October 8, 2022 • 59 mins
Once in a while a movie comes along that's so forward-thinking it changes the way that horror is done. A new subgenre is spawned, new tropes are established, and audiences are more terrified than ever. Hear about these pivotal works in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. The moment October starts, all I want to
do is watch horror movies. So I thought it would
be a good select this weekend to release our episode
on horror movies. If you watch much horror, doesn't take
long to catch up to the fact that there are
a lot of creddy horror movies out there. But there's
also a bunch of really great ones too, and we
talk about some of them here. I hope this episode
(00:21):
directs you to some movies that scare your socks off
this October. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a
production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:42):
I'm Josh Clark, Charles W. Chuck Bryant Towdy, middle names Wayne,
middle names Malcolm. There we have. I always forget about
that Malcolm. Yeah, Wayne named after Wayne Coin, right, Uh? No,
John Vane and you were named after Malcolm in the middle.
(01:03):
That's right, right. Frankie Munis is my name saying? I
hope he's okay. Early, Brian Kranston too. I used to
love that show. Oh, it's a great show. I watched it,
um like within the last couple of months. I was
cleaning the house and put it on Netflix and still great. Yeah. Yeah,
(01:24):
it's really is a good show. So you clean your house,
you put on your VR goggles and just cue up
Malcolm in the Middle. Yeah. No, I just walk around
and bump into things and right exactly. But I put
on like a huge feather duster suit. Yeah, so you're
just cleaning and bumping into things. That's right, That's how
I do it. Yeah, it works kind of Well, someone's
(01:47):
gonna take that idea. Yeah, they like the shark Nado. Yeah,
but they should just they should sell that suit with
purple drink. I think you get one spot on the
floor really really clean. Uh, what are you gonna title
this one? By the way, because this was your pick,
(02:08):
and we title our own shows some horror films that
change the genre, all right, and you should add this
a k A. How could you guys forget blank? Yeah, yeah,
we should say like this. First of all, this is
a Grabster article, So it's Grabster's list, and he knows
(02:29):
what he's talking about. If you look at some of
the entries, some don't even have source tags. He's just like,
I just know he should just Grabster. But we even
took his list and carved some out and put some in.
So this is how about this. This is Josh and
Chuck's idea of some horror films that change the genre,
(02:51):
featuring the mind of the grabster. Yes, in other words,
it is not a complete list of every horror film
that changed the genre. Yes, because I would argue that well,
and actually I see grabs or put Texas Chainsaw Massacre
in there. He said that if this were a top
fifteen list, that would be in there. So would Alien. Yeah,
(03:11):
he has that Alien ring Goo and the U S
remake Ring and I would lobby for Well, Psycho didn't
make it onto his list, which but we're going to
put that in. And there was one more. Oh, even
though I didn't really think it was that great, the
movie Saw, I think kind of changed horror films. And
(03:33):
that's what this list is. Not best horror films, but
things that kind of changed the game. Yeah, it seems
like Saw kind of kicked off that that torture porn, Yeah,
didn't it. I can't remember if it was that or hostile,
one of the two. It was definitely one of the two.
For a sub genre. Well, it's pretty accurate, actually it is.
(03:55):
But most of these are movies that either uh, We're
or the first of its kind and maybe did start
a sub genre, or movies that were so popular that
they just you know, kind of rewrote how people view
horror movies. Some of them because of marketing, some because
they were really good movies, some because of box office,
(04:18):
but all of these I don't think anyone could argue
did not change the genre. How about that? Yeah, I
think that's well put dude. Uh. And before we get
started speaking of horror, I want to give a plug
to bow my friend Toby's movie that's coming out. He's
a producer on a movie coming out called The Ghost Story. Yeah, Toby. Uh.
(04:41):
When we met Toby, well you knew Toby before me,
of course, because he's your friend and I know him
through so really, but he was he was small time
doing short films and stuff. And since that time, and
this has been within the last like since we've been
doing this podcast, he's now big time. Yeah. They did
Pete Dragon yeah, um, and then yeah they have this
(05:04):
this they did Ain't Them Bodies Saints was I think
the one that they kind of broke out with, and
then this one, um definitely kind of falls into that
same look. And mood and feel what. It's called The
Ghost Story, and I think it comes out in July,
and I think it's labeled a drama rather than horror
or even supernatural or thriller um. But the reason I
(05:28):
tie it into horrors because A twenty four is releasing
it and A four is killing it with horror movies lately. Yeah,
that's a good Uh, that's good outfit. They did The Witch,
they did The Black Coat's Daughter. Have you seen that? Uh? No,
it's on Amazon Prime. It's on Amazon Prime right now. Dude.
(05:51):
It's one of the best fourror movies I've seen in
a while. I think The Witch is probably my favorite
right now. Black Coats Daughter is a close second. And
then last night I saw it is at night in
the theater and it comes at night. Actually upset my
stomach that ending did it? Was? It was that rough? Yeah.
(06:11):
I think we're we've we're at a place with horror
movies that we haven't been in a long time, like
a really genuine good spot. Yeah, like the whole torture
porn sort of era is over and the found footage
thing is so played. But I think we'd like with
movies like the which I think we've really like there's
(06:32):
some really creative uh it follows. Did you see that one? Yeah,
like some just really creative ways of bringing scares that
I haven't seen before. Get Out. That was amazing. I
still haven't seen it. You're gonna love it. I'm I'm
envious of you. It's really it's great movie, Chuck, you're
gonna love it. Well. I don't get to the movies
much anymore, and the only time I could was a
(06:53):
couple of weeks ago, and I elected to see Wonder Woman. Yeah.
Not a good choice. A long way of saying congratulations
to Toby and his new film, Well, it's funny. We
also need to congratulate Toby too, because Toby just got married.
Toby and and Nell are now married, so congratulations to
them as well. So this is this new movie with
(07:13):
his uh directing partner David Lowry, Yeah, yeah, and Rooney Mara. Yeah,
they definitely do. So it's gonna be good. I'm looking
forward to it. Okay, So let's get started. Thanks for
indulging that, Thank you, everybody. So the first the first
movie on our list is what's widely considered the first
(07:36):
horror movie, and it's a nine movie out of Germany
that um basically was the first film that undertook what's
the artistic movement known as German Expressionism called the Cabinet
of Dr Kaligari. Yeah, I mean some say, like you said,
it was the first horror movie. Some say it was
the first cult film. Um it Uh, well, just you
(08:03):
may not be able to get the whole thing if
you're not into silent movies, but you should cue up
a little bit of it and watch a little bit
of it because it's hugely impactful. Um and still to
this day like very disconcerting to look at because of
it how um ominous and weird it looked, just physically looked. Yeah.
(08:27):
Like the sets that they built are obviously um constructive manufactured.
They were not in any way shape before him going
for realism. They were going for surrealism for sure. And
so like the staircases are at crazy weird curves and
angles and um, like everything from the house, the houses,
rooftops to the blades of grass are super pointy and sharp,
(08:51):
and and the shadows that they employed were just perfect.
You've never seen a better use of shadows than this.
They didn't get in the way they just created this mood.
And it was the first movie to really kind of
do that, to just take to use the camera for
something other than capturing realism. Uh, and it it it
for that reason, it's considered the first horror movie because
(09:14):
that that's such a standard part of horror, whether large
like in large part like in a Tim Burton movie,
or in small part. You know where you're um, you're
using small spaces to create claustrophobia. The idea of using
the set to mess with the viewers mind, I think
is born in Dr Caligary's cabinet. Yeah. It's almost like
(09:36):
they they took a child and gave them construction paper
and said cut out scary things. Uh. And then like
like that movie The Baba Duke, I think the actual
book within The Baba Duke was hugely inspired by this, uh,
the actual movie itself. Um. The plot is about a
sideshow operator, a hypnotist who um has a patient that
(09:58):
he takes around of these side shows with sleep disorders.
Supposedly he's been asleep his entire life, and he uses
this patient to commit murder. Right, he's like a sleepwalker, Yeah, somnambulist.
So that in itself is a pretty frightening plot. And
to think about that being cooked up in nineteen twenty
when there weren't really not such things that you think
(10:20):
of as horror movies is pretty impressive. Um. And then
some of the deeper critiques I've seen of it was
like the the explanation for why the filmmakers chose like
these weird odd angles to kind of depict insanity or
that kind of thing, Um, was rooted in World War One.
(10:41):
The horrors of World War One had just been seen
and revealed and recently taken place, and it upended Europe
in general, and especially Germany as well. Um. And that
the idea is that they might not have had this idea,
They might not have had this desire, this drive to
(11:01):
create this this weird set and in fact this weird
movie had World War One not happened. Yeah. This there's
this writer Jeff Saparrito, who um kind of put it
this way about German expressionism because I wasn't exactly sure
how to define it, but you're kind of right on
the money, he said. Germany was largely isolated from the
rest of the world following World War One, so expressionism
(11:22):
therefore became confined to the country refers to a number
of creative movements from World War One through the nineteen twenties.
Expressionist works examined the current in future state of the
culture through bold and artistic creations of creativity, and often
explore topics of madness, betrayal, and other intellectual concepts. And
nothing encapsulates these ideas more than the cabinet of Dr Calla.
(11:46):
That's basically what I say. Yeah, you did you read
that or were you just uh that? I don't know
that that one or not? It sounded kind of familiar. Yeah,
not to say you came up with it. Um, so
the I of the this set is creating like a
creepy tone and texture to everything. Um, that was Dr Calgary.
(12:08):
That's how it changed the genre. Yeah, Tim Burton say
thank you. Yeah, Um, have you seen Coraline? No? But
I know it. It's a They did that to a
very good effect. You know. I think Hodgman does a
voice in that, doesn't he does? He does the dad.
He did a spectacular job because you actually forget it's
Hodgment while you're watching it. That's impossible. Alright, Chuck, Moving on,
(12:30):
That was We're Gonna fast forward all the way to
what nineteen sixty nineteen sixty three. If you're talking about
Blood Feast, well I wasn't, but let's uh. Cybern Simon
Abraham's of Roger Ebert dot Com says, this Blood Feast
is a terrible film, and a historically important one too,
(12:52):
And I think that's sort of the deal with Blood Feast.
It is not good by any accounts. Did you watch
any of it? Yeah, sure, it's not good. No, it's
not good. It's terrible. It was written on a basis
on a fourteen page outline, didn't even have a script.
It's got the same cult cloying technicolor of like an
early Hawaii five oh episode directed by Herschel Gordon Lewis
(13:18):
and producer David F. Friedman. And basically the idea was this,
these guys did not see films as art. They saw
them as a business and thought you were foolish if
you thought it was anything else. So they sat around
they brainstormed movies that they thought no one else would make. Yeah,
because they started out making like Porky's esque type movies,
(13:39):
and they were they were doing fine with that. But
apparently they were successful enough with it that theyre started
to be imitators and the market was crowded, so they said,
where can we go make movies that no one else
is gonna make? Yeah, because we want to shock people essentially.
