In 1938, in a nervous world approaching conflagration, a young American radio star called Orson Welles, backed by the Mercury Theatre company, broadcast his dramatisation of a 19th-century science fiction novel by near-namesake HG Wells. Soon after The War of the Worlds hit the airwaves, terrified audiences across the United States started packing up their station wagons and leaving town. They were convinced that a Martian invasion of Earth really was in progress, so persuasive were the horrifying images of interplanetary conflict Welles’ masterful work had generated in listeners’ heads. We now know that reports of the Earth’s demise were greatly exaggerated – as were the accounts of traumatised citizens fleeing in panic. Nevertheless, the power of suggestion had been established – and that’s something at devious play in nine-episode production Calls , based on Timothée Hochet’s French series of the same name and streaming in its entirety from Friday on Apple TV+. Our modern-day Welles is Fede Álvarez, director and co-writer of an unconventional work that is heard as much as seen, meaning the surreal horrors it spews out are products of one’s own imagination. Which could prove dangerous in a 21st-century world that is permanently on edge. The calls in question are telephone calls, made and received in each episode by mostly ordinary folks in apparently normal settings … the last part of which equation rapidly disintegrates as “normality” vanishes down a rabbit hole of mind-warping bewilderment. While the conversations take place, unseen terrors take hold, bizarre events spiral into chaos and time twists and shatters until all interlocutors are physically and mentally disoriented. Star Wars fans build replica Mandalorian spaceship in Siberia And because the accompanying graphics, plus overlaid text, are minimal (but unexpectedly potent, more of which later), the worst is not only easy to imagine, but psychologically irresistible. We might be more tech-savvy than Welles’ audience, but the flip side of the coin is that, bombarded by information, we’re always ripe for a good conspiracy theory – an idea not lost on Álvarez. “For me, the inspiration was always Orson Welles doing The War of the Worlds and convincing everybody there was an alien invasion,” he says during a video call from his native Uruguay. “That sort of thing, [so we] can convince the audience that this is an actual phone conversation and you really can get lost in it. Doing that requires a certain level of realism and great performances, otherwise you wouldn’t [believe] that they are real people talking.” Delivering those performances in an unusual environment were Rosario Dawson ( Briarpatch ), Aaron Taylor-Johnson ( Tenet ), Jennifer Tilly ( Family Guy ), Paul Walter Hauser ( Cobra Kai ), Danny Huston ( Children of Men ), Stephen Lang ( Avatar) , Pedro Pascal ( The Mandalorian ) and Lily Collins ( Emily in Paris ), all heard but not seen, yet given a great deal of leeway when it came to trying to unsettle their forthcoming audiences. “At this level of cast, most of them had experience of voice acting,” says Álvarez. “And there’s a lot of freedom when it comes to performing for animation: if you make a mistake you go back and say it again, there’s no ‘cut’ and ‘action’ again because someone said something wrong. We gave them a lot of freedom with the lines,” he adds. “They had a script, obviously, but we could always let them improvise. All they needed to know for voice acting was, ‘Talk close to the mic!’ Whatever limitations there were they always overcame them.” Realism in the wide spectrum of performances was also a product of circumstances. “With the pandemic and the lockdowns, most of it was recorded in the actors’ homes,” says Álvarez. “Some would run to their backyards to do an exterior scene or go into the street with their microphones, so that as far as possible they evoked the spaces they were supposed to be in [according to] the stories. They all became audio technicians in their own ways!” Given that the series’ graphics are relatively minimal, might it be possible to listen to the show, as if on the radio, and not watch it at all? “You could,” says Álvarez, “but it wouldn’t be the same experience. The graphics are like a Rorschach test, everyone sees something different on the screen and your attention is drawn in a completely different way than it would be if it were just audio. There are also clues to the stories in the graphics, so it’s absolutely a better experience if you’re looking at them.” “Because it was Apple, we went back to basic, almost monochrome, simple colours,” says Álvarez. “The inspiration was the original Macintosh graphics, when they went colour for the first time. There’s a simplicity and beauty to them. And we knew that as the season evolved the graphics would also evolve in fantastic ways, so the graphics team took that and created amazing things. “I remember telling them I wanted one image that could be the cover of an album – like if a rock band did a series of nine albums that had a consistency. So here, each episode has a shape: we go from a line to a circle to a triangle … every episode has one shape as a reference, that was going to be the starting point.” Where you go from there is up to you. Take the call.