Mad Ghoul Radio

October has arrived, and the dead have apparently taken over the turntables.

Mad Ghoul Radio returns with a Halloween-season broadcast filled with strange electronic transmissions, gothic rock, vintage horror soundtracks, and a few records that have become permanent fixtures in my October listening rotation.

We kick things off with some wonderfully unsettling electronics before digging into the music that always takes me back to autumn in Michigan. There's something about falling leaves, cold nights, old horror movies, and certain records that just belongs together. And yes, a few familiar Halloween favorites make their return. Some traditions are worth keeping.

We also spend some time exploring the fascinating world of production library music and its connection to George A. Romero's 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. I'll be sharing a couple of selections from the film's soundtrack and talking about how a collection of preexisting recordings helped create one of the most recognizable soundscapes in horror history.

Elsewhere, we're talking haunted attractions, including my friend Clint Tacy's Haunting in the Hills, Gruesome Gifts, and the all-new Traincar of Terror. I'll also have details about the free October 24th screening of Night of the Living Dead that I'm hosting at the Backus Community Center in International Falls, Minnesota.

Plus, I'll tell you about my recent guest appearance on the I Like It Spooky Podcast, where we spent some quality time discussing Dario Argento's Suspiria.

And, as always, we'll close things out with something from the world of Nine Inch Nails, this time with a particularly disturbing connection to one of the great psychological thrillers of the 1990s.

It's a little nostalgic, a little strange, occasionally loud, and exactly the kind of Halloween radio show I love putting together.

Turn it up, dim the lights, and enjoy the season.

Season 03 - Episode 20 - Detroit Residue

Fresh off a trip to Detroit, DJ Robb comes back to the basement with a little concert noise still stuck in his head.

Episode 20 starts with Rob Zombie, but not where most people would expect. Robb goes back to the earliest days of White Zombie, before the major-label records, before MTV, and before the sound most people associate with the band had fully formed.

From there, the episode moves through industrial rock, dark electronic music, soundtrack cuts, strange late-night grooves, and a few records pulled straight from the shelves.

There’s also some talk about Marilyn Manson’s current live show, the surprise of seeing The HU in person, and why some artists still matter decades after you first heard them.

The rest of the set gets darker, dirtier, and more mechanical as the night goes on.

Streetlights. Warehouses. Old records. Detroit residue.

And, as always, the basement closes with Nine Inch Nails.

Episode 19 finds Mad Ghoul Radio back in freeform mode, drifting through one of those late-night sets where the records start making their own decisions.

We begin in the strange, oppressive world of an obscure 1980's horror score before moving into post-punk, goth, psychedelic rock, archival discoveries, instrumental surf, spy music, haunted exotica, and downtempo electronics.

There are a few deep cuts, a few recent vinyl pickups, some long-buried material, and plenty of music that sounds like it belongs to a movie that never existed.

No strict theme this time.

Just a dark room, a stack of records, and a signal getting stranger as the night goes on.

Somewhere between a horror soundtrack, a crooked lounge, and a bad decision after midnight!

This episode of Mad Ghoul Macabre is not a traditional horror mix.

Psych Ward Soundscapes takes a much stranger route — a disorienting trip through the empty corridors of an abandoned mental institution, built from horror film scores, psychiatric dialogue, trailers, environmental recordings, early electronic music, and heavily manipulated tape.

Expect fluorescent hum, distant machinery, locked doors, therapy sessions, rolling carts, voices bleeding through walls, and music that often feels more like a recovered experiment than a song.

A large part of this episode dives into musique concrète and early tape composition — artists cutting, looping, reversing, stretching, and physically manipulating recorded sound decades before sampling became commonplace. Tod Dockstader, Pierre Schaeffer, Bernard Parmegiani, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Delia Derbyshire, and others become part of the architecture of the ward, alongside cues and voices pulled from films centered on institutions, confinement, treatment, and psychological collapse.

