The Lost Valley

In 1971, Richard Matheson decided to one-up Shirley Jackson's Hill House with a much, much nastier haunted house tale. And despite appearing at the heart of the 60s-70s occult revival, Matheson's Hell House is rarely mentioned today in the same breath as The Exorcist, Amityville, or The Omen. In this Halloween special, join the Explorer's Club on a haunted house stakeout to find out wh...

It's two-thirds pulp gangsterism and one-third utopian Lost Race shenanigans when the Dutchess Camilla and her cadre of 1930s socialite hangers-on are thrust to the bottom of the Atlantic in a bathysphere by the unscrupulous (but well-dressed) mobster Oxford Kate. Beneath the waves, the Dutchess' entourage discover lost races of mermen, brutish 'sub-humans,' and free-love endorsing...

If you prefer your lost race Atlantis yarn with a side order of Theosophy, and a dollop of 1920s street-talking Yanks, you've come to the right place as we down the submersible to check out Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's last novel, 'The Maracot Deep.' Is this an attempt to provide some bang-up-to-date pulp lit from Sir Arthur, or is it the last gasp of HG Wells-style 1890s Victorian sci...

During a particularly busy time in the Tiny Assistant's internship, Cian digs out an old episode from the vaults to fill the silence. Revisit the first iteration of the Lost Valley, and check out the 1950s lost world comic Thun'da, drawn by none other than the legendary Frank Frazetta!

Join an Explorers' Club expedition into the murky depths of the lost world that is turn-of-the-century London, as we finally begin tackling the greatest of all lost worlds, and the trope namer itself! With asides into the history of Congo colonialism, Irish nationalism, the Piltdown hoax, and more.

Join our host, once again on the track of unknown animals ... Taking a break from the search for mystery big cats, Cian stops to read newspapers reports from 1911 featuring a possible 'neodinosaur' sighting from South America in 1911. Could this story have influenced Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World? Was Percy Fawcett nothing but a bombastic blowhard? Can creationists be good cryptozool...

Along with Journey To The Centre Of The Earth and The Lost World, King Solomon's Mines is another 'line in the sand' watershed moment for lost race fiction. Often credited with reinventing the adventure fiction genre and creating the 'lost race' subgenera, Haggard fused centuries-old storytelling archetypes with contemporary Imperial anxieties and exotic locations. But is it an...

A chance car boot sale find prompts an unexpected episode! You ineffable cad - it's the Annual for Boys, 1936! Join daring young British chums as they venture into the Congo to find an Ancient Egyptian lost city, foil the dastardly plans of a Japanese secret society while on their summer break from school, and get one over on an untrustworthy Kurdish warlord using a loaf of bread. Ripping yard...

Better pack your elephant gun for this one. NOTE: the guest appliance on Pirates Don't Eat The Tourists mentioned probably won't be out when you hear this. But it will be before too long ... I didn't intend to get into the history of Mokele-Mbembe, the infamous African living sauropod (I really, really didn't) but this short story 'The Great Beast of Kafue' by Anglo-Irish w...

A project that was almost certainly greenlit following the immense success of the novel and movie Jurassic Park, John Darnton’s 1996 novel ‘Neanderthal’ is a relatively rare 1990s example of a literal ‘lost world’ tale. Two paleontologists travel to the Pamir mountains in Tajikistan to follow up on a rumour that a surviving band of Neanderthals is hiding out there. Frontloaded by lots of ‘real’ cr...

Described recently by one of its stars as 'one of the great bad movies of our time,' the widely-panned 1995 cinema outing for Michael Crichton's Congo is given a hearing at the Explorer's Club. A somewhat out-of-time 'jungle movie,' Congo is sometimes a competent if silly B-grade Indiana Jones adventure, with odd nuggets of social commentary on the genre itself. And some of...

Michael Crichton takes an unlikely band of explorers into central Africa to recreate the classic 'lost city' narrative, almost one hundred years after H. Rider Haggard invented this literary form. But is Crichton too interested in ape language research and red-hot 1970s tech to focus on the lost city story? Fortunately, there's an unknown species of cryptozoological gorillas menacing o...

With the Bigfoot world consumed by debate over a documentary supposedly proving the Patterson-Gimlin film to be a hoax, we at the Explorer's Club retire to a gentler place: a look back at one of my favourite Bigfoot books, and the one that makes your host keep the door of belief open just a crack: it's the natural history book that just happens to feature the big guy: Where Bigfoot Walks....

In this episode, we cover several of H.G. Wells' stories which contain mysterious animals, or other links to the world of cryptozoology. These stories include underwater civilisations of fish-people, murderous octopus species of octopus, extinct elephant birds, and highly-evolved ants! Wells' fertile brain and immense talents often used science fiction ideas to comment on social issues, bu...

Dennis Wheatley is better known for his occult novels. But he wrote several 'lost race' novels as well. 'The Man Who Missed The War' from 1946 is by far the daftest of them all, though of course it has that Wheatley charm. Take a seat at the Explorer's Club for a tale of Atlanteans and leprechauns (with extra giant crabs).

'There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers which inhabit them ...' Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a few stories, other than The Lost World , which might be considered important to the history of Cryptozoology. In this episode, we examine 'The Terror of Blue John Gap' and 'The Horror Of The Heights.'

The lost 'Spider-Pit Sequence' from the original 1933 King Kong has long been the subject of much lore and myth-making. Was it truly a scene so disturbing it had to be cut? Were audiences terrified by the sight of stop-motion spiders, crabs and octopus-armed critters devouring the crew of the Venture? Was this scene even filmed around all? You're invited to the Explorer's Club as C...

For your first trip to the Explorer's Club, crack open a copy of James Hilton's 1933 classic 'Lost Horizon.' Journey to Shangri-La, where sensitive types from many countries wait out the turbulent 1930s, recovering from the last War and hiding out from the inevitable Next War. And just what does 'Glory' Conway and his visitors think of the place? And just what do they think...