Episode 127: The Three Doors of Death (How to Surprise Horror Fans Who've Seen It All)

Hi, I'm S. A. Bradley and welcome to Hellbent for Horror, a podcast devoted to all things related to me. Welcome back to Hellbent for Horror, and yes, welcome back. It's been a little bit of time for me, and I do want to talk about a little bit of that. First, I want to say happy Halloween to everybody. I hope your 2024 Halloween season has been fantastic so far. I've been having a reasonably good time.

It has been a little bit of time since I've done a show, and I didn't expect a brief history of failure, which was the last show that I did to have such ironic meaning for me. I had some technical errors on the last show that I was doing prior to that, and I decided on having this problem and putting out a show that was talking about how failure sometimes works right into the art, and also sometimes, unfortunately, failure also hinders the art.

And I guess there's something about this podcast medium. I hear people often talk rather personally about themselves, and that's not necessarily how I go. I mean, when I'm doing my show, yes, there's things that I bring out that are personal, but most of the times those things are from the past. They're there to align with what I'm talking about, whatever the message might be, whatever the theme might be for that show. And I'm not afraid to give a little bit of my past, my background.

I like to put a little piece of me into the show, because I think that it helps you bring a little bit of yourself to the show as well, making it a little bit more like a conversation. But I'm not very good about talking about when things are happening in the real world, as we like to say. You know, there's a difference between essay Bradley and Scott Bradley. There's something about essay Bradley is kind of a little bit of an emotional removal from the regular world.

He's still an emotional guy, but he can keep his cool a little bit better, I think, than Scott Bradley does in the real world. And unfortunately, what's been happening in the last couple of months, people are probably wondering where I've been. And I thought I was going to get things together a little bit easier, but it's just personal issues that are happening, family issues, things that are happening at a certain age. We hit a certain age and people start exiting your life.

They start exiting the planet. And there's been a couple things that have happened of recent with unexpected deaths and long-term illnesses for some folks. It didn't seem to be bothering me that much, but I guess it did. I should have seen that when I was making big mistakes on the podcast, coming back on the head of steam going, we're going to be doing this forever. I've got my mojo back and then all of a sudden I had a technical issue which kind of kicked me right in the teeth.

That was probably the sign that the balls were not being juggled properly in the air. And so whether I don't want to go deep into it, but let's just say that there's been some issues in focus and there's been a difference in some forms of priority. And it's not like I've been completely languishing. I have had a couple short stories that have been put out and published.

I've done a few articles and interviews for magazines and I'll be probably announcing some of those and putting them on the website. I've been terrible about even updating the website. It's very funny how things go. There's probably very few things in the world as important to me as doing this show, working on the podcast.

Working in talking to people about horror and going across the country to meet people and to sit on panels and rub elbows with other crazy folks like myself, all of us enjoying the absolute pleasure of being able to champion this wonderful Jean-Ravars. And yet with that said, there's nothing I love more and yet it's the thing that gets hurt easily. It's the thing that fell to the wayside. It's the thing that I put in the background for a while. So I want to come back.

And I just wanted to let you know where I was because I have been quiet about it and that has not necessarily worked out the way that I thought it would. I thought a good old-fashioned stoicism would have gotten me just through. And instead, it just made for silence, so people don't know if this show exists anymore. There's no order to it anymore. There's been no great pattern. I'm going to do my best to get back into a pattern. I'm going to do my best to get this conversation rolling again.

And I thank you for being out there. Really, it's just been a joy so far. I want to keep this going as long as I can. I feel the desire to continue to do it. I have at least one or two episodes that have been sitting there waiting for me to just do some heavy edits on. And I realized I should just do this instead first. I've been a lot better about that recently and that is mainly because of this creativity being able to create.

So speaking of creating and creativity, I'm going to talk a little bit today about something that I'm putting into the new book. There's a book that's been being written by me for quite a while. Those of you who have read Screen for Pleasure, How Hard Makes You Happy and Healthy. This is going to be an extension to that, the second non-fiction book. But the name of it is Defenders of the Faith. That's the working title. How hard is saving the world one fan at a time.

And this is something that I was recently writing. And I will say that some of the genus of this, one of the long time listeners and good friends, John or Minio, we were talking about different things that I might put into the book. And John came up with an idea that was kind of cool. And it was just talking about what we really look for when we're horror fans. If you're a horror fan and you've been doing it for quite a while, you've seen it all.

You haven't seen every movie, but you've seen pretty much the ideas of what cinema tends to use to try and scare us, try and intrigue us into a story. So I wanted to see about taking that idea of something that John or Minio had brought up to me. And I've altered it a little bit. But he came up with a few ideas of dealing with expectations.

But what we really look for is someone who can manfully take control and manipulate our expectations, know what our expectations are, and then play with those as much as possible. So what I'm going to talk about here today is going to be an extension of that idea. And I like to call it the three doors of death, the ways that you can make horror fans happy. Yes, let's talk about the three doors of death, essentially how to surprise fans, horror fans who have seen it all.

