New Scripted Podcast: The Horror at Martin’s Beach
When the pandemic hit in 2020, I turned my fledgling live events company into a scripted podcast production house.
I produced chart-topping hits like The Last Station (a post-apocalyptic western — final episodes coming out this year!), and Just to Be Nominated (an Oscars murder mystery) — all without any experience producing scripted podcasts. It’s been a wild ride, to say the least.
Our most recent podcast, however, is one for the books.
The Horror at Martin’s Beach begins when a group of Greek Life students show up fashionably late to a party at the ominous Martin's Beach. When they find that all of the partygoers have disappeared, they find themselves fighting for their lives against the internal and external horrors that could only exist in this place. It’s an adaptation of the short story of the same name by HP Lovecraft and Sonia H. Greene — but with a modern twist.
I first stumbled across The Horror at Martin’s Beach (THAMB, for brevity) when I read the feature film adaptation that my partner Kyle Cords had written. I was in the middle of attempting to learn how to use power tools to hang some curtains (badly) while on the phone with Kyle. We were discussing how the (very long) feature film script would have a hard time finding eyeballs with its current page count.
Then, an idea hit.
“Why don’t we turn THAMB into a scripted podcast?” I asked Kyle.
And our three-year journey began.
The final episode of the series just aired, and we just passed the 4,500 download mark with glowing reviews and a buzz growing on the audio drama forums on Reddit and beyond.
I interviewed my partner-in-crime Kyle Cords for this article to get his perspective on the process.
Interview with Kyle Cords, Writer/Creator/Executive Producer of The Horror at Martin’s Beach
Note: this interview contains light spoilers for episodes 1-4 of The Horror at Martin’s Beach. Listen first if you don’t want to be spoiled!
Amy: So Kyle, what’s the journey been like of getting to where you’re at with THAMB?
Kyle: It's been a long journey to get here, for sure. I first imagined the concept of people getting dragged into water by a rope they couldn’t let go of when I was growing up — about eight years old — before I had even read the Lovecraft short story of the same concept. I took this idea to NYU, and wrote a short play about it. And then I took the idea and tried to make a short film. And then while I was writing the short I realized — oh, I'm actually writing this as a feature. And then I blinked and it was 200 pages. And if anybody knows anything about writing a feature film, they should never be 200 pages. So instead, you and I decided to spend three years turning this crazy idea into a ten-episode scripted podcast series.
Amy: This is your official debut as a writer. You’ve written professionally in Hollywood, of course, but this is your first produced work with your name front-and-center. What does it feel like to have your written work out there?
Kyle: I've had people read my work, but it was never in the format that it was meant to be consumed in. This scripted podcast was meant to be in the highest format I was capable of making. It’s a finished product. This isn't built on concessions and compromise. This is everything that I wanted to make as an audio drama. And so I think it's in its highest form for what the medium is. It’s exciting to see it come alive.
Amy: When you were diving into production, what were some of your first impressions of running your own ship?
Kyle: There are so many decisions to make — who to hire, who not to hire? How do these episodes flow? Is there a narrator? Curiously, recording the credits took such a long time. Be ready for those to take up more time than you think.
Amy: How did you get through the ups and downs of production, especially when things didn’t go right?
Kyle: I think about it this way: when the first explorers were sailing across the oceans, they were probably jazzed and thinking it could be some joyous adventure… but wanted to quit and wish they hadn’t done it halfway through. It’s human nature to underestimate the hard things you’ll encounter along the way. And I'm really proud of Martin's Beach and a lot of the work that everybody went into it, but it's been a Herculean task. I felt like Octomom, if she had ten babies instead of eight. Things kept ballooning. I had to do more and more as time went on. It reached its fullest form when it finally made it out into the world, but I definitely have a lot of stretch marks from the process.
On the Casting Process for THAMB and Audio Dramas/Scripted Podcasts
Amy: Can you talk a little about your experience casting THAMB? That’s been something audiences keep raving about — how great the cast is. That’s a rare thing to have in this space, so how did you pull that off?