So a couple of ideas they had that did not
make the list was Conman evangelists and Nazi torture, which
(14:02):
which were later made exactly. And they finally said, you
know what no one's really done yet is hardcore gore yep,
Like everyone always cuts away when the knife comes, and
you're like, what if we showed the grossest gorrious stuff
imaginable on screen? Yeah, And even still they didn't show
(14:23):
so like one of the first murder a woman stabbed
through the eye and then the murderer hacked their legs
off of the machete, and they didn't show the knife
penetrate the eye. They didn't show the machete making contact
with the skin. But what they did in Blood Feast,
and what made Blood Feast the first of its kind,
was they would show the what came after that. They
(14:45):
would show the brains on the ground, they would show
the entrails like on the knife. Um, they would show
the leg being you know that had been dismembered being
put into a bag and like the wound that was
left by like that. This was no one had ever
done anything like that on film before. No, and it
(15:05):
paid off. They depending on who you ask, the budget
was uh, anywhere from like twenty to thirty grand and
it made between seven and thirty million dollars, Like I said,
depending on where you get your info. But by all
accounts it was a huge financial success compared to what
they paid to make it. Yeah, and they shot it
(15:26):
in um, I think six days or something downe in Miami. Um,
based on a fourteen page outline. There wasn't even a script,
it as an outline, and basically it was like, murderer
goes and kills this girl. Yeah, next girl, murderer comes in,
kills girl, cuts off leg that kind of thing, right, Yeah,
I mean, if it matters the movies about serial killer caterer, Yeah,
(15:51):
that's it. There's your plot right there. Um. But the
the it was just such a revolutionary movie that the
sensors at the time there wasn't such a thing as
the m p a A hadn't been formed yet, um,
And there was basically no one except for local sensors
overseeing movies, so you know, you you could be playing
(16:11):
in one town um to all audiences, and then the
next town over it could be banned. But these sensors
had never seen anything like it, and they didn't know
what to do with it. So it was hugely successful
commercially too. Yeah. And another big impact it had was
it inspired a generation of special effects. But basically, um,
(16:32):
let's be honest, young boys who were doing this on
their own Super eight films right and said, wait, uh,
I can get a job doing this. Yeah. So including
Tom Savini I think was inspired by it, wasn't he
or was he inspired by Yeah? I think he was
inspired by Blood feast um. And then we should also
(16:53):
give a mention to the Grand Gun y'all. Is that
how you think it's pronounced? Grand Guen y'all. It was
a theater in Paris, I believe, from the late nineteenth
century onto I think sixty two, so the year before
Blood Fees came out it had closed up. But it
used to do this stuff on stage. It was like
a gore fest um, and there was lots of like
(17:16):
blood and sex and and like depraved themes in the
plays that were put on at this theater. People loved it.
They were crazy for it. Um, and this was kind
of like the grand gun y'all tradition, put onto film
for the first time and who right for that? You
(17:36):
want to take a break, Yeah, let's do it, all right, Charles,
(18:05):
we're back. So nineteen sixty or nineteen sixty, not eight.
I've got nineteen sixty eight in front of my face. Uh,
and that could be no other movie. The Night of
the Living Dead classic George Romero film. Romero was a
TV director, making TV commercials. Commercial director. Rather, he was
(18:26):
also making short films for Mr Rogers neighborhood at the time. Yeah,
and he was he was young. Yeah, I don't I
don't know how old he was, but he was pretty
young guys still. I think when he made Shot and
Not in the Living Dead, he was like twenty six
or twenty seven, so uh yeah, but any standard, that's
still pretty young unless you're twenty three. So he I'm
(18:49):
he had um. He and his buddies were like, let's
make a horror movie, but let's not make a stupid
horror movie. Let's make on with like an actual plot
that explores like deep themes too, like a good movie.
Let's let's make the first good horror movie. Well yeah, so,
and we'll delve into that little more, but that that
was definitely a different thing at the time. And the
(19:10):
other different thing was that all the horror movies up
to that point, uh, they were called the Universal monsters
from Universal Studios, you know, all the kind of the
classic Frankenstein and Dracula and Creature from the Black Lagoon
and the Werewolf, and that was where that was mainstream horror.
And George Romero comes along and says, um, how about zombies,
(19:34):
And everyone said, what in the world's a zombie? And
he said, well, let me define that for every future
generation of movie and TV goers and lovers. Yeah, and
there have been zombie movies before, but they had been
things like like Dr Caligari's Cabinet, somebody who was under
the control of something someone else or something like that,
(19:54):
there was a hypnotist or this was like the first
time what we think of a these were ever introduced,
like flesh eating ghoules who were dead and come back
to life, just what you think of as a zombie.
This guy started that genre, like you said, Yeah, they
(20:14):
shot it outside in in Pittsburgh on about hundred and
fifteen thousand dollar budget ended up grossing twelve million domestic
not bad, and I think close to twenty worldwide. And
um was eventually selected by the Library of Congress for
preservation in the National Film Registry. It's a good movie.
It's a very good movie. He shot in black and
(20:37):
white to save on cost, even though color was the
standard by that point, and black and white is also
a little more forgiving for rudimentary special effects. And one
of the revolutionary things he did was cast a black
actor as the lead, and for no other reason than hey,
this guy Dwayne Jones is really good, exactly right. Like,
(20:59):
he didn't go back and go, oh, well, you know,
our our heroes black, so we need to make the
the whole thing of meditation on race and have him
confront racism. It was just we're here's the script. And
then the guy playing the lead just happens to be black,
and he was the best guy in the auditions. And
you know this didn't really happen. You didn't just cast
(21:21):
a black guy as a lead actor for no with
no like ulterior motive, basically right. So I read this
review from the from the Time from nineteen sixty nine.
The year after it came out, young Roger Ebert went
and watched it and he wrote, um a pretty pretty
interesting review, which is basically it was about the reaction
(21:43):
of the audience. And he went to a Saturday matinee
that was populated almost entirely by ten eleven year olds,
and they were used to seeing the Creature from the
Black Lagoon for Frankenstein or um. You know, just just
movies that any kid could handle and could enjoy watching,
(22:04):
and you know, fun, scary kind of stuff. And he said,
that's how that that was how the crowd reacted for
the first half of the movie. But then about the
point where and here's here comes spoilers. Everybody, if you
haven't seen either Living Dead, just hit yourself in the
knee with a hammer. Um. You the the teenage couple
(22:27):
go to get gas and when their car blows up
and his engulfs in flames, they die. They're burned to death.
He said. Right about that time, the tone, the mood
of the theater changed and there was no like gleeful
screaming anymore. Kids were starting to like not move and
we're afraid to like move in their seats, and some
were quietly crying to themselves, and from that the whole,
(22:50):
the whole point on, it just got worse and worse
for these little kids watching this movie. So it was
a huge impact on horror movies. A uh, like you
said earlier, it was kind of the first one to
really sort of delve into other issues like if you
look up, like significance of not at a living dead
or um meaning of not a living dead or something
(23:12):
like that. There scores of articles that have been written
over the years of how it was a metaphor for
the Vietnam War, or an allegory about distrust of authority
or the collapse of traditional family. And I think Romero said,
like I didn't necessarily mean all these things, but you
can certainly find it in the movie. That is art.
(23:32):
Like one of the great revelations of my adult life
is that the artist, the writer, the songwriter, the um,
the author rarely intends to imbue as much meaning into
their work as people take from it. That that's part
of art as interpretation in that neat like you don't
(23:54):
if you're a writer, if you're a young writer right
now who's just sitting there racking your brain for how
to insert metaphor and meaning into this. Just write your
story and people are going to find it for themselves. Yeah, agreed.
I wish somebody had told me that. When I was younger,
I had teachers that said stuff like that. Oh, I
didn't like good college professors in English that would when
(24:18):
students would argue like I think he means this, he
would say like, you know, he may or she may
not have meant anything. Right, I's the revelation. I had
teachers that would just go wrong. Uh. The other thing
about Night Living Dead is it spawned um obviously the
zombie genre and uh sequels Dawn of the Dead, Day
of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, the Walking
(24:40):
Dead remakes shout out, shout out, Stephen. You know, yeah right,
why not? I'm still into the Walking Dead. You yeah,
we talked about this. Yes, yes, okay, Stephen, you listens. Anyway,
zombies are at still hot and we can so hot.
(25:03):
We we owe that all to Mr Romero, master of
the genre. Yep. Check one more thing too, that that
NYA Living Dead did that they weren't the first, but
very famously Romero did was kill off his hero senselessly
and shockingly. Yeah. At the end, good point. Thanks man. Okay,
so let's move on. Like I said, yes, stay after Christmas.
(25:29):
If you've ever been uh in Washington, d C. At
the end of M Street, you might have noticed very
uh during the daytime, ordinary set of stairs. At nighttime,
maybe they look creepy to you because those are the
Exorcist stairs. Yeah. I'm trying to conjure the music in
my head, but all I'm coming up with is the
(25:49):
unsolved mysteries music. It was not quite right, so close,
but it's not. I'm so unsatisfied right now. So The
Exorcist was based on a book by William Peter Bladdie
who wrote this uh in one and then in seventy
three the movie was made. Uh. And there's I think
(26:09):
I referenced not too long ago a great Mark Marin
interview with um William Friedkin where he talks about the
audition process for Linda Blair. So you should go listen
to that because it was pretty insightful. But um, the
Exorcists really kind of changed the game, UM and that
it was a It spawned a bit of a sub
(26:30):
genre of um demonic movies. Sure, I were like religious based. Yeah,
even though I guess Rosemary's Baby was before that, but
The Exorcist was such a mega hit and it was
nominated for Best Picture, the first horror movie to be
nominated UM for for that, and so it was just
(26:51):
like it was a big deal. It was. It sold
six million tickets in about two months. Yeah, it's amazing.
This is a horror movie, right, and it came out
in nowhere. Um. Apparently the effect I had on audiences
was extremely pronounced. There was a woman in Boston who
had to be carried from the theater and she goes
(27:11):
it cost me four dollars, but I only lasted twenty minutes.
So we're like that's the stories of that got around
and and people wanted to see, you know, this movie
can't be that scary, and they went and they were like,
oh my god, that movie is that scary. Yeah, and
it holds up too. I mean, um, special effects are
they'd never quite hold up. But it's still a very
(27:33):
creepy movie. Um. Very famously, Linda Blair played the little
girl who was possessed by a demon, and uh, the
the heavy hitters were called in to exercises demon, including
um A Max van Style who was only forty four
(27:53):
when he played this guy in his easily in his seventies. Yeah,
is he Benjamin Button? Well know they made him up. Wow,
they did a great job. Yeah, which I don't see
why they felt the need to do that. I know
they God, who else did they almost cast? Oh? Brando?
They almost cast Brando? But that would have been a
(28:14):
colossal mistake. Well, Friedkin said, you know, as soon as
you do that, it's a Marlon Brando movie. Yeah. And
I think he said picture a Brando picture. Sure, that's
what they said. Uh. And he'd wanted to be a
Brando picture. He wanted to be the Exorcist. Um, so
that you said. It was based on a book from
two years before by William Peter Bladdie. He he he apparently
was known as a comedy writer and he wanted to
(28:38):
do something different. He said, Hey, wouldn't it be funny
if the little girl's head spun around and she keeped
green bile? Wait, what do you hear? What I ever
do with the crucifix? Hey? So? Um? He actually wrote
the book because he wanted to scare America back to church.