This one is deliberately unconventional. There are long stretches without rhythm. Sounds appear, disappear, repeat, and deteriorate. Voices surface where they shouldn't. Some recordings feel clinical. Others feel damaged. At times, it may be difficult to tell where the movie dialogue ends and the music begins.

That is the point.

Think less playlist.

More recovered reel-to-reel tape discovered in a locked room at the end of a condemned hospital wing.

Turn the lights down...Put on headphones....And whatever you hear coming from the room next door…

Don't answer it!

#madghoulradio #thepfpn

Season 03, Episode 17 finds Mad Ghoul Radio returning to the basement after a difficult stretch, with an episode built around memory, loss, discovery, and the strange comfort of music that seems to exist somewhere outside of time. DJ Robb talks briefly about the unreleased Episode 16, the launch of the new Mad Ghoul Sessions interview series, the arrival of a new show intro from horror icon Danielle Harris, and the slow construction of a permanent Mad Ghoul Radio studio.

From there, the episode moves through hypnotic world music, psychedelic grooves, unsettling electronic sounds, cinematic instrumentals, and music that feels equally at home in a ritual, a nightmare, or a late-night drive. There are new discoveries, a look at an upcoming release from Phantom Lightkeeper, and several moments dedicated to artists and horror figures we’ve recently lost, including a personal tribute to Phantasm legend Reggie Bannister.

It’s also one of the more personal episodes of Mad Ghoul Radio. Robb reflects on losing his sister and father, the long gaps between recent shows, and the listeners who continued to stick around through all of it. But this isn’t an episode about stopping. It’s about finding the signal again, getting inspired, rebuilding the studio, and remembering why Mad Ghoul Radio existed in the first place: to dig through the stacks, find something strange, and pass it along.

The night eventually winds down the way it should—with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross guiding the signal back into the dark.

Welcome to the very first installment of The Mad Ghoul Sessions, a new Mad Ghoul Radio series featuring long-form conversations with the filmmakers, musicians, writers, collectors, haunters and creative minds who shape the horror community and preserve its history.

In this first installment, I sit down with filmmaker, journalist, author, podcaster and Phantom Lightkeeper musician Justin Beahm.

Justin has spent his career digging beneath the surface of the films we love—preserving the voices of actors, filmmakers, effects artists and craftspeople through his work with Reverend Entertainment. We talk horror history, physical media, collecting, disappearing roadside attractions, Roadside Memories, and the responsibility that comes with documenting stories before they vanish.

Then the conversation moves somewhere much more personal.

Justin takes us inside the making of the new Phantom Lightkeeper album, Four Days at the Precipice. The record began during four isolated days at a remote cabin while he was experiencing a serious health condition. After returning home, undergoing emergency surgery and facing his own mortality, Justin went back to those recordings and finished one of the most personal works of his career.

The episode also opens with “Francesca Woodman’s Camera,” my favorite track from the new Phantom Lightkeeper album, Four Days at the Precipice—a haunted, slow-burning piece filled with atmosphere, distortion and more than a few textures that sent my Nine Inch Nails–obsessed brain into overdrive.

And don't worry, this isn’t a standard press interview. It’s two friends talking about horror, music, art, grief, survival, memory and the strange need some of us have to save the things we love before they disappear.

Turn down the lights.

Welcome to The Mad Ghoul Sessions.

No host. No commentary. No survivors.

This edition of Mad Ghoul Macabre drops straight into the blood-soaked world of The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II—a full-length mix built from score cues, dialogue fragments, sound design, Deadite chaos, and enough cabin-in-the-woods madness to wake something buried under the floorboards.

This is the sound of tape hiss, cellar doors, possessed forests, chainsaws, shotguns, and ancient words that should never be read aloud.

Turn it up.

Keep the lights low.

And whatever starts scratching at the window, do not let it in.

