ABOUT OMINOUS THRILL

OMINOUS THRILL
Director's Statement
Jeff Schmidt


I've spent most of my career inside other people's stories. As a sound designer my job is to take what a writer imagined and make the listener feel like they're there. I've worked on stories about doctors who killed, families who disappeared and crimes that destroyed communities. I know how to make darkness land.

What I wanted to create with Ominous Thrill was a fiction anthology that took the full range of what women actually are; ambitious, sexual, enraged, grieving, capable of extraordinary things including terrible ones, and follow those women all the way. Whether the destination is justice or power or transformation or something more murky, the story goes there fully and treats that destination as the point without apology.

Every story in Ominous Thrill runs on that engine. The genre changes: folk horror, erotic supernatural, dark comedy, body horror, psychological thriller, sometimes inside the same story. What doesn't change is the commitment to following her all the way.

It took me a while to notice I was creating a distinct world inside Ominous Thrill. It's a world where the horror arrives through ordinary channels, because that's how most harm actually works. Where the systems that are supposed to protect people have failed before the story begins. Where what you've been suppressing accumulates, and eventually has to go somewhere. Where the thing you set in motion tends to come back through the instrument you used to send it.

These aren't themes I imposed on the stories. I never start with "theme" as those kinds of stories tend to make themselves evident by how the "point" of the story drags characters around.  In Ominous Thrill, any thematic revelations emerge from the character's dramatic journey.

Audio is not a lesser medium to me, it is the most intimate one.

Each Ominous Thrill story is made specifically and intentionally as an audio story and never gets distracted with visions of adaptation for other media. I refuse to use the word “cinematic” when talking about Ominous Thrill even though listeners have called it that. To me "cinematic" is distinctly the language of images projected on screens. Audio is not that, and Ominous Thrill is dramatic audio story-telling.

With audio, the listener is inside the story in a way that no other medium can quite replicate. Everything is happening inside their head, in the dark, alone.

I want every writing and production decision I make to honor that intimacy and exploit it fully.

Hopefully, when you listen, alone, in the dark, you will feel that, too.

--Jeff Schmidt



Jeff Schmidt is the creator of Ominous Thrill and an award winning sound designer whose work includes Dr. Death, Blood Ties, and Aftershock. Ominous Thrill is a multi-award-winning, twice Ambie-nominated dark fiction audio drama anthology.