Ep. 155: The boundaries of horror

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:00:03] Speaker B: Mark, now, I know your mom is a little youngish, like, for a mom. No, she isn't. For a mom of, like, a nearly 45 year old man, like, she's only in her, like, mid 60s, right? [00:00:14] Speaker A: She's fucking 75 in a couple of weeks. [00:00:17] Speaker B: Oh, I thought she was in her 60s. Never mind. This is great. This makes things better. Okay, so your mom is I thought she was like a decade younger than that. [00:00:24] Speaker A: No fuck, though. [00:00:25] Speaker B: Okay. Normal aged mother. Perfect. That means that as such, your grandparents would have been like adults during World War II, right? [00:00:39] Speaker A: Yes, they would have. [00:00:43] Speaker B: And they're from Wales? [00:00:46] Speaker A: Yes. [00:00:47] Speaker B: Did they ever talk to you at all about World War II? [00:00:50] Speaker A: Nope. Not never. [00:00:52] Speaker B: Never heard any of their. [00:00:57] Speaker A: I'm really, really racking my brains here with the usual caveats. I have no memory. I have no long term I have no memory, really. I've got memento guy syndrome, but no, I don't remember ever being sat down and gone. Now then this was the war and this is what we did. I simply don't remember any of that. No. [00:01:19] Speaker B: Where in Wales would your grandparents have. [00:01:21] Speaker A: Come from so reasonably sure that they didn't really venture far afield from where they were born? So it would have been, yeah, the South Wales Valleys, Trudiga, that kind of area. Okay. [00:01:37] Speaker B: But valleys. [00:01:38] Speaker A: Yes. [00:01:39] Speaker B: Basically nowhere near the water. [00:01:42] Speaker A: Essentially coast like an hour's drive away. [00:01:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, fair enough. This kind of makes sense. I will broach that a little bit later. But the Welsh experience of World War II obviously had a lot to do with mining and stuff like that. But when it came to worrying about getting bombed or something like that, if you were in the Valleys, you're probably not super worried about it as opposed to being in a port of course kind of thing was happening. I was just really curious. I think that's kind of funny that they didn't pass that on. This also does feel like from everything that I have been reading about this kind of how British people are about this stuff, they're either going to talk about it constantly or you will never hear a word from it. It's one or the other that tracks. Yes, but growing up in America, I think war is a bit abstract. I've certainly heard my grandmother's stories of World War II and she was here, but she was developing photos in a photography lab. I think I've mentioned it before, but know developed the first photos that came to America out of Buchenwald concentration camp when she was kind of lied her way into this job that she was 17 and you weren't supposed to be able to do that yet. And thus saw these images before anyone had ever seen them in America before. But even knowing her stories and things like that, the only wars on our soil have basically been with ourselves, like the Civil War and the American Revolution. In World War II, Pearl Harbor was attacked, but that's not on the mainland US. Most of us have never been to Pearl Harbor, like, most Americans have never been to Hawaii at all, for that matter. And it was so unheard of to be attacked here that we still memorialize it every year. [00:03:35] Speaker A: Is the kind of the stereotype of Americans not generally kind of traveling far outside their home state. Is that accurate or not? [00:03:49] Speaker B: I think it depends. It probably depends on where you're from because I think a lot of Americans, especially in the past, people road trip a lot here. So a lot of people will drive to other places in the you know, because, like, a lot of, like, Europeans will be like, oh, Americans don't even have passports. But it's like our country is the size of so many European countries or whatever. So I think people do tend to go on vacations or whatever to other places in the United States, but say somewhere like like that's a like you can't drive to Hawaii. It's a long trip, and it's expensive once you get there. [00:04:31] Speaker A: If Hawaii was in my country, I'd want to go. If I could get to Hawaii just with a domestic flight, I would. [00:04:40] Speaker B: Fucking a seven hour domestic flight? [00:04:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:04:43] Speaker B: That will cost you $900 or whatever. It's expensive. Not an easy trip. Obviously one that we do because our family lives there, but if it weren't for that yeah, it's difficult to get to Hawaii. So yeah, most people will never see Pearl Harbor in their lives. So it's very abstracted. [00:05:05] Speaker A: Where is it? Where is it? Just sketch out the geography for me. Where is it? [00:05:08] Speaker B: It's in Honolulu. Which is on Oahu, I believe. So it is a mid sized Hawaiian island. Smaller than the Big Island. Bigger than Kauai. Okay, yeah, small. Yes, definitely very small, but a big city. So, yeah, here we just don't really have a huge connection with the idea of war on our soil. And so it's kind of interesting and a little bonkers to me to think about the fact that the UK absolutely did and that people who like your grandparents would remember this. People who are alive today remember, obviously fewer and fewer people fit that because it's getting to be so long ago. But there are people alive today who remember those times. At the height of the Blitz, which lasted from September of 1940 to May of 1941, germany was bombing the shit out of various strategic British cities. [00:06:15] Speaker A: I love that I'm getting schooled on World War II in Britain. [00:06:20] Speaker B: Yeah, feel free to interrupt, too, but this is obviously for our listeners. I assume you know this stuff, but I'm going to educate you today. So yeah, British cities getting bombed a fuck by Germany during the Blitz, which lasts from September 1940 to May of 1941. And this was a shift from Germany's previous strategy, where they'd been sort of battling Royal Air Force sites directly, the RAF. And at that point, they had actually been at an advantage when they'd kept things to the RAF, because Britain was losing pilots and planes at a rate that was becoming somewhat unmanageable. Like, there's not an unlimited number of people to fly around fighting Germany here. So really they were exhausting Britain's resources. But Britain had been prepared for the bombing of civilian targets. So Hitler's decision to focus efforts that way, basically in retaliation for Britain bombing Berlin and making Germany look like doofuses, actually ended up shifting the war effort in Britain's favor. But that obviously wasn't without some huge costs. So on the one hand, because they'd anticipated that Germany would eventually switch to these tactics, there was a concentrated effort to get people, especially children, out of the cities. And Americans will be most familiar with this from stuff like The Chronicles of Narnia or Bed Knobs and Broomsticks, which center around children who are sent off to the countryside to avoid being bombed in London. I will say, when I was a kid, I did not understand, like, now that I'm an adult, I'm like, oh, that's what this is about. I had no idea. I have seen bed knobs and broomsticks dozens of times. I know that movie by heart. And it wasn't until I was, like, 25, I was like, oh, shit. Yeah, they're here because they would die in London. It's dark, man. [00:08:31] Speaker A: Refugee children that is covered to hell in schools. [00:08:36] Speaker B: Oh, I'm sure. [00:08:38] Speaker A: Creative writing exercises. [00:08:40] Speaker B: Oh, wow. [00:08:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember that quite clearly. Yes. And I know the boys have done it, too. [00:08:45] Speaker B: Oh, I love this. This is fascinating. Please tell me any things, as we go, of stuff that you learned about in school, because, you know, I'm so interested in your experience of all this. If it didn't come from your grandparents, I want to know where you learned things. So, over the course of three days in 1939, 1.5 million civilians moved out to rural areas of the UK in what was called Operation Pied Piper. Meanwhile, in the cities, the government worked to erect bomb shelters as well as distribute what were called Anderson shelters. Do you know what those are? [00:09:19] Speaker A: No. [00:09:20] Speaker B: Okay. They seem nightmarish to me and kind of ineffective, but I'm not an engineer. Basically, what Anderson shelters were were big sheets of corrugated steel that you would dig into your yard and cover with dirt. So basically, you're just like digging up a hole for you to be in, putting some metal over it and covering it up with dirt. And this basically would help you to dodge debris and shrapnel, which apparently it was very effective at doing, but you couldn't stay in there for, like, long periods of time. [00:09:53] Speaker A: It's like a fucking hole in the ground. [00:09:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a hole in the ground. It is literally nothing but a hole in the ground with metal over it. But there was also another kind of shelter that they began distributing later on that was called a Morrison shelter. And that was essentially a cage that you could keep inside your house that would fit two adults and two children and would make it so that if the house collapsed on you, you'd be shielded. Sounds I mean, terrifying. [00:10:22] Speaker A: It's a great idea, though. It's like a safety box, isn't it? It's like a little cup. [00:10:26] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. It's like a little panic room, essentially, just in the middle of your house. [00:10:32] Speaker A: I love the idea of a panic room, by the way. And I'd love one. If I was to commission a house to get built, for me, there would 100% be a little secret room. [00:10:42] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:10:43] Speaker A: Zillion I would love that. [00:10:44] Speaker B: I have one of my friends from one of my best friends from growing up. Her husband is like a prepper. And when they were buying houses they live in Texas, there was a house that was being sold in their neighborhood. Actually, they'd already bought a house. They were just looking at stuff in the neighborhood because they're curious. In fact, me and my friend used to do this when we were in high school. She lived in a mansion and the estate she lived in often would have open houses and we'd just go in like teenagers, like looking around like we were going to buy a house. She and her husband still do this, and there was one in their neighborhood that had like a panic room in it. And he was like, we have to buy this house. She was like, we're not buying another house just because it has a panic room in it. And he was like, no, I think we need this house. But yeah, this, I mean, obviously is a lot more rudimentary than a panic room, but it would be fun to have one. So they put all of these measures into place in 1939 and for the most part went about their business with the smattering of cinemas and sporting events and stuff like that still going and folks out and about using the parks and such. In fact, the parks in 1939 were like, in 1940, early 1940 were like popping. Everybody was going out and hanging out. This changed, though, on September 7, 1940, when the blitz officially began. At around 04:00 p.m., german bombers began an hours long assault on London. And later they came back and continued their siege through the night until around 04:30 a.m., leaving the city a fiery heap of rubble in many parts and killing 430 people in just one night. Understandably, that day is referred to as black Saturday, which I actually did not know. I had never heard that before. The bombing continued for 57 straight nights without a single 24 hours period sands bombing. And even after that, it went on for months, albeit with occasional days where nothing happened. But honestly, that kind of almost feels worse, like it stops and then you're like, when the fuck is this going to start again? At this point, you're used to just being like, at night I go in my bomb shelter and now you're like, Are they coming? So it went on for months, while the Brits kept calm and carried on continuing to go to work and maintain essential services around the city. In fact, none of the essential services ever shut down for more than a few hours to be put back together in England. [00:13:22] Speaker A: Go us. [00:13:23] Speaker B: It's pretty wild, if you think about it, and Londoners were basically getting bombed in the morning, cleaning up and then getting back to their daily routine a few hours later. In November, the Germans expanded their bombing to other cities like Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. And in 1941, they focused their efforts on ports like Bristol Hull, Belfast and Swansea. So for sure, at least one Welsh city was getting pummeled at the time, maybe more. April and May of 1941 saw the worst of the Luftwaffe attacks on London, with some 2500 people killed in two major days long air raids and over 10,000 homes and buildings just wiped off the map instantly. [00:14:13] Speaker A: Which is a fucking wild thought, isn't it? This fucking country in which I now sit. [00:14:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's been, what, 80 years or something like that. [00:14:27] Speaker A: You know, I'm back and forth, London all the fucking time. [00:14:30] Speaker B: Right. [00:14:31] Speaker A: It just doesn't compute. [00:14:33] Speaker B: You'd never like to think of something devastating. This place is, like, flattened, it's burning down, all this kind of stuff. A, you can't see that now, they've completely rebuilt, and B, yeah. The idea like, imagine you're then supposed to leave your family every day and just keep going to BT, training people on shit like nothing happened. That's a wild thought. [00:15:02] Speaker A: Yeah. And even wilder still, that it's a present day reality. [00:15:08] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. [00:15:10] Speaker A: Not so very far away from here. [00:15:12] Speaker B: No, not at all. In multiple places at this particular moment. As indeed, yes, people are dealing with this exact kind of stuff. [00:15:22] Speaker A: It is in your nature to destroy yourselves. Yeah, well, the terminator was right. [00:15:28] Speaker B: Yeah. I say that all the time. [00:15:32] Speaker A: I haven't told you this, but I've got it tattooed on my buttock. [00:15:37] Speaker