If you listen to the Lore podcast, you’ll recognize host Aaron Mahnke’s dulcet voice immediately as it beckons you to join him for a television adaptation of his acclaimed audio show. Yes, Lore has a new Amazon Studios series in development, which will seek to echo the podcast’s goal of exploring dark parts of history to reveal something about ourselves. Naturally, Mahnke’s noteworthy voice will be along for the experience, narrating and illuminating between filmed segments featuring guest actors like Robert Patrick, Colm Feore, Campbell Scott, and True Blood‘s Kristin Bauer van Straten.

This is real make-popcorn-and-turn-off-all-the-lights stuff right here.

It’s a beautifully simple concept that works because Mahnke does the homework and spins old yarns into compelling modern tales that deliver us uncomfortably into the insane asylum or wooden shack or slaughterhouse in question. The trailer is beautiful (that patchwork animation!), and its haunting sensibility is appropriate not only for the creepy tone of the show (it’s launching on a Friday the 13th in October, after all) but also for the way these stories stick around in our cultural subconscious. The subjects and the stories themselves linger.

The six-episode series will blend documentary footage, mixed media, and Mahnke’s fireside voiceover to bring us the real stories that gave birth to horrifying myths and legends–vampires, werewolves, creepy dolls, seances, and more.

There will undoubtedly be a few scares, but if the show is like its podcast progenitor, the overwhelming emotion will be shocked despair at the depths of human ability, with the bonus despairing sentiment that people are alike all over.

What do you think?

Images: Amazon Studios