Have The Creators of Undertone Even Heard A Podcast Before?

What are we even doing here

You may not know this about me, but podcasts have been a part of my life for a very long time. I remember taking a family trip to Philadelphia in 2005 and listening to the same episode of a Harry Potter podcast over and over and over because I could only fit the one on my iPod Nano and I had no way to download new episodes. In 2012 I started making podcasts myself, talking about movies and tv shows with my friends on microphones so bad you would think they were Edison originals. I’ve spent hundreds of hours recording podcasts over the last 15 years. Today, I do a monthly show called The Lost Broadcasts with my wife where we watch failed Lost ripoffs, and we co-host with our friend Spencer a seasonal show about internet ephemera called Get Cynical. These are my bonafides, please nod in approval.

Podcasts have become such a ubiquitous medium in recent years; everyone who doesn’t host one of their own is regularly listening to several. They are as impossible to avoid as music or television. I took this level of cultural saturation to mean that people, generally speaking, probably had some background knowledge on what it is like to make them. This new film Undertone made me wonder, though.

Undertone is a horror movie pitched as a primarily auditory experience—“The Scariest Movie You’ll Ever Hear” is on the poster. Nina Kiri plays Evy, a podcaster who’s trapped in her childhood home so she can care for her comatose mother. She hosts The Undertone Podcast, a show about the paranormal (we’ll get into the details later). One night, her cohost Justin says that he’s been emailed ten spooky audio recordings, and he’d like to play them for her live on air.

Here is the full list of things that are basically fine about Undertone’s depiction of podcasting: Evy sets up her equipment in her mom’s dining room (it’s a tough situation, she’s making the best of it); Evy has a serious grown-up microphone on a swivel arm and not just a Blue Yeti stationary on the table (finally someone is modeling good behavior); the podcast is about reacting to internet ephemera (see above link). That’s about it. Now, here is the full list of everything about Undertone’s depiction of podcast that is totally unbelievable:

What Is This Podcast Even About?

The Undertone Podcast seems to be part of an unnamed but prevalent internet subculture organized around “creepy” material. Think of those Youtube videos called “Top 10 Scariest Real Ghost Sightings” or subreddits where people post their stories of encountering the Hat Man. It’s a fun milieu, and one Undertone seems to want to prove its knowledge of early on. Evy drops a coded reference to Elisa Lam (“That poor girl was just depressed”) and we learn that the previous episode of the show was about a cursed video that seems inspired by Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv. It was the latter detail that first made me wonder if they knew what they were doing here. How did they get an entire episode’s worth of discussion out of a video they can’t, by the nature of the medium, even show to their audience?

Those two references hit the limit of Evy and Justin’s apparent knowledge in their alleged field of expertise. The Undertone Podcast introduces itself as “your source for all things spooky” but nothing they dig into is all that arcane or far-flung—most of it is the result of Google searches like “scary children’s rhyme backwards horror.” A lot of the podcasting we see features long pauses as the characters flail around Google for something to talk about before going “Whoa…..oh my god….” at whatever they’re seeing. The episode that we actually see being recorded has a lot of spooky audio playback and not a lot of reaction. It is textbook bad podcasting. What on earth is the format of this show?

Why Are They Playing Characters On Their Podcast?

Undertone tries to preempt this question in a way that only prompts further inquiry. We’re told early on that Evy and Justin have kind of a Mulder/Scully thing going on, where Evy is the skeptic and Justin is the believer. What’s bizarre, though, is that this dynamic isn’t just a description of their actual personalities, but rather fictional roles they’re playing for the purpose of the show. This seems patently insane to me. The whole appeal of doing a podcast is that you get to talk as yourself about stuff you’re interested in, with perhaps some light exaggeration of your personality for the sake of entertainment. Evy, though, literally describes her recording process in terms of “getting into character.” Why is she doing this? It’s not like the “character” version of Evy has a different affect or attitude, it’s really as simple as her character not believing in the paranormal even though she clearly does. Justin, who plays the believer, has even less delineation between his real and fictional personas! Early on, Evy says that recording this podcast is “the only thing keeping me sane right now,” yet the entire premise of her show seems designed to cause stress and discomfort. Speaking of which….