Kyle: We famously took a full year to cast this. Julia Stier was our first casting decision for the role of Megan, and she’s phenomenal. You vouched for her, I remember, from your USC days and she’s super talented. We sifted through thousands more actors before finding each of our actors one by one, and I’m so grateful for them. And then finding Josh was really, really hard. It took 12 months to find Josh. The actor we chose just happened to be acting on another podcast that we were producing called Just to Be Nominated. So we brought him in to audition, and he knocked it out of the park. Abel turned in an amazing performance.
Amy: What were some of the considerations you had to make for casting for an audio drama?
Kyle: For casting audio dramas and scripted podcasts — especially for our show — all these characters have a lot of like, dimension and archetypes and like reversals, and they're all based on the seven deadly sins, and they all have a seventh virtue to redeem them. I was trying to find the people that could have this dynamic range — none of our characters are one-note, so the actors need to be able to nail small nuances. They also needed to sound super different from each other. When you're working with a podcast, the listener needs to know “oh, this is Megan talking” and then hear Lorena reply and know it’s Lorena without someone having to say her name. I found a ton of great actors — but if they sounded too similar to our current cast members, we had to move on and find someone else.
On Writing for Audio Dramas/Scripted Podcasts and the Challenges of Sound-First Storytelling
Amy: What was the biggest challenge when it came to the differences between writing for the screen to podcasts where you were writing for audio-forward mediums?
Kyle: I think it helped that I produced The Last Station and Just to Be Nominated, our other Kingdom of Pavement podcasts which people should check out. But I think The Last Station really taught me how to take scripts that other people had written and alter them to work better for the audio experience. Because some writers would write, “she's having your hand like go up and down outside the car window” and as a visual that’s a perfectly fine image. But in audio, you'll never hear it unless somebody points it out. Someone has to say, “hey, what are you doing with your hand? Air surfing on the wind outside the window?” which can sound clunky unless you massage it just right. Writing emotion without too much exposition is a real challenge in audio. With The Last Station, I also had to think about what would be threatening sound-wise. I remember we were talking about episode two, and I pitched the idea of having a siren head monster to create a sense of impending danger, and to add to our lexicon of threats we didn’t have to explain with words. For weapons, it's really really hard to have any weapon other than a gun, because you can hear the chamber of a revolver or the sound of a gunshot, but for a knife? That’s visually scary, but you can’t hear a knife in a way that’s threatening. As a storyteller in the scripted podcast space, you have to really bend towards the things that are going to make a sound that is terrifying or interesting.
Amy: When it comes to THAMB specifically, what were your influences?
Kyle: For a really long time, I was imagining this as a single-location movie. Back when this was a feature, I was like, oh, let's go to a beach and film, it’ll be easy. And I didn't realize how difficult filming at a beach would be — especially with having a bunch of electricity and generators, and the fact that the sun's always changing — it's just a nightmare. But the inspiration I gained from single-location thrillers still held in the audio version. There’s this 1962 film by Luis Buñuel called The Exterminating Angel I found interesting: it’s about these high socialites who enter this room, and then they can't leave. And it was interesting, this idea of a psychic force that keeps you from leaving somewhere. And why is that? That’s something that drew me to the concept of THAMB in the first place. And you know, people can like derive a lot of metaphors for what The Exterminating Angel is about. It's about like, you know, like materialism and the rich. But I thought what was interesting is like the animals, they had goats that added humor to the movie. That’s what gave me the idea that in THAMB there should be animals on the beach.
Amy: Can you talk more about single-location thrillers you loved?
Kyle: There were so many little things from single-location stories that I was like picking up on and integrating because we are on this beach pretty much the whole duration of THAMB, and I had to keep the audience listening. In THAMB, all the characters will be stuck to a rope at some point. What would people naturally do to try to get off this rope and figure out how it works, and test it? Like, you know, how are they stuck to it? What are our characters doing? And so I think a lot of those films made me appreciate the level of detail in these stories. They’re like escape rooms.
Amy: How did you drill down into the details of the “escape room” elements of a single-location thriller?
Kyle: As part of my research, any time I was talking to anybody, I would pose the question: if you were stuck to a rope that begins slowly dragging you into the ocean, what would you do? And the person I would be talking to would pose different ideas: they would say, I would look for something around me. I’d respond: what if nothing’s around you? And they might ask if saltwater could dissolve the rope or something. That thought exercise got me a lot of interesting details on what people might do in real life that my characters could try in the story. I also read a lot of plays like Waiting for Godot, which are great examples of single-location storytelling.