That was his aim with the book. He believed that
(28:58):
there was real evil going on the world that part
of it was because of a a loss of faith
or a loss of religion, I guess, and that's what
he wanted to do with it. UM. And when the
movie came out, there was a huge pushback from religious
authorities like Billy Graham said he believed the movie itself
was possessed by a demon. I'm not sure how that
(29:19):
would happen, but that was like a huge thing at
the time. UM and a lot of a lot of
other UM religious establishment types were like, don't go see
that movie. It's evil. But there were some who who
were part of part of religion, major organized religion, who
kind of saw through it and said, no, no, this
(29:41):
is it's good that we're talking about this, that there
we're telling people, you know, or people are seeing that
there there's such a thing as like good versus evil
literally combating on earth, you know, and people are talking
about this and thinking about it. And so in that sense,
the Exorcist like really kind of went to bat for
organized religion. Interesting. I saw another um criticism of it though,
(30:04):
that that said, one of the themes of the movie
that the book hadn't really intended but the movie picked
up on and expounded on, was intergenerational conflict, that that
it was Reagan the child represented the younger generation who
was at war with the establishment, and that it even
goes um so far as to where her mother, the
(30:27):
actress the movie that she's working on is about campus
takeover by young radicals, so that that's kind of a
theme that was apparently part of the subtext, but was
a major part of it in the movie at least interesting. Yeah,
I thought so too, because apparently, I mean, you think
of intergenerational conflict now, apparently in the late sixties and
(30:48):
early seventies it was sharper than it probably ever has
been before or since. Yeah, m hm. The only other
thing I got is that the the green stuff that
she projectiles was Anderson's P soup and a little bit
of oatmeal texture Anderson's PC. Well, but you can't give
(31:09):
that anymore, Chuck. Let's do Jaws and then we'll take
a break. I love talking about Jaws. Yeah, I mean,
Jaws is on you know, I did my top favorite
movies list at one point on our website, and I
listed Jaws is my favorite movie favorite of all time. Yeah,
I mean that list changes, but it's Jaws is always
in my top five. I can watch it anytime it's on. Uh.
(31:32):
It is one of the I've all. I've often said
it's a perfect movie. Um. And what I mean by
that is there's just not a misstep. Like the casting
was perfect, the acting was great, the script was great.
It played out just perfectly throughout the film. Um. He,
like Spielberg, was just a master storyteller with that movie.
(31:56):
You were talking about how young George Romero was in
Night of the Living Dead. Olberg was twenty six when
he made Jaws. He was thirteen years old. He Uh,
and he was apparently scared to death when he finished filming.
The schedule had been for fifty five days, it went
to a hundred and fifty nine. Yeah. He had I
think been allotted four million dollars. He ended up spending
(32:20):
twelve million on it. Um. Yeah, largely because a shooting
on water is notoriously difficult and be the shark mechanical
shark they used was legendarily um wonky and how it
are not wonky but wonky wonky. It didn't work. It
(32:41):
rarely worked. So they spent a lot of time and
burnt a lot of hours trying to get this shark
to do its thing, and uh so much so that
it didn't even make that many appearances in the movie.
I think they even kind of scaled it back, and
that ended up being better for the movie because you
didn't get as much shark. I looked up the um
the urban legend about the shark being named after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce,
(33:05):
and apparently it's true. Really, Yeah, Bruce Rayner was the
name of Spielberg's lawyer, and the that was the nickname
for the mechanical shark on the set was Bruce. That's
pretty funny. So with Jaws, right, we're talking about horror
movies that changed the genre. Jaws not only changed the
horror genre, it changed movie making to this day, and
(33:28):
in multiple ways, multiple massive ways. It changed the entire
film industry, almost single handedly. Yeah, it was at the time,
there was a there was no such thing. You take
it for granted now, but there was no such thing
as a quote unquote summer release. No, a lot of
(33:49):
theaters closed down because a C wasn't in every theater
and people didn't want to sit around in a hot
movie theater for two hours. Yeah, a summer release or
a tent pole for home or a blockbuster feature like
Jaws was the first one of all those. At the
time when Jaws came out, they used to UM release
(34:10):
a movie on maybe one two screens and say New
York or l A for a week, and they did
make its way to you know, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago for
a few weeks, and then eventually make it to your
small town six eight weeks later. That was how movies
were released, not Jaws. Jaws was released on four hundred
(34:31):
and thirty five screens across the country, which is huge,
which is part of the part of the UM Summer
Blockbuster release playbook now. Yeah, and it was also the
first movie to to spend lots and lots of money
on marketing UM and so I think the studios were like,
wait a minute, if you spend some dough on marketing,
(34:51):
you released this sing wide, you can make a ton
of money in the first month that the movie's out
and you're kind of set, like after that it's anything
else's gravy. Yeah, and that's after the first week or
two probably, Yeah, it was. Yeah, the whole the whole
point of blockbuster now is to get that opening weekend
to make all your money back in the opening weekend
(35:12):
and then everything else is gravy on top of it. Right,
Jaws was it didn't make it. I don't know. Maybe
it did make its money back in the first weekend
because it hit a hundred million dollars in like seventy
eight days or something incredible like that, because it was
the first movie too had a hundred million dollars and
it did it in just a couple of months. Even. Yeah,
it eventually went on to make about two hundred and
(35:34):
sixty million dollars domestically, which is I mean, that's a
great take now, Yeah, you know, much less the mid
nineteen seventies for a twelve million dollars spend. For sure.
My only beef here is that I would not consider
Jaws a horror movie. Yeah. I think it's an adventure film. Yeah,
I guess you're right, with a scary antagonist. Yeah, but um,
(35:58):
it's amazing how much I quote that movie in my
day today life. Yeah, just Shark, that's a great that's
a classic. All right, let's take a break. I'm gonna
meditate on that line, and we'll talk about a few
other scary movies, including one that was originally titled Scary
Movie Okay, moving on to Halloween. Halloween Chuck eight, I
(36:49):
believe Halloween. Yes, John Carpenter, Uh, the youngish John Carpenter
who originally titled this movie The Babysitter Murders. No, A
little on the nose. Yeah, pretty terrifying title, I guess.
Young Jamie Lee Curtis her very first movie, was it
(37:10):
really Yeah? Well, she went on to become known as
the scream Queen for all the horror movies she was in.
Totally and this was shot in twenty days and uh
South Pasadena as the Midwest and um it's credited as
being birthing the slasher genre. Yeah it did, so there
(37:31):
were slasher films before. The Town That Dreaded Sundown was
like based on a true crime story actually in Texas
of one called Black Christmas The Grabster sites from UR
haven't heard of that one. But the idea of um
of a faceless almost a like non entity entity coming
(37:55):
at you, uh and relentlessly stalking you, be impervious to harm,
as the Webster puts it, um, and just coming at
you again and again trying to kill you. That that
was that was all established by Halloween, and it was
done like too too great effect as well. Yeah, and
it holds up. It's still scary. Uh. Michael Myers, of
(38:17):
course was the killer. Um the music that John Carpenter score.
I mean, he scores most of his movies himself, but
very iconic, uh, basic thing. I think he only took
a couple of days to come up with it. But
like the Michael Myers character and the mask or so iconic,
the music is so iconic. Do you know about the mask, right, Chatner? Yeah, yeah,
(38:41):
go ahead. I went and check that one out too
to verify that it was true. And it definitely is
true that Michael Myers mask is actually a Captain Kirk
star Trek mask painted white. That is history. Yep. The
in the in the script when it came to the mask,
it just a pale, neutral features of a man. Yeah,
(39:04):
which makes the whole thing even creepier because he's an
implacid or is that the right word. I don't know.
He's just it's just almost like just an emotionless killer.
It made the fact that he was merciless, ruthless, pitiless
and and all arbitrarily killing people almost all the more
(39:25):
pronounced because his expression never changes. Well, to me, the
two things were creepiest about Halloween was the expression never
changed because of that mask, and he did not run,
like oh yeah, he would just walk and you still
got the feeling like you can't outrun this guy even
though he's walking. That was another creepy part about it.
It follows with the walking aspect of it for sure. Yeah,
(39:49):
in the same way that like twenty eight Days Later
was freaky and that it took zombies and made him run. Yeah.
Or I remember when I saw Friday I'm sorry, h
Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time and Freddy
Krueger was running around. I was like, that's not what
scary dudes do. Yes, scary dudes don't try now they
walk very creepily towards you and still somehow gained speed
(40:12):
on you even though you're running full speed. Freddy scared
me to death the first time I saw that movie. Yeah,
the first one was a pretty good one. But Halloween
established this, Like you said, it established the slasher genre,
and everything about slasher films still today all rooted in
Halloween John Carpenter's tropes. Yeah, and again, like you said,
there were a couple of other slasher films before, but
(40:34):
none of them grossed close to fifty million bucks. Wow,
is that how much Halloween made? Yeah, forty seven million
domestic at about a three hundred thousand dollar budgets. So
it uh, you know, that's sort of like with The Exorcists,
Like there were other movies that sort of did this
thing before, but when you have a huge hit that
does it was when it sort of redefines the genre
(40:55):
because it's money. Yeah, that's everyone starts paying attention after all, Right,
what's next? What's next? My friend? Is a movie that
came out when I don't know, were you still in college? Uh? No,
you must have just been out then I was out
a few years. Okay, Well, regardless around our college era,
(41:16):
this movie came out. Because up to this point, everything's
come out either when we were little or before we
were born. This one was right in our wheelhouse. It
was The Blair Witch Project, which came out. Yeah, and uh.
One of the big things that um Blair Witch Project
did well two things. Really, it established the found footage
genre or sub genre that is so overplayed now, uh
(41:39):
in the viral marketing campaign. And that's how I came
upon it. I remember very specifically being in the apartment
of Scotty Polito, who you know, he shot our TV show,
one of my oldest friends. And I was sitting in
his apartment on Claremont Avenue Indicator and I happened upon this.
And this was pre Facebook. I don't even know how
I found it. You before things were being shared around
(42:02):
and I happened upon this website, the very first Blair
Witch Project website, and I was like, dude, come over
here and check this out. This is the scariest thing
I've ever seen. And I remember the website set it
up as if it was real, and that this found
footage thing, it's so overdone now it's hard to go
back in time and remember when it was fresh. But
(42:25):
I remember looking at and being like, did this happen?
Did they really find this footage of this murder in
the woods? Liked to see this? That was the rumor
that this was actually real, man. And this is, like
you said, I mean, this is before the found footage genres.
So people were being exposed to this concept for the
first time, and we're kind of falling for it. I mean,
(42:45):
you're either in college or you're just recently out of college,
so you're maybe slightly more guldbal than you are ten
years ready to believe it? You want to believe right,
So yeah, the idea that this was actual found footage,
it just made it all the more enjoyable and people
were buying into it. And I think the other part
of it too, was that the filmmakers, partly because they
(43:06):
didn't have the budget for actual effects, left a lot
of the scariest parts to your imagination. Yeah, nor did
they have the talent to make a good narrative film,
I guess. I mean, they worked on a sixty four
page script, which I was surprised that it was that
that big. But they shot it for eight days and
(43:27):
originally they were going to make it like a documentary
about the found footage, and then one of them had
a flash of of perspective was like, wait, wait, wait, wait,
let's just release it like it's found footage. And that
was that. The rest was history. Yeah, and I'm poking fun.
That was not very nice at all. Um Eduard of
Sanchez and Daniel Myrick or Merrick, the co directors, they
(43:52):
they should be credited with the truly ingenious uh campaign
and invention that well, they weren't the first to come
up with on footage, right, there were some films before. Um,
I've never known how to pronounce it, Mondo Kanne, ermando Kane,
I think Connie. It's from nineteen sixty two and it
was supposedly a documentary about um like some like weird
(44:16):
tribal rituals. I think there's head shrinking maybe involved, and
it purported to be like real footage. Same with Cannibal Holocaust,
where if you've never seen Campbell Holocaust, go out and
watch it right now. It's very disturbing. Um. And it's
so disturbing that the director of the movie was charged
(44:36):
with murder because they believed that the actual murders depicted
they were so realistic. They thought that it was a
snuff film basically, but it was supposed to be a
documentary as well. So there was an idea of like
found footage or documentary style horror movies that had come before,
but nothing like The Blair Witch where it was just
straight up these people we found their their old camera, uh,
(45:00):
and this is what was on it. Well, and they
were smart enough to kind of dig up an old
thing that never went huge, you know, and they're like, hey, man,
like these other movies, they never really hit it big,
and they it was a timing thing. They they, I mean,
hats off for them to them, yeah, good for them,
and to them. Nice going to a right chuck. Scream, Yeah, scream.
