If you miss the days of hearing ghost stories around the campfire, you're in for a treat (and a few tricks.)
The popular Lore podcast is a weekly dive into history's most haunting folktales, each story striking an eerie balance somewhere between "true" and "imagined." Now, Amazon is bringing the concept to TV, adding a mixture of historical photos, creepy animations, and live-action reenactments to podcast host Aaron Manhke's narration.
We've got an exclusive sneak peek of a preview that debuted at Lore's New York Comic Con panel and, to be real, we're already totally spooked.
For fans of the podcast, the clip relives one of the most chilling episodes ever, entitled "Unboxed." For the uninitiated, the episode tells the story of Robert Gene Otto, who was gifted a doll in 1906 that he named after himself. The events that followed earned Robert the Doll the moniker of "most haunted doll in history."
But Lore is never just about one scary story. Mankhe often gives us further context, like where our fear of dolls comes from psychologically and the historical underpinnings of these creepy tales.
During the panel, executive producer Gale Anne Hurd revealed that she finds the show particularly chilling because it explores the darkness of human nature, especially "the idea that these things really happened, and they happened to real people and there were consequences. And sadly, maybe in our day and age we haven’t really travelled that far… We’re still marginalizing people in a way that could end with them being burned alive. It’s an interesting commentary, which makes it scarier than anything I’ve ever done."
Mahnke agreed that while he generally has to approach the stories from a more "clinical" perspective when distilling them into scripts, "the stuff that gets to me is how monstrous humans have been throughout history and how we really haven’t given up on it. We don’t chase people down and burn them as witches anymore, but we use our hate as a weapon in other ways ... Every episode I do, I put my head in my hands and say 'man, we are messed up people.'"
Or, as the show's tagline points out, "the scariest stories are true."
Lore premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, Oct. 13.
With reporting by Laura Prudom.
Topics Prime Video