Evy Clearly Hates Paranormal Stuff

Evy is the most scared woman of all time and she clearly doesn’t enjoy doing this. We see no indication that she has an interest in the spooky or supernatural outside of this podcast (barring her investigation into the demon at the center of the story, which is more of a desperate thing), whereas Justin is clearly sincerely obsessed. You really should not be doing a regular podcast about something if you’re not passionate about it. Do you know how many evenings my wife and I have spent over the last few years watching terrible TV shows so that we can talk about them on a monthly podcast? The Undertone Podcast goes up every WEEK! Think about how much of Evy’s life is spent focused on this stuff that clearly freaks her out.

Part of the structure of the movie is that we never see anyone on-screen except Evy or her mother. Everyone else is only heard, and the voice we hear the most is Justin’s during the recording sessions. This means that a lot of the movie is spent just watching Evy record the podcast alone in her mother’s house, and it could not be more apparent how uncomfortable she finds the process. I don’t even think she likes podcasting, honestly. It doesn’t seem like she knows anything about the technical side of things. Justin seems to do all the editing and uploading, with Evy kind of a podcast passenger princess. In multiple scenes she’s shown dragging and dropping audio files into Logic Pro or Garage Band to listen to them. Evy, just hit spacebar! As for the content of the show iself, she’s visibly anxious listening to the spooky audio, shifting in her seat and looking around the house. It’s not fun for her! This is probably exacerbated by the fact that she only records The Undertone Podcast in the middle of the night.

The Recording Schedule Is Completely Insane

As mentioned above, The Undertone Podcast is a weekly show, releasing a new episode every Friday. I understand that wrangling schedules to record a podcast can be difficult, and all the more so if you’re doing one every week. Evy and Justin are in a particular predicament: Justin is based in London, at least six hours ahead of Evy in America. Sometimes it’s hard enough to find time to record with Spencer and we live in the same time zone, so I sympathize with their situation. That being said, the solution they’ve come to is unfathomable. Evy records around 2 or 3 in the morning, which for Justin is around 8 or 9 AM. How is it possible that this is the best arrangement for both of them? Couldn’t they record for Evy in the middle of the day and Justin in the evening? It’s not like Evy has a job right now besides looking after her comatose mother.

Perhaps you’re thinking that Justin works nights or something, but I don’t think that’s the case. We know this because at one point he aborts a recording session about five minutes in because he needs to go to work. Hello?!? Buddy, you knew what time you had to be at work that day, why did you schedule a podcast recording for immediately before you had to leave? Especially given that you knew this would be in the middle of the night for your cohost, who spends all day caring for her dying mom and is a scaredy-cat!

By the way, we do need to talk about the aborted recording sessions, because there are several throughout the film. Evy bails out of the first one after ten or so minutes because she gets too scared. This is the kind of outrageous behavior necessitated by the structure of the film needing to flow between the podcast sequences and more generic haunted house material. Ten minutes? It’s one thing if you’ve got some kind of emergency situation, but I would genuinely hit my cohost with a “How dare you?” if they tried to cancel a recording ten minutes in because they got freaked out while recording the Look At Scary Pictures Podcast. They schedule a time to record the day after next, and you would never imagine from how carefully Justin considers his options that he was selecting a timeslot mere minutes before he had to leave to go to his job. The third recording session is even more irresponsible. After a further ten minutes of recording, Evy and Justin decide that they have run out of time (???) and that they’ll just upload what they have as “part one” to meet their weekly deadline. They have, generously, recorded 25 minutes of material at this point. How long are episodes of this show supposed to be that they get to 25 minutes and think “Well this is getting ridiculous, we have to cut it off here.” The movie really should have taken place over a single evening recording session, with small bathroom breaks here and there for external scares. I think that if I had to record a single episode of a podcast in ten minute chunks over the course of multiple days I would start thrashing around and hurting people.