B: That's this week's cover photo for I'll do it. [00:15:40] Speaker A: I'll fucking write it on there with a pen. I'll do it. [00:15:44] Speaker B: I'm concerned you will. So, while there were nothing to tease, while there were other sporadic air raids over the rest of the war, that May attack is considered the official end of the Blitz. It was never that intense again afterwards. And the people of the UK did their best to try to pick up the pieces and move on. After all of this, folks had become sort of accustomed to the intrusions of air raid sirens and were largely, almost hardened by, oh, there it is again. They wouldn't necessarily just go straight running to shelter when they heard one, but would sit and wait to see. What kind of siren am I hearing? [00:16:29] Speaker A: Is it a bad one, right? [00:16:31] Speaker B: Yeah. Is it a test or? They would see if they heard planes coming as soon as it went off and if they didn't hear any planes, I'm sure it's fine. And I remember reading somewhere a few months ago that sort of a fatalistic vibe came over many of the young people in London. [00:16:48] Speaker A: I can certainly imagine. [00:16:50] Speaker B: And they would use air raids as an excuse to party and have sex in a sort of like Macabre baby, it's cold outside situation. It was like if they went to a love interest place and a siren went off, it was just like, oh, guess I'm going to have to stay the night. In a sense, I feel like we can relate to that, right? Like many of us don't have a great sense that there is like a future for us here in our climate crisis planet. So the urge to be kind of like yolo about things is absolutely real amongst young people. [00:17:24] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'm certain this is an observation we will have made before, but I think our epitaph will be so incredible in that we saw it fucking coming. [00:17:41] Speaker B: We knew it was happening, right? [00:17:44] Speaker A: We knew it was happening and fucking dickheads quibbled over data and denialists be denying, but just this fucking week there was data about September being not just the hottest September on record by a little bit, but in increments of a full degree, and that it was like. [00:18:12] Speaker B: Literally every single day. There was never an aberration. [00:18:21] Speaker A: So many different news stories say the same thing in different ways that the scientific community is stunned at how quickly, right, we fucking knew we saw it fucking happening and we didn't fucking change it. If one fucking snippet of audio from this podcast survives in a post fucking cockroach, when the cockroaches have evolved and are running the world, let it be this. We fucking knew it was happening and we didn't do shit. [00:18:52] Speaker B: Pretty much, yeah, this is obviously a tangent, but yeah, I did like a wisecrack video on this recently and one of the craziest things about this is that basically the scientists who initially sounded the alarm of the I mean, the first person to bring this up was in like 1890 or something like that. But when it actually became a thing that someone stood in front of a whole bunch of people was like, this is a huge fucking problem. It was like the 50s or sixty s and basically they set out that they were like, it's going to be this amount of years that we have and then we're going to see this much warming and we pretty much met that dead on and then just jumped. [00:19:34] Speaker A: Blew on really quickly. [00:19:37] Speaker B: It was exactly as predicted and anyone who is sitting there like, oh, cycles and blah, blah, blah. It's like, no. If a scientist can look and go our emissions are causing this and we're going to hit this degree of warming by this time, that's not a coincidence. [00:19:52] Speaker A: What I am almost as excited about as the climate increase is the societal collapse. [00:20:01] Speaker B: Well, right, exactly. I'm just thinking, like, look at this past week. Last week when I went to New Hampshire here, the rain was so bad that the Asbury Park flooding was worse than Hurricane Sandy which is usually our bar for things in New Jersey that destroyed everything in this entire state. The flooding was worse than know there are videos of the New York City subway system just looking as though it's. [00:20:35] Speaker A: About to fucking collapse. [00:20:36] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Yeah. It looks like something out of a disaster movie. Like that kind of stuff is like that's the societal collapse type shit that you're seeing right there. It's cool. [00:20:48] Speaker A: Just so cool. Because we've constructed our society during a very, very brief kind of window of comfort. And it's built to support and enable that comfort. [00:21:03] Speaker B: Right. [00:21:04] Speaker A: So fucking colossal scales of like climate migration and infrastructure collapse and dependence on oil, all of that stuff is just kind of mixed up and it makes it impossible to kind of extricate ourselves from, I think. [00:21:21] Speaker B: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I don't think it is impossible, but I think we are making it impossible. [00:21:27] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Oh, hey, we could solve it. Let me be fucking clear. Without wishing to sound like a Tory fucking scumbag, let me be clear. We can solve this. But we got the Netflix and it's very comfortable. Very comfortable. I'm sorry we've rabbit holed, but I digress. [00:21:48] Speaker B: Yeah. But thus all of that to say I have Climate Crisis Jones over here. No judgment for those heavily bombed Brits acting like Andrew. Certainly not independence. Certainly not no one wants to die a virgin. So I tell you all this. [00:22:08] Speaker A: That's the second bit of audio. I hope so I use that. [00:22:12] Speaker B: Yes. First, the climate change bit. And that. I tell you all this to contextualize what happened on March 3, 1943 at the Bethanyl Green tube station. Now. [00:22:25] Speaker A: Specifically at Bethany Green. [00:22:28] Speaker B: Specifically at Bethanyl Green. Bethanyl Green was a hugely popular station in East London at the time that had been built as an extension of the city's central line in 1939. It's pretty new. It was huge and had a canteen and a library inside. The station could hold up to 7000 people and it had 5000 bunks inside for air raids. People apparently even had weddings and parties inside of it, which is wild. I'm just imagining being like hey, let's go get hitched at the bomb shelter tube station. It's kind of an interesting choice, but strangely, people really liked it down there. [00:23:08] Speaker A: Well, I dare say similar stuff happened all across the fucking world during lockdown a couple of years back. [00:23:15] Speaker B: Yeah, you're probably know, that's a good point. So one writer, Brian Penn, posted an account of his mother's experience using Bethanyl Green as a shelter and showed a picture where his mom is just casually eating a sandwich with her smiling family relaxing around her, just like sewing and stuff like that. And I imagine it's kind of like when I was a kid and we did like, earthquake drills and we'd just bring our pogs outside and have a blast. Like, hey, no big deal. We're just going to sit here and play and we don't have to be in school. And I watched a video of someone walking through Bethanyl Green now because I'm pretty sure I've been there and I didn't remember it being anything to write home about. And sure enough, yeah, it's big, but there's no real trace of the glory days of whatever it was like, at. [00:24:02] Speaker A: This point, I don't think of it as one of the major stations. I dare say someone will correct me, but I don't think of Bethany Green as being one of London's big fucking transport hubs. It's. No Kings Cross and Pancreas. It's. No. Paddington. [00:24:12] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. I think at the time it was important because it was that expansion that was the only thing that was going to get you to East London. And I think that since there have been other things added and obviously things think I tried to look it up and I don't even think there's food of any kind in there. Even in that video. There wasn't even like a stall at the front where someone was selling, like, crisps. It was just a regular. [00:24:40] Speaker A: And also, I can totally picture you with pogs. [00:24:46] Speaker B: That fucking freaking loved pogs. I had a pog maker. Yeah, it was like well, it was not like a lever, but you pushed it down. Kind of like playing Trouble or whatever. Okay, yeah, cut the little circles out. Oh, man, I love those. [00:25:04] Speaker A: Strike a pog. [00:25:05] Speaker B: Pogs always made me nervous, though, because it was like some people wanted to play for keeps and I didn't want to lose any pogs. I'm like, I can't afford pogs. These don't come cheap. Anyways, so it's 1943, we're two years out from the Blitz, and there are still occasional raids and sirens. But largely, people have gone back to their normal lives a good chunk of the time. If they hear a siren, they assume it's a drill. Folks take shelter in Bethanyl Green to be on the safe side, but it's kind of a fun atmosphere. Largely, people aren't living their lives in terror at this point. The 3 March was a mild but wet day. It had rained earlier and at 08:17 P.m., sirens began going off. At this point, there were already 500 people in the station doing normal tube station things, whatever they were up to. But quickly, people began filing out of local businesses, homes and the cinema and into the shelter. About 1500 people heading into the entrance in a ten minute window. There was only one entrance to this station and it was dimly lit with only a 25 watt bulb and no center railing for people to hold onto as they were walking. The local council had asked to make such alterations two years prior, but were denied the funds by the government. The weather had made the stairs down into the underground slippery and tricky to navigate, and at 827, the previously unbothered folks heading down into the station were suddenly startled by the sound of 60 antiaircraft rockets being fired off from nearby. An unfamiliar sound to them as the battery had been newly built. The government had, for whatever reason, assumed that everyone would totally know this was just a test and they'd proceed as usual. But not being psychic, the people freaked out at these new powerful gun sounds and flew into a panic all of a sudden. It wasn't just a routine cautionary measure to get down there, but there actually seemed to be an attack that they needed to escape. And what happened next was chaos. A woman holding a child slipped on the wet stairs, and then an elderly gentleman behind her tripped over her. And before long, you had a domino effect, as people at the back of the line continued surging forward to get away from the guns, and the people in the front fell on top of one another, just stacking into a pile of tangled limbs. Many of them, because it's March in London, had been wearing thick coats. And as they continued piling onto each other, they were overcome by the heat and they suffocated. According to the BBC, it's estimated that hundreds of people fell over the course of just 15 seconds. That's hard to wrap your head around. Yeah, it is like, in an instant, a stack. Hundreds of people high, completely unable to extricate themselves as they lost air. Brian Penn, who I mentioned before, whose mother had been in the casual sandwich photo, described his mother's experience, explaining that her father had decided that they should all wait it out when the air raid siren sounded, even though they normally would have gone down there. One of his mother's cousins, however, had just arrived home on leave from the military and had excitedly gone down to the tube station to meet up with his wife and young son, whom he'd been told were down there. So again, the vibe is just like, oh, it's just another whatever, I'm just going to go down there, meet up with them in the air raid shelter, we're going to have a joyful reunion, that kind of thing. The author's grandfather went to the tube station to help as soon as he heard of the crush that had occurred. And when he returned home in the early hours of the morning, it was with the news that the cousin and his family, his wife and son, had all been killed. They were among 173 people who died that night seven men, 84 women and 62 children. The woman who had initially slipped survived, but her child didn't. Hundred and Joan Martin, 100 and 7173 in total, most of them women and children. Jesus only seven men died in the whole thing. So Joan Martin, a newly minted doctor at Queen Elizabeth's Hospital for Children, described the aftermath in graphic detail. She said, we had hardly finished changing the beds before the first wet mauve body was carried into the hospital. Wet because apparently when they pulled the bodies from the shelter, all they did was to dump them on the pavement and throw water on them. Mauve because they were all, asphyxiated they continued to arrive until 11:00 that night, at least 30 bodies, mostly women and children, almost all dead at 100 years old. She said that the nightmares of that night never fully stopped occurring, although talking about it later in life did help some. And that is actually an important point, because one of the absolutely insane parts of this is that no one was allowed to talk about it. While obviously plenty of journalists were immediately on hand to try to find out what happened, they were rounded by who? [00:30:26] Speaker A: Put who? [00:30:27] Speaker B: I'm about to tell you. [00:30:28] Speaker A: Okay, thank you. [00:30:29] Speaker B: These journalists were there to find out what happened. They were silenced by the British government, who decided that it would be a dangerous hit to morale if people were to know the location and number of fatalities in a totally unnecessary, accidental tragedy. That was kind of their fault for not warning everyone that they were going to shoot off a fuck ton of artillery for no reason. [00:30:49] Speaker A: Wow. [00:30:51] Speaker B: There was no public inquiry. What was found was locked away for safety reasons. And one article noted that journalists literally tried bribing kids with suites and money to tell them details of what happened. God yeah, but the kids were largely either, like, scared or they were traumatized from what had happened, or they were just too obedient to give up the story. Parents said, don't tell anyone, so they. [00:31:15] Speaker A: Didn'T, Fuck off, Mr. [00:31:19] Speaker B: Just like that. [00:31:20] Speaker A: I'd