Spooky Stories Will Have You ‘Keep The Candle Burning’ (Review)

Keep the Candle Burning is an enjoyable trio of scary stories that feel custom-made for campy late-night TV. The writing is stuffed with predictable jump scares, the score is gorgeous but referential, the narrator has a textbook evil laugh that gets deployed one-too-many times, and none of the themes are especially sophisticated — but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t covered in goosebumps for the full 90 minutes of storytelling. Somehow, Electric Goldfish manages to bend a genre that usually requires group participation into an experience that works beautifully over headphones, at home… alone.

“For total immersion this audio has been designed to be listened to through headphones, and in the dark.” You should also do whatever the narrator says. Sure, you can listen without playing along. But none of the three stories that make up Keep the Candle Burning are all that scary on their own. Getting spooked requires buy-in. If you’ve ever lain in bed at night wondering what that sound at your window was, you’ll know what I’m talking about. “Yeah,” you may have thought at the time. “I know that’s just a tree and not a hook-handed axe murderer in my yard.” So you either accepted that mundane thought and fell asleep or you started paying closer attention to the shadows, to a cool gust of wind, and to that tap, tap, tapping on the glass. It’s not like you were scared, exactly. But when you buried yourself a little deeper under the covers — just in case — you were buying into the possibility that something sinister was scraping along out there. That’s the kind of buy-in it takes for things to get really scary.

Listeners are told up front that Keep the Candle Burning is an exploration of fear itself. After hiding in my own closet for 20 minutes, I’m pretty sure it’s a masterclass in shifting perspective to make the familiar feel pleasingly foreign. Part of what makes this shift work is the buy-in we talked about earlier: listeners are asked to collect all sorts of strange little props from around the house before pressing play. It’s hard not to feel haunted-house excited after arranging a knife, your housemate’s old doll, and a glass of salt water on the floor before pressing play. The 360º soundscape that accompanies your movement through your home’s “safe spaces” completes the experience.

It’s been a few days since I listened to Keep the Candle Burning, and it’s not the stories that have stuck with me — it’s the unfamiliar feeling of sitting in the dark with my knees pressed against the inside of my closet door while I listened for footsteps.

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Looking at the component parts: Lee Conway’s production quality and the Storyteller’s voice acting are top-notch, Nick Hutson’s music and sound design is a joy, and the overall experience comes together surprisingly well. But I think this was a case of something’s parts being more than their resulting whole. I’d have been hard-pressed to call “Keep the Candle Burning” an immersive experience if it weren’t for the use of spatial audio and an occasional interactive prompt. Take those away and you’re left with a standard narrative podcast that doesn’t feel like it was written to serve an interactive show. The immersive part of Keep the Candle Burning is well done, but it feels like an afterthought. The stories that make up this show’s skeleton are basic campfire stories that don’t inform our interaction with the narrator. And while there’s nothing wrong with telling a straightforward story, I would have preferred a more integrated experience that didn’t feel like the horror equivalent of “sing along to the bouncing ball.”

The show’s intentional dedication to an outdated aesthetic presented another challenge. A few moments — a euro-centric description of “exotic masks,” for instance, that felt othering in a colonial sort of way — made me uncomfortable enough to pull me out of the story. Electric Goldfish absolutely nailed their tribute to a style of horror that was popular in the 1980s. But in 2021, I want production companies to figure out how to bring nostalgia like that into their shows without relying on unnecessary cultural clichés.

Even with the above-noted reservations, I recommend Keep the Candle Burning. Not a giant horror buff? Don’t worry about it. Keep the Candle Burning was “designed to give a warm nod and salutation towards classic favorites like The Twilight Zone and Tales of the Unexpected.” Just like these classics, you can expect to be creeped out but not traumatized. If you’re on the fence, read the disclaimers, give yourself a little time to gather up props like red thread and a glass of salt water, then turn out the lights and take the plunge. I promise that Keep the Candle Burning is a great way to kick off your very own spooky summer of good-natured chills and thrills.

Keep the Candle Burning; £4.99; online/at home; play as many times as you like; Ongoing. Electric Goldfish is a creative partnership between Faceless Ventures, Incognito Experiences and Nick Hutson Music.

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