Broken Veil Series 2 – secrets and lies in haunted Essex

Series 2 of the found footage horror podcast Broken Veil builds and improves on the first season with a focus on the audio uncanny.

Arguably my positive reaction to Broken Veil, verging now on fanboyish, is because this is media made for people exactly like me, by people rather like me.

Creators Joel Morris and Will Maclean are children of the so-called ‘haunted generation’ who seem to have spent their adult lives chasing the thrill of reading The Unexplained magazine, of hearing local legends in the school playground, and catching glimpses of grainy ghost stories on late night TV.

The problem with real life creepy stories is that eventually you run out of good ones. Just look at the hit podcast and TV show Uncanny which, after a dazzling start, has been scraping the barrel for a couple of years now.

Enter Morris and Maclean with a valiant effort to make up some brand new faux genuine eerie mythology. Their efforts are so deft that, at times, I had to pause the podcast and ask myself: wait, is this real? The trick is that they interlace their fabrications with snippets of real and familiar supernatural lore.

They mention the well-known Max Headroom broadcast intrusion. That’s the convincer. Then they introduce their own invented ‘Marconi Intrusion’ which is not. But even knowing this is cleverly camouflaged drama, it took me a while to realise we’d crossed the line from fact into fiction.

In fact, there really was a Marconi intrusion, in 1903, when the magician Nevil Maskelyne interrupted an early radio broadcast. So when the Broken Veil team uses that phrase, something in the recesses of the brain says, “Oh, yes, I’ve heard of that.” Cunning.

One reassuring giveaway that we are listening to drama is that, in many instances, their concoctions are too perfect and perhaps too weird. The description of the Marconi Intrusion from the Broken Veil timeline (outcome) is dense with fantastic, Lovecraftian imagery a million miles from some dickhead in a rubber mask wobbling about in front of a tin shed.

When the real story of the rediscovery of the audio for the legendary Hexham Heads footage is borrowed and applied to an invented local news report from 1979 it performs one of two functions. Either it makes you feel clever for spotting the reference, bringing you in on the joke. Or it triggers that feeling that you’re re-hearing something familiar but half forgotten, and therefore true.

I wonder how many listeners, even those well schooled in British folklore and the paranormal, would correctly identify every truth and every falsehood. Eric Gill did indeed carve 14 stations of the cross for Westminster Cathedral. But is there a memorial to him studded with black stone and inscribed ‘Lapidarius’ beneath station 14? I really haven’t been able to confirm that there is, even though it sounds entirely plausible, and even though Joel Morris stridently declares “This is not bullshit” at that point in the episode.

The emphasis on the early days of radio, electronic voice phenomena (EVPs), lost tapes and broadcasting gives this series a sharper focus than the first. It also, obviously, leans into the podcast medium. Morris’s immersive sound design adds layers of dirt, noise and obfuscation so that the ‘evidence’ in the case is always heard obliquely, through a sort of fog. The two investigators are placed in echoing, noisy spaces – cars, trains, cafes – constantly reinforcing the mundane reality of their adventures.

Broken Veil is also a great example of how nimble independent audio productions can be. Though a year in the making it nonetheless includes what feel like references to the current fascination with liminal horror triggered by the release of the film Backrooms and to a weird news story that went viral back in February.

If I had reservations about the excellent first season they were around the ending which felt hurried and somehow unsatisfying. This time, they really stick the landing, finishing on a suspended note of uncertainty that’s been building throughout the series.

If you think of it as like buying an album, or a Big Finish Doctor Who audio adventure, the price of entry via Patreon is pretty minimal. I’ve certainly got more value from it than I would from a couple of takeaway coffees.

I also find myself wondering about spinoffs. A Haunted Essex Corridor short story anthology, perhaps, inviting various authors into the game. Or a TV adaptation starring Laurence Miller and Chris McNally – ideally with monster of the week episodes to prolong the enjoyment.

The second series of Broken Veil is available via Patreon. The first series is available free wherever you forage for podcasts.