Wide Atlantic Weird

Things get a little serious at the cabin in the woods this week as Cian and Dónal talk about problematic podcast hosts Chris Jericho and Joe Rogan. Both have a tendency to showcase fringe beliefs and bad-faith actors without any critical context. Both regularly expose their huge audiences to conspiracy thinking without pushback. And neither seem to feel that wielding such influence requires them t...

An empty, apocalyptic London, survivors proposing radical utopias - and all while 9-foot, monstrous carnivorous plants roam the streets? It must be THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, the most famous novel by John Wyndham, the mid-century British author famous for penning so-called 'cozy catastrophes.' Cian is joined at the Cabin In The Woods by Mr Neil Philips from the UK Wildlife Podcast to discuss Wyndham...

Like arch-conspiracy fiend Alex Jones, wrestler Hulk Hogan has had to claim in court that his real self is seperate from his in-ring persona - and that's just the beginning of his self-fictionalisation. Join Cian and his BROTHER Donal at the Cabin In The Woods for a somewhat off-topic episode of Wide Atlantic Weird where the lads delve into the extremely weird world of professional wrestling in FA...

Since we were in the area - a very brief ghost story/urban legend for you from County Cork.

Every town has that one spooky abandoned building, the one that seems to naturally gather scary stories and urban legends. On the west side of Cork City, the great Victorian redbrick section of the Our Lady's complex, St Kevin's, has a real-life history of scandal and tragedy. In this episode, Cian takes a trip to the empty, fire-scarred structure that still stands above the Lee Valley onto the ci...

*NOW UPDATED WITH EXTRA BONUS MATERIAL!* On this episode, enter the Wide Atlantic Weird cabin-in-the-woods to find the place stuffed with mummified cats, cursed relics and forbidden idols as we delve into THE JEWEL OF SEVEN STARS! This 1903 book from Dublin-born Bram ‘Dracula’ Stoker affords us the perfect excuse to doff a pith helmet, drink cognac, and tell mystical tales of turn-of-the-century G...

Prometheus, made with a decent amount of creative control by increasingly-eccentric director Ridley Scott, is a sorta-maybe prequel to the Alien movies, and a rather divisive entry into the franchise. Cian invites Prometheus fan Daffy to the Cabin In The Woods on a rainy summer's night to discuss the ups and downs of this visually-stunning but thematically confusing film. The guys discuss racism i...

Christ on a bicycle, you just wouldn't believe the madness that went on behind the scenes during the making of ALIEN 3. An astonishingly bleak, gothic entry into a big-budget franchise that killed off most of its beloved cast, Alien 3 was hated by fans upon release and has only very slowly gained a slightly better reputation over the years. Cian and Stokes enjoy some fine German beer (and Kinsale...

Digging up an old script at the Cabin In The Woods, Cian addresses an old topic, a suitably spooky and Gothic one for an unseasonably cold summer’s evening: the Uberwald, the mythical imaginary version of Central and Eastern Europe where Gothic tales of the macabre traditionally take place. On this journey we take on the Fighting Fantasy books, The White Wolf Of The Harz Mountains , Sheridan Le Fa...

Some months ago we did an episode solely about the first Blair Witch movie from 1999. We're doing everything else in the franchise (two movies and a bunch of video games) in one episode. While this might give you an idea of the level of quality we're dealing with, there are interesting things to notice within these films and games. Perhaps the take-home lesson is simply that not everything needs a...

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World is the proverbial ‘not-terrible’ dinosaur story. Let’s face it, besides Jurassic Park , there aren’t many. And Conan Doyle knocked it out of the (ahem) park back in 1912 when he brought prehistoric creatures of literary age in this tale of daring Englishmen, led by the infuriating Professor Challenger, finding dinosaurs alive and well on a flat-topped mountain i...

In 1993, the world of gaming was changed forever by Doom, a fast-paced game with action and horror elements that was hugely controversial for its violent and Satanic plot. Joining Cian for a beer and a chat about the history of the game is Ian Stokes, the Wide Atlantic Weird resident IT guy. Grab yourself a brew for a conversation about the wild and woolly days of cowboy game developers, space mar...

Another strange tale from the world of music here as Cian and Donal delve into Metallica’s infamously difficult phase during the recording of their much-maligned St Anger album. Metallica stand head and shoulders above most other groups in the metal world, and at the time they were making this record their star was still shooting up. But personal problems left them wracked with insecurity and an i...

