Last week we gave you a sneak peek at the trailer for the upcoming fiction podcast, Bridgewater. The new audio fiction series is the result of a collaboration between Lore‘s Aaron Mahnke and The Bright Sessions‘ Lauren Shippen. What do you do when you have way too much fascinating material for a single podcast episode? Well, if you’re Mahnke and Shippen the answer is — you write an entirely new fiction podcast based on your real-life findings. Bridgewater is based upon a real town in Massachusetts, one vertex of what is known as the Bridgewater Triangle. Mahnke sat down for a chat with FANGORIA to talk about inspiration and give us a little more info on the new show. It’s his love letter to the shows he grew up on, raised on a heavy helping of The X-Files and Unsolved Mysteries, Mahnke always had a taste for “all of the creepy mystery stuff.”
“The X-Files really ticked a box that I feel my soul was looking for. And for the last fifteen years, I think Supernatural has really filled that box as well, bringing in a lot of folklore elements.” Lore was created out of “leftovers”, essentially. Mahnke was creating and self-publishing his own “Stephen King type supernatural novels”, weaving in bits of real-world folklore into those works of fiction. At a certain point, he wondered, “How do I share this leftover stuff with people?” The answer to that question, was Lore. Bridgewater was birthed in a similar fashion. “Six and a half years of all this folkloric knowledge and these cool stories that I bumped into and we have this perfect place from the world of folklore to sort of build those stories in, which is the Bridgewater Triangle.”
The Bridgewater Triangle essentially sounds like the Northeast’s foresty cousin to the Bermuda Triangle. A vortex of weird. A veritable hotbed of the unexplainable. Mahnke says, “If you love Lore and you love the stories about things like lights in the darkness or cryptid creatures, UFO’s, ghosts, cursed stories— all of it has happened in the Bridgewater Triangle. Bigfoot, thunderbirds, giant snakes. You name it, it’s all been there.” It’s not just paranormal entities lurking around Bridgewater, though. Real-life humans engaging in nefarious activities up the creepy factor, “The 1970s had the satanic panic. There were true cases of abduction and murder going on in the Freetown State Forest.” An area rife with unexplainable activity, murders, disappearances, Mahnke and Shippen wrote a narrative with Bridgewater as a fitting backdrop, “Let’s build our own little fantasy world within this. So you’ve got this story of a folklore professor who’s very skeptical, meets up with his long-lost father’s former police partner who is a lot more open-minded and willing to believe things and adventures ensue.” As far as the realm of folklore and the unexplained goes in modern media, Mahnke says, “I feel like there’s a void in pop culture.” He cites Supernatural‘s amazing fifteen-season run and Stranger Things as shows that handled this sort of material well. “Bridgewater is sort of my attempt to offer the world, hey this could be your next big thing if you want it to be.”
Aside from the limitless canvas the backstory of Bridgewater provides as a vehicle for stories seeped in folklore and the unexplained, Mahnke says he is also very excited about the music in the podcast. Longtime Lore collaborator Chad Lawson is also on board for this project who Mahnke describes as “an amazing chameleon.” More specifically, “He traded in his Chopin and pulled out his Trent Reznor and made this great soundtrack.” One of the cast photos is the link to a sample of the show’s theme song. In fact, the website as a whole feels as though the game is already afoot, take some time to poke around and maybe come across some clues. The cast is amazingly ridiculous, starring Misha Collins (Supernatural), Melissa Ponzio (Teen Wolf), Karan Soni (Deadpool), and Nathan Fillion (The Suicide Squad). Mahnke describes this stacked lineup as, “We really tried to keep things sort of in the family, folks who are fans of the genre will be fans of everybody that shows up and I think it really paid off.”
Mahnke absolutely lights up as he talks about the various elements contained in the show, with Bridgewater acting as a perfect playground for all those leftover bits of research to come together, “This has got to be the thing that makes my heart happy. All of that creepy weirdness inside me, this is ticking the boxes.” When asked whether he has made the trek to Bridgewater or trounced around Freetown State Forest himself, he has a very wise answer, “I have yet to go because I would like to stay alive.” Good call, we get the feeling you still have lots of cool stories to share.
The first season of Bridgewater premieres on August 6 with the first two episodes released simultaneously. Visit the official website for episodes and more. Bridgewater is an iHeartMedia and Grim & Mild co-production, distributed by the iHeartPodcast Network.