say, Nothing cost you more than that, Governor. [00:31:29] Speaker B: All the kids like that. Yeah, something like that, as the BBC put it. Instead, it was decided that a short statement should be made to the House of Commons by the Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security acknowledging receipt of the inquiry and saying that action was already being taken to prevent further such disasters taking place. Furthermore, in accordance with the inquiry's findings, it was stated that rumors of Jewish or fascist elements involved in creating the crush were absolutely without foundation, which is Jewish wild, because right, even when they're in a war where bajillions of Jews are being murdered and it's like, but did the Jews do it? Come on. [00:32:12] Speaker A: God that's insidious as fuck, isn't it? [00:32:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Anti Semitism, man. It is. Rife. [00:32:21] Speaker A: Just to mention my mother again. Yeah, we had a kind of a conversation about anti Semitism some weeks back when I saw her last. And in her 75 year old way, she kind of was trying to get across she was trying to come across from a kind of a sympathetic angle to Jews and Judaism. Mark, why are Jews so vilified? Mark? They're a peaceful people, aren't they? They're just good with money. [00:33:01] Speaker B: Oh, boy. [00:33:02] Speaker A: And she wouldn't grasp that, even fucking that right. [00:33:07] Speaker B: That sounds like a compliment. Like, what's wrong with exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's the tough thing that's a mindset to people. And thus it's like well, if you start believing that, then it's really easy to think that they are ruling the world and controlling all of the money that comes and goes and blah, blah, blah. That's the root of an insidious belief. There are plenty of Jews who are shit with money just like the rest. [00:33:33] Speaker A: Of us, of course. [00:33:35] Speaker B: But yeah, it's like things that people think are complementaries, like people talking about, like, oh, Asian women are so meek and polite and things like that. Any of this just don't yeah, of course. Even if you think you're complimenting people, you're probably saying something that's contributed to their oppression. Of course, in one way or another. But yeah, I mean, that's the thing. Yeah, we get and our listeners get, I'm sure. But yes, anti Semitism is so prevalent and at the root of so many insane things like this. But anyways in 2006, after pressure from survivors and from families of those who'd been killed, a monument was erected in their memory. With only three people who'd been there alive and able to attend the ceremony at its unveiling called the Stairway to Heaven, the monument is considered to finally recognize the truth between finally recognize the truth behind the tragic loss of life and what caused it. And by the way, immediately after the incident, the government installed handrails there you go. [00:34:46] Speaker A: Listen, thank you, by the way, for that. I adore Joe AG's, where I learn, right? I love it. I just love it. I'm going to regret saying this, but next week I'm going to school you on an American event. [00:35:08] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh, please do. I would love that. [00:35:11] Speaker A: Fucking you. Wait. Next week, I'm going to bring some knowledge to you about an, you know, like a historic yeah, some kind of fucking Jo AGI dark shit. [00:35:24] Speaker B: Because you've absolutely told stories about America before, but I would love to. Give me a nice history you're going to learn. [00:35:32] Speaker A: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:35:35] Speaker B: Yes, please do. [00:35:36] Speaker A: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, Misel sen. [00:35:40] Speaker B: I don't think anyone has ever said Misel sen in such a horny way before. [00:35:44] Speaker A: The way I whispered the word sex cannibal received. [00:35:46] Speaker B: Worst comes to worst, Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:35:50] Speaker A: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm gonna leg it. [00:35:56] Speaker B: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:35:59] Speaker A: I think you feel great about it. [00:36:01] Speaker B: Do you like to lead us into this fine podcast that we both host? [00:36:05] Speaker A: Yes. Friends. Imagine like, a large, heavy open door, right? And it's got a big kind of brass kind of dong dong dong kind of knocker on it, right? And it opens with a creek. And on the other side of that door, beckoning you in, is me and Corey, right? And it leads to a parlor, right? Almost like a parlor. And there's a fire burning, a cozy fire burning in the half. Yeah. And I reach for a large kind of pewter tankered and I offer it to you and it's foaming, like a foaming tankered veil. And I thrust this into your hand. Come, stranger, come. I'm beckoning you in like this. And my face promises forbidden delights. And I'm beckoning you. Come. And I beckon you to a chair, a stool by the half. Sit, stranger. Welcome for this is Jack of all graves. Come, won't you? And maybe you pull back the hood of your cloak because you've been traveling, haven't you, stranger? [00:37:16] Speaker B: Naturally. Yeah, obviously. [00:37:17] Speaker A: And maybe like a serving goblin comes with and he's got a little train refreshments. [00:37:26] Speaker B: Adam. [00:37:27] Speaker A: And you take a little something off the tray and sit down and we begin our tales for the night. [00:37:36] Speaker B: That was vivid. Thank you. I feel the warmth of the situation. [00:37:41] Speaker A: Listen, that 20 minutes I spent playing Bald escape, mate. [00:37:48] Speaker B: This is why we have to get you into this real Dungeons and Dragons thing. You were built for this, obviously. [00:37:56] Speaker A: Oh, thank God you came when you did, stranger. We're about to start another tale. Sit. Shake off the cold, stranger. [00:38:07] Speaker B: This is absolutely going on YouTube. I think everyone needs to experience shake. [00:38:12] Speaker A: Off the cold, stranger. Help yourself to a drink. We have tales to tell. Dark tales. Welcome to Jack of all graves, stranger. [00:38:26] Speaker B: Yes, welcome. Welcome, everybody, to Jack of all Graves. [00:38:30] Speaker A: How's your October working out? Let me tell you something that made me so we've driven back from Wales today, right? [00:38:38] Speaker B: Yes, that's right. [00:38:40] Speaker A: It's October and it was warm as fuck, right? [00:38:44] Speaker B: Not a FAM. [00:38:45] Speaker A: And I think we went through the same thing last year, didn't we? I think I did a video rant. Remember them? When I talked about how fucking freaked out I was at it being hot as fucking in September or whatever, dear, I noticed corey, would you notice? And this is incredible not only did I notice that it's warm as fuck and it's the middle of October, but as we were driving, right, mamas and the papas came on the radio. All the leaves are brown and we looked around and they fucking aren't. All the leaves are green, mate, to. [00:39:20] Speaker B: Be fair, that song is about winter. [00:39:22] Speaker A: And the sky's gray. I went for a walk on a winter's day. Yeah, it's right there. [00:39:30] Speaker B: But yeah, you think leaves crunchy. [00:39:32] Speaker A: Everything should be haddonfield, right? [00:39:38] Speaker B: I mean, being from where haddonfield is, I will say that we're starting to get some of that. But it has been hot. We are like, bits of my block is all green, but around the corner we're getting that nice autumn eness, which is just like I'm feeling the vibe. [00:39:56] Speaker A: No, it seems entirely absent. I'm getting the vibe. I fucking love October. I'm in it, but I'm sure nuts, mate. [00:40:02] Speaker B: But the weather hasn't gotten the message. [00:40:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Physically, you wouldn't really know it because all the leaves are green. The leaves are green. And the world is fucked. [00:40:14] Speaker B: And the world is fucked. [00:40:16] Speaker A: It is way too warm. It's way too warm for Spooky season. I could carry on. [00:40:23] Speaker B: I'm just letting it where I'm going with that. I was not going to interrupt. I was like, okay, let's see how far he takes this. [00:40:33] Speaker A: On a witty, warm October day. [00:40:38] Speaker B: That's art right there. And I for 01:00 a.m. Proud to witness its genesis. [00:40:43] Speaker A: You are correct and you should be. Which is a long winded way of saying, welcome to the podcast, friends. Welcome to another Jackpot Graves. Wherever this episode finds you, I hope it is with just a steadfast fucking resolute aspect to your jaw. You know what I mean? Fucking grit your jaw and crack the fuck on. Because that's what being human is all about. It's not all fun, though, and that's what we're here to discuss. That's the business that we're in. [00:41:11] Speaker B: That's true. But listen, hey, this episode, aside from me talking about a whole bunch of people dying in World War II, is not going to be our darkest. We've done much darker today. We're going to delve into what brought us together in the first place, which is horror flims. [00:41:29] Speaker A: Horror flims. We're freewheeling a little bit this week because it's fun to do that. You've said this to me plenty of times. What you and I can do is converse, corrigan it's a thing we do. We've pretty much done it 24/7 for the past three years. [00:41:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Whether anyone is listening or not, we are pretty much always talking. [00:41:48] Speaker A: We'd be doing this anyway. [00:41:50] Speaker B: Yes. [00:41:51] Speaker A: Right. So pull up a fucking chair, grab a tanker and listen. [00:41:54] Speaker B: And one of the things that I love about today's episode is the thing I love about this podcast in general, I love when people take ownership of this podcast besides us, because obviously, I think we both look at it as more of a community than anything. We sit here for a couple of hours on Sunday in order to then talk with our friends on all the social medias and things like that. The rest of the week, we plant. [00:42:16] Speaker A: The seeds here, we reap the crop. [00:42:18] Speaker B: With, you know, that's that's the point of all of this. And so what was great is that we got a message from our dear friend Sam this week that was basically like, hey, let's do this conversation on the podcast. And he wanted us to talk about basically sort of the boundaries of horror and why we consider some things horror and some things not, and those hazy edges around what that means. And so we're going to talk about that not just because I think that's a great topic, but also because I love when someone's just like, all right, let's do this. This is what Jo AG needs to be about. Yes. Take ownership of this podcast. Tell us what to talk about. We love that it is always open. [00:43:01] Speaker A: Hey, Pragmatically. It makes things easier. [00:43:03] Speaker B: It's true. There's a lot fewer late night Saturday panic text messages from going, oh, fuck. What are we going to talk about tomorrow? [00:43:12] Speaker A: Even less time spent in front of Wikipedia before hitting record. [00:43:18] Speaker B: I will have you know, I don't ever look at Wikipedia for Jo AG. [00:43:23] Speaker A: Nope. Oh, me. [00:43:29] Speaker B: Um, we promised that I can't remember if it was last week or two weeks ago. It must have been two weeks ago. But we did promise that we were going to update on what happened with Taylor Shabism. [00:43:40] Speaker A: Yes. And the update on Taylor Shabism. What do you think might have happened. [00:43:46] Speaker B: What would you expect to have happened with Taylor Shabismus and her sentencing if you did not listen to the podcast two weeks ago? Mark Cold opened with the story of an absolute sociopath who viciously murdered her friend and seemed to really have a fun time dismembering him. [00:44:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:44:07] Speaker B: Showed no remorse for it afterwards. Her sentencing was the day after we recorded that Monday, we found out the fate of Taylor Shabismus. And this I don't think is going to shock anybody, but she received a life sentence. [00:44:24] Speaker A: She went down. She went down. [00:44:26] Speaker B: She went down for that one. It might have even been like, I think it was multiple life sentences that she received. Concurrent life sentences, which then at the end of it, I don't know if you caught this because I just put it on while I was working, just because I was fascinated by the mechanations of this court thing. I haven't really watched a lot of court sentencings and stuff like that, but they made sure to get five months off for time served or whatever. I was like, what does that do? What is that for? [00:45:02] Speaker A: That's due process. That's what that is. [00:45:04] Speaker B: Yeah. I guess it's just a technicality or whatever. I don't know. [00:45:08] Speaker A: But I mean, it gives you a little bit of insight into how her day had gone that she came out into court wearing a fucking spit shield. So she'd obviously been a little feisty. Feisty. That's the word that's very much yeah. I like that they brought her was it her grandma? Was it her NAN? As a character? [00:45:27] Speaker B: Yeah. It was like, oh, my. Was we talked a little bit about this while playing Deathstor. But also we're very distracted because Mark kept dying. But they did they brought, like, her grandmother out as a character witness who was not super convincing, and then her father, who is also currently in jail, which the judge was not impressed by. [00:45:50] Speaker A: Almost comedic exchange with the judge talking to a dad. Does your daughter have any kind of pleasant characteristic qualities? Yeah. Would you like to tell us? [00:46:01] Speaker B: And he couldn't really think of any. [00:46:02] Speaker A: Yeah, now is your time to tell us. [00:46:09] Speaker B: Yeah, it was really something. And obviously this whole thing has been part of our discussion of empathy and about prison, abolition, all those kinds of things. So it's a complicated thing. But of all people, I mean, what happened to her is exactly what you would expect to happen. [00:46:27] Speaker A: No. [00:46:28] Speaker B: Whether that is right or wrong. [00:46:29] Speaker A: Plot twists. [00:46:31] Speaker B: No plot twists. Exactly what you would think happened. That's what happened. There you go. In other news, we are changing it up a little bit with our watch along this month and hopefully not stepping on any dead and lovely toes. They do watch things on Sundays, but I figure we can marathon it. It's Halloween time. [00:46:53] Speaker A: It is. [00:46:55] Speaker B: We need to do a Halloween time watch along. We will not be able to do it on a Saturday. So Sunday the 29th, Sunday of October. [00:47:02] Speaker A: This month's watch along. And you know what? Because it's the Halloween watch along, it has to be a good one, doesn't it? [00:47:06] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. [00:47:08] Speaker A: It has to be a killer. So I'll think on I mean, I don't know, there's an agitator part of me that maybe why do we do rob zombies? Halloween. [00:47:23] Speaker B: Oh, God, I don't know about that. I guess it's a great one to mock all the way through. So there is that we'll think on what the best idea for a watch along at Halloween time is. And please let us know if you have any suggestions. But for now, Mark, October 29 in your calendar, if you're available. 