The Fear Archive — A Violet Hour Media Production
A Violet Hour Media Production

The archive is open.

Hosted by Amanda Kagiwada and Michael Ryan Assip. Every episode, a deep-dive into the real crimes, cultural anxieties, and folklore behind horror’s most unforgettable films. Darkly funny. Rigorously researched. Free.

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Every episode ↓
Format Horror true crime & film history
Hosts Amanda Kagiwada & Michael Ryan Assip
Frequency Every other Wednesday
Studio Violet Hour Media — Los Angeles
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Watch & Listen

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New episodes drop every other Wednesday. Watch or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube — free, no paywall.

From Amanda & Mike

Dead Air

Horror news, listener mail, and whatever Amanda and Mike can’t stop thinking about. Same feed as The Fear Archive — no separate subscription, no paywall.

Listen on Spotify → Apple Podcasts → All 10 episodes ↓

Every Episode

The full archive. Every episode of The Fear Archive.

Each episode takes a horror film and follows it back to the real crimes, folklore and cultural history it was built on. New episodes every other Wednesday. Free, everywhere.

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The Fear Archive investigates Faces of Death — the 1978 shock documentary that was not quite a documentary, not quite fiction, and was deliberately designed to keep you from knowing the difference — and the 2026 remake that asks the harder question: why are you still watching?
20

Twenty-eight days.
19

A note arrives at the San Francisco Chronicle in August 1969.
18

There is a body lying on a riverbank.
17

Monster vs. Aileen Wuornos is the Fear Archive episode that asks the question true crime almost never asks: when society creates someone like this, does it have the right to destroy her?
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Six men walked into the Colorado mountains in February 1874.
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It is a normal day.
14

The Fear Archive investigates the Hmong sleep deaths — a series of unexplained nocturnal deaths among Southeast Asian refugees in the early 1980s that Wes Craven has cited as direct source material for A Nightmare on Elm Street.
13

What if the CIA didn't just experiment on human minds — what if they also shaped the movies inside them?
12

The Fear Archive investigates the Bell Witch — the oldest and most entrenched paranormal legend in American history — and the 2005 film that claimed this was the only haunting in the United States ever documented to result in a death.
11

The Fear Archive investigates the Travis Walton abduction — one of the most famous and most contested UFO encounters in American history — and the 1993 film that tried to put the experience on screen.
10

Black Christmas vs. Danny LaPlante is the episode that asks the question horror fans have never dared to ask out loud: did the film create the killer?
09

The Fear Archive investigates the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter — the most detailed and extensively documented alien creature sighting in American history — and the unlikely film it helped inspire.
08

The Fear Archive examines the DeFeo murders — one of the most disturbing family annihilations in American true crime history — and the exploitation film that tried to explain them with demons and incest.
07

The Fear Archive investigates Joseph Kallinger — a Philadelphia shoemaker, father of seven, and serial killer who claimed God ordered him to murder every human being on earth — and the Bill Paxton film that channeled his darkness.
06

The Fear Archive examines the Keddie Cabin murders — one of the most disturbing unsolved cases in California history — and how that atmosphere of random, senseless violence found its way into The Strangers.
05

The Fear Archive investigates the haunting of Doris Bither — the real paranormal case that UCLA researchers took seriously enough to document — and the 1982 film The Entity that dramatized it.
04

Ed Gein is the most influential killer in horror film history — and most people do not know the half of it.
03

The Fear Archive investigates Ray and Faye Copeland — a Missouri farming couple convicted of serial murder in their seventies — and the Ti West horror film X, which excavates the darkness lurking beneath rural American surfaces.
02

The Fear Archive investigates Paul Bateson — a radiology technician, Exorcist film extra, and convicted killer — and William Friedkin's Cruising, the film that documented the exact world Bateson moved through while bodies were disappearing into the Hudson River.
01

The Fear Archive investigates Danny Rolling — the Gainesville Ripper — and the murders that Kevin Williamson turned into Scream.

Every Dead Air

The other half. Every episode of Dead Air.

Horror news, listener mail, and whatever Amanda and Mike cannot stop thinking about. Same feed as The Fear Archive, no separate subscription.

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Fear Archive Membership

More of the show.

Five dollars a month. Every episode ad-free, a Dead Air you can’t get anywhere else once a month, and The Watch List — a horror movie club where Amanda and Mike pick the film and everyone argues about it afterward.

The main feed stays free. It always will.

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About the Show

Horror isn’t just entertainment. It’s evidence.

Every horror film starts somewhere — in a real crime, a moral panic, a folk legend, or a cultural anxiety that nobody wanted to say out loud. The Fear Archive finds that starting point.

Each episode, Amanda Kagiwada and Michael Ryan Assip pick a horror film and follow it backward: the true events it drew from, the era it was made in, and the specific dread it was designed to tap. The result is something that feels less like a podcast about movies and more like an autopsy on fear itself.

Occasionally, the line runs the other direction — The Exorcist, Black Christmas, and Scream didn’t just reflect fear; they helped generate it.

Research-heavy. Frequently funny. Never precious about it.

A Violet Hour Media Production Explore the full catalog →
Amanda Kagiwada

Amanda Kagiwada

Co-Host

Amanda is a writer, producer, and lifelong horror obsessive based in Los Angeles. She co-created The Fear Archive and has been making it deeply, unnecessarily personal ever since.

Michael Ryan Assip

Michael Ryan Assip

Co-Host

Michael Ryan Assip writes for stage, screen, and audio. He co-wrote The Gloom and Hollow for Violet Hour Media, and brings the same level of craft to explaining exactly why Jaws made an entire generation afraid of municipal water.

Common Questions

What horror podcast connects movies to real crimes?

The Fear Archive. Each episode, Amanda Kagiwada and Michael Ryan Assip take a horror film and trace it back to the real crimes, folklore and cultural history it was built on — Scream and the Gainesville Ripper, A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Hmong sleep deaths, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Ed Gein. Research-heavy. Genuinely funny. Free.

How often do new episodes arrive?

Every other Wednesday, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Dead Air — Amanda and Mike on horror news, listener mail and the cases they cannot let go of — is its own show, in the same feed.