We horror fans love to say that we want to be scared. But it's very hard to say that you're going to be able to scare us when most of us have been watching horror movies for most of our lives. Some of us amassed thousands and thousands of different movies as part of our list of things that we've seen. So flat out scaring us is kind of a big ask for people. So what I say is, you know, if you can't scare us, surprise us.

Because really, we love being scared, but we know that being scared is a rather rare commodity. For the most part, what we really want to find, what we really want to get out of something is an element of surprise, something that just completely takes us out of what our expectations are and rattles us a little bit. Now say, I think surprise is a big deal.

I think this is where horror and comedy, and I've said this before, and I don't want any of my stand-up comedy friends or comedy writer friends to, you know, kill me while I sleep by saying, oh, horror and comedy are very similar. But I will say that they have certain things that are the same. One of the things that they have in common is a detriment that they both have, which is the more you study the art of horror and the art of comedy, the more you find yourself anesthetized from surprise.

So say you study stand-up comedy most of your life. You're going to learn those primary rhythms. You're going to find the beats that are there just from sheer repetition. You know, if you follow a specific comedian like myself, say someone like Brian Possein, I absolutely love. There's things that he still does that surprises me, but I can see, you know, what his style, what his structure is. And there are times when I can see the punchline coming.

In fact, there are two different Brian Posseins on any show that I've watched and when I've seen him live and I've seen him live a couple times. There's the guy that is the comedian who is coming up and every so often you can feel the layup and then the dunk of the punchline coming. And then there's the guy who's just the silly nerd who's up there and he goes into these crazy side things and it's part of his show.

It's not like he's losing it or riffing up there, but there are moments where he's going to go for the solid joke, which is the standard thing, to make sure that you know that he understands joke structure and then there's the rest of them. And that's the stuff that's fun. So if you're looking at comedy, you study it your whole life, you're going to get those rhythms down, you're going to know just by repetition, you're going to see a punchline coming. It's the same with horror movies.

Your scars are really hard to come by if you see them coming from a mile away. If you go, okay, I see how this shot is framed. And just the way that it's shot in the rule of threes, or the rule of thirds where you have the screen broken up in three different slots. Well, actually it's nine different slots. Let's not get too academic about it.

But anyway, you're going to have one third of the screen, usually to the side, being the primary thing that draws your eye, which means it's going to be all this empty space behind you waiting for the killer to show up in that empty space. You know, that's the kind of thing that we talk about. So we see that coming a mile away, we value the element of surprise as much as we do a heart stopping scare.

So if we get that idea that there's going to be that scare there and you somehow surprise us by not having that scare happen right at that moment. You know, we will try and reward that for you as a filmmaker. The film goal is going to want to really be in your court. You know, surprise and comedy, they make fans laugh. Horror, of course, same element of surprise, except it comes from another direction, comes from a screen. And you know, there's a big incentive for genre filmmakers to aim high.

You're going to want to try and surprise fans. It should be what the baseline that you should be wanting to go to. Because if you show us something that we've never seen before, your box office is going to go up. It's just that simple. We are hungry for those moments that are completely different than what we've seen before. Or scenes that are done so immaculately that we're like, oh man, that is like the best wine I've ever had in my life.

You know, if you hit it out of the park, we are going to become hopelessly devoted to you. And what I mean by hopeless devotion from a horror fan, if you jazz us, I can tell you, it works with me. If you jazz me in either way, you get me excited and happy, I'm going to follow your work for years afterward. I'm going to go back. I'm going to look at all of your work. Dedicated horror fans tend to be completists. Now for me, if a director makes a movie I love, I go back.

Like I said, I'll watch everything. I'll follow the career for the rest of the life. Now that becomes a real fucking slog if you're, you know, Jess Frank or Joe DiMotto. These guys made hundreds of films between the two of them. You just call both of them people that you absolutely love. You've got like 400 movies to watch. So yeah, it could be really tough. But you know what? The thing about completism is that we never really want to complete.

I mean, complete is essentially your feeder in the soil, right? Your six feet under your toes up because you're never going to get everything in this world. If you, if they start making horror movies today, I still wouldn't see everything that has been made since the silent era. There's that much out there and there's so much that is available now. You know, so we never will complete the journey.

But we secretly hope that as we are toiling through all of these movies that we want to watch and we have bitchly go towards these and we want to find the new stars and we want to find that element of surprise, we're always looking for one more movie that we still need to see. And you know, we have a thrill that comes from that. How far will some of us go to cash that thrill? We go pretty damn far.

If you're of my time period, back in the 80s and the 90s, like you're growing up in the 80s and the 90s, I was first generation VCR. I guess that's the way you could say it. First people could actually rent a movie that you saw on the theater. You had the movies that were in the video stores, but you're reading about all these other movies in different magazines, deep red magazines, stuff like that.