09:00 p.m. British Time 04:00 p.m. Eastern Time 01:00 p.m. Pacific Time And we'll get together and watch something. And then we'll ice cream Sunday afterwards. [00:48:01] Speaker A: With dead and lovely Jo AG friends. And then just hop. [00:48:04] Speaker B: Yeah. What do you do when it's Halloween time? You just watch movies. [00:48:08] Speaker A: That's all you do. You indulge in the color orange. [00:48:14] Speaker B: It's true. I love orange. Orange looks great on me. I don't wear enough of it, but. [00:48:18] Speaker A: I can't get time for that. Ever remember seeing you in orange? I'm sure it would look good things. Do. [00:48:26] Speaker B: A regular what clothes horse. A clothes horse? [00:48:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:48:31] Speaker B: That's complimentary. [00:48:33] Speaker A: Yeah, you're a regular clothes you know what a clothes horse? [00:48:35] Speaker B: I don't think anyone's ever like, okay. [00:48:38] Speaker A: A clotheshorse is well, or was it's like an old timey fuck? I'm sure I'm getting it wrong now, but a clotheshorse is like an old timey way of storing and displaying clothes like a mannequin, almost like a dummy and you're a regular clotheshorse means you look good in pretty much wherever you should wish to wear. [00:48:59] Speaker B: Okay. I'll accept it because most of the time being called a horse is not positive. But I will accept that in this. [00:49:09] Speaker A: Case I guess that one doesn't translate. [00:49:12] Speaker B: Not so much doesn't translate from the 40s where you apparently came here today from I'm timeless. Timeless and book club. October 21 as always, the book is that's a good question. I know it's short, whatever it is. I downloaded the audiobook and it was only 5 hours and if you're like me and you put it on near double speed that's no time at all. [00:49:42] Speaker A: That is reading. Is it? [00:49:44] Speaker B: Yes, of course. Like what if you're like a blind person or something? Have you not read books because you've never been able to look at it? [00:49:54] Speaker A: Is the act not the thing though, with reading with a book? Is the format not the thing? [00:50:03] Speaker B: No, I don't think so. [00:50:04] Speaker A: Okay. [00:50:06] Speaker B: I think if you are getting the same information from the book, either way it's reading. I mean, you could say I listened to a book but it doesn't really functionally say anything different than if you said I read a book because you got the exact same information from I'm. [00:50:27] Speaker A: Certain I'm kind of pouring my way through a fucking argument which has been had a zillion times in a zillion other places. I'm sure this isn't a new fucking but the act of carving out time to sit and to read a book is more of a conscious decision than you can just hit play on something wherever you're doing, can't you? [00:50:49] Speaker B: Well, that's one of the reasons this is often so contentious is that kind of looking at it that way excludes many disabled people from ever reading. [00:50:57] Speaker A: It does. [00:50:58] Speaker B: Right. So this is one of the reasons that I've started doing audiobooks is because a lot of times my ADHD is such like as I read for work all day and write all the time that sitting down to read a book it's just head bees. But if I put an audiobook on and then put like a mindless video game on, I can absorb that information just fine. I need that extra sort of stimulus to be able to take it in and I think a lot of people sort of have those kinds of things. It would be great to sit down and read a book but sometimes you have to balance what's going on in your brain. [00:51:37] Speaker A: You're right, of course. It's the first time I've even fucking considered that. So it's a there you go, poorly formed, half ass, just stream of consciousness. Just like my life. [00:51:54] Speaker B: I feel great about it. Me too. October 21 look jackovallgrace.com bookclub to find out what the book is because of course I can't remember right now and I did not write it down Headbees, but it's a quick one. So even at headbees. So even if you can't get to it till the day before, hey, it's not going to take you very long. [00:52:13] Speaker A: What a beautiful segue to talk about. Just something wonderful which happened today book wise. Right, go ahead. Loads of times I've spoken about how great it is to show your kids the films you love, right? [00:52:26] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely, yeah. [00:52:27] Speaker A: Now, today, for the first time, I had the experience of giving passing down to my kids a book that I fucking love, right? [00:52:35] Speaker B: Okay. [00:52:36] Speaker A: They've read The Hobit and fucking other. [00:52:37] Speaker B: Books, sure, like the standard ones everybody's read. [00:52:40] Speaker A: But this was a contemporary book from the last kind of 1015 years or so that I adore, and I've read cover to cover, and I described it to my kids in the car earlier because we had, like a two and a half hour car journey and I gave it to them earlier on and they've had their fucking nose in it ever since. Just chortling away at this book, and it's been a delight. [00:53:00] Speaker B: What is it? [00:53:02] Speaker A: The book is called The Time Wasted Letters. [00:53:06] Speaker B: Okay. [00:53:07] Speaker A: Right. It is a work of comedy from a guy by the name of Robert Popper. Right? [00:53:14] Speaker B: Okay. [00:53:15] Speaker A: He co wrote, look around you with Seraphinovich. He's had a fantastic career as a comedy commissioner in childhood, and the book is him in character, as a character called Robin Cooper. And it's verbatim copies of spurious letters that he's written to just organizations and clubs and companies and corporations in the UK, just with just the specific intent of just wasting people's fucking time proposing kind of ridiculous new product ideas, just scientific mistakes. There's a letter where he writes to the Beekeeping Association of the UK. We all know that bees make honey, but did you know wasps make mustard? And he then outlines how wasps make mustard and then proposes at the end, I have a line of mustard that I'm producing, and I assume I'm fine to put your name on the jar. And nice. Just the correspondence goes on and on and on, often becoming quite fractious. The Beekeeping association reply with yes, very interesting. Do not use our name on your product. [00:54:29] Speaker B: Right. [00:54:30] Speaker A: End of, you know, they often include diagrams of just stupid shit that he's made up. And I can read this book and laugh my ass off. And the boys enjoyed it, too, because. [00:54:42] Speaker B: It inhabits are they reading it together? Like, are they just, like, sitting there. [00:54:45] Speaker A: Letters and the return of the time whistle letters? [00:54:48] Speaker B: Okay. [00:54:50] Speaker A: It inhabits this really narrow space of comedy that I love, which is no one gets hurt, no one's harmed it's not at anyone's expense. It's just fucking just stupid enough to be funny. [00:55:05] Speaker B: Right? [00:55:08] Speaker A: I think my 45 years I've spent pursuing that fucking zone. If it's too stupid, you can dismiss it, right? Nobody cares if it goes too far. That way it becomes malicious and you're trying to derail people. But there's a little fucking beautiful sweet spot where it just elevates. It almost takes it to another plateau. It's so fucking stupid, but just the right sort. It's almost kind of a studied stupid. You've got to really put thought into getting something in that sweet spot. And I adore it. And that book nails it. The time wasted diaries by Robert Popper, writing as Robin Cooper. It's brilliant. [00:55:53] Speaker B: Awesome. [00:55:54] Speaker A: And the boys, if you're looking for. [00:55:55] Speaker B: A little bit of great stupidity in. [00:55:57] Speaker A: Your life, check that book out. It's fantastic. [00:56:01] Speaker B: Into it. You've sold it well. Also, next week, Arboffin is back. Eileen will be here. Normally, we'd solicit questions from you, but we already had several that she's going to answer for us. And it promises to be epic. So we know you all love her. [00:56:23] Speaker A: As much as we do these episodes, right? I live for Eileen's kind of good natured exasperation. I fucking love it. A couple of weeks of bangers lined up. In fact, not only do we have our good friend Eileen next week, the week after that, we have once again, fuck me. We have some learned ass guests on this. We do podcast. The week after, we have Dr. Kerry Thomas, who's a very good friend of mine. And her area of expertise is in just old ass arcane fucking texts. [00:56:58] Speaker B: Medievalism is her specialty. Yeah. [00:57:01] Speaker A: So I said old ass arcane text, arcane fucking and Kerry's going to come on and she's going to just we're going to talk about just tomes with fucking dark, dark, dark tales attached because it was called the Dark Ages for a think. You know, some awful shit happened. So Kerry is going to give us her learned view on some old school fucking nastiness. [00:57:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm super stoked on that. [00:57:29] Speaker A: Can't wait. Can't wait. [00:57:31] Speaker B: So lots to look forward to. Dear friends, spooky season is upon us, and we are hitting it hard. [00:57:35] Speaker A: Yep. [00:57:36] Speaker B: And in that the fact that we. [00:57:37] Speaker A: Keep getting doctors on it, it's legit as shit, right? [00:57:40] Speaker B: I feel like we need more respect put on our names here for this. [00:57:45] Speaker A: Right? [00:57:46] Speaker B: Some educated ass guests. [00:57:49] Speaker A: Booksellers and doctors and fucking scientists, psychiatrists. I am elevated by the company we keep here. Here, as in turn, are they denigrated by my presence? [00:58:06] Speaker B: Never disagree. [00:58:08] Speaker A: And we kind of meet in the middle. Yeah. And we even one another out. [00:58:12] Speaker B: Yeah. I feel good about that. Upon us. No, it's great. I mean, that's what we do here. It is that kind of episode. We were both in the mood for this. So with all of this said, obviously we've been hitting the films pretty hard lately. I feel like I will start just because I have a bunch and I'm going to cycle through them, rip into them. Then we'll talk about yours and we'll talk about what we watch together. So I've been trying to do the thing that people do where you make sure to watch at least one good Halloween movie every night, which I have been absolutely adoring and have been largely pleased with the films that I've watched, whether I'd seen them before or not. It's been a really good time to just get into the season. So I started day one. I was like, I want something classically like 90s that takes me back. And so I watched Disturbing Behavior for day one of the Halloween season. Have you ever seen it? [00:59:15] Speaker A: No, I don't believe I have. [00:59:17] Speaker B: Love Disturbing Behavior so late ninety s. I think it's 1998. James Marsden and Katie Holmes and Nick Stahl in this. [00:59:26] Speaker A: Spike. [00:59:28] Speaker B: No, Marsden not basically, you know, James Marsden moves to this new town after the suicide of his brother, played in flashback by my boy Ethan Embry. And as he sort of starts to make friends, he finds that the jocks in this town are sort of weird and malicious and they're all very perfect, but they tend to kind of short circuit if they have an imperfect thought leading to lots of violence. Something is happening that is teenagers. Yeah, there's sort of stepford teenagers. And the soundtrack is very 90s. [01:00:13] Speaker A: Who's on the soundtrack? [01:00:15] Speaker B: Fashion. Oh, gosh. The main song is Got You Where I Want You by The Flies. Do you remember that one? [01:00:21] Speaker A: No. [01:00:22] Speaker B: Got you where I want you. [01:00:26] Speaker A: No, I don't know it. I don't know it. But I love that we're both singing it up this week. [01:00:29] Speaker B: It's a singing episode. [01:00:31] Speaker A: It's a musical episode. [01:00:32] Speaker B: Every fucking every show doesn't but anyways, yeah, very 90s soundtrack does that 90s thing where movies for some reason were always trying to coin phrases and words like new slang and so like, oh God, I wish I could remember. There's one point where Katie Holmes just says something as if it's like a normal word for cool that we all say and it's not a thing. But I love that about 90s movies. They're always trying to coin a term like, oh, cool, rebellious goth chicks are going to say this. It's so much fun. Everything I've watched has basically been a cool 90 minutes. So yeah, I highly recommend Disturbing Behavior. So much fun. Good throwback. I watched Dead Silence, which is a little bit of our boy Lee, Juan El and James Wan. And it is about a murderous ventriloquist demi which know generally something that's going to be a good time. And I quite enjoyed that as well. It is divisive. A lot of people hate it for whatever reason. But I love the vibes. I think the vibes are immaculate. It is at times very gory and surprising. [01:01:49] Speaker A: Is it a recent film? [01:01:50] Speaker B: It's a James Wan. Not one appeared of no, it's an early one. So this is before all the things that we kind of know him for. I want to say it's like the late upgrades. Something like that. Yeah. And I thought it was an absolute delight and highly recommend it. And I watched another ventriloquist dummy movie, one that I've been meaning to watch since it was on one of those shutter documentaries about like oh, the Scariest movies or whatever. It was magic with your boy Sir Anthony Hopkins in it when he was like young for him. It's