(45:26):
I tease that it was originally titled scary movie. I'm
glad it wasn't because scary movie is awesome. I don't know,
it's scary movie ever would have been called maybe it
would have never been made, or maybe they would have
called that scream. Oh yeah, I guess so. So. Scream
was a very big deal when it came out. The
writer Kevin Williamson, um, and this is still the highest
growing slash of film of all time, basically Scream one. Yes,
(45:48):
it was huge. I got Nev Campbell's haircut as a
result of it. Like it was a big, big pop
culture water mark. It was. And one of the big
things about it, aside from the boatloads of money that
it made, was it spawned a sub genre called meta horror,
which is um even though it had been done by
(46:09):
no less than its own director Wes Craven. With Wes
Craven's New Nightmare Uh two years before Scream, it wasn't
nearly as popular, but met a horror is this idea?
And if you've ever seen Scream, you know they're constantly
just referencing horror movies, like this is where you know,
you don't go out and make out in the car
because that's where you get killed. And then they would
(46:29):
do that and get killed, right, although I don't think
that specific thing happened, like don't go back into the house. Yeah,
like all the tropes of horror movies are addressed in
the movie, and they're talking about them as the horror
movie tropes. Yes, yeah, exactly, maya horror. Yeah. And there
are plenty of other things that came along better met
(46:50):
a horror um examples like have you seen Tucker and
Dale Versus Evil? Uh no? Check it out? Man, all right,
that's a good movie. Zombie Land. Did see that where
he's rattling off all of the things that you need
to notice survive a zombie apocalypse that he learned from
zombie movies, right, And then Cabin in the Woods. Did
(47:11):
you see that? One? Great movie? It was a great movie.
I thought it was really good. I mean from beginning
to end, it was a great movie. Did you like Scream? Yeah?
I love Scream. I liked all the screams. I only
saw the first two. The second one I think might
have been even better than the first to me, And
(47:31):
that the second was shot Emily worked on that it
was shot here in at Agnes Scott College. Parts right
to go back and watch it knowing that now I'll
be like, oh, I've driven past that place. Uh. So
I got a few tidbits, like I said. Initial title
of scary movie um number two. The Weinstein Brothers initially
offered it to George Romero and Sam Rami, Um, what
(47:54):
else do I have here? Drew Barrymore was originally supposed
to play Sydney, the lead character, and then she said, no,
how about if I just played that girl at the beginning,
which kind of was a big thing because you see
Drew Marry Barrymore And it was a big shock when
she died in the first scene. You know, you can't
(48:15):
kill off your heroine right away. Yeah, I mean, like
I remember, I remember that first scene really really scaring
me when I saw it the first time in the theater.
Yeah it is. It's a scary, gruesome, gory. Yeah, very
well played. Uh. And then before he went to um
NEV Campbell, he went out to Alicia with Britney Murphy
and Reese Witherspoon Cambell your christ choice. Uh. And then
(48:40):
the mask, the iconic screen mask apparently wasn't off the
shelf mask. Wow, that made that company's money. Yeah. And
the wine Steins didn't like it. They were like, I
hate that mask. Everything else is fine, huh. But west
Craven said, no, it's got to be the mask. It
would be stupid. Bob m alright, we're gonna finish up
(49:03):
with our own edition here. Finally, nineteen sixty Psycho. I
can't believe this wasn't in the list. I think Ed
kept this off the list to toy with somebody he
doesn't like specifically. That's the only explanation. Yeah, because Psycho
changed everything. Yeah, it really did. I mean it was
(49:26):
the you could say that it was one of the
first slasher flicks. It was a early psychological thriller. Um.
It was based on the real life story of Ed Geen.
I mean, it doesn't exactly mirror a Gaen's life, but
the idea of um being obsessed with your mother so
(49:47):
much that you will commit murder. Uh. It was definitely
rooted in a Gains story. Um. If you're not familiar
with ed Geen. He not only he was I don't
even know if he was a serial killer. I think he.
I think he murdered one, maybe two people, but more
than anything, he was a grave robber. But he likes
(50:07):
to um dress up in people's skin, women's skin and
pretend he was his own mother. Which, man, that's a
lot of years on the couch work and that one
out or you can just die at the hands of
cops one of the two. Um. And he also inspired
leather Face from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yeah, and and Buffalo
Bill of course. Oh yeah, yeah, Sounds of the Lambs. Yeah,
(50:30):
one guy inspired all those two, all those guys. So
I found this article Psycho Colan The Horror Movie that
Changed the Genre by Owen Glieberman or is it Gliberman?
Think he wrote for Legendary Critic, wrote for e W
for years and years and now writes for a variety.
Oh he does. Yeah, but he uh he put it best.
(50:51):
He said, um, well, you know, the iconic shower scene,
first of all, is hugely important because it was Hitchcock
really kind of ripped up the script, not literally, but
the horror movie script when he kills off Janet Lee
halfway through the movie. It was you just didn't do
that at the time. We came out of nowhere, and
(51:13):
we've seen that come up later on, like at the
end of Nither Living Dead or Drew Barrymore and Scream.
Hitchcock was the first one to do that. Yeah, And Uh,
Glieberman puts it this way. He said he was also
slicing through years, decades, centuries even of audience expectation that
the hero or heroine of a fictional work would be
(51:33):
shielded and protected or would at least die usually the
end in a way that made some sort of moral
dramatic sense. Uh. In Psycho, the murder made no sense
at all, right, And he really kind of hits it
on the head there. It was like, if you've never
seen Psycho or heard of it, the movie is just
going along about this woman who likes steals some money
from her work, and she's kind of on the lamb
(51:54):
and checks into this hotel and you don't even know
it's a horror movie. You're thinking it's a a movie
about a lady who steals money and is trying to
get away from getting caught, right, and then just out
of nowhere, she's hacked up in a shower and at
the time, audiences and still if you haven't seen it,
it's shocking. The audiences were just like they didn't know
(52:16):
what they'd seen right exactly, So you're not not only
is is the hero no longer safe? That means maybe
you're not either. So it has it had a really
huge unsettling effect. And then Owen Glieberman points out that
Hitchcock was so smart that he even he he even
(52:36):
made a nod to the the type of pat expected
horror that the audience was used to. In the house
that he used for Psycho, the Bates House. There was
this huge, rambling Victorian mansion on a hill. There's lots
of taxidermy, and it was like over over decorated and
(52:58):
just creepy. But up to that point, like that was horror.
That was what a horror movie looked like and felt like.
And this was this was kind of Hitchcock's homage to that,
but at the same time he was also putting the
heel of his shoe on it as well. Yeah, and
that house was, I mean almost a character in itself.
Like if you've ever seen the recreation of it, at
(53:19):
in in Los Angeles. I think it's a universal Did
you see it? Oh yeah, I never did. The closest
I came was I think when different Strokes went there.
That's the closest you got to it. Yeah, uh yeah. Man,
if you've ever seen the thing in person, like it's
it sends a chill up your back just seeing this
thing in like a sunny Los Angeles day. Still, it's
(53:42):
such an iconic house, it's like, oh man, uh, there
it is. That's where Norman Bates lives. He's the most
disturbed human of all time. Right. So in the movie,
of course, there was the mother character who is sort
of referenced throughout the movie. And it is not until
the end that you realize that there is no mother.
Mother is dead. There's just Norman Bates and all his
(54:05):
rage and hang ups. Yeah. So all the monster movies
about giant ants and or the creature from the Black Billgoon, monsters,
things that were and other that a normal person had
to do battle with that was gone. Now the monster
had been on screen the whole time, and you had
noticed it. And now what do you think about your
neighbor who has seemed a little weird from time to
(54:28):
time before. Could he be a murderer who thinks he's
his mother, who knows this is what Hitchcock did everybody
back in nineteen sixty And you almost get like I think,
Owen Gliberman points it out. Yeah, he does. At the beginning,
he basically says like, UM, we probably didn't see Psycho.
If you're reading this, you're probably too young to have
(54:49):
seen Psycho in nineteen sixty And we should all feel
sad that we didn't, because it's so changed everything that
we can't do anything but take it for granted now.
And everything that's comes since the and has been trying
to regain that shock and horror that it instilled in audiences,
and and thus far no one's actually been able to
(55:10):
do it. Yeah. And the other thing, I remember when
I saw it when I was younger. I think I
saw this when I was like fourteen ish, Um, and
I think I had this impact on just about everyone.
I don't think I took a shower for a month.
I was straight up bathtub curtain open, doors open, windows open,
making your mom watch, she's keeping watch. You know. That
(55:32):
would have been full circle back to yeah, yeah, you
didn't even want to have anything to do with your
mom No, man, like it changed the shower curtain industry
for a while after that. Yeah, bet, very good movie.
And um, there were a couple of Hitchcock movies in
the last few years. Uh, two different ones, one with
(55:53):
Anthony Hopkins and one with Toby Jones that were both
really good. And one was about the years that he
was making Psycho. The other was about the years when
he was making The Birds, and they were both really
really good movies. And you should check those out too.
You should repeat that. We just got a interjection from Noel,
so go ahead and say it again, Josh, in case
it didn't come through. So Nol just said that. Um.
(56:16):
The director of The Black Coats Daughter is Anthony Perkins,
who played Norman Bates in Psycho's Son. Wow. He also
did another movie now that Noel says that, Thanks Noel. Um.
It's called The Pretty Little Thing That Lives in the House,
which was another horror movie, a ghost story that was
his first one, and I think that might be on Netflix.
(56:38):
It's great. It's a really great movie too. Man. This
has got me fired up to see some horror movies.
It's a renaissance of horror Yeah. It's tough though, because
Emily doesn't really dig it, so I have to just
find a loane time to do that, to watch in
the bathroom. All right, Well, if you want to know
more about horror movies, go watch horror movies. Go forth
(57:00):
and let us know what we missed. For God's sake. Yeah,
if you want to check out the grabsters list, type
in horror movies on the search bar at house to
works dot com and will bring up this fine, fine
list that you will disagree with. And um, since I
said disagree, it's time for listener mail. Uh. This from Eric,
and I'm gonna call it what he called it, a
Schoolhouse Rock and nostalgia theory. Alright, I think he's pretty
(57:23):
right on this just came in. Actually, there's a hot take, hey,
guys in Schoolhouse Rocks. So Josh made the statement that
gen xers are most nostalgic generation attributed to this success
of Schoolhouse Rock. I'm going to offer my own theory.
I propose that gen x is nostalgic mostly for pop
culture because of the prolifer uh that word of child
targeted advertisements and marketing in the seventies and eighties. Certainly
(57:47):
something We've talked about this. Theories got like, while our
little impressionable brains were developing, we're being taught by those
who are steering pop culture to long for and find
fulfillment in the toys and other products our cartoons were
pushing on us. Now it's adults, those messages are still
deep in our psyche. We can't shake the idea that
we still really need those Star Wars action figures to
be happy, not because the toys and the shows were
(58:08):
so great, because we had been tricked into believing we
need them. I have nothing scientific to back this up,
just a hunch yet. What you mean there hasn't been
a study from m I t alright on Star Wars toys.
I'm kind of surprised by that as well. I thought
you were being facetious at first. Yeah. I don't know
(58:29):
which ways up at this point. Nothing scientific to back
this up, but I'd love to hear what you all think.