You're looking at this, the Fengoria film threat was another great one to find these movies where they'd be talking about them and you could go to your mom and pop store and they never even heard them. They never even heard of like sub-rosa pictures or barrel. It's like, what are those? You know, I don't know what these these labels are.

So when that we would come up in something like that, movies that say were never released in the United States or movies that were no longer available, we found ourselves in the gray market, which is someone somewhere has a copy and they dub it down into another VHS, sometimes an SLP, which means that you can get three movies on the same 120 minute tape, which means if you try to fast forward, you've gone through half of the movie in 10 seconds. You're like, what the fuck just happened?

And it looks muddy and everything like that, but we're going to watch. But you'd watch the shittiest looking transfers because you want to watch movies that you've heard about certain scenes in. You know, these things that are hopefully going to surprise you when you watch them, that you're just going to have your jaw drop. We obsessively search for these movies and because these movies had mythic replications, they promise us something unpredictable. They promised us a little bit of danger.

They promised us that maybe we would be offended at some point, but certainly what we were getting was something that was unlike what we had seen before. We still go the extra mile. We're going to invest our time and our effort to find a movie that's going to, you know, shock us. And if you shock us, you surprise us, we are going to reward that filmmaker. We will do everything we can to spread the gospel. You know, the gospel of good scare is going to make its way through any convention.

We're going to do everything we can to spread that gospel if you actually get us excited. It's also, I think, why so many directors, first time directors want to make horror movies? Because fandom for horror is evergreen. Diehard, horror fans are going to try out just about anything that opens. We'll give a new, unknown indie movie a chance because deep down we're all romantics. We want to fall in love with your movie. We want to die for it.

It's incredible how often directors and producers knowing that they squander our enthusiasm by trying to pass us a predictable boring photocopy of a far better film that we've seen before and has already been copied a million times. So at the most fundamental level, hello horror filmmakers out there, horror filmmakers need to know the audience. They need to understand horror fans' expectations and how to manage those expectations. It's hard, just like comedy.

You need to surprise the audience to be effective. Now I will put in some caveats. Know the audience. The audience has to know if they're the audience or not as well. I think that's one of the things that we're hitting right now. Being a man of a certain age, many of the horror fans of my age are starting to sound an awful lot like Bosley Crowther when he watched Bonnie and Clyde the first time.

So there is going to be this thing where you, you know, it's a ride or die thing with horror, my friends. Quite honestly, if you're my age, if you're in your 50s, you're not the audience anymore, my friend. I don't know how to tell you that. The audience is younger. Repeat offenders. Those people will go and watch the movie again and again and again. That's the audience are trying to catch. If we come along with for the ride, that's great as well.

Horror is always evolving and we need to evolve with it. Now after that caveat, let's roll right back through that and let's talk once again about what the horror filmmakers need to do. You need to know your audience. You need to understand the expectations and how you're going to manage those expectations is going to be whether or not you actually make people happy and you make yourself happy because you've made a hit film or you've just made a movie that everybody's going to love.

So in my sort of humble opinion, there are three approaches to managing expectations and I call them the three doors of death. One, meeting expectations, two, subverting expectations and three, ignoring the fuck out of expectations. So let's start with door number one, meeting expectations. Now it's essentially as easy as giving the audience what you advertised. There is nothing wrong with a good simple story told well. It does not have to be complicated.

You can breathe a breath of fresh air just by telling the story in an elegant fashion. Some story setups are timeless and they don't need to really be changed or it feels weird if they do get changed. And we admire a movie that hits those classic beats and gives us that solid classic vibe. As long as the film strives for the quality, the excellence that made those stories timeless. In other words, you're going to have to do as well as the movie that you mimic, right? It has to feel that way.

Or the story. If you're going for a classic story, you have to try and make it as classically strong as you can. And that has to do with quality that makes these stories what they were. Can we make it a bare minimum requirement that the movie needs to live up to its trailer? Is that too much to ask? Can we make that a bare minimum requirement? Can you, folks, make a movie that lives up to the trailer? Whatever mood or excitement the trailer generates, that's it, folks.

The film has to fulfill that contract. Too many times the best parts of the movies are in the trailer. We all know this. That doesn't meet our expectations. That's a great example, a really good example of how you can just drop the ball. You can have everything set up. You've got expectations going and just fucking drop the ball would be snakes on a plane. Now, snakes on a plane is a strong case of not living up to your trailer. Your hype or even a meme at the movie started with a meme.

It's generally agreed that this is probably the most internet hyped movie ever snakes on a plane. It really started as a blog post by the screenwriter, Josh Friedman. The principal photography had wrapped. It was a PG-13 thriller with a funny name. And it became a cultural phenomenon that was bound at a point because this blog post, which I'm going to quote here, he wrote, it's a title. It's a concept. It's a poster and a log line and whatever else you need to be, it's perfect.