one of his first movies, but he's like 40 in it. That man is old. Yes. I don't know if I've said this before, but I always kind of like when I watch something and someone's at the beginning of their career or whatever and they're old, they're older than I am now or in the same region as I am mentioned. [01:02:47] Speaker A: Max Von Siddo last week, my earliest fucking film I've ever seen him in. [01:02:51] Speaker B: He's already that like Anthony Hopkins is alive and well now and it just to know. People always say like, life is short, but I'm like that's just kind of like this movie was made before I was born and he is older than me and he is still hanging out doing stuff. [01:03:11] Speaker A: Now, Kane has been for some reason doing the rounds lately. He's got a movie out and he had a kind of a long interview segment on Radio Two last week. He's 90. [01:03:23] Speaker B: 90? [01:03:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:03:25] Speaker B: So is Ellen Burston. She's 90 as well. This came out talking about the new Exorcist movie, which is apparently trash but still think it's wild that she's 90 years old. That's bonkers. Dick van Dyke. William Shatner. Angela Landsberg. I mean, she's not alive now, but she lasted a long time. No, she died like a year ago, something like that. Okay, you of all people should know that. [01:03:54] Speaker A: I'm sure you post keeper of the fucking records. In fact, I think she died like on or around New Year's Day. Thus fucking up. [01:04:03] Speaker B: I want to say you're right or something like that. [01:04:06] Speaker A: I've got big plans for deadpool this New Year's Eve, by the way. I'm going to do a spreadsheet. [01:04:11] Speaker B: What do you usually do? [01:04:13] Speaker A: I just scroll through the comments every time? Yeah, for years, whenever. [01:04:20] Speaker B: That's insane. I always assumed you had a spreadsheet. [01:04:23] Speaker A: No, I'm going to do it this year though because I'm sick to fucking death of every time there's a celebrity fatality. Oh, one SEC. Find the post. [01:04:34] Speaker B: Paint. You're incredible. So magic. Youngish Anthony Hopkins plays a wannabe magician who is know he's a magician. People don't like super like magicians. And so he's trying know perform and people don't take him seriously. But then he introduces this ventriloquist dummy into his act, which shoots him up into fame and he becomes this incredibly famous performer. But he is asked to do like a medical exam as part of being insured or whatever to do performances and he refuses and he ends up basically fleeing to his long ago basically childhood crush who owns like an inn or whatever. And he ends up staying. In her home while this dummy we start to see seems to have some form of mind of its own. Nice. And yeah, things get crazy, and it's a weird, super weird movie, but it's well acted and unsettling. So magic is, I think, worth a watch. It's on shutter. I went and saw Haunting in Venice. [01:06:00] Speaker A: That was not and you solved it within the first. [01:06:07] Speaker B: I won't give it away, but it was like, literally something happened in it that I was like, oh, yeah, okay, so it has to be this. And sure enough, that ended up being the solution. And that was, like, about 35 minutes into the movie that I was like, okay, but it's like, basically just like all the other poirot brana poirot movies, except with tons of jump scares and canted angles. And it was like they were like now we've made horror very annoying on. [01:06:38] Speaker A: Topic, I guess, because in no way would you describe that as a horror movie, right? [01:06:43] Speaker B: They seem to think it is. [01:06:44] Speaker A: Yeah. But the jump scares, I found it super dull. Laura was all over it, though. But I was not a fan. [01:06:54] Speaker B: I think dull is exactly the right word for that, which was, unfortunately, kind of my experience also of the movie Historia de Loquuto or History of the Occult, which I'd been looking forward to seeing. This was notoriously the highest rated horror movie on letterboxed in 2022. Oh, I feel like it was like an algorithmic glitch or something. I can't imagine how that's the case. It's short. I think it's like an hour and ten minutes or something like that. But it felt like it dragged forever, basically. And here, listen, this is what I'll give it. It is very low budget, obviously, and they're doing the best they can with what they've got. However, I did read one of the reviews that was in Spanish, but was talking about how there had been an interview with the director, okay. And that the director said basically he came up with the idea, wrote the script and started shooting within, like, three weeks or whatever. And it feels like that. [01:08:03] Speaker A: Good sign. [01:08:04] Speaker B: Good sign. So basically, the story of History of the Occult is that there is some sort of like you're seeing this through, these people who are watching an evening news broadcast called 60 Minutes to Midnight, and we find out that this 60 Minutes to Midnight show is having its last broadcast and it has something to do with that. Some sort of conspiracy involving the president of the country has been unfurled, and they're about to try to go on and expose what happened here. And they have various guests on this show. Meanwhile, you're watching these people who are somehow involved in the process of this unraveling on this show. And then there's like a cult that is somehow involved in this. There's like a magic mushroom that they all take, and that's revealing things to them. There's a lot of moving parts to this. [01:09:00] Speaker A: It sounds super interesting. They're like found footagey kind of vibes. [01:09:04] Speaker B: It's in black and white. It's not found footage, but you're watching these people and you're watching this broadcast. [01:09:12] Speaker A: See, that sounds super interesting. [01:09:14] Speaker B: It does, doesn't it? In theory, this sounds great. It's just kind of boring and really confusing. And part of that, I think it's from Argentina, I think. And there are some things I read in some of the reviews, too, that people were like, oh, there are hints as to anachronisms and stuff like this in this that should clue you into certain things. But if you don't know anything about Argentinian geography or politics, you're not going to get that. So things that are supposed to cue you into various things you're not necessarily seeing in this, and then it's like one of those things where it ends and it's, like, completely open. It does not attempt to tell you at all what happened. So I know it's short, so you could always put it on. It's not going to be like, I wasted my life watching this movie just for me. I was just like, it was so confusing to try to figure out this conspiracy theory and what I had to do with any of these things going on. And it felt like threads didn't go anywhere, and then it ended. [01:10:20] Speaker A: Isn't it amazing just how much more forgiving one can be if a film is simply short? [01:10:27] Speaker B: Right? [01:10:28] Speaker A: Oh, God, it forgives a get away with so much more if you just do it. [01:10:33] Speaker B: Just don't make me sit forever. [01:10:36] Speaker A: Make your mistakes and make them quickly. I'm fine with that. I'll enjoy it. [01:10:40] Speaker B: Right. I'd have no animosity towards a movie that doesn't make me sit there for something I hate. Yes, okay, that's fine. This is legitimately. Like, you know how much I hate Skinner Marink, but I think if Skinner Marink was an hour, I wouldn't hate it as much as it being nearly two. [01:10:58] Speaker A: But Skinner Marink is the exception because the fucking length was a part of the fucking that was a part of the. [01:11:09] Speaker B: Again. [01:11:10] Speaker A: I could watch Skin and Rick again. [01:11:11] Speaker B: I know it's on Anna's list for the Halloween season. I will ever, ever make that mistake again. [01:11:20] Speaker A: I'm so curious to know what she's going to make of it, yet somehow kind of suspecting what she might feel. [01:11:27] Speaker B: Oh, she's already seen it. [01:11:29] Speaker A: Okay. [01:11:30] Speaker B: Yeah, this is a rewatch. [01:11:34] Speaker A: Wow. Good. Yes. I could happily watch Skin ring again because I loved it. I loved what it was as much as what I saw. I loved what it represents. [01:11:45] Speaker B: Anyways, not to kickstart Skinnerink discourse again. I'm just merely going with the like I would not have been as mad at it if I didn't sit there as long. [01:11:52] Speaker A: I think I like Skinner in the same way as I like the time wasted letters. It's an exercise in fuckery stupidity. Yeah, it's an exercise in pushing just what it can get away with. [01:12:04] Speaker B: Right. [01:12:04] Speaker A: How dare you fucking do that? I applaud that. [01:12:09] Speaker B: Fair enough. I also watch Ghost Watch again because I just love Ghost Watch. It used to be really hard to find. Someone actually messaged me on Instagram was like, how did you watch it? I've been trying to watch this for years. This year, for the first time, it's on. Like, you can rent it or buy it. I actually bought it because I was like, I don't want to search for it every year. I'm just going to buy the movie. It's like 799. You can rent or buy it on stuff. So if you've never seen Ghost Watch I watched it last year on Archive.org, but there's notoriously nothing to streamarchive.org to your TV. So if you want to just watch it regular styles, you can rent it. And if you don't know Ghost Watch, it was BBC. Yeah. [01:12:50] Speaker A: Yes. [01:12:52] Speaker B: Sort of early kind of found footagey sort of thing, where I believe it's. [01:12:57] Speaker A: 1990 proto found footage. Yes. And it just completely blindsided the British public. [01:13:06] Speaker B: Yes. It's presented like a real sort of news special broadcast, including real presenters from. [01:13:14] Speaker A: The BBC, fronted by none other than Michael Parkinson. [01:13:18] Speaker B: Michael Parkinson. It's got what's his face from Red Dwarf. [01:13:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:13:22] Speaker B: Is in it playing himself. So really has the art of it. [01:13:26] Speaker A: Sarah Green, all of whom were in no way associated with fiction or with anything like know you simply did not see it coming. [01:13:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And they do such an incredible job with it. [01:13:37] Speaker A: They sell it. I watched it as a kid. [01:13:40] Speaker B: I love that so much. And the premise of this is that they are investigating a haunting thinking about. [01:13:48] Speaker A: That experience of seeing that live as it went out. It was fucking wild. It was wild. It was like you were seeing a fucking supernatural event unfolding on TV in front of you. You were all in on it. And then at a point where you twig, oh, okay. But everything leading up to that just nobody in the UK fucking saw this coming. It was incredible. It can't be overstated just how big an event it was in TV. [01:14:17] Speaker B: I love that so much. And it's like the kind of thing that you just simply couldn't pull off. Now we aren't all watching the same thing. I mean, in America, the way TV works, that would have been difficult anyway, just by sheer volume of channels people have tried. [01:14:33] Speaker A: A couple of years back, Inside Number Nine had a go at something similar, obviously with them being who they are, right. [01:14:42] Speaker B: Like you're not going to be able to pull off the cast or like the actors that they have for Inside Number Nine. [01:14:48] Speaker A: They were obviously massively influenced by Ghostwatch and it was a kind of a behind the scenes look at them as they filmed like a Halloween special of Inside Number Nine. They did some really fun social media tricks as well as it was going out, one of the characters, they have a power cut or the fucking communications goes down or something. And one of them says the other, check Twitter. And at the time you're seeing him tweeting in real time as the show is going out, very cool as fuck. [01:15:17] Speaker B: I do love that sort of like transmedia type stuff where you can incorporate things, but you couldn't pull off the just like everyone's sitting around, oh, it's the evening. What do we do after we eat dinner? We're going to park and park. Right. [01:15:30] Speaker A: Not like Parkinson doing something like this. Or it's ghosts. What the fuck? [01:15:34] Speaker B: What's happening? Yeah, so it's so fun to watch. And I feel like I can kind of put myself in the position of, like, I wish that I would have gotten to see this live with everybody, but I can understand watching it, what that would have been like. [01:15:48] Speaker A: Fucking so well, right? The glimpses you get in the background of Pipes. [01:15:56] Speaker B: On yeah, I said this last year, but Pipes is just such a perfect spooky name, too. It makes sense why the kid nicknames the monster ghost thing Pipes. And then every time you hear it, you kind of shudder a little bit. So great. If you haven't seen Ghost Watch. Yeah, rent it. It's a dollar 99 or whatever. [01:16:16] Speaker A: Put yourself in character in Britain in the 90s. You're watching this going out for the first time, or the 89, did you say? [01:16:23] Speaker B: I think it's 90. [01:16:24] Speaker A: Okay. Just imagine how that would have fucking landed at the time. Incredible. [01:16:30] Speaker B: Amazing. And then the other last two things I want to mention is after enjoying timeless Tony Storm on AEW on collision last night, I had a craving to watch Sunset Boulevard, which she obviously has based this character on. And that movie is just so fucking insane and such a good time. If you've never seen Sunset Boulevard, it's about an aging former silent film star who, when the talkies hit, she sort of fell out of fashion. But she still considers herself a star and wants to make her comeback. And so she employs this writer who's sort of down on his luck to help her to fix up a script. And this is going to be the thing that she shows to Cecil B. DeMille and gets her back into Hollywood and into the spotlight again. And she's completely delusional, falls in love with the writer, basically holds him hostage. And it is escalation upon escalation. And it's a phenomenal movie everyone should watch at some point. Have you seen it, Mark? [01:17:43] Speaker A: I have not. If you listen to this week's episode, I've seen and done shit. I know nothing of what anyone is talking about this week. [01:17:52] Speaker B: Fair enough. The final thing I want to mention is a podcast that I listen to that I think you