Amy: Is there a psychological aspect to single-location thrillers that inspired you?
Kyle: I loved this idea of like the madness that is created when you're stuck in a place and there's nothing left to do but pick at each other. I think that's why prisons drive people mad: you're in a cage and you can’t do anything about it. When you have nothing you can do, you look inward. But before people look inward, they usually look outward at those around them. If they're feeling upset or angry, they direct that at other people. I also thought about how being in really stressful circumstances reveals people's worst and best traits. That was another thing I used to expose these characters more.
On Writing Greek Life Meets Lovecraftian Horror
Amy: What was your research process like for THAMB? You capture many of the details of what it’s like to be in Greek Life — without having been in a frat. How did you hit such an insider’s view of this world while you were remixing it with Lovecraft tropes?
Kyle: My dad was a member of Kappa Sigma, and a lot of his friends were people that he knew in college, so I saw what they thought about brotherhood and stuff like that. I also attended major universities and the rare Greek Life party, and observed how fraternities and sororities were recruiting and cultivating people to be a certain way. I remember I was at a frat party at SDSU for Halloween, and there was this guy that was the head of a frat there. And he went on all these rants about how misunderstood the Greek Life system was. Everyone in the system has justifications for why they do the things that they do — some are more comfortable to share than others.
Amy: How did your research inform how you built your characters?
Kyle: Characters in THAMB like Megan and Chase are mosaics of real people I met and talked to about Greek Life. They’re not one person, but they’re made up of details from many different true experiences and stories.
Amy: What about the Lovecraft side of things?
Kyle: I was getting really into Lovecraft’s work when I was in college, and I thought that he just had these insane descriptions of mind-bending things: there's a high calorie count to his writing. I think he's probably one of the best authors who can describe the uneasy unknown. I always thought that Lovecraft’s stories had interesting grounds to explore, like the horrific messiness of humanity. And eventually, I came across the short story The Horror at Martin’s Beach and realized it was about people getting dragged into an ocean with a rope they couldn’t let go of — the same story I had been developing on my own before I read Lovecraft, which was perfect. From there, I blended these concepts with things I had been writing about Greek Life, which is such a great microcosm for the greater world: there's a lot to be mined in Greek Life when it comes to societal structures, gender roles, how these institutions are formed, what they support and what they suppress. And, you know, for better or for worse, I was very fascinated with how they operated. From there, I was able to transpose both the Lovecraftian horror and Greek Life tropes into one story: they both have a peanut butter jelly of ceremony, sacrifice, and ritual.
On the Intent of The Horror at Martin’s Beach Scripted Podcast
Amy: What do you want the audience to take away from The Horror at Martin’s Beach?
Kyle: There's a theme of choice in THAMB. And it's the idea of what are the things that we kind of naturally flow down the river for? And what is the choice that we do to walk up the river, or exit the river and find something else? And I think that, historically, in my life, hard conversations make life better. Whether that’s a breakup conversation or letting someone in your family know they’ve disappointed you — these are never easy but critical for a better life. And there are some people that never have these hard conversations. So I wanted to kind of dissect what makes people get attracted to certain institutions, and how do these institutions block things like hard conversations and vulnerability? How does being part of a group change us, and what are the upsides and downsides? What does peer pressure make you become? I’d love for our listeners to think about the institutions that they're a part of and what that says about them and what they're contributing to. Nobody's perfect, but I think if we questioned the institutions that we join and think about who we truly want to be, I think that that'd be a cool thing for people to take away and think about at the end of the series.
Amy: What was the hardest thing you had to do to pull off the level of quality you achieved with this series?
Kyle: Oh, man. Stamina. I thought that this was going to be done within a year. And it's been an almost three-year journey. Obstacles get in the way. You can’t find the right actor, or a team member drops out. But I made a promise that I was gonna finish THAMB no matter what. And a lot of people have called me crazy for seeing it through. What looked Herculean to me looked Sisyphean to others. The hardest parts were the things that were out of my control. I can't make an actor right for the part. I just have to keep looking. Getting THAMB made right was a volume game, not just a brick-a-day game.
Amy: When people call you crazy for embarking on something like this, what is your response?