It's the everlasting gobstopper of movie titles. And then he made the parody meme that everybody went viral with, the photo of Samuel L. Jackson saying, there are motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane. Now when that one viral, it started Buzz that was unexpected. You know, the producers, the director, the actors, nobody was ready for it. They didn't know what they were in for. The Buzz suddenly went way past the expectations of the filmmakers.

So horror action genre, you know, you mix those two, it's going to be something big. So as the weeks went by after that Buzz and the viral meme and the movie hadn't opened yet, anticipation is going through the roof. And it was like we were all expecting a movie that was not the one that they shot, but we were expecting the movie that they advertised in that meme. Not even to the trailer yet, just the meme. We already wrote the movie in a weird way.

So we expected a movie that was going to be self-aware and an ironic B movie that was going to be a bit of a gore fish. It was going to be a cult trash classic. It was going to be a nasty gory and funny and it was going to do stuff that was just going to be a little bit outrageous. The big problem with that was that wasn't the movie that they made. I mean, and the thing was when they realized that the hype was really getting high, they said we better do some reshoots.

So they had five days of reshoots. They were trying to capitalize on the weird ass luck. They stepped in shit and all of a sudden they had all of this heat for a movie that wasn't the one they made. So they added some gruesome shit. They added a little bit of sleeves, but you know what, it was just kind of tacked on. And what people saw was not the thing that was in their head, what they got from the meme, what they ended up getting from the trailer.

All that stuff of the motherfucking snakes and the motherfucking plane went and was like a sour note. It's just another mediocre thriller and mildly imagine a plot line, but it was really, you know, what I like to call the beige town car. It's just a beige town car. It's fine. I'll get you where you need to go and you're not going to remember the ride. And that's sadly what ended up happening. Now that's not managing the expectations.

That's not at least hitting the expectation that was there, but there are movies that do that extremely well. So yes, snakes on a plane did not meet expectations, but then you get something like the excellent Australian independent horror film, Talk to me. Now this takes a standard horror concept and it makes it immaculate with just a few cosmetic tucks here and there for time, timeliness, setting it in a more contemporary time. The set-up is one of the oldest that there is in heart.

It's a group of kids play with forces they don't understand. They want to talk to the dead and they did not expect the dead to talk back. So instead of a Ouija board, we have one of the kids that carries around a plaster cast of an embombed arm with an outstretched hand. And it's creepy and the little legend behind is that there's actually an arm inside of that cast. It's from a witch. And so it sounds like something a kid would say.

It also sounds like every great myth you've ever heard, every great ghost story that you've ever read starts with something like that. We are firmly grounded in an MR Jamesian ghost story with this movie Talk to me. We have a cursed object and we have a supernatural force attached to it. However, instead of it being, you know, instead of the human monkey's paw, let's call it a monkey's paw, being treated as a dangerous talisman as most of these stories do.

Like, do not touch, do not do this, do not do that. It's a party trick. And that is really kind of clever. It says a lot about where we are as a culture. It says a lot about the carelessness and how common danger is and how risk is just part of life. And you know, the thing is it's a party trick and the owner is a teenage boy, right? He carries it around from party to party. He's trying to find new people to play with. And instead of that making him a weirdo, it makes him popular.

Think of that arm as being the best pot that anybody has ever bought. And he's just taking it from party to party and saying, who wants to hit? It's pretty much kind of like that. And you know, the arm itself, it's plastered, covered with graffiti scrolls from people who signed it after they played with the dead a little bit. Now, it's a harm movie, right? So as one would expect in a harm movie, dealing with a dead involves rules of engagement.

And this is where it falls back into classical mode. We go back more into the rules of engagement you see all the time. So the engagement is the participant has to grab the plaster hand and say, talk to me. And they're hit with this psychic rush at that point as if they got that harsh, harsh job to talk off of a bong. The surrounding party guests, they all laugh with recognition. It's kind of like now I don't want it while I am dating myself no matter what.

And I don't want to don't try this at home, kids, but we used to whip it a lot. And essentially I used to work at a, when I didn't have the actual whip, it's we used to improvise. And I used to work at a fast, not a fast, a family restaurant. And they used to have pies and they would have the whipped cream containers. And essentially there was always extra CO2, I can't remember is it CO2? I guess it is. That was in those canisters where that held all the ready whip whipped cream.

And so us wonderful bus boys and shorter cooks would sit in the back and take a pen knife and just squeeze on down and suck up some of that as a shooting through. And you would get this incredible rush. And everybody would laugh. They'd look at you and go, whoa, more innocent thing of that was when you were a smaller kid and they spun you on a swing forever at the playground.

And then you got off and you tried to walk and everybody was like, well, that's the same way that they're treating this playing with the dead. And so I really love that. The surrounding party guests are laughing. All of it seems like fun, but there's a second part to this ritual. As there normally is when you're talking about rules of engagement, the participant then has to say, I let you in. And at that point, the entity from the other side takes the bait.