See if anyone out there is any respectable and informed input,
which Eric, that is from Eric Lewin and Erica. I
think that's super valid. Yeah I do too, Eric. I
think you've really hit upon something here, and that's all
I have to say. About it. If you have a
(58:51):
great theory, fan theory, real life theory, whatever, we want
to hear them there, especially if it's interesting. You can
tweet to us s y s a podcast. You can
send us an email. The Stuff podcast at how Stuff
Works dot Com has always joined us at at Home
on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
(59:13):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Hey, everybody. The moment October starts, all I want to
do is watch horror movies. So I thought it would
be a good select this weekend to release our episode
on horror movies. If you watch much horror, doesn't take
long to catch up to the fact that there are
a lot of creddy horror movies out there. But there's
also a bunch of really great ones too, and we
talk about some of them here. I hope this episode
(00:21):
directs you to some movies that scare your socks off
this October. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a
production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:42):
I'm Josh Clark, Charles W. Chuck Bryant Towdy, middle names Wayne,
middle names Malcolm. There we have. I always forget about
that Malcolm. Yeah, Wayne named after Wayne Coin, right, Uh? No,
John Vane and you were named after Malcolm in the middle.
(01:03):
That's right, right. Frankie Munis is my name saying? I
hope he's okay. Early, Brian Kranston too. I used to
love that show. Oh, it's a great show. I watched it,
um like within the last couple of months. I was
cleaning the house and put it on Netflix and still great. Yeah. Yeah,
(01:24):
it's really is a good show. So you clean your house,
you put on your VR goggles and just cue up
Malcolm in the Middle. Yeah. No, I just walk around
and bump into things and right exactly. But I put
on like a huge feather duster suit. Yeah, so you're
just cleaning and bumping into things. That's right, That's how
I do it. Yeah, it works kind of Well, someone's
(01:47):
gonna take that idea. Yeah, they like the shark Nado. Yeah,
but they should just they should sell that suit with
purple drink. I think you get one spot on the
floor really really clean. Uh, what are you gonna title
this one? By the way, because this was your pick,
(02:08):
and we title our own shows some horror films that
change the genre, all right, and you should add this
a k A. How could you guys forget blank? Yeah, yeah,
we should say like this. First of all, this is
a Grabster article, So it's Grabster's list, and he knows
(02:29):
what he's talking about. If you look at some of
the entries, some don't even have source tags. He's just like,
I just know he should just Grabster. But we even
took his list and carved some out and put some in.
So this is how about this. This is Josh and
Chuck's idea of some horror films that change the genre,
(02:51):
featuring the mind of the grabster. Yes, in other words,
it is not a complete list of every horror film
that changed the genre. Yes, because I would argue that well,
and actually I see grabs or put Texas Chainsaw Massacre
in there. He said that if this were a top
fifteen list, that would be in there. So would Alien. Yeah,
(03:11):
he has that Alien ring Goo and the U S
remake Ring and I would lobby for Well, Psycho didn't
make it onto his list, which but we're going to
put that in. And there was one more. Oh, even
though I didn't really think it was that great, the
movie Saw, I think kind of changed horror films. And
(03:33):
that's what this list is. Not best horror films, but
things that kind of changed the game. Yeah, it seems
like Saw kind of kicked off that that torture porn, Yeah,
didn't it. I can't remember if it was that or hostile,
one of the two. It was definitely one of the two.
For a sub genre. Well, it's pretty accurate, actually it is.
(03:55):
But most of these are movies that either uh, We're
or the first of its kind and maybe did start
a sub genre, or movies that were so popular that
they just you know, kind of rewrote how people view
horror movies. Some of them because of marketing, some because
they were really good movies, some because of box office,
(04:18):
but all of these I don't think anyone could argue
did not change the genre. How about that? Yeah, I
think that's well put dude. Uh. And before we get
started speaking of horror, I want to give a plug
to bow my friend Toby's movie that's coming out. He's
a producer on a movie coming out called The Ghost Story. Yeah, Toby. Uh.
(04:41):
When we met Toby, well you knew Toby before me,
of course, because he's your friend and I know him
through so really, but he was he was small time
doing short films and stuff. And since that time, and
this has been within the last like since we've been
doing this podcast, he's now big time. Yeah. They did
Pete Dragon yeah, um, and then yeah they have this
(05:04):
this they did Ain't Them Bodies Saints was I think
the one that they kind of broke out with, and
then this one, um definitely kind of falls into that
same look. And mood and feel what. It's called The
Ghost Story, and I think it comes out in July,
and I think it's labeled a drama rather than horror
or even supernatural or thriller um. But the reason I
(05:28):
tie it into horrors because A twenty four is releasing
it and A four is killing it with horror movies lately. Yeah,
that's a good Uh, that's good outfit. They did The Witch,
they did The Black Coat's Daughter. Have you seen that? Uh? No,
it's on Amazon Prime. It's on Amazon Prime right now. Dude.
(05:51):
It's one of the best fourror movies I've seen in
a while. I think The Witch is probably my favorite
right now. Black Coats Daughter is a close second. And
then last night I saw it is at night in
the theater and it comes at night. Actually upset my
stomach that ending did it? Was? It was that rough? Yeah.
(06:11):
I think we're we've we're at a place with horror
movies that we haven't been in a long time, like
a really genuine good spot. Yeah, like the whole torture
porn sort of era is over and the found footage
thing is so played. But I think we'd like with
movies like the which I think we've really like there's
(06:32):
some really creative uh it follows. Did you see that one? Yeah,
like some just really creative ways of bringing scares that
I haven't seen before. Get Out. That was amazing. I
still haven't seen it. You're gonna love it. I'm I'm
envious of you. It's really it's great movie, Chuck, you're
gonna love it. Well. I don't get to the movies
much anymore, and the only time I could was a
(06:53):
couple of weeks ago, and I elected to see Wonder Woman. Yeah.
Not a good choice. A long way of saying congratulations
to Toby and his new film, Well, it's funny. We
also need to congratulate Toby too, because Toby just got married.
Toby and and Nell are now married, so congratulations to
them as well. So this is this new movie with
(07:13):
his uh directing partner David Lowry, Yeah, yeah, and Rooney Mara. Yeah,
they definitely do. So it's gonna be good. I'm looking
forward to it. Okay, So let's get started. Thanks for
indulging that, Thank you, everybody. So the first the first
movie on our list is what's widely considered the first
(07:36):
horror movie, and it's a nine movie out of Germany
that um basically was the first film that undertook what's
the artistic movement known as German Expressionism called the Cabinet
of Dr Kaligari. Yeah, I mean some say, like you said,
it was the first horror movie. Some say it was
the first cult film. Um it Uh, well, just you
(08:03):
may not be able to get the whole thing if
you're not into silent movies, but you should cue up
a little bit of it and watch a little bit
of it because it's hugely impactful. Um and still to
this day like very disconcerting to look at because of
it how um ominous and weird it looked, just physically looked. Yeah.
(08:27):
Like the sets that they built are obviously um constructive manufactured.
They were not in any way shape before him going
for realism. They were going for surrealism for sure. And
so like the staircases are at crazy weird curves and
angles and um, like everything from the house, the houses,
rooftops to the blades of grass are super pointy and sharp,
(08:51):
and and the shadows that they employed were just perfect.
You've never seen a better use of shadows than this.
They didn't get in the way they just created this mood.
And it was the first movie to really kind of
do that, to just take to use the camera for
something other than capturing realism. Uh, and it it it
for that reason, it's considered the first horror movie because
(09:14):
that that's such a standard part of horror, whether large
like in large part like in a Tim Burton movie,
or in small part. You know where you're um, you're
using small spaces to create claustrophobia. The idea of using
the set to mess with the viewers mind, I think
is born in Dr Caligary's cabinet. Yeah. It's almost like
(09:36):
they they took a child and gave them construction paper
and said cut out scary things. Uh. And then like
like that movie The Baba Duke, I think the actual
book within The Baba Duke was hugely inspired by this, uh,
the actual movie itself. Um. The plot is about a
sideshow operator, a hypnotist who um has a patient that
(09:58):
he takes around of these side shows with sleep disorders.
Supposedly he's been asleep his entire life, and he uses
this patient to commit murder. Right, he's like a sleepwalker, Yeah, somnambulist.
So that in itself is a pretty frightening plot. And
to think about that being cooked up in nineteen twenty
when there weren't really not such things that you think
(10:20):
of as horror movies is pretty impressive. Um. And then
some of the deeper critiques I've seen of it was
like the the explanation for why the filmmakers chose like
these weird odd angles to kind of depict insanity or
that kind of thing, Um, was rooted in World War One.
(10:41):
The horrors of World War One had just been seen
and revealed and recently taken place, and it upended Europe
in general, and especially Germany as well. Um. And that
the idea is that they might not have had this idea,
They might not have had this desire, this drive to
(11:01):
create this this weird set and in fact this weird
movie had World War One not happened. Yeah. This there's
this writer Jeff Saparrito, who um kind of put it
this way about German expressionism because I wasn't exactly sure
how to define it, but you're kind of right on
the money, he said. Germany was largely isolated from the
rest of the world following World War One, so expressionism
(11:22):
therefore became confined to the country refers to a number
of creative movements from World War One through the nineteen twenties.
Expressionist works examined the current in future state of the
culture through bold and artistic creations of creativity, and often
explore topics of madness, betrayal, and other intellectual concepts. And
nothing encapsulates these ideas more than the cabinet of Dr Calla.
(11:46):
That's basically what I say. Yeah, you did you read
that or were you just uh that? I don't know
that that one or not? It sounded kind of familiar. Yeah,
not to say you came up with it. Um, so
the I of the this set is creating like a
creepy tone and texture to everything. Um, that was Dr Calgary.
(12:08):
That's how it changed the genre. Yeah, Tim Burton say
thank you. Yeah, Um, have you seen Coraline? No? But
I know it. It's a They did that to a
very good effect. You know. I think Hodgman does a
voice in that, doesn't he does? He does the dad.
He did a spectacular job because you actually forget it's
Hodgment while you're watching it. That's impossible. Alright, Chuck, Moving on,
(12:30):
That was We're Gonna fast forward all the way to
what nineteen sixty nineteen sixty three. If you're talking about
Blood Feast, well I wasn't, but let's uh. Cybern Simon
Abraham's of Roger Ebert dot Com says, this Blood Feast
is a terrible film, and a historically important one too,
(12:52):
And I think that's sort of the deal with Blood Feast.
It is not good by any accounts. Did you watch
any of it? Yeah, sure, it's not good. No, it's
not good. It's terrible. It was written on a basis
on a fourteen page outline, didn't even have a script.
It's got the same cult cloying technicolor of like an
early Hawaii five oh episode directed by Herschel Gordon Lewis
(13:18):
and producer David F. Friedman. And basically the idea was this,
these guys did not see films as art. They saw
them as a business and thought you were foolish if
you thought it was anything else. So they sat around
they brainstormed movies that they thought no one else would make. Yeah,
because they started out making like Porky's esque type movies,
(13:39):
and they were they were doing fine with that. But
apparently they were successful enough with it that theyre started
to be imitators and the market was crowded, so they said,
where can we go make movies that no one else
is gonna make? Yeah, because we want to shock people essentially.
