The Creator of 'Lore' Explains How to Make a Scary Story Go Viral
Lore podcast homepage. Image: Aaron Mahnke/Lore

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The Creator of 'Lore' Explains How to Make a Scary Story Go Viral

In a few short months, Lore has jumped to the top of the iTunes charts. Hunger for historical horror is alive and well.

Take a scroll through the iTunes podcast charts, and you'll find few titles that stand out from the glut of legacy news and comedy podcasts, run by large media conglomerates, that dominate the top ten. Lore is the freaky exception.

A series created by novelist Aaron Mahnke, it's a one-man-show—written, produced, and narrated by Mahnke—and a relative newcomer, having only been around since March 2015. As its name implies, Lore is ostensibly about folklore, with episodes that delve into superstitions surrounding cannibalism, changelings, witches, even cryptids like the Jersey Devil.

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But what separates the show from other retellings of the same material is Mahnke's ruminative storytelling style, which weaves together contemporary accounts, literary allusions, and sweeping existential asides about the darker side of our nature.

In "Half-Hanged," for example, Mahnke tells the story of Mary Webster, a Massachusetts woman accused of witchcraft in 1683. While she was acquitted of the charges by the court, her neighbors remained convinced that she was practicing devil worship to the detriment of them all. The consequences of their paranoia played out in a way that was both monstrous and resplendent—and above all, spooky as hell.

"History is full of people who took things too far," Mahnke says in the episode, and that may as well be Lore's unofficial mission statement.

I recently spoke to Mahnke about the making of Lore, its meteoric success, and the continuing appeal of scary stories in a digital age. Needless to say, if you are looking to get into the Halloween spirit, this is right up your alley. Just remember to check for black cats before you walk down it.

Motherboard: Lore has garnered an enormous fan base in only a few short months. Why do you think it has struck a chord with so many people?

Aaron Mahnke: Like a lot of people, I've got a long history of starting projects and then closing them down when they fail to take off. Prior to Lore, I think my most successful failure managed to reach hundreds of people. Hundreds.

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But here's Lore, like something from a different planet. I had over one million downloads just in September, and I'm on track to crush that in October. These are NPR-level numbers.

I say all that to highlight what you asked me: Lore has somehow struck a chord with people. My best guess is because of a deep desire for storytelling. Sure, like a lot of things, it's much more complex than that, but at the core of it I think this is about our love of story. That's why Serial was so huge, because there was a story to follow and dig into, so I do think that stories play a huge part in it.

What I wanted to try to do with the storytelling in Lore was provide a little more closure than something like Serial provided. I wanted to do something where there was a little bit more satisfaction at the end of each episode, and button things up more—but not completely.

But storytelling is not the only thing. Production, delivery, everything… it all adds together. Hopefully, Lore brings a lot of that to the table. I'm not just copy and pasting from Wikipedia, I'm writing narration, I'm trying to weave together a path that I can lead the listener on to get to a destination. All those things add up.

What kinds of mindsets or situations do you think commonly motivate people to invent, spread, and even act on folkloric beliefs? What is the appeal of a supernatural answer over a natural one?

Folklore, from what I've seen, is really built around teaching proper behavior, reinforcing religious teachings, and explaining things that the natural world offers no explanation for. When you have no concept of where snow comes from when it falls from the sky, you can either accept the fact that it's a mystery, or tell an elaborate story that explains every last bit of it.

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The first choice is boring but practical, and the second option is a lie that entertains. It wins because it distracts you and and satisfies that urge for answers. The answers might be completely false, but heck, it was fun, right?

You place a lot of emphasis on the ways in which humans act on folklore, which is usually more frightening than the supernatural stories themselves. Was this an angle you wanted to highlight from the outset?

Not particularly. In the beginning, what I wanted to do was share my favorite tales of folklore and superstition. I knew I wanted to group stories together under larger topical banners, but I didn't set out to find the human aspect of them. But that's the thing, really: Folklore is a human byproduct. If you look long enough at a photo, you're going to find the pixels, right? Folklore is the same way: If you stare at the tales long enough, you can't NOT see the humanity behind them.

It was an accident, just by focusing on these stories, the human part floated to the surface.

These were stories that had real people behind the exaggerations, and real lives were hurt by the things we see now as just footnotes in a history book.

My goal now is to not let that aspect of the show get too out of control. There needs to be balance. But anytime you can reveal the humanity is a story, you've done well.

Even the first episode, "They Made a Tonic," seems to find that balance in recounting the story of the vampire paranoia surrounding Mercy Brown.