It's like it's bait bringing a live human for it to interact with. It enters the participant and it possesses them. So everyone laughs, right? And so they're possessed. There's a spirit inside of the body. And everybody, instead of thinking that it's like a possession or a bedevilment, they act like they're watching a drunk friend trying to walk across the room or like the kid on the swing getting spun around trying to walk across the park. So of course, how does this go wrong, right?

Well, you have to have a little bit more of a rule of engagement. The other side has its rules. So it is explicitly crucial that the spirit is not allowed inside the participant's body for more than 90 seconds. 90 seconds, why 90 seconds? Who the fuck cares? Nobody knows. I remember Guillermo del Toro talking about Pan's labyrinth and how you have the three fairies that are in there and the sleeping gray man at the table.

And he said, you know, this is a very reminiscent of my grandmother's story to me about how to get a wish granted. He had to find the devil sleeping. He had to pull three hairs out of his back. And it's like, why three? Who the fuck knows? It's just how all these stories go. It's three. So the other side has this third rule. Don't go for more than 90 seconds. Like playing around with drugs, the risk and the potential danger is what makes it all the more fun, more provocative.

Teenagers know the rules, right? So what could possibly fucking go wrong? Yes, right? So even though talk me follows one of the oldest setups in the horror playbook, it does so at a lot of skill and does so with a genuine sincerity for the idea. And the directors Danny and Michael Flippu, their brothers, they understand what makes this setup so compelling. And what I think is the greatness to the story is that, you know, in youth, we're ignorant of a silent presence of death.

And until we respect death, we cannot respect life. And so the filmmakers lean into that idea. And they create a very believable group of characters that are going through this. So the teens very much feel like teens. The adults very much feel like adults, not movie adults. Mom is just a slightly older teenager. And that feels very, very prescient to most people's families. And you know, these teens, the way they act, they starve to be long.

You know, they risk harming themselves to shine just for one brief moment in front of everybody. And I think probably most of us can relate to that. You know, everything about the relationships between the parents and the teenagers brings true. And I think it was really smart of the filmmakers as well to not get caught up in, you know, the super exorcist kind of ideas of possession. They kept everything. This possession sequences were very small. They're really intimate.

They're physically subtle. The whole thing of the talk to me thing is the biggest effect is contact lenses. Is that make it look like they have extremely dilated pupils? So the rest of the effect that's being done has nothing to do with prosthetics or CGI. It's purely acting. And that helps make everything feel really unique and authentic. They take that subject matter seriously, the directors. They create a realistic world. They understand their characters.

So when the supernatural stuff finally shows up, it gets really believable even though the violence is really over the top in some areas and pretty terrifying. You know, how old is this story, right? This is an expectation that goes all the way back to 1936. Ronal Kaiser wrote the sails. That's the granddaddy of all these restless spirit stories. So talk to me makes cosmetic updates to that structure, but the truth is that talk to me is that old of a story.

But it doesn't need to reinvent that wheel. It just needs to know how to make that wheel roll along smoothly. The final moments of that movie, harken back to literally a literary ghost story. It feels like HL MENK and MR James coming to life. That movie has a well-deserved profound ending that feels like every old ghost story you've ever read. And it's so wonderful. So talk to me is an excellent example of successfully walking through that first door of death.

That first door of death is meeting expectations. So the first door of death is meeting audience expectations, meeting expectations. Now the second door subverts expectations. So subverting expectations is kind of like a right of passage in horror movies. It's kind of the moment when the filmmakers themselves realize how old the idea is. They get this bored with the limitations of the same tropes. They're just as bored with it as the audience is and they decide to do something about it.

They find new ways to present what works out of those tropes and they throw everything else out and they just keep the fresh perspective. And the best way to shake up audience expectations is like changing from within, changing the creature canon. So one of the most sacred things, right? You start dealing with the creature and what the creature is supposed to do and what the moon is supposed to do to it and what color it is and all that. Oh my goodness, these are plants.

The creature can and you're taking chances. But this is how horror evolves. So take zombies as an example. Now, 1943, I walk with a zombie. The titular character is a cursed, reanimated slave. His slow lumbering through the woods at night is more tragic romanticism than it is scary. However, the way that that movie shot, there are some really scary moments in how that character looks. Now, that's what a zombie was for the longest time. George Romero talked about it.

Romero was saying, when I was growing up, the zombie was a work and stiff. He was a guy up on the plantation. The white collar criminals were making him do all this stuff. And so George Romero decided to make the zombie still blue collar but be a little bit different. He takes that shambling zombie. Reinvenc it adds the ghoul character. So the characteristics of what was known as a ghoul, the flesh eater, the thing that was always in the cemeteries eating stuff.