This Podcast Has A Call-in Element??

The fourth recording session is the most preposterous of all. The Undertone Podcast, it has been painstakingly established, is a pre-recorded show. This is the case with almost every podcast in existence. Being pre-recorded was the feature that originally distinguished them from radio talk shows, which required tuning in either at a particular time or not at all. I’m not saying it’s unheard of for a podcast to record episodes live in some capacity, either streamed to the internet or in front of a real audience. I am saying, though, that you cannot be pre-recorded and live at the same time. The Undertone Podcast is an innovator in this regard. When Evy and Justin sit down for the fourth recording, we learn that Justin has sent out for listeners to call into the show with their thoughts about the spooky recordings. But the episode they’re recording isn’t being streamed live, so the people calling in are doing so totally blind. Did no one on set realize how completely ridiculous this is? It’s one thing to ask listeners to leave voicemails that you can play and respond to on the show, it’s another to say, “Hey, we’re going to be recording the show in this window, feel free to just call in whenever and we’ll take the gamble that we haven’t already talked about whatever you’re about to say.” It is a deranged way to produce a podcast. Oh and remember, it’s three in the morning in America, so all of these listeners have decided to stay up all night to call into this show they can’t even listen to live. How is it possible that this didn’t occur to anyone in the production?

Justin Doxes His Cohost

This is a small one but at one point during the call-in show a listener notes that he lives in a particular town and Justin, with zero hesitation, says “Wow that’s where Evy lives!” Dude what is wrong with you.

Do Evy and Justin Even Know Each Other?

I think it’s fair to say that most podcasters who host shows together are friends with each other. You’re not likely to want to spend an hour every week talking to someone you don’t already know and like. Evy and Justin could have fooled me. Their pre-recording conversation is stilted and awkward—they talk like old high school acquaintances catching up after years apart, not like people who are in constant communication with one another. Their dynamic on the show is no less labored, perhaps due to the “characters” they’re forcing themselves to play. They have negative chemistry with one another. You could probably cut about fifteen minutes from the runtime just from removing the awkward pauses between their lines. It gives the impression that they were total strangers who got paired up by some podcast network like Simon Cowell building a boy band. No wonder Evy is so depressed!

They Just Take The Audio From The Call, Don’t They

This is the final nail in the coffin for me, the thing that makes it really clear that no one involved with this production knew anything about podcasting. We’re meant to assume, based on Evy’s apparent lack of technical knowledge, that Justin is the one editing the show. Sadly, it’s also clear that Justin is doing the number one lazy podcaster move of just recording the audio from the call directly instead of having the participants record their own audio and editing it together. The issue here is that in the final product, Justin’s audio is going to be crystal-clear because he’s taking the recording from his end, but Evy’s audio is going to be compressed and choppy because it’s coming through the phone. All that fancy mic equipment is going to waste for Evy! Her voice is going to sound like shit!

I knew right away that Justin was doing this because when the recording starts, he hits a button to play the intro music. If he was doing real editing, the music would get dropped in later on. Where is the quality control, Justin? Where is the respect for your craft? The Undertone Podcast fucking sucks, man! The audio is terrible and most of the content is just the two of you clumsily faking reactions to scary Google search results! I’m supposed to believe that this show has enough listeners to support a call-in episode? Not a chance! You would be struggling to crack 20 listeners on Soundcloud! Your Apple reviews section has a tumbleweed rolling through it! Your closest friends and family haven’t listened to a single second of this shit even out of pity! Frankly they were done a favor when the demon ate them or whatever. In heaven, we must choose to believe, there are no podcasts.

Thanks for reading! This is just a fun one I wanted to get out before the Oscars, which I’m hoping to have a piece for paid subscribers about over the weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve done something loose like this and I hope you all enjoyed it. Subscribe for more!