specifically, Mark, will be interested in, and some of our listeners might as well. There's a podcast, and I can't remember who the host producer is, but she's BBC presenter and the podcast is called Scamanda, as in Scam and Amanda. And it's only eight parts. And basically the premise of this is that this woman, Amanda, she became, like kind of a cancer influencer essentially by writing this blog about her journey after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma or non Hodgkin's lymphoma, whichever one can kill you, and I think they both can. But the one that's more she, you know, over several years sort of kept this blog about her cancer journey is really detailed and everything that was happening to her and going into remission and then it coming back and all of this kind of stuff raised money for her bills from people as an active churchgoer and everything. And it turns out she did not have cancer. And that's just the beginning, you know, that she doesn't have cancer basically from the outset of this. And the story is absolutely fucking bonkers of how she scammed all of these people and how deeply she committed to the bit and how long it lasted and how people started to question it and all of that stuff. Big recommends gamanda. [01:19:37] Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you. And because it's BBC that legitimizes. [01:19:41] Speaker B: You will actually listen to it. [01:19:44] Speaker A: Something that I might actually give time to. [01:19:46] Speaker B: Precisely what have you watched? I know you watched fewer things. [01:19:52] Speaker A: Give me a moment. [01:19:53] Speaker B: Aside from what we watched together, we did watch several. Again, we're leaning in hard to spooky seasons. So part of the reason you haven't watched things on your own is just that we've watched stuff almost every night. [01:20:04] Speaker A: Yeah, just on a wreck from our good friend Richard The Card Counter, which is the Paul Schrader movie. Rich recommended it to me on the kind of the merits of it, of it being quite brutal in places, being quite kind of uncompromising, quite violent in parts, which it is. It's a drama about, as you would expect, a card counter, a card shop played by Oscar Isaac, who is just doing Oscar Isaac things, brooding with his being hot fucking bone structure on that man. [01:20:41] Speaker B: Damn it. [01:20:43] Speaker A: And fucking playing cards and wearing suits. Fucking give me a fucking break. He's got a murky past. He was part of the kind of enhanced interrogation squad in Abu Girab and fucking that kind of thing. And, yes, perfectly serviceable. I enjoyed it. I was into it, but was unmoved by it. It isn't something I'd ever returned to, but it's a solid three stars. Thank you, Richard's. Good movie. Now, as we were watching this movie, I was looking forward to talking about it. [01:21:21] Speaker B: Yes. [01:21:23] Speaker A: And I don't even know where to begin, right. Because this week Corey and I watched a movie that I know had I discovered this movie as a 1415 or 16 year old, I would be trading the tapes. I would be fucking writing letters to magazines about it. I would be sharing it with my friends. I would be encouraging Alan, and I would be watching it together on VHS. It would have been fucking right there on the video. Nasty shelf. This is burial ground. [01:21:54] Speaker B: Burial ground. [01:21:55] Speaker A: An Italian joint from 1981. [01:21:58] Speaker B: Oh, boy. [01:21:59] Speaker A: Which just dial that fucking WTF factor right up to eleven. Because what the fuck? [01:22:10] Speaker B: So when I pitched, like, it was my turn to pick the movie and I sent a bunch of screenshots, but I was like, Burial Ground. This last one look at this review. And someone had basically written that this movie has no plot or character development or anything, but just insane straight in practical gore effects. That is accurate. Everything that happens in it is so bizarre. [01:22:36] Speaker A: Yeah. You've got a group of people, their connection, their relationship to one another is just literally never explored. [01:22:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I think they briefly at the beginning when they descend upon the house, they mentioned something about a professor who we have just seen die openings there's. [01:22:55] Speaker A: Like a kind of a prologue with a Rasputin looking fella, and he's got some texts and he's reading them, and the dead come to life. Bang. Cut to like an upbeat jazz opening. And then you've got these knob Eds, because they are all knobheads. No one's at all. Likable. [01:23:17] Speaker B: You're not going to be sad to see anyone go. [01:23:19] Speaker A: No one to root for, no one to care about. They all descend on this mansion and the dead arising. And bang. Game on, dude. We're off. We're off at the races. I don't know where to begin on just how fucking interesting this film is. Because on one level, right, this is a very fucking competent as fuck movie, I believe that right. I think this movie is competent as shit. I think it is an excellent example of Italian horror at the turn of the decade. Right, sure. The walkers themselves, the creepers themselves, the zombies themselves are fantastic. [01:24:07] Speaker B: Yeah, they really are. [01:24:08] Speaker A: The mask work and the makeup work is just first fucking class. You get a sense of hollowed out kind of cavities putrefaction having done its work. These are rotten fucking cankerous. When these zombies get shot, nothing comes forth but dust. And just dusty dust and pus husks. Rotten bloated, missing eyes, worm fucking infested, teeth sticking out where they shouldn't. Just holes. These look like fucking wet, soggy corpses. [01:24:51] Speaker B: Gross. [01:24:52] Speaker A: Am I wrong? [01:24:53] Speaker B: No, you're right. You are right. It's just. [01:24:58] Speaker A: The craft that has gone into each and there's only like eight of them. [01:25:02] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. [01:25:04] Speaker A: At 1.1 of the characters is looking through the window at these dead advancing on the house. There must be 20 of them. There aren't. I counted. There are nine. [01:25:13] Speaker B: Right. [01:25:16] Speaker A: But it has that very much in its favor. The work that's gone into these fucking creatures is immaculate. I loved it. I was nerding out over these fucking zombies. They're amazing. But then what it also has is just the weirdest fucking cast of supporting. [01:25:32] Speaker B: Characters, right, where it's like basically you come into this and obviously Italian movies horror of this point is often just kind of like sex and then stuff and then murder, which yeah, it's just these weird. Like, everybody comes into this place and then goes to various corners to have sex with each other. But amongst the weirder what the first couple we see getting it on are then interrupted by the creepiest manchild you can possibly well, yeah, imagine the film. [01:26:09] Speaker A: Doesn'T ever make reference to this, but they've clearly cast an adult with a growth condition, right? As a child, it's blatant from the first time you see this. The kid looks like fucking Modoc, right? He's got the kid looks like Modoc. [01:26:29] Speaker B: This Misshapen Bowl cut. [01:26:31] Speaker A: No, this is a very specific reference for the Brits here. [01:26:35] Speaker B: Right, okay. [01:26:35] Speaker A: But if anybody's ever seen Reeves and Mortimer doing Lloyd Grossman on MasterChef, right, the kid looks like that. And I'll walk you through this reference later on, right? And you'll get this kid air quotes. Oh. [01:26:56] Speaker B: No, balloons. Oh, there they are. There's the balloons. [01:26:59] Speaker A: You've got this clearly this short adult with a massive cranium acting as an eleven year old. Why did they just cast a kid every other fucking film? [01:27:09] Speaker B: Right? Well, I think later on we find out why they didn't cast a kid, to be fair. [01:27:14] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, there was that, wasn't it? [01:27:16] Speaker B: Yes. [01:27:18] Speaker A: And the plotline, the plot thread of this kid goes in a fucking takes a swerve that you will not see coming. You won't see it coming. And people are killed in various ways. Old school gore. They've obviously got some fucking pig innards in a dummy and just ripped them apart. [01:27:41] Speaker B: All that good bright red blood. [01:27:44] Speaker A: It's got the juice and the meat. This is a carnivorous fucking movie, but it's high camp. It's hammed right up. It makes no sense. There's no plot. It is a curious little bit of cinema, this. And I was all over it. I fucking loved it. [01:28:05] Speaker B: Yeah, this is the kind of thing that's exactly what Mary Whitehouse was talking about. Where is the redeeming value of this movie? There isn't any. And that's the point brings nothing brings nothing to the table other than a. [01:28:20] Speaker A: Work of some considerable artistic craft. The prosthetic guys just went ham on this and it shows they bring of their best. I had a great time. Burial Ground been thinking of late that I think I'm on the cusp of reevaluating my approach to the letterboxed. [01:28:42] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [01:28:43] Speaker A: I think I'm leaning now more towards rating films based on how much I enjoyed them as opposed to how good they are as pieces of film, pieces of cinema. [01:28:57] Speaker B: See, that's my letterbox profile headline says, sometimes I rate with my heart, sometimes I rate with my head, sometimes it's like I have to rate this on goodness. Like the kind of movie I'm watching other times. It's like with Ghost ship. My review of it is like, I gave that five stars. Is this an objective? Five stars? No. Do I have a five star time every time I watch it? Fuck yes. [01:29:21] Speaker A: Because anyone who's just listened to me gush about Burial Ground would expect four, four and a half, five stars. And I think I only gave it three. [01:29:30] Speaker B: Yeah, you gave it three. [01:29:31] Speaker A: I had a fucking great time with that movie. As did you, I think. [01:29:35] Speaker B: I mean, not as much as you did, but I had fun. [01:29:39] Speaker A: You were faking it. I had a great laugh. And to anyone who listens to Jack of All Graves, I think you will, too. I think you'll enjoy Burial Ground, so please do me a favor and go. Yeah. [01:29:52] Speaker B: Especially knowing what it is going into it. But you watched Critters with your kids, too, didn't you? [01:30:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I watched Critters with the boys. They had a great time. [01:30:05] Speaker B: How can you but you said Owen left, didn't he? [01:30:07] Speaker A: Oh, Owen walked the fuck out. Pete enjoyed it. Pete stuck the course. But Owen owen just kind of he stuck with it for the first 20 minutes and then just kind of walked out the room. [01:30:15] Speaker B: See you, mate. [01:30:17] Speaker A: But me and Pete really enjoyed it. How can you not? I put to you, I challenge you to find me a reason. Dis critters to me and see what fucking happens. How can you not enjoy critters? [01:30:34] Speaker B: Right? That's what I'm saying. [01:30:35] Speaker A: It's just right. Just a good time, through and through, full of mistakes. It's like they just included the blooper reel, right? [01:30:45] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:30:46] Speaker A: You know the two bounty hunters, like, when they're in the spaceship and they don't have their faces yet, there's a shot where one of them is like putting, like, a computer chip in a thing and you should just clearly see his face. It's the guy. They haven't even bothered trying to fucking crop it out or anything like that. Brilliant. There's loads of just glove puppetry. It's just a fucking good laugh. It's just classic post gremlins hijinks. Love it. [01:31:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. Together. We also watched the nun too. I don't think either of us have much to say about that nun. Inspiring film. [01:31:26] Speaker A: Redeeming features. None. And you know what we also watched? I didn't mention this at the time, right? But the opening credits, they've just nicked the Nine Inch Nails logo, mate. [01:31:39] Speaker B: They've just stolen it. [01:31:41] Speaker A: N middle letter backwards. [01:31:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess so. [01:31:44] Speaker A: Fucking Trent needs to sue. [01:31:47] Speaker B: I don't think he cares, to be honest with you. [01:31:50] Speaker A: He's got, like, a lot very protective of his IP is Trent. And rightly so. He's cultivated his brand over a long time and it's true. Blah, blah, blah. Do you remember me talking about losing faith in sentences? [01:32:01] Speaker B: That just happened there? It was just happened. We also watched another sequel, House Two. The second story. Yes. We watched House together a year or two ago. Figured, why not watch the second one? [01:32:14] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, you don't need me to remind you of how much I love House. I think House is a fucking tight. Funny example, once again, of that mid eighty s. I think it's 985 or six. You got monsters, you've got comedy, you've got Steve Miner, isn't it? Who's got a rap sheet as long as your arm. [01:32:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So house two, it's kids. Yeah, it's a kids movie, basically, with. [01:32:47] Speaker A: Cute rubber characters and peril. It's a fantasy. [01:32:52] Speaker B: It's like Indiana Jones as a horror movie, basically. It is. [01:32:58] Speaker A: Only not in the Temple of Doomway. [01:33:01] Speaker B: No. [01:33:04] Speaker A: It feels like a horror movie. [01:33:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess that's true. I was trying to think when we watched it, I was like, it's like you can see Indiana Jones. Well, it's basically Indiana Jones meets house. [01:33:16] Speaker A: I would take that. Yes. [01:33:17] Speaker B: Yeah. It's kind of cluttered all over the place. But as I put it to you at the time, I was like, if I had watched this as a kid, I would have watched this constantly as an adult. I'm like, oh, that's cute. That's a cute little kids movie, or whatever. As a kid, if I had watched that would have been an addiction. And apparently my brother loved it when he was a kid. It came out, I think, in 86. And my brother's the same age as you, so he would have been like, eight, I guess, when that came out. And yeah, my mom said they used to watch it together all the time. [01:33:47] Speaker A: Obviously, we have to finish the trilogy. We have to. Anna martin it. I