He put that on the zombie and created Night of Living Dead. And it changed the creature canon forever. You really can't go back to that romantic zombie of the 30s. It doesn't seem to really hold much resonance. So what happens with a zombie? Well, say 28 days later. And yes, I know everybody goes, oh my god, that's not really a zombie movie. It's rage. Rage is somehow. The poetic idea of rage becoming a disease that infects everybody. With that said, great, we can split hairs if you want.

But to me, 28 days later, feels like a reinvention of the zombie where you weren't stuck with all of the zombie canon. You just changed up what the disease was, whatever the malady was. So yes, it's rage and everything. Let's, you know there's zombies, right? When you're watching the movie, you're not going, I've never seen. No, you fucking go right to zombie, okay? Whether it's rage or whatever, the guy's going, like that, you're thinking zombie. Now you're still thinking zombie, right?

Your mind is still making that connection. And that's where Danny Boyle really kicks you in the nuts because then he introduces speed to the zombies. So now the zombies can run down victims, right? And I remember the first scene in that movie where the guys are on fire, the zombie-esque rage boys are on fire because of Molotov cocktails and they're still chasing the main character. And they're sprinting after him. Whoever did those fire stunt effects, holy shit, that was amazing.

Now that was the jaw dropper though. I leaned in instead of sitting there going, god damn it, all my zombies must be slow. And some people did. You know, they didn't do it so much or 28 days later but they did do it to Zack Snyder's movie. So dawn of the dead. That fast zombie continued into dawn of the day and then there was this banging of heads around canon. And you know what, I have no problems with slow zombies. I love slow zombies but I also like fast zombies. All depends on the situation.

It's kind of like I love cinema. I love film, so we would. But I also can handle shot on video and depends on how the shot on video is done. So 28 days later did not bother me when it was on digital video, right? It was like one of the first Sony DV cameras. And so it has a certain look but what it does is and we're going to come back to this as this essay that I'm doing here.

It says essay continues on how much technology changes the language of cinema changes as much as the language does in actual speaking. The thing is there's always a change happening. There are shortcuts to entire sentences that we use. And it happens in cinema as well as the technology changes, the visual language changes. So 28 days later feels very much like a 9-11 film. It has many little stingers in it that reminds you of 9-11.

The empty airport and hotel and hospitals and you know, Piccadilly Square is empty and all of the pictures that are up on the billboards of people who are missing. That's very, very provocative of 9-11. But it's also the idea that that was televised so much. That was the first major disaster that I think we saw from the point of view of passers-by and stuff. You had so much video.

People had video cameras and they were taking video of this and it had that raw, shaky, ugly look and that became reality. And so 28 days later actually feels more realistic at times because of what it's talking about and the look that's in it, meeting bad expectation as well, subverting that expectation in some ways because we expect to film to look like a film. Don of the dead, you know, Zack Snyder's, I love it by the way. Those movies subvert each one of them.

The original idea of the zombie. I walk with a zombie to Knight of the Living Dead to 28 days later to Don of the Dead and then onward and upward using this as an example of subverting expectations. Changing the canon of the monster can sometimes refresh and revitalize an old idea as long as the idea was good in the first place, right? Vampires change with the times. The filmmakers subvert expectations more by daring to change the vampire folklore, right?

So you can change whether it's Transylvania or the United States or it's the New England town or it's the middle of Manhattan, but what really makes the change is when the folklore starts to switch around. Cross is garlic, holy water. Hey, they aren't going to cut it against many of the revamped vamps that are out there. The death in Bigelow's New Dark, right? Daylight is still fatal to vampires, in fascinating and truly cinematic ways in that film.

But vampires don't have fangs as far as we know. And they cast reflections. Crosses never even enter the story. They're still blood drinkers though. New Dark also does something I like to call the chocolate and peanut buttering of a story, making two ideas, two genres or multiple genres and creating something unique, putting that chocolate into the peanut butter and all of a sudden you got something cool.

New Dark combines a road picture, a western and a horror movie and drops the mixture into the outlaw storyline of Bonnie and Clyde. And you put all of that together and you get something really fucking cool. And that's why I love New Dark. And some people talk about like it's the trailer trash vampire movie. I'm fine with you using a pejorative like that, I guess. But I think it's really an outlaw film. And I love the idea of it.

I love that it is kind of like a murder spree kind of badlands or Bonnie and Clyde kind of story and done with vampires. But I think the thing that really makes that is that even though you are never really sitting there going, maybe I don't know, maybe the Brahms stoker family might be going, fuck this movie.

But I think most people were able to realize that there was enough of an adherence to what makes vampires really interesting and then also played with the folklore in a way that made it surprising, subverting the expectations once again. Same year that movie comes out, you have the lost voice. And that combines like rebel without a cause with MTV style videos, music videos and gave traditional vampires a makeover. They had a very colorful 80s like makeover. They really leaned into the beauty.