So a couple of ideas they had that did not
make the list was Conman evangelists and Nazi torture, which
(14:02):
which were later made exactly. And they finally said, you
know what no one's really done yet is hardcore gore yep,
Like everyone always cuts away when the knife comes, and
you're like, what if we showed the grossest gorrious stuff
imaginable on screen? Yeah, And even still they didn't show
(14:23):
so like one of the first murder a woman stabbed
through the eye and then the murderer hacked their legs
off of the machete, and they didn't show the knife
penetrate the eye. They didn't show the machete making contact
with the skin. But what they did in Blood Feast,
and what made Blood Feast the first of its kind,
was they would show the what came after that. They
(14:45):
would show the brains on the ground, they would show
the entrails like on the knife. Um, they would show
the leg being you know that had been dismembered being
put into a bag and like the wound that was
left by like that. This was no one had ever
done anything like that on film before. No, and it
(15:05):
paid off. They depending on who you ask, the budget
was uh, anywhere from like twenty to thirty grand and
it made between seven and thirty million dollars, Like I said,
depending on where you get your info. But by all
accounts it was a huge financial success compared to what
they paid to make it. Yeah, and they shot it
(15:26):
in um, I think six days or something downe in Miami. Um,
based on a fourteen page outline. There wasn't even a script,
it as an outline, and basically it was like, murderer
goes and kills this girl. Yeah, next girl, murderer comes in,
kills girl, cuts off leg that kind of thing, right, Yeah,
I mean, if it matters the movies about serial killer caterer, Yeah,
(15:51):
that's it. There's your plot right there. Um. But the
the it was just such a revolutionary movie that the
sensors at the time there wasn't such a thing as
the m p a A hadn't been formed yet, um,
And there was basically no one except for local sensors
overseeing movies, so you know, you you could be playing
(16:11):
in one town um to all audiences, and then the
next town over it could be banned. But these sensors
had never seen anything like it, and they didn't know
what to do with it. So it was hugely successful
commercially too. Yeah. And another big impact it had was
it inspired a generation of special effects. But basically, um,
(16:32):
let's be honest, young boys who were doing this on
their own Super eight films right and said, wait, uh,
I can get a job doing this. Yeah. So including
Tom Savini I think was inspired by it, wasn't he
or was he inspired by Yeah? I think he was
inspired by Blood feast um. And then we should also
(16:53):
give a mention to the Grand Gun y'all. Is that
how you think it's pronounced? Grand Guen y'all. It was
a theater in Paris, I believe, from the late nineteenth
century onto I think sixty two, so the year before
Blood Fees came out it had closed up. But it
used to do this stuff on stage. It was like
a gore fest um, and there was lots of like
(17:16):
blood and sex and and like depraved themes in the
plays that were put on at this theater. People loved it.
They were crazy for it. Um, and this was kind
of like the grand gun y'all tradition, put onto film
for the first time and who right for that? You
(17:36):
want to take a break, Yeah, let's do it, all right, Charles,
(18:05):
we're back. So nineteen sixty or nineteen sixty, not eight.
I've got nineteen sixty eight in front of my face. Uh,
and that could be no other movie. The Night of
the Living Dead classic George Romero film. Romero was a
TV director, making TV commercials. Commercial director. Rather, he was
(18:26):
also making short films for Mr Rogers neighborhood at the time. Yeah,
and he was he was young. Yeah, I don't I
don't know how old he was, but he was pretty
young guys still. I think when he made Shot and
Not in the Living Dead, he was like twenty six
or twenty seven, so uh yeah, but any standard, that's
still pretty young unless you're twenty three. So he I'm
(18:49):
he had um. He and his buddies were like, let's
make a horror movie, but let's not make a stupid
horror movie. Let's make on with like an actual plot
that explores like deep themes too, like a good movie.
Let's let's make the first good horror movie. Well yeah, so,
and we'll delve into that little more, but that that
was definitely a different thing at the time. And the
(19:10):
other different thing was that all the horror movies up
to that point, uh, they were called the Universal monsters
from Universal Studios, you know, all the kind of the
classic Frankenstein and Dracula and Creature from the Black Lagoon
and the Werewolf, and that was where that was mainstream horror.
And George Romero comes along and says, um, how about zombies,
(19:34):
And everyone said, what in the world's a zombie? And
he said, well, let me define that for every future
generation of movie and TV goers and lovers. Yeah, and
there have been zombie movies before, but they had been
things like like Dr Caligari's Cabinet, somebody who was under
the control of something someone else or something like that,
(19:54):
there was a hypnotist or this was like the first
time what we think of a these were ever introduced,
like flesh eating ghoules who were dead and come back
to life, just what you think of as a zombie.
This guy started that genre, like you said, Yeah, they
(20:14):
shot it outside in in Pittsburgh on about hundred and
fifteen thousand dollar budget ended up grossing twelve million domestic
not bad, and I think close to twenty worldwide. And
um was eventually selected by the Library of Congress for
preservation in the National Film Registry. It's a good movie.
It's a very good movie. He shot in black and
(20:37):
white to save on cost, even though color was the
standard by that point, and black and white is also
a little more forgiving for rudimentary special effects. And one
of the revolutionary things he did was cast a black
actor as the lead, and for no other reason than hey,
this guy Dwayne Jones is really good, exactly right. Like,
(20:59):
he didn't go back and go, oh, well, you know,
our our heroes black, so we need to make the
the whole thing of meditation on race and have him
confront racism. It was just we're here's the script. And
then the guy playing the lead just happens to be black,
and he was the best guy in the auditions. And
you know this didn't really happen. You didn't just cast
(21:21):
a black guy as a lead actor for no with
no like ulterior motive, basically right. So I read this
review from the from the Time from nineteen sixty nine.
The year after it came out, young Roger Ebert went
and watched it and he wrote, um a pretty pretty
interesting review, which is basically it was about the reaction
(21:43):
of the audience. And he went to a Saturday matinee
that was populated almost entirely by ten eleven year olds,
and they were used to seeing the Creature from the
Black Lagoon for Frankenstein or um. You know, just just
movies that any kid could handle and could enjoy watching,
(22:04):
and you know, fun, scary kind of stuff. And he said,
that's how that that was how the crowd reacted for
the first half of the movie. But then about the
point where and here's here comes spoilers. Everybody, if you
haven't seen either Living Dead, just hit yourself in the
knee with a hammer. Um. You the the teenage couple
(22:27):
go to get gas and when their car blows up
and his engulfs in flames, they die. They're burned to death.
He said. Right about that time, the tone, the mood
of the theater changed and there was no like gleeful
screaming anymore. Kids were starting to like not move and
we're afraid to like move in their seats, and some
were quietly crying to themselves, and from that the whole,
(22:50):
the whole point on, it just got worse and worse
for these little kids watching this movie. So it was
a huge impact on horror movies. A uh, like you
said earlier, it was kind of the first one to
really sort of delve into other issues like if you
look up, like significance of not at a living dead
or um meaning of not a living dead or something
(23:12):
like that. There scores of articles that have been written
over the years of how it was a metaphor for
the Vietnam War, or an allegory about distrust of authority
or the collapse of traditional family. And I think Romero said,
like I didn't necessarily mean all these things, but you
can certainly find it in the movie. That is art.
(23:32):
Like one of the great revelations of my adult life
is that the artist, the writer, the songwriter, the um,
the author rarely intends to imbue as much meaning into
their work as people take from it. That that's part
of art as interpretation in that neat like you don't
(23:54):
if you're a writer, if you're a young writer right
now who's just sitting there racking your brain for how
to insert metaphor and meaning into this. Just write your
story and people are going to find it for themselves. Yeah, agreed.
I wish somebody had told me that. When I was younger,
I had teachers that said stuff like that. Oh, I
didn't like good college professors in English that would when
(24:18):
students would argue like I think he means this, he
would say like, you know, he may or she may
not have meant anything. Right, I's the revelation. I had
teachers that would just go wrong. Uh. The other thing
about Night Living Dead is it spawned um obviously the
zombie genre and uh sequels Dawn of the Dead, Day
of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, the Walking
(24:40):
Dead remakes shout out, shout out, Stephen. You know, yeah right,
why not? I'm still into the Walking Dead. You yeah,
we talked about this. Yes, yes, okay, Stephen, you listens. Anyway,
zombies are at still hot and we can so hot.
(25:03):
We we owe that all to Mr Romero, master of
the genre. Yep. Check one more thing too, that that
NYA Living Dead did that they weren't the first, but
very famously Romero did was kill off his hero senselessly
and shockingly. Yeah. At the end, good point. Thanks man. Okay,
so let's move on. Like I said, yes, stay after Christmas.
(25:29):
If you've ever been uh in Washington, d C. At
the end of M Street, you might have noticed very
uh during the daytime, ordinary set of stairs. At nighttime,
maybe they look creepy to you because those are the
Exorcist stairs. Yeah. I'm trying to conjure the music in
my head, but all I'm coming up with is the
(25:49):
unsolved mysteries music. It was not quite right, so close,
but it's not. I'm so unsatisfied right now. So The
Exorcist was based on a book by William Peter Bladdie
who wrote this uh in one and then in seventy
three the movie was made. Uh. And there's I think
(26:09):
I referenced not too long ago a great Mark Marin
interview with um William Friedkin where he talks about the
audition process for Linda Blair. So you should go listen
to that because it was pretty insightful. But um, the
Exorcists really kind of changed the game, UM and that
it was a It spawned a bit of a sub
(26:30):
genre of um demonic movies. Sure, I were like religious based. Yeah,
even though I guess Rosemary's Baby was before that, but
The Exorcist was such a mega hit and it was
nominated for Best Picture, the first horror movie to be
nominated UM for for that, and so it was just
(26:51):
like it was a big deal. It was. It sold
six million tickets in about two months. Yeah, it's amazing.
This is a horror movie, right, and it came out
in nowhere. Um. Apparently the effect I had on audiences
was extremely pronounced. There was a woman in Boston who
had to be carried from the theater and she goes
(27:11):
it cost me four dollars, but I only lasted twenty minutes.
So we're like that's the stories of that got around
and and people wanted to see, you know, this movie
can't be that scary, and they went and they were like,
oh my god, that movie is that scary. Yeah, and
it holds up too. I mean, um, special effects are
they'd never quite hold up. But it's still a very
(27:33):
creepy movie. Um. Very famously, Linda Blair played the little
girl who was possessed by a demon, and uh, the
the heavy hitters were called in to exercises demon, including
um A Max van Style who was only forty four
(27:53):
when he played this guy in his easily in his seventies. Yeah,
is he Benjamin Button? Well know they made him up. Wow,
they did a great job. Yeah, which I don't see
why they felt the need to do that. I know
they God, who else did they almost cast? Oh? Brando?
They almost cast Brando? But that would have been a
(28:14):
colossal mistake. Well, Friedkin said, you know, as soon as
you do that, it's a Marlon Brando movie. Yeah. And
I think he said picture a Brando picture. Sure, that's
what they said. Uh. And he'd wanted to be a
Brando picture. He wanted to be the Exorcist. Um, so
that you said. It was based on a book from
two years before by William Peter Bladdie. He he he apparently
was known as a comedy writer and he wanted to
(28:38):
do something different. He said, Hey, wouldn't it be funny
if the little girl's head spun around and she keeped
green bile? Wait, what do you hear? What I ever
do with the crucifix? Hey? So? Um? He actually wrote
the book because he wanted to scare America back to church.
That was his aim with the book. He believed that
(28:58):
there was real evil going on the world that part
of it was because of a a loss of faith
or a loss of religion, I guess, and that's what
he wanted to do with it. UM. And when the
movie came out, there was a huge pushback from religious
authorities like Billy Graham said he believed the movie itself
was possessed by a demon. I'm not sure how that
(29:19):
would happen, but that was like a huge thing at
the time. UM and a lot of a lot of
other UM religious establishment types were like, don't go see
that movie. It's evil. But there were some who who
were part of part of religion, major organized religion, who
kind of saw through it and said, no, no, this
(29:41):
is it's good that we're talking about this, that there
we're telling people, you know, or people are seeing that
there there's such a thing as like good versus evil
literally combating on earth, you know, and people are talking
about this and thinking about it. And so in that sense,
the Exorcist like really kind of went to bat for
organized religion. Interesting. I saw another um criticism of it though,
(30:04):
that that said, one of the themes of the movie
that the book hadn't really intended but the movie picked
up on and expounded on, was intergenerational conflict, that that
it was Reagan the child represented the younger generation who
was at war with the establishment, and that it even
goes um so far as to where her mother, the
(30:27):
actress the movie that she's working on is about campus
takeover by young radicals, so that that's kind of a
theme that was apparently part of the subtext, but was
a major part of it in the movie at least interesting. Yeah,
I thought so too, because apparently, I mean, you think
of intergenerational conflict now, apparently in the late sixties and
(30:48):
early seventies it was sharper than it probably ever has
been before or since. Yeah, m hm. The only other
thing I got is that the the green stuff that
she projectiles was Anderson's P soup and a little bit
of oatmeal texture Anderson's PC. Well, but you can't give
(31:09):
that anymore, Chuck. Let's do Jaws and then we'll take
a break. I love talking about Jaws. Yeah, I mean,
Jaws is on you know, I did my top favorite
movies list at one point on our website, and I
listed Jaws is my favorite movie favorite of all time. Yeah,
I mean that list changes, but it's Jaws is always
in my top five. I can watch it anytime it's on. Uh.