seem to remember House Three leaning right back into the horror again. I think House Three is quite nasty. [01:33:56] Speaker B: I didn't even know there was a House Three. [01:33:58] Speaker A: There is. I have very limited memories. It's about kind of a serial killer returning from the dead, I believe. [01:34:07] Speaker B: Okay. [01:34:08] Speaker A: Yeah. And I seem to think it goes quite hard. [01:34:12] Speaker B: Well, then I think this month we need to finish House, and we still got two pumpkin heads left. [01:34:18] Speaker A: We do. Speaking of Anna Martin, delighted to read from Paul Thomas on our Facebook that that term, to Anna Martin. That verb. To Anna Martin. A series has taken on a life of its own and now know, outside of the podcast, independently of Jo AG. Yes. Love that. If you were to look it up in the dictionary, it would be to doggedly pursue completion of an unfulfilling series of films, generally horror. [01:34:47] Speaker B: I love that. So we salute you, Anna, who also, I believe, brought the story to my attention that I used for the Cold Open. I think they posted about it on our beautiful Facebook back in the day. [01:34:57] Speaker A: Her stint at the helm may have passed, but her influence remains here. [01:35:01] Speaker B: Here. And the last thing that we watched together was Pet Sematary bloodlines. [01:35:07] Speaker A: Oh, what an interesting, frustrating surprise of a film. Very frustrating. It has a lot going on and some of it is really good. [01:35:27] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:35:28] Speaker A: It's got ambition. It wants to be a real fucking film. Some of the cinematography and Pet Sematary, which is a prequel to the remake, let's be clear, right? This is a prequel to the wrong pet cemetery, right? But it's a film with ambition. Some of the cinematography in it is lovely. [01:35:46] Speaker B: Yeah, it's great. I think the acting is really good. [01:35:49] Speaker A: The performances are terrific. Yes. The casting is great. All of the bits that aren't the film itself and the story are great. [01:35:59] Speaker B: Right. [01:35:59] Speaker A: I don't know if you picked up on a couple of the same bits as me, right? But when we talk about cinematography, when we talk about kind of telling the story visually, the film fleshes out some of the events that alluded to in the original. In fact, the Native American burial ground. The kid coming back from Vietnam and being buried in the pet cemetery by his dad. Now, there's a wonderful it was the first bit of the movie that made me prick up my ears and go, oh, something's going on here. Tim a right. The kid who's been brought back from the dead by the Wendigo. The first time we see him, he's talking to Judd and his other mate from behind a screen door, a mesh screen door. And there's a kind of a scratch, a mark on the screen door which looks exactly like a fucking bullet hole in his forehead. Did you spot that? [01:36:54] Speaker B: No, I didn't. And that's funny because I did post that picture on my you did? [01:36:59] Speaker A: The shot lasts like three, 4 seconds, so it's clearly intentional. There's a kind of a stain on the mesh and it just looks like a fucking wound right in the middle of his head. And I knew right then it's coming to the fucking party. Yes. And there were other bits like that. There's the shots of Judd's dad on the porch drinking beer. Shadow. I love that you saw that. Beautiful. Clear. His shadow self is on display. It's fucking yes, it's going for it. However, it promises so much, but it doesn't deliver on anything that it promises. It doesn't have any kind of spatial continuity. I would say, for lack of struggling to find the term. There's no clear sense of place in the film. We jump from one bit to another and we don't know how we got there. The end of the film takes place in, like, a subterranean network of tunnels, right? Which is literally what is even fucking hinted that this might exist or why. There it relies on a lot of shitty old tropes like the creaky fucking bone guy. And out of nowhere they do that thing where the film looks like it's been sped up over cranked to give this illusion of, like, otherworldly movement. And it just. Looks shit, but really disappointing. [01:38:32] Speaker B: Ends very abruptly, in my opinion. [01:38:34] Speaker A: I was kind of like, now, hang on. [01:38:35] Speaker B: Okay. [01:38:36] Speaker A: I don't think it did end abruptly. I think it dovetailed with modern pet cemetery beautifully because you've got all the. [01:38:43] Speaker B: I just felt like it happened fast. It's not so much that it's like, oh, that was the wrong way to it was like, oh, okay, we're here. [01:38:50] Speaker A: Now is a symptom of that lack of kind of cohesiveness to the kind of physical kind of sense of the film. But you're right there. I fucking adore Pet Sematary. Right. Of all of Uncle Steve's huge body of work, pet Sematary is one I remember going back to again and again and again. I love it. I love Pet Sematary. I love the mythology of it. I love that the town has good and evil competing. There was a line in this prequel, in fact, that I loved. It speaks the presence is hungry and it speaks to people that it knows will feed it. And I love how in Pet Sematary the good manifests itself as that student with a busted head. I love Pet Semmetry. It's great. So the way this movie ends with Judd on his porch okay, let's not sorry, look, you know, because that's because. [01:39:55] Speaker B: We obviously, it's a prequel, so I guess that's fair. [01:39:59] Speaker A: Ends with Judd on his porch as a fucking articulated lorry barrels past the house. I thought that was right. See, for sure, a prequel to the remake of Pet Sematary. Shouldn't it should just be piss? It should just be easy to disregard, right? [01:40:13] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. [01:40:15] Speaker A: But this film wasn't fuck it. The seeds were all there, man. All of the fucking pieces were there for something really cool. But it got in its own way and it didn't work. [01:40:28] Speaker B: Yeah, agreed. But yeah, again, it's one of those ones, though, where I didn't hate it. There was so much that I did enjoy about it before it kind of went sideways that I have an affection for it. Anyway. [01:40:43] Speaker A: Yeah. I like that it exists. And I like that it wasn't just piss. It wasn't Pet sematary three. [01:40:49] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. [01:40:50] Speaker A: That even exist. Is there a pet symmetry three? [01:40:53] Speaker B: I don't think so. Is there? [01:40:54] Speaker A: There's a pet symmetry two, which I which I never bothered. [01:40:56] Speaker B: Is a pet sematary two, obviously. [01:40:57] Speaker A: Or am I thinking of, like, Children of the Corn? There's a whole bunch of them, isn't there? [01:41:01] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [01:41:02] Speaker A: With a load of them. [01:41:04] Speaker B: There's no reason there should be a. [01:41:05] Speaker A: Bunch of paging Anna Martin. Paging Anna Martin. There are loads, I think, Children of the Corn movies. [01:41:11] Speaker B: I feel like Anna has done this or is going to this because we watched a Children of the Corn for a scream and chat, which means they're for Anna. [01:41:21] Speaker A: So she's aware of. [01:41:25] Speaker B: The corniverse. But no. I don't know how many pet cemeteries there are. I know there's at least two. [01:41:29] Speaker A: And this tell you what the remake, the most heinous fucking crime it committed was. It dared to end on a cover of the fucking Ramon song. You fucked up. You done fucked up, son. [01:41:47] Speaker B: It's a song that can't be improved upon. [01:41:49] Speaker A: Absolutely. [01:41:50] Speaker B: Again, leave it alone. [01:41:51] Speaker A: I love the book and I love the original movie. And I'm certain I've said this time and time again on the cast but that cruel ending and just smashing to that fucking banger of a track. Just a great film. [01:42:04] Speaker B: Agreed. Well, now that we have discussed all. [01:42:09] Speaker A: Of those yes, segue. [01:42:12] Speaker B: Segue. We're on the same track. We're still talking about movies. Like I said, Sam had pitched to us this conversation to have about what constitutes horror and how do we decide what is and isn't. And he said that this came from a conversation in which their friend Matt, who I believe we have both met before, had asked if Mad Max, the original Mad Max, was a horror movie. And Sam's response was, no, but I can't totally explain why. I just know it isn't. And I thought that was, like, fascinating. We were kind of discussing a little bit. We're like, no, it's not sci-fi. Dystopia. Sure, but it's not a horror movie. [01:42:58] Speaker A: For the record, I'll start off by disagreeing with you think it is not Mad Max, but Alien. [01:43:04] Speaker B: Okay. You don't think Alien is a hard. [01:43:07] Speaker A: No, I absolutely think it is. [01:43:08] Speaker B: Whereas we said that we said it's a horror movie. [01:43:11] Speaker A: I think Sam didn't, though. I think Sam was leaning more towards it being it's a Sci-Fi with horror elements. I disagree. I think it's a straight up it's a slasher movie in space. It's really a horror film. But why right. [01:43:25] Speaker B: Like, this is what's so fascinating about this conversation. And one of the things that, as we talked a little bit about it in the Chat was that horror is partly a feeling. It's not a genre. [01:43:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:43:40] Speaker B: You know it when you see it. I looked at a few websites just before this to see what are different ways that people define horror. And a lot of it was pretty much the same kind of basic thing, which is the definition I liked the best came from Studio Binder, which seemed to kind of summarize these things. And the first sentence of it is basically what everything says. Horror is a genre of storytelling intended to scare, shock and thrill its audience. Then it goes on. Horror can be interpreted in many different ways, but there is often a central villain, monster or threat that is often a reflection of the fears being experienced by society at that time. This person or creature is called the other, a term that refers to someone that is feared because they're different or misunderstood. This is also why the horror genre has changed so much over the years. As culture and fear changes, so does horror, which I think is I don't. [01:44:31] Speaker A: Agree with any of that. Yeah, really nice. [01:44:33] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Those are all absolutely true. They go into Biffet, I think, though, because for some reason they decide to try to distinguish a horror film from a thriller film, specifically. And I think this will get into kind of why it's partly a feeling and things like that too, they said. While the two genres are often confused, there's a clear difference between horror and thriller movies. Horror movie rules demand violence and a monster that appears early and relatively frequently. The climax revolves around a final fight or an escape from the monster. The monster in horror is typically unnatural or even supernatural, whereas thrillers tend to rely on human threats. In a thriller, there is much more mystery and discovery. Tensions rise. The protagonist gets closer to discovering the evil threat. The climax revolves around a big reveal, such as the true intentions of the villain. The two genres can blend, of course, such as the modern horror thriller Get Out. Something like Halloween might also be considered a crossover since the killer is human, but he exhibits supernatural abilities like how he never seems to die when he's killed. So parts of that make sense to me, right? Like, absolutely, these things blend and all that kind of stuff. But I take issue kind of with the idea that there has to be sort of this supernatural element to it and that even we need to see the monster early and often or anything like that. I think you can absolutely have something where you don't. One of my favorite genres of horror, of course, is the home invasion. Where does that stand in that kind of definition? Right? That's a very human threat. [01:46:15] Speaker A: What was the movie that we saw last week with Fastbender? Eden Lake. [01:46:20] Speaker B: Yeah, Eden Lake. Right. Like kids tell me that's not a horror movie. [01:46:24] Speaker A: 100% horror. [01:46:25] Speaker B: Just kids. It's asshole kids. [01:46:29] Speaker A: You're right. That's biffed. It beautiful term, by the way. Never hear that before. [01:46:34] Speaker B: Nice cultural exchange. [01:46:36] Speaker A: Yeah. That description feels way too prescriptive. It's not that clear cut. It simply isn't that straightforward. [01:46:43] Speaker B: Right. So I think the first part of that, the idea of scaring, shock or thrilling the audience, that it's interpreted multiple ways. It's got a central villain, monster or threat that they're sort of an other and that it speaks to the fears of society. Absolutely makes sense. But how is it that we kind of come to these conclusions, right. Why do we know that some movies are horror and some aren't? [01:47:13] Speaker A: I enjoy a great deal those movies that dance on the edge. [01:47:20] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. Just before getting to that, because, you know, that's a huge thing. One of the other questions that know, example Sam put forth was like war movies, right, that are super violent and you've got villains and all that kind of stuff, but nobody watches a World War II movie or whatever movie and is like, this is a horror movie. [01:47:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Apocalypse now is not by any stretch a horror movie. But you go down that fucking list, it ticks a lot of those boxes, you've got a force of fucking another, a reveal of characters motivations. You've got a fucking gribli in the background. [01:48:05] Speaker B: Certainly speaks to society's fears at the time. [01:48:07] Speaker A: Beautiful. Yes. But it ain't a horror movie, mate. No chance. [01:48:11] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. And that's such an interesting thing to think about when it's like, oh, if you were to write a checklist, yes, that's a horror film. But horror is a feeling as much as it is a straightforward genre that you can list characteristics of. And so, yeah, you're saying, like, some of the things that kind of cross that boundary a little bit. Those are interesting. [01:48:40] Speaker A: Is this one of the reasons why it's a lifelong passion for the two of us? Because you know when you're watching