That's one thing that I will say for Joel Schumacher on that. He uses a great location, Santa Cruz, all its fog and its beaches and it's a very hippie college town and a lot of townies. So there's kind of this blue collar look to it. And so he uses that but he's also leaning right into the fact that the Brat Pack had just happened, right? And teen movies had suddenly exploded and beautiful faces were now the leads in a way that was like almost model perfect.

They had all these really, really beautiful faces in that movie and they wore model like clothes. They throw a whole bunch of stuff in. I think all of these filmmakers who decide to subvert expectations and that's once again how hard grows, right? Upstart genre filmmakers like your mom was left over. They're going to use whatever meat is left on the bone, they're going to combine it with ever else's in the fridge.

They're going to make some kind of fantastic cast all you're like going where did this come from? Let's try the slasher film, the most simple, controversial popular horror subgenre that's out there, the slasher film. And this is how I think maybe I can explain better about subverting expectations, helps make something old feel new again.

Like Jason Voorhees, you know, the subgenre of slashes itself, it rises from the dead over to the decades and I think the reason that it comes back every so often is a hint of nostalgia, a hint of mystery of what maybe younger generations feel they missed with the slasher because it had such a controversial thing to it. And just some tweaks to the template. Ugly enough, you know, the slasher's roots are not in the horror genre really, but they're in the mystery genre.

Specifically, Ag of the Christie's, and then there were none, her 1939 novel. It's remembered today as Ten Little Indians because all the movies and plays and everything came out of it were called Ten Little Indians. So why that one is such a watershed book, previous mystery novels revolved around a single murder and multiple suspects. See, Ten Little Indians, however, breaks from that model. It's a verse expectations by having a series of murders occur to multiple suspects, right?

So there's Ten Strangers. They receive invitations to a mansion on a secluded island. They get there. The mysterious host is nor to be found except there's a recorded message. And on that message it accuses each of the guests that come to that island of serious crimes that they all got away with. And one by one, the guests are killed and the killing is somewhat bizarre. The man who's getting more bizarre as it goes because they go with a nursery rhyme that hangs in every room.

So the structural twist, it changes from the predictable idea of the drawn room murder investigation that Ag of the Christie made popular herself as well. And it turned it into a race to find the killer before he kills off everybody in the story. So Ag of the Christie changed the intellectual exercise of who done it and turn it into something visceral, one from intellectual to visceral because it goes from who done it to who is doing this. So it's happening in the now.

It's happening as you're reading, not something in the past. In doing so that helped create the idea of I guess the thriller. Maybe that's what a thriller is, huh? So in a few decades, thrillers are going to take this really twisty path through wait until dark and stuff like that and evolve into slasher's. Now I think there's a lot of debate over which film is the first slasher.

But if I had to put money down on it, I would say Twitch or the Death Nerve directed by legendary Mario Bava, Italian director. It's also known as a Bay of Blood. You may have seen it by that title. So that was 1971. From like 1939 to 1971, we have this evolution from a mystery to a thriller to something as a slasher and a little bit in there's a jolo. We'll talk a little bit about that too.

Now, the thing that's interesting about Twitch and Death Nerve and why I consider that the first slasher has to do with kind of the historical way that the director Bava was working and stuff and how much of a controversial kind of switch in his style, Twitch or the Death Nerve was. So Bava was a crucial figure in early Italian cinema. And then he started as a cinematographer and he started as a special effects artist in the 40s and the 50s.

And he directed his first credited feature Black Sunday in 1960. And he was trained as a painter. So his movies, you know, Blacks have blood and black lace especially, kill baby kill as well. They're legendary for immaculate composition, you know, use of light and color. If it's black and white, use of shading and a lot of stylized violence. His violence is really kind of itchy over the top. I like to call it itchy.

Like when you're watching Barbara Steele get that fucking iron made mask put on her face. You feel it when that big mallet goes in there. That was something that you might see in biblical stories. For some reason, biblical movies just be able to get away with crazy violence like that. But his movies had that stylized violence and it was never super explicit, but it was more than what was normal in that cat your eye. Kind of like how hammer films when they had Kensington Gore.

So anyway, this idea of Bava's technique, he helped create what ended up being the Jalo genre, hybrid of mystery and horror films. The violence goes way up. The stylization goes way up as well. And so a lot of people credit Jalo as the Italian progenitor to the American slasher. So where blood and black lace exudes just unbelievably beautiful, almost 3D images, this Bava flair, even the violence is glamorous, there's like a sexiness to the violence.

There's that and blood and black lace, but which of the death nerve is the exact opposite. It is uncharacteristically brutal. It's seedy. The whole thing feels like it has a sheen of sweat on it. And it's shockingly gory, especially for 1971. The plot follows the Ten Little Indians template. This murder of a countess brings a bunch of people to claim her estate. And they get on that island and they are just graphically julienned and sliced and diced and blended.

