderness, hundreds of miles from civilisation, with no means of getting home or even contacting another living soul? Nothing could be worse, right?

Well, nothing other than finding out that you aren’t alone in said snowy wilderness. Nothing other than finding out that some ungodly thing (there’s always some ungodly thing otherwise it just wouldn’t be horror) is out there on the ice with you. Hunting you.

That kind of bleak situation is what makes horror set in these conditions so appealing. Its what made ‘The White Vault’ such an addictive listen for me and I can’t wait until October when season three is released.

The way season two ended was just the most intense of cliff-hangers and I want more.