#madghoulradio #thepfpn

Season 03 Episode 14: Exit Wounds & Haunted Signals

Episode 14 of Mad Ghoul Radio opens with a little help from friend of the show Dani Filth, then slips into a set built around old obsessions, new curiosities, and the strange machinery that keeps certain sounds alive long after they first crawl into your head.

This episode moves through industrial shadows, damaged carnival energy, resurrected rock and roll ghosts, exclusive new music, cult soundtrack memory, and a few left turns that make perfect sense once you’re inside the room. There’s no forced theme this time — just a trip through the shelves with music that connects through atmosphere, history, horror, and that familiar Mad Ghoul Radio feeling of “what the hell is this, and why do I love it?”

DJ Robb revisits the early danger and weirdness of Marilyn Manson’s first era, including the lasting Trent Reznor connection, the importance of craft beneath the noise, and what it feels like when a new track unexpectedly pulls you back toward an artist you thought you had drifted away from.

The episode also spends time with one of Mad Ghoul Radio’s sacred bands, digging into the renewed activity around a legendary catalog and why certain artists still feel like a secret doorway into punk, garage rock, horror movies, bad taste, and late-night obsession.

There is also an exclusive from Phantom Lightkeeper, the solo music project from Justin Beahm, whose upcoming album Four Days at the Precipice continues the haunted, cinematic mood of Shore Ghosts while moving into deeper emotional territory. Justin will be joining the show soon, so consider this a first step into that conversation.

From there, the episode shifts gears through heavier electronics, 80s film nostalgia, one of the most fearless voices in modern music, and a final descent into a Trent Reznor-produced instrumental that closes the show with tension, pulse, and cold mechanical beauty.

Episode 13 had to go back to the lake. For this installment of Mad Ghoul Macabre, we’re paying tribute to Friday the 13th the only way that felt right: no host breaks, no commentary, and no safety briefing from the counselors. Just trailers, music, screams, stingers, synths, warnings, bad decisions, and the blood-soaked echo of Camp Crystal Lake.

There’s something perfect about making Episode 13 the Jason episode. The number is already part of the curse. The franchise turned bad luck into a brand, a calendar date into a threat, and a drowned boy into one of horror’s most recognizable shadows. Across the series, Friday the 13th became more than a slasher franchise. It became a ritual: the woods, the lake, the cabins, the mask, the final girl, the impossible return, and that strange comfort horror fans get from knowing exactly what kind of trouble is waiting in the dark.

This episode is built like a straight-through audio nightmare from the entire Friday the 13th universe. It plays like something pulled from an old VHS shelf, a warped tape left behind in a wet backpack, or a late-night broadcast coming from somewhere deep inside Camp Blood. You’ll hear the franchise through its trailers and music, without interruption, letting the atmosphere do the work. No analysis this time. No campfire speech. Just the transmission.

So lock the cabin, stay out of the water, and don’t trust the quiet. Episode 13 belongs to Jason.

Episode 12 of Mad Ghoul Radio begins in a dark and familiar place: the fluorescent hum of a nearly empty grocery store, the doors locked, the aisles quiet, and danger somewhere just out of sight. From there, DJ Robb leads another late-night journey through the music that gives him life, pulling together a shadowy mix of deep cuts, downtempo grooves, cult favorites, strange detours, and artists who live just outside the obvious.

This episode moves with the feel of a crate-digging séance. It drifts from eerie atmosphere into heady rhythm, from underground discoveries into warped rock energy, and eventually into a strong Bowie thread that leads to a perfect closing moment tied to one of the most legendary live collaborations in alternative music history.

Like the best episodes of Mad Ghoul Radio, Somewhere Deep in the Stacks is less about playing the expected and more about following mood, instinct, and obsession wherever they lead. It is a transmission for listeners who love soundtrack thinking, forgotten gems, late-night records, and music that feels like it was waiting to be found.

Turn the lights down, let the shelves close in, and step a little farther into the stacks.