A proper, enjoyable 'bad movie' needs to have been made with by someone who truly believes in what they're doing, without irony. Cian and Ali enjoy a beer and return to the subject of their very first episode: the so-bad-they’re-good films of visionary ‘auteur’ Neil Breen. This time they finally discuss his divisive 2018 movie Twisted Pair, an effort that had them wondering whether Breen had final...

As something of a follow-up to our last episode about the birth of the ‘Spooky New Orleans’ archetype, join Cian for a lockdown bottle of ale on the porch at the Cabin in the Woods for a reading from the book ‘The Magic Island’ by William Seabrook. In 1929, Seabrook’s book was a massive success, telling dark tales about Haiti and its voodoo secrets, and in particular popularising the word ‘zombie’...

The popular image of New Orleans as a spooky, mysterious city full of witchcraft and voodoo needs no introduction. But few know that the city owes this image largely to the work of an Irishman named Lafcadio Hearn – a Victorian-era writer and traveller who sought out magic and mystery wherever he went, a collector of folklore and stories of everyday life. During his ten years writing about life in...

Get ready for a look back at a strange world: 2001 was a different time. A time of baggy jeans, wallets on chains, and a strangely heavy, angry, and proudly stupid style of music that inexplicably became mainstream. It was the era of Nu-Metal: a subgenre now so hated and disgraced that even those of us who were fans are happy to pretend it all just never happened. For myself and my brother Donal,...

Join Cian for a quarantine session of brandy and nostalgia at the cabin in this much-delayed episode. If you fondly remember reading (and cheating) through Fighting Fantasy gamebooks in the 80s, this installment has you covered, as Cian talks us through House Of Hell , his favourite FF adventure. It's a haunted house game that really goes into far more disturbing territory than most. Cian spots th...

With the world in the midst of difficulties and upheaval, we bring you a brief update on the Wide Atlantic Weird status, as well as a short episode about a woman from County Cork who was famous in the 1920s for her mediumship, automatic writing, her follow-up books to the Bible (!) and for telling fortunes for the great and the good. Her name was Geraldine Cummins, and while not well-remembered to...

Reading Lovecraft is a great way to discover new writers and strange old pseudoscientific theories. In this episode I discuss how through Lovecraft I first learned of Margaret Murray and the infamous Witch-Cult Hypothesis – the idea that the ‘witches’ persecuted in early-modern witch trials were in fact the survivors of an ancient pagan cult. Yes, not only did people take this idea seriously, but...

In the second of our American Militia episodes, we examine the horror that was the 1993 Waco Siege. In February of that year, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms bungled a raid on a religious cult, the Branch Davidians, and their leader David Koresh, who were living in a compound in Texas. What resulted was an hours-long shootout, a 51-day siege, a killer fire, and controversies that sti...

In 1999, a supposedly-real ‘horror film’ was released that showed us virtually nothing while filling us with a terror of virtually everything. Those of us who were young and impressionable at the time still owe our fear of camping to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, an upstart indie film that expertly utilised internet marketing, folklore and terrific world-building to create a movie that exists to this d...

Sitting by a roaring fire in the Wide Atlantic Weird cabin, Cian delves into a potted history of the Ancient Aliens theory – once a fringe, almost-dead belief, it’s come back with a vengeance, now being one of the most popular paranormal worldviews out there. Statistically, you probably know someone yourself who believes that ancient non-white cultures around the world were incapable of building t...

Cian and Ali begin their deep dive into the American militia (or Patriot) movement. There are some odd beliefs very particular to America at play here, so we crack a couple of cans and get stuck into the founding of the country and the constitution to find out exactly why grown men like to LARP at being military folks out in the wild woods of backwoods America. In this episode, we focus on the sie...

On a dark and stormy night, as London is pelted with rain and lashed by intense winds, the WIDE ATLANTIC WEIRD crew serves you up a BONUS EPISODE. Enjoy a true strange SCARY CLOWN tale from The Ghost Trail’s Faye, then Cian and Ali indulge in their old hobby of bad movie-watching. They discuss infamous mockbuster studio THE ASYLUM, running through the reasons why the likes of Sharknado just doesn’...