Kyle: A lot of people are done with their art when their energy gives out. Or they think that no piece of art is ever finished, it’s only abandoned. For me, that’s not the case. My projects are done when they’re done. There were a lot of instances during the making of this show where me, Kyle as a person was exhausted, but y’know, we were in the middle of the ocean, we couldn’t turn back. So I just kept kind of digging deep and solving each problem that came in front of me while writing the scripts and pushing forward production and post.
On Advice for Others Writing or Producing Scripted Podcasts
Amy: What would your advice be to people who are looking to write and produce their own scripted podcasts for the first time?
Kyle: Have as few characters as possible, and also, don't put them on a beach like I did. Because there's a lot of like sound that is constantly going on — it’s almost as much of a nightmare on audio as it is on film. If you’re writing a scripted podcast, put them in a room like a radio station. If you can figure out a compelling concept that's really exciting to you that has 20-30 minute podcast episodes, I think that's great because it won't get too out of hand.
Amy: What’s a controversial hot take that you know now that you didn’t at the beginning of this process?
Kyle: I plead the fifth. No, I think the sobering take of it maybe is that like, podcasts don't make money, especially scripted podcasts. Like, it's really, really hard to monetize. And often, like other companies are using scripted podcasts as a tax write-off or using it as an IP play. Even well-known podcast houses like Gimlet can’t survive on their own, and had to get acquired by Spotify — despite raising VC funds and producing hits like Homecoming. You need a tremendous amount of capital to be in the game, and even then you still probably won’t turn a profit.
Amy: What do you think about the ad-supported revenue model for podcasts?
Kyle: Even if you sell ad space, the only way to become profitable is through a talk show model, because you need so much new content to constantly come out in order to have enough spots for sponsored content. Podcast hosts like Joe Rogan have hundreds of episodes that come out on a weekly basis. THAMB has taken me the equivalent of five months to do one episode. And so when you're dealing with that level of effort and energy and quality control, it's a lot harder to scale. For most people, producing scripted podcasts should just be an art form that you love. If you figure out a way to monetize and get profitable in the scripted space — give me a call. But if you're putting other expectations onto the podcast other than wanting people to listen to it, I think you might be like setting yourself up for a very hard experience.
On Last Thoughts for Listeners of The Horror at Martin’s Beach
Amy: What’s your ten-second pitch for why people should listen to The Horror at Martin’s Beach?
Kyle: Who doesn't want to see a bunch of frat guys fight Lovecraftian gods? I wonder who wins…
Amy: Any last thoughts for the listeners?
Kyle: I want people to feel every emotion with this story. I want them to feel confused, I want them to be sad, I want them to be happy, I want them to cry. And I want them to feel the wins and the losses. And I think the core soul of what THAMB is revolves around what I call the excavation of the human spirit. Some people have been through so much that they like aren’t attached to their five-year-old self that was excited to see the world. And I think that this is like my best attempt to go through the crime scene of the lost human spirit and try to figure out what happened. And if I can draw some strings or maybe potentially lead a character back to what that their core is, I can help those who are listening do the same.
Amy: That’s really beautiful.
Kyle: Thanks. I also think human memories are really fascinating. And I think how they distort as we get older, what we go through — it changes us. And I think of the story that was in Ronald Reagan's biography. To summarize, at the end of his life, he had dementia. And Nancy tells the story of walking into his office because she can't find him. And she finds this fish tank that was in his office, and it’s not where it’s supposed to be. And she finds the rocks and water from the tank out to the porch, where she found Regan, in a bathrobe, crying, and holding something in his hand. She asks, “what's wrong? What do you have there?” And he reveals it and it's a tiny little White House. And he says, “I don't know what this is, but I feel like it's really important.” And that makes me so sad, thinking about the fragility of humans and how things happen. With this series, I want to explore what it feels like to try to reconnect to those parts that we've lost that were really important to us at one point, and the situations that we were put in where we were forced to choose to remember or forget to move on. THAMB explores the truths that a lot of people die never saying. And I think that if we were able to say them, it would make the world a better place. With the ability to find our truth, we would wind up in the right friend groups, the right relationships, and the right tribes they were meant to be in — but it takes a lot of work to get there, and potentially a lot of gods don't want to see that happen.
