How Orson Welles’ iconic The War of the Worlds broadcast inspired surreal new Apple+ drama Calls
- This unconventional nine -part thriller series uses phone calls, and sparse graphics and text to play on viewers’ imaginations.
- Pedro Pascal, Rosario Dawson and Lily Collins all give great vocal-only performances.
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.