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The Mercy Brown story from Rhode Island—you can't help but think about the human aspect of it. You have what seems like this Medieval, barbaric thing happening in the late 1800s, ten minutes away from Newport where there are these enormous mansions of very well-educated and successful business people. Ten minutes apart, you've got these people that are just diametrically opposed to each other. It's really bizarre, but history is full of things like that, and it is fascinating to find them.

Even HP Lovecraft, who grew up in Providence, makes reference to how people were exhuming bodies and cutting out organs in his novels. It wasn't this under-the-radar thing. It happened in lots of places. It got noticed.

What is your process for weaving together these different arcs, themes, and beats into a cohesive episode?

Wow, yeah. Sometimes those things are too easy. Mary Webster in "Half-Hanged" was a good example of that. Sometimes the surprise twists are just tossed into my lap. But a lot of times I really have to work hard to find a way to stitch things together. It's not easy, and it's hard to explain. I sort of intuit my way through it.

I tend to tackle my episodes by trying to figure out the larger concepts or idea that I want to talk about because ultimately it's not about one particular story, it's about an angle that's bigger than that. I'll do a line of research into the topic, and try to find stories that have a little more meat to them. People are constantly emailing me saying "there's this cool story from my home town, you've got to do it." But sometimes, those stories can be told in a minute and a half or two minutes.

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Sometimes, the time is spent providing some historical context. Sometimes, these stories just have a lot of nuance, and ups and downs.

Sometimes, I finish an episode script and then read through it out loud, and it's just clearly not paced well or structured in a way that doesn't build right, and so I have to go back and change things. I'm not sure how to teach that instinct, though. Heck, if I could, I'd hire some help!

A common throughline in a lot of the episodes is that folklore seems so real to people that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Do you think this kind of dynamic—in which people create or become the monsters they fear—is an intrinsic part of human nature?

It's hard to say, really. Humans are capable of horrific acts of violence. We're gifted in other ways, and those are good, but every now and then, someone takes things too far.

I think folklore is a double-edged sword in that regard: It's often meant to pass along essential lessons, to teach the next generation the proper way to act and behave. But sometimes, it has a way of suggesting the oddest behavior to people, you know? Or maybe people are just really good at reading way too much between the lines. I don't know. The mystery of it all just adds to the flavor, right?

You mentioned on Twitter that Lore won't cover modern legends like the Slenderman because they are not folklore, by definition. What do you think are the hard-and-fast parameters of folklore?

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Modern urban legends aren't folklore, but we tend to treat them the same. The Slenderman and sites like Creepypasta give us story, but it lacks the soul of folklore, you know? It's missing the historical depth, the cultural connections, and the real life stories that folklore has in spades, from centuries of being told. I just don't think that they manage to explain the unexplainable; they're simply there to frighten and entertain.

I would say, for example, that on one end, you have movies based on modern urban legends like Paranormal Activity, or the remake of Poltergeist. But then on the folklore side, you have The Village from M. Night Shyamalan. Both are equally frightening, but one of them has a lot more depth. The Village has this culturally rich aspect to it and it's more about the people than it is about that sudden sound that might have your heart thumping the next moment. It's a different approach.

I tend to say folklore is joined to culture like a Siamese twin. They have to be together. But urban legends tend to be this scary thing that gets passed around, and it's sometimes tied to a location or Internet site, but it's not necessarily tied to an entire culture.

Plus, we also live in a time when a lot of cultures are beginning to diverge. In some ways, folklore is very ethnic. You have German folklore, you have Irish folklore, and they have stayed German and Irish for a very long time. Things like Slenderman are very pan-cultural.

I think if I had to draw the line between folklore and urban legend, it would probably be something having to do with its cultural roots.

So folklore is typically molded by one geographic area?

I mean, folklore spreads. A lot of people make mention of how a lot of my episodes are based in New England, and the Massachusetts area. Part of that is because that's where I live, but part of it is just because, if you think of folklore moving like a group of people from one place to another, it migrated into this area from England, and parts of Europe. New England was the colonial ending point for a lot of that folklore. So if I start here, I can use that folklore bridge to go across the ocean to where it's deeper and older.

The Information Age has just changed so much about how society operates and how culture is moved around. I don't know how long it will take for modern urban legends to become global historical folklore. Will it be decades? Centuries? I don't know. I think folklore is like concrete; it has to set first.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. All in Your Head is a series that takes a scientific look at all things spooky and scary. Follow along here.