(31:32):
It is one of the I've all. I've often said
it's a perfect movie. Um. And what I mean by
that is there's just not a misstep. Like the casting
was perfect, the acting was great, the script was great.
It played out just perfectly throughout the film. Um. He,
like Spielberg, was just a master storyteller with that movie.
(31:56):
You were talking about how young George Romero was in
Night of the Living Dead. Olberg was twenty six when
he made Jaws. He was thirteen years old. He Uh,
and he was apparently scared to death when he finished filming.
The schedule had been for fifty five days, it went
to a hundred and fifty nine. Yeah. He had I
think been allotted four million dollars. He ended up spending
(32:20):
twelve million on it. Um. Yeah, largely because a shooting
on water is notoriously difficult and be the shark mechanical
shark they used was legendarily um wonky and how it
are not wonky but wonky wonky. It didn't work. It
(32:41):
rarely worked. So they spent a lot of time and
burnt a lot of hours trying to get this shark
to do its thing, and uh so much so that
it didn't even make that many appearances in the movie.
I think they even kind of scaled it back, and
that ended up being better for the movie because you
didn't get as much shark. I looked up the um
the urban legend about the shark being named after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce,
(33:05):
and apparently it's true. Really, Yeah, Bruce Rayner was the
name of Spielberg's lawyer, and the that was the nickname
for the mechanical shark on the set was Bruce. That's
pretty funny. So with Jaws, right, we're talking about horror
movies that changed the genre. Jaws not only changed the
horror genre, it changed movie making to this day, and
(33:28):
in multiple ways, multiple massive ways. It changed the entire
film industry, almost single handedly. Yeah, it was at the time,
there was a there was no such thing. You take
it for granted now, but there was no such thing
as a quote unquote summer release. No, a lot of
(33:49):
theaters closed down because a C wasn't in every theater
and people didn't want to sit around in a hot
movie theater for two hours. Yeah, a summer release or
a tent pole for home or a blockbuster feature like
Jaws was the first one of all those. At the
time when Jaws came out, they used to UM release
(34:10):
a movie on maybe one two screens and say New
York or l A for a week, and they did
make its way to you know, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago for
a few weeks, and then eventually make it to your
small town six eight weeks later. That was how movies
were released, not Jaws. Jaws was released on four hundred
(34:31):
and thirty five screens across the country, which is huge,
which is part of the part of the UM Summer
Blockbuster release playbook now. Yeah, and it was also the
first movie to to spend lots and lots of money
on marketing UM and so I think the studios were like,
wait a minute, if you spend some dough on marketing,
(34:51):
you released this sing wide, you can make a ton
of money in the first month that the movie's out
and you're kind of set, like after that it's anything
else's gravy. Yeah, and that's after the first week or
two probably, Yeah, it was. Yeah, the whole the whole
point of blockbuster now is to get that opening weekend
to make all your money back in the opening weekend
(35:12):
and then everything else is gravy on top of it. Right,
Jaws was it didn't make it. I don't know. Maybe
it did make its money back in the first weekend
because it hit a hundred million dollars in like seventy
eight days or something incredible like that, because it was
the first movie too had a hundred million dollars and
it did it in just a couple of months. Even. Yeah,
it eventually went on to make about two hundred and
(35:34):
sixty million dollars domestically, which is I mean, that's a
great take now, Yeah, you know, much less the mid
nineteen seventies for a twelve million dollars spend. For sure.
My only beef here is that I would not consider
Jaws a horror movie. Yeah. I think it's an adventure film. Yeah,
I guess you're right, with a scary antagonist. Yeah, but um,
(35:58):
it's amazing how much I quote that movie in my
day today life. Yeah, just Shark, that's a great that's
a classic. All right, let's take a break. I'm gonna
meditate on that line, and we'll talk about a few
other scary movies, including one that was originally titled Scary
Movie Okay, moving on to Halloween. Halloween Chuck eight, I
(36:49):
believe Halloween. Yes, John Carpenter, Uh, the youngish John Carpenter
who originally titled this movie The Babysitter Murders. No, A
little on the nose. Yeah, pretty terrifying title, I guess.
Young Jamie Lee Curtis her very first movie, was it
(37:10):
really Yeah? Well, she went on to become known as
the scream Queen for all the horror movies she was in.
Totally and this was shot in twenty days and uh
South Pasadena as the Midwest and um it's credited as
being birthing the slasher genre. Yeah it did, so there
(37:31):
were slasher films before. The Town That Dreaded Sundown was
like based on a true crime story actually in Texas
of one called Black Christmas The Grabster sites from UR
haven't heard of that one. But the idea of um
of a faceless almost a like non entity entity coming
(37:55):
at you, uh and relentlessly stalking you, be impervious to harm,
as the Webster puts it, um, and just coming at
you again and again trying to kill you. That that
was that was all established by Halloween, and it was
done like too too great effect as well. Yeah, and
it holds up. It's still scary. Uh. Michael Myers, of
(38:17):
course was the killer. Um the music that John Carpenter score.
I mean, he scores most of his movies himself, but
very iconic, uh, basic thing. I think he only took
a couple of days to come up with it. But
like the Michael Myers character and the mask or so iconic,
the music is so iconic. Do you know about the mask, right, Chatner? Yeah, yeah,
(38:41):
go ahead. I went and check that one out too
to verify that it was true. And it definitely is
true that Michael Myers mask is actually a Captain Kirk
star Trek mask painted white. That is history. Yep. The
in the in the script when it came to the mask,
it just a pale, neutral features of a man. Yeah,
(39:04):
which makes the whole thing even creepier because he's an
implacid or is that the right word. I don't know.
He's just it's just almost like just an emotionless killer.
It made the fact that he was merciless, ruthless, pitiless
and and all arbitrarily killing people almost all the more
(39:25):
pronounced because his expression never changes. Well, to me, the
two things were creepiest about Halloween was the expression never
changed because of that mask, and he did not run,
like oh yeah, he would just walk and you still
got the feeling like you can't outrun this guy even
though he's walking. That was another creepy part about it.
It follows with the walking aspect of it for sure. Yeah,
(39:49):
in the same way that like twenty eight Days Later
was freaky and that it took zombies and made him run. Yeah.
Or I remember when I saw Friday I'm sorry, h
Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time and Freddy
Krueger was running around. I was like, that's not what
scary dudes do. Yes, scary dudes don't try now they
walk very creepily towards you and still somehow gained speed
(40:12):
on you even though you're running full speed. Freddy scared
me to death the first time I saw that movie. Yeah,
the first one was a pretty good one. But Halloween
established this, Like you said, it established the slasher genre,
and everything about slasher films still today all rooted in
Halloween John Carpenter's tropes. Yeah, and again, like you said,
there were a couple of other slasher films before, but
(40:34):
none of them grossed close to fifty million bucks. Wow,
is that how much Halloween made? Yeah, forty seven million
domestic at about a three hundred thousand dollar budgets. So
it uh, you know, that's sort of like with The Exorcists,
Like there were other movies that sort of did this
thing before, but when you have a huge hit that
does it was when it sort of redefines the genre
(40:55):
because it's money. Yeah, that's everyone starts paying attention after all, Right,
what's next? What's next? My friend? Is a movie that
came out when I don't know, were you still in college? Uh? No,
you must have just been out then I was out
a few years. Okay, Well, regardless around our college era,
(41:16):
this movie came out. Because up to this point, everything's
come out either when we were little or before we
were born. This one was right in our wheelhouse. It
was The Blair Witch Project, which came out. Yeah, and uh.
One of the big things that um Blair Witch Project
did well two things. Really, it established the found footage
genre or sub genre that is so overplayed now, uh
(41:39):
in the viral marketing campaign. And that's how I came
upon it. I remember very specifically being in the apartment
of Scotty Polito, who you know, he shot our TV show,
one of my oldest friends. And I was sitting in
his apartment on Claremont Avenue Indicator and I happened upon this.
And this was pre Facebook. I don't even know how
I found it. You before things were being shared around
(42:02):
and I happened upon this website, the very first Blair
Witch Project website, and I was like, dude, come over
here and check this out. This is the scariest thing
I've ever seen. And I remember the website set it
up as if it was real, and that this found
footage thing, it's so overdone now it's hard to go
back in time and remember when it was fresh. But
(42:25):
I remember looking at and being like, did this happen?
Did they really find this footage of this murder in
the woods? Liked to see this? That was the rumor
that this was actually real, man. And this is, like
you said, I mean, this is before the found footage genres.
So people were being exposed to this concept for the
first time, and we're kind of falling for it. I mean,
(42:45):
you're either in college or you're just recently out of college,
so you're maybe slightly more guldbal than you are ten
years ready to believe it? You want to believe right,
So yeah, the idea that this was actual found footage,
it just made it all the more enjoyable and people
were buying into it. And I think the other part
of it too, was that the filmmakers, partly because they
(43:06):
didn't have the budget for actual effects, left a lot
of the scariest parts to your imagination. Yeah, nor did
they have the talent to make a good narrative film,
I guess. I mean, they worked on a sixty four
page script, which I was surprised that it was that
that big. But they shot it for eight days and
(43:27):
originally they were going to make it like a documentary
about the found footage, and then one of them had
a flash of of perspective was like, wait, wait, wait, wait,
let's just release it like it's found footage. And that
was that. The rest was history. Yeah, and I'm poking fun.
That was not very nice at all. Um Eduard of
Sanchez and Daniel Myrick or Merrick, the co directors, they
(43:52):
they should be credited with the truly ingenious uh campaign
and invention that well, they weren't the first to come
up with on footage, right, there were some films before. Um,
I've never known how to pronounce it, Mondo Kanne, ermando Kane,
I think Connie. It's from nineteen sixty two and it
was supposedly a documentary about um like some like weird
(44:16):
tribal rituals. I think there's head shrinking maybe involved, and
it purported to be like real footage. Same with Cannibal Holocaust,
where if you've never seen Campbell Holocaust, go out and
watch it right now. It's very disturbing. Um. And it's
so disturbing that the director of the movie was charged
(44:36):
with murder because they believed that the actual murders depicted
they were so realistic. They thought that it was a
snuff film basically, but it was supposed to be a
documentary as well. So there was an idea of like
found footage or documentary style horror movies that had come before,
but nothing like The Blair Witch where it was just
straight up these people we found their their old camera, uh,
(45:00):
and this is what was on it. Well, and they
were smart enough to kind of dig up an old
thing that never went huge, you know, and they're like, hey, man,
like these other movies, they never really hit it big,
and they it was a timing thing. They they, I mean,
hats off for them to them, yeah, good for them,
and to them. Nice going to a right chuck. Scream, Yeah, scream.