a rom.com, you know when you're watching a police procedural or a fucking martial arts movie, for example, they and these are just off the top of my head, but they are checklist stuff. You can tick those boxes, you know where you are. But because horror is a vibe, horror, it's a different cattle fish. Completely. You can't quantify a vibe. You can't catch a vibe, mate. You can't read and file and categorize vibes, which is one of the great things about horror. You can drop bits of horror into stuff, making it more horrific, but not necessarily giving the entirety up to the genre. Doctor Strange in the multiverse of madness. [01:49:41] Speaker B: Right, right. [01:49:44] Speaker A: Soaked in horror. Not a horror movie. [01:49:48] Speaker B: Right. Yeah, absolutely. And there's things like I will sort of joke that they're a horror movie or things like that because they have those conventions and yet we still understand that's not what they are. I was thinking about some movies that I say are horror even though they're not, but that have something of a vibe to them. Like, one of them I think a lot of people would agree with is Return to Oz. Have you seen Return to Oz? [01:50:11] Speaker A: Oh, my God. Yes. [01:50:13] Speaker B: One of the scariest movies I've ever seen in my life. [01:50:16] Speaker A: Horrible. Yeah. [01:50:18] Speaker B: It is just as scary when you are a grown ass adult as it is when you were a child. That was not intended to be a horror movie. That's a children's adventure movie. [01:50:31] Speaker A: I'd like to know a little bit more about who some of the people were who worked on that. [01:50:37] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. [01:50:38] Speaker A: What their CV looks like, what their rap sheet looks like. [01:50:41] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:50:42] Speaker A: Because I don't necessarily believe you when you say that's not intended to be a horror movie. It has to have been intentional. They must have known that shit. They knew the vibe. [01:50:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Right. I think the thing about Return to Oz is that it's supposed to be unsettling. Right. And I've seen other say there are versions of Alice in Wonderland for example, that are also deeply unsettling, that, again, you wouldn't really call it a horror movie. But the way that things are presented to you are so uncanny. They're so disquieting that it plays to you as horror. The one that had Tina Madrino in it, for example, freaked the shit out of me when I was in middle school. Return to Oz bills itself as a dark fantasy film, which I think is part like that's its own thing. Dark fantasy in and of itself. And yeah, I don't think I've never heard of it's. Directed by Walter Merch, who did worked on Apocalypse Now, Godfather, American Graffiti, The Conversation Ghost english english Patient Not the director of them, but worked on them. Yeah. But nothing there that's really horror in that real sense. So yeah, I think yeah, it's like it's dark fantasy or whatever, but I don't think anyone on that was like, we're making a horror movie. And yet the vibe is so unsettling when you're watching it because there isn't a ton of actual violence in it. There's certainly the threat of violence. You feel unsafe, you know, when watching it. [01:52:38] Speaker A: Were any of those fucking griblies to grab you, it would be a really bad time. [01:52:42] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. There's always that threat of violence and terror in that movie. But while none of it is actually really visited upon anybody, I always say anything with a submarine is horror claustrophobia. You're sort of but again. [01:53:01] Speaker A: That just lends credence to what I was saying earlier on about it. Because I could watch submarine movies all day and I couldn't fuck. No. [01:53:08] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:53:08] Speaker A: I was like, Would you I certainly wouldn't feel as though I was watching a horror movie if I was watching Hunt for Red October or something like that. [01:53:16] Speaker B: That's you. [01:53:17] Speaker A: You're bringing the horror. [01:53:18] Speaker B: Yeah. I think anything where you're kind of at your gribbly is basically just sort of the claustrophobic nature of having no way out and being trapped. I also always say Home Alone Two is a horror movie. It is incredibly dark, in which extremely violent things are visited upon people. As the main character is stalked by two unrelenting murderers they want to actively murder. [01:53:52] Speaker A: They do this child, Home Alone Two completely escues the kind of the fun violence, the slapstick of the first one. [01:53:59] Speaker B: Right. [01:54:00] Speaker A: It's an altogether murkier affair. [01:54:03] Speaker B: Exactly. It is so much darker than the first movie is and feels much more visceral in its violence and the nature of that threat. Again the threat feels throughout home Alone You don't know that they want to kill him until they hang him up on the door. Yeah. They just want to rob the house. They hang him on the door and they threaten to eat his fingers. And you're like, oh, they act there's peril. But you don't know that in the first one, where the second one, they spend the entire movie trying to murder a child. [01:54:32] Speaker A: Well, take the goonies, right? We are told in no uncertain terms, the Fratellis are killers. We see corpses that they have left in their wake. These are murderers. But we get invested in the thrill of the chase. They're always one step behind the crew, you know what I mean? They're always kind of on their tails, snapping at their heels. But these guys are fucking organized criminals and murderers. They will kill Chunk if they catch him. They will make him do the fucking truffle shuffle. They'll fucking put two in the back of his head. Yeah, I feel that. Watching the goonies. That's one of those films that I was astounded at on revisiting it as an adult of how close it sails to horror. [01:55:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And there's something in about like maybe it's the direction, maybe almost misdirection. But that's the thing is when you're watching it, especially when you're not casting sort of a critical eye or whatever onto the movie that you are directed, you're focused. The movie tells you to focus on the adventure and not on that peril for the most of the runtime. You know, there's this looming threat or whatever, but ultimately your eye is pointed at the adventure that this entails, as opposed to like, we're going to get murdered by serial killers. [01:56:01] Speaker A: There's this concept of the unfamiliar and the Other. These kids are plunged into a fucking world that they can't really deal with. The way that sloth is introduced. Out of nowhere, there's this air quotes monster. What the fuck? Where did that come from? It shocks you. That's a huge horror trope. [01:56:21] Speaker B: What was interesting, though, is in one of the articles that I was reading, it talked about Et. Right? And how we don't read Et as horror. And one of the reasons for that is like, he is a monster, he's an Other. But the way in which we are introduced to him or he's developed indicates to us that he's a friend, right? That even though this is an Other that theoretically you should be terrified of, and initially you kind of have that response. It is not a horror because we are given the indications that we are to identify with him as a no. [01:56:57] Speaker A: There'S a movie be scared of him. Wouldn't work in 2023. [01:57:01] Speaker B: Wouldn't it? I never rewatch it because it was traumatic to me to watch. I went and saw it in the theater when they rereleased it, and I was like, this is like sad and scary. So I don't really remember what wouldn't work now, aside from just it was too much for me. [01:57:19] Speaker A: Was that the version where they fucking clone brushed out the guns? [01:57:26] Speaker B: Oh, I don't know. See, I didn't have a memory of it from before I was like 16 when I saw it, when they rereleased it. So if they did do that, I didn't notice. But it was terrifying. [01:57:41] Speaker A: Yeah, it is until ET's true nature is revealed to us. He's a fucking monster in the torchlight. [01:57:51] Speaker B: And that's I mean, you kind of get that with Sloth as, oh, that's a terrifying monster. But we are given then the cues that actually we are misunderstanding this monster and he's not actually the villain or the source of the horror here, which then changes the movie. If he remained a monster, we'd have a horror movie on our hand, of course, because our monster is not it is no longer a horror film. It's an adventure, despite the murderous people, criminals who are after our dear main characters. [01:58:28] Speaker A: But you know it when it's a horror film, don't you? And it's no one thing. [01:58:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's ultimately what it comes down to that's so interesting is like, yeah, there's a lot of things that you could call a horror movie, but you just deep down in your soul know they aren't, or even ones that are. Like, Jaws, for example, is considered a horror movie. Yes, I think the way that I watch it, I would not on my own have called that a horror movie. But it's pretty well established that it is that most people have the sense that this is a horror movie, and it certainly has those kinds of conventions. But that can be like an iffy thing, too. Sometimes. Take something like the menu is another sort of example of this is the menu a horror film? Once it got to there's a case. Yeah. Once it got to the point where you get the mess in that movie, all of a sudden I was like, oh, this is horror. But you could absolutely say it's not. You could say this is a thriller, a drama, a dark comedy, one that. [01:59:43] Speaker A: I saw recently that I'd love your views on. Horror or not horror. Silence of the Lambs. [01:59:51] Speaker B: See, yeah. This is where you've got that, like that thriller horror line, right? [01:59:57] Speaker A: But you've got a couple of griblies in there. [02:00:00] Speaker B: Yeah, you do. [02:00:01] Speaker A: You've got unfamiliarity. You've got a world that you're plunged into that you can't rationalize, right? [02:00:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a vibe, because I instantly think, yes, of course that's a horror movie. And certainly like Red Dragon, you would never argue, isn't a horror movie or things like that's clearly a horror movie. At the same time, Silence of the Lamb has more of the conventions of like a traditional procedural detective thing. But the vibe is absolutely horror. [02:00:28] Speaker A: The threat horror adjacent. [02:00:32] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a fascinating question and I'm very curious. What people listening, how you define it is what vibe sells you that something's horror what's something that people think of as horror that you would say isn't or vice versa. How do you explain it to other people? Because yeah, I think that also contributes to the fact that sometimes people will be like, oh, I don't like horror movies. And you're like, well, describe one for me, don't you? Yeah, I bet you do. But do you like Jaws? Do you like Home Alone, too? You know what I mean? It is such an inherently broad genre where I think kind of how you were talking before about any other kind of genre. You have your standard things that have to be hit. [02:01:24] Speaker A: Maybe I'm being dismissive of sure. I mean, of course they're buddy road trip genre. [02:01:29] Speaker B: I don't fucking there's range within these. [02:01:31] Speaker A: Yes, there's room to play, but you. [02:01:34] Speaker B: Know what you're watching most of the time where I think horror just by its nature, means so many different things depending on like that definition said, where society is at a moment what we're afraid of at this particular time, who is our other? What is our other? Things like that. [02:01:57] Speaker A: And it feels to me as though there are quite a few Trojan horse horrors that you don't even know you're in a fucking horror film until I mean, Get Out is one of those. [02:02:12] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. [02:02:13] Speaker A: Horror film. Like, of course, but right. Not for the first 3rd or so, it ain't. Yeah, it almost kind of loses dark comedy and then BA, you're in a horror film. I like that a lot. I enjoy the kind of subterfuge of that. [02:02:28] Speaker B: Yeah, which is kind of what I'd say for the menu as well. You've got a dark comedy and then all of a sudden that's like, oh, fuck, this is horror. Yeah, I like that. Bait and switch to it. Which is fun. [02:02:41] Speaker A: Very nice. Which you just don't have. You can't do that with a rom.com. You can't do that with what bait. [02:02:47] Speaker B: And switch are you going to pull on a rom.com? That's not gonna piss your audience off? [02:02:51] Speaker A: Oh, imagine it. You pay to see a fucking horror film and then Drew Barrymore walks out. [02:02:57] Speaker B: Well, I mean she is in scream. [02:02:59] Speaker A: Oh, she is. Isn't she bright? Hey. All right. Here's the fucking cat amongst the pigeon. I don't think Scream is a horror film. Fuck you. [02:03:09] Speaker B: Now you are just being contrarian. [02:03:13] Speaker A: It's not a horror film. It's a film about horror films. [02:03:21] Speaker B: This is a conversation for another day. [02:03:23] Speaker A: It spends so long regarding itself in the mirror and talking about horror films, it forgets to be an actor. [02:03:29] Speaker B: Here we go again. [02:03:30] Speaker A: Here you go. Snack on that scream head. [02:03:36] Speaker B: Once again, Mark insists on being wrong. But let us know what you think defines horror and what its boundaries are. Is there more than just a feeling or is it a vibe on all the socials? [02:03:50] Speaker A: We're using horror as a very broad term. [02:03:53] Speaker B: We are. [02:03:54] Speaker A: Horror, of course, has subgenres and genres within genres. And as always, like we said earlier on in this episode, we plant the seeds, you guys water the plants. Talk to us. Let us know what you think. Let us know when have you been surprised to find, holy shit, I'm watching a horror movie. When have you been surprised to find hang on. I thought I was watching a fucking horror movie. Because we are, as always. Hey. Oh. Ding, ding, ding. It's last orders at the Joag tavern. [02:04:25] Speaker B: OOH. Get them in. Get them in. [02:04:28] Speaker A: Wench has drained the last drop from the barrel. Stay. Spooky. Figure. [02:04:40] Speaker B: Amazing. It.