(45:26):
I tease that it was originally titled scary movie. I'm
glad it wasn't because scary movie is awesome. I don't know,
it's scary movie ever would have been called maybe it
would have never been made, or maybe they would have
called that scream. Oh yeah, I guess so. So. Scream
was a very big deal when it came out. The
writer Kevin Williamson, um, and this is still the highest
growing slash of film of all time, basically Scream one. Yes,
(45:48):
it was huge. I got Nev Campbell's haircut as a
result of it. Like it was a big, big pop
culture water mark. It was. And one of the big
things about it, aside from the boatloads of money that
it made, was it spawned a sub genre called meta horror,
which is um even though it had been done by
(46:09):
no less than its own director Wes Craven. With Wes
Craven's New Nightmare Uh two years before Scream, it wasn't
nearly as popular, but met a horror is this idea?
And if you've ever seen Scream, you know they're constantly
just referencing horror movies, like this is where you know,
you don't go out and make out in the car
because that's where you get killed. And then they would
(46:29):
do that and get killed, right, although I don't think
that specific thing happened, like don't go back into the house. Yeah,
like all the tropes of horror movies are addressed in
the movie, and they're talking about them as the horror
movie tropes. Yes, yeah, exactly, maya horror. Yeah. And there
are plenty of other things that came along better met
(46:50):
a horror um examples like have you seen Tucker and
Dale Versus Evil? Uh no? Check it out? Man, all right,
that's a good movie. Zombie Land. Did see that where
he's rattling off all of the things that you need
to notice survive a zombie apocalypse that he learned from
zombie movies, right, And then Cabin in the Woods. Did
(47:11):
you see that? One? Great movie? It was a great movie.
I thought it was really good. I mean from beginning
to end, it was a great movie. Did you like Scream? Yeah?
I love Scream. I liked all the screams. I only
saw the first two. The second one I think might
have been even better than the first to me, And
(47:31):
that the second was shot Emily worked on that it
was shot here in at Agnes Scott College. Parts right
to go back and watch it knowing that now I'll
be like, oh, I've driven past that place. Uh. So
I got a few tidbits, like I said. Initial title
of scary movie um number two. The Weinstein Brothers initially
offered it to George Romero and Sam Rami, Um, what
(47:54):
else do I have here? Drew Barrymore was originally supposed
to play Sydney, the lead character, and then she said, no,
how about if I just played that girl at the beginning,
which kind of was a big thing because you see
Drew Marry Barrymore And it was a big shock when
she died in the first scene. You know, you can't
(48:15):
kill off your heroine right away. Yeah, I mean, like
I remember, I remember that first scene really really scaring
me when I saw it the first time in the theater.
Yeah it is. It's a scary, gruesome, gory. Yeah, very
well played. Uh. And then before he went to um
NEV Campbell, he went out to Alicia with Britney Murphy
and Reese Witherspoon Cambell your christ choice. Uh. And then
(48:40):
the mask, the iconic screen mask apparently wasn't off the
shelf mask. Wow, that made that company's money. Yeah. And
the wine Steins didn't like it. They were like, I
hate that mask. Everything else is fine, huh. But west
Craven said, no, it's got to be the mask. It
would be stupid. Bob m alright, we're gonna finish up
(49:03):
with our own edition here. Finally, nineteen sixty Psycho. I
can't believe this wasn't in the list. I think Ed
kept this off the list to toy with somebody he
doesn't like specifically. That's the only explanation. Yeah, because Psycho
changed everything. Yeah, it really did. I mean it was
(49:26):
the you could say that it was one of the
first slasher flicks. It was a early psychological thriller. Um.
It was based on the real life story of Ed Geen.
I mean, it doesn't exactly mirror a Gaen's life, but
the idea of um being obsessed with your mother so
(49:47):
much that you will commit murder. Uh. It was definitely
rooted in a Gains story. Um. If you're not familiar
with ed Geen. He not only he was I don't
even know if he was a serial killer. I think he.
I think he murdered one, maybe two people, but more
than anything, he was a grave robber. But he likes
(50:07):
to um dress up in people's skin, women's skin and
pretend he was his own mother. Which, man, that's a
lot of years on the couch work and that one
out or you can just die at the hands of
cops one of the two. Um. And he also inspired
leather Face from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yeah, and and Buffalo
Bill of course. Oh yeah, yeah, Sounds of the Lambs. Yeah,
(50:30):
one guy inspired all those two, all those guys. So
I found this article Psycho Colan The Horror Movie that
Changed the Genre by Owen Glieberman or is it Gliberman?
Think he wrote for Legendary Critic, wrote for e W
for years and years and now writes for a variety.
Oh he does. Yeah, but he uh he put it best.
(50:51):
He said, um, well, you know, the iconic shower scene,
first of all, is hugely important because it was Hitchcock
really kind of ripped up the script, not literally, but
the horror movie script when he kills off Janet Lee
halfway through the movie. It was you just didn't do
that at the time. We came out of nowhere, and
(51:13):
we've seen that come up later on, like at the
end of Nither Living Dead or Drew Barrymore and Scream.
Hitchcock was the first one to do that. Yeah, And Uh,
Glieberman puts it this way. He said he was also
slicing through years, decades, centuries even of audience expectation that
the hero or heroine of a fictional work would be
(51:33):
shielded and protected or would at least die usually the
end in a way that made some sort of moral
dramatic sense. Uh. In Psycho, the murder made no sense
at all, right, And he really kind of hits it
on the head there. It was like, if you've never
seen Psycho or heard of it, the movie is just
going along about this woman who likes steals some money
from her work, and she's kind of on the lamb
(51:54):
and checks into this hotel and you don't even know
it's a horror movie. You're thinking it's a a movie
about a lady who steals money and is trying to
get away from getting caught, right, and then just out
of nowhere, she's hacked up in a shower and at
the time, audiences and still if you haven't seen it,
it's shocking. The audiences were just like they didn't know
(52:16):
what they'd seen right exactly, So you're not not only
is is the hero no longer safe? That means maybe
you're not either. So it has it had a really
huge unsettling effect. And then Owen Glieberman points out that
Hitchcock was so smart that he even he he even
(52:36):
made a nod to the the type of pat expected
horror that the audience was used to. In the house
that he used for Psycho, the Bates House. There was
this huge, rambling Victorian mansion on a hill. There's lots
of taxidermy, and it was like over over decorated and
(52:58):
just creepy. But up to that point, like that was horror.
That was what a horror movie looked like and felt like.
And this was this was kind of Hitchcock's homage to that,
but at the same time he was also putting the
heel of his shoe on it as well. Yeah, and
that house was, I mean almost a character in itself.
Like if you've ever seen the recreation of it, at
(53:19):
in in Los Angeles. I think it's a universal Did
you see it? Oh yeah, I never did. The closest
I came was I think when different Strokes went there.
That's the closest you got to it. Yeah, uh yeah. Man,
if you've ever seen the thing in person, like it's
it sends a chill up your back just seeing this
thing in like a sunny Los Angeles day. Still, it's
(53:42):
such an iconic house, it's like, oh man, uh, there
it is. That's where Norman Bates lives. He's the most
disturbed human of all time. Right. So in the movie,
of course, there was the mother character who is sort
of referenced throughout the movie. And it is not until
the end that you realize that there is no mother.
Mother is dead. There's just Norman Bates and all his
(54:05):
rage and hang ups. Yeah. So all the monster movies
about giant ants and or the creature from the Black Billgoon, monsters,
things that were and other that a normal person had
to do battle with that was gone. Now the monster
had been on screen the whole time, and you had
noticed it. And now what do you think about your
neighbor who has seemed a little weird from time to
(54:28):
time before. Could he be a murderer who thinks he's
his mother, who knows this is what Hitchcock did everybody
back in nineteen sixty And you almost get like I think,
Owen Gliberman points it out. Yeah, he does. At the beginning,
he basically says like, UM, we probably didn't see Psycho.
If you're reading this, you're probably too young to have
(54:49):
seen Psycho in nineteen sixty And we should all feel
sad that we didn't, because it's so changed everything that
we can't do anything but take it for granted now.
And everything that's comes since the and has been trying
to regain that shock and horror that it instilled in audiences,
and and thus far no one's actually been able to
(55:10):
do it. Yeah. And the other thing, I remember when
I saw it when I was younger. I think I
saw this when I was like fourteen ish, Um, and
I think I had this impact on just about everyone.
I don't think I took a shower for a month.
I was straight up bathtub curtain open, doors open, windows open,
making your mom watch, she's keeping watch. You know. That
(55:32):
would have been full circle back to yeah, yeah, you
didn't even want to have anything to do with your
mom No, man, like it changed the shower curtain industry
for a while after that. Yeah, bet, very good movie.
And um, there were a couple of Hitchcock movies in
the last few years. Uh, two different ones, one with
(55:53):
Anthony Hopkins and one with Toby Jones that were both
really good. And one was about the years that he
was making Psycho. The other was about the years when
he was making The Birds, and they were both really
really good movies. And you should check those out too.
You should repeat that. We just got a interjection from Noel,
so go ahead and say it again, Josh, in case
it didn't come through. So Nol just said that. Um.
(56:16):
The director of The Black Coats Daughter is Anthony Perkins,
who played Norman Bates in Psycho's Son. Wow. He also
did another movie now that Noel says that, Thanks Noel. Um.
It's called The Pretty Little Thing That Lives in the House,
which was another horror movie, a ghost story that was
his first one, and I think that might be on Netflix.
(56:38):
It's great. It's a really great movie too. Man. This
has got me fired up to see some horror movies.
It's a renaissance of horror Yeah. It's tough though, because
Emily doesn't really dig it, so I have to just
find a loane time to do that, to watch in
the bathroom. All right, Well, if you want to know
more about horror movies, go watch horror movies. Go forth
(57:00):
and let us know what we missed. For God's sake. Yeah,
if you want to check out the grabsters list, type
in horror movies on the search bar at house to
works dot com and will bring up this fine, fine
list that you will disagree with. And um, since I
said disagree, it's time for listener mail. Uh. This from Eric,
and I'm gonna call it what he called it, a
Schoolhouse Rock and nostalgia theory. Alright, I think he's pretty
(57:23):
right on this just came in. Actually, there's a hot take, hey,
guys in Schoolhouse Rocks. So Josh made the statement that
gen xers are most nostalgic generation attributed to this success
of Schoolhouse Rock. I'm going to offer my own theory.
I propose that gen x is nostalgic mostly for pop
culture because of the prolifer uh that word of child
targeted advertisements and marketing in the seventies and eighties. Certainly
(57:47):
something We've talked about this. Theories got like, while our
little impressionable brains were developing, we're being taught by those
who are steering pop culture to long for and find
fulfillment in the toys and other products our cartoons were
pushing on us. Now it's adults, those messages are still
deep in our psyche. We can't shake the idea that
we still really need those Star Wars action figures to
be happy, not because the toys and the shows were
(58:08):
so great, because we had been tricked into believing we
need them. I have nothing scientific to back this up,
just a hunch yet. What you mean there hasn't been
a study from m I t alright on Star Wars toys.
I'm kind of surprised by that as well. I thought
you were being facetious at first. Yeah. I don't know
(58:29):
which ways up at this point. Nothing scientific to back
this up, but I'd love to hear what you all think.
See if anyone out there is any respectable and informed input,
which Eric, that is from Eric Lewin and Erica. I
think that's super valid. Yeah I do too, Eric. I
think you've really hit upon something here, and that's all
I have to say. About it. If you have a
(58:51):
great theory, fan theory, real life theory, whatever, we want
to hear them there, especially if it's interesting. You can
tweet to us s y s a podcast. You can
send us an email. The Stuff podcast at how Stuff
Works dot Com has always joined us at at Home
on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
(59:13):
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