They're just torn to pieces by an unseen killer. There are set pieces that are in there. This guy that gets his face split into the hatchet. There's a beheading. And when the head comes off, the body like lurch is forward in the arterial blood shoots towards the camera. There's two people who are in pale with a spirit during sex. And this was something that was repeated, you know, went into the slash films of the 80s.

I mean, really kind of huge oh, watch is in some way, I think Friday 13th part two has the the spirit going through two people or having sex. Now that was big in the 80s, but that kind of carnage just wasn't around in 1971. And even more interesting in Bob's films, Bob did not do that kind of thing until twitch of the death nerve. You can say that he had gut churning violence at certain points, but the visuals did not match the feel that Bob he was usually going for.

And so what's interesting is Bob recognized that the culture and cinematic tastes were starting to change. And you know, he took a chance. He subverted the fans expectations of Jalofilms and in a way, unintentionally probably. I can't speak from Mario Bava, but I think he unintentionally laid the groundwork for the slasher. I think he made his movie, he made his point. He took things too far, I think intentionally.

So when the movie came out, film critics who loved his old stuff and supported his earlier work rejected it, right? And the fans who were normally fans of his movies, they were offended by it or they didn't support it. Now cut ahead, 10, 20 years later, the movie is now revered because of its place in horror and history. It's this kind of little hidden horror that takes an older idea and turns it into what becomes a slasher.

Now, if we're going to talk slashes, we've got to talk about certain movies, right? So the influence of John Carpenter's Halloween. I think that influence is more cosmetic. I don't think Carpenter's Halloween has the attitude and mindset that I would personify as a slasher. I think its bigoted influence is where it was really cheap to make. It had an easily repeatable formula, it made a ton of money, and it was set on a holiday, right? And it had a massed killer.

So those things were things that other filmmakers are going to use, add infinitum up to this day and even Halloween itself is cannibalizing Halloween. But the original film just wants to be a spooky suspense movie with a supernatural band to it. A lot of the scaringness comes from the power of suggestion in that movie, less is more. And less is more is not the mission statement of a slasher film. Slasher films are more is more.

The strongest and longest-lasting influence on slashes comes from Friday the 13th, you know, the original 1980. That movie started as a teaser poster to gauge audience interest on that title. The response was super positive. So they put it in movie theaters, they played this trailer, they just had that glass, get shattered by the word Friday the 13th coming through and people were like, I gotta see that. And so producer director Sean Cunningham wrote a script.

He decided to go toward the more is more excess. And that is the excess of say, Bob is twitch at a death nerve. He copied a little Indian structure. I mean, he even borrowed some of the violent kills that were used in twitch at a death nerve. So timing is everything. And what back fired on Boava 1971, nine years later was paid dirt for Cunningham. He has an entire career and a franchise and probably 20 houses because of what he did to twitch at the death nerve and turn it in Friday the 13th.

So Friday the 13th to say the least and caught everybody by surprise, right? I mean, it was a trailer and it became this movie. So people went to see Friday the 13th expecting it to be still in that mold of Halloween where we're going to be, you know, it'll be reserved. That is not what we got. Friday the 13th was cinematic anarchy. I consider that the punk rock movie the first real big punk rock horror movie.

We didn't feel like a studio released it and it felt like it escaped from a mental world. It was wish fulfillment of every horror fan, you know, that wish fulfillment of Gore and Carnage that we imagined when we were watching older films and we were watching Boava films. We imagined what was happening to Barbara Steele's face. We never thought anybody crazy enough to show us what happened, but that's what happened. The rules no longer applied.

Friday the 13th seemed really dangerous in a way that I think only a handful of movies like saying the Texas chain, some ask or felt at that time. Now, that was a huge success, right? Friday the 13th opened the floodgates for tons of slasher films, mostly following that revised horror formula, right? Many of these movies took place around a holiday or especially events, you know, special events or holidays.

It's time for a slasher, prom night news, evil, my bloody Valentine, your happy birthday to me. Most of these movies also use the 10 little Indians revenge template where someone usually an outsider or the loner, the wall flower, they had a prank plate on them and it either injured or killed them, but of course didn't or it killed a family member and it was revenge. So the burning, the prowler, both really good ones, Hell Night, final exam.

Now, every single one of the slasher films had a mask killer and the masks got more elaborate but it was the same template, right? Multiple weapons were being used off teenagers. You know, how closely were slasher films adhering to a new formula, right? Which is why I ran out of steam on the slasher than the first two years of them. You know, after 1983, they really started feeling derivative. So there was a documentary.

If you haven't seen it, you should watch going to pieces, the rise and fall of the slasher film came out in 2006 and whether you're a slasher fan or not, it's well worth taking a look at the documentation that there is around the slasher film. So herp-freed was the director and the writer of graduation day, not one of the high points, but he talked about taking on that assignment and so let me quote that.

You went to see Halloween in Friday the 13th and we just saw how these things were constructed. And if you watch carefully and you watch several times, you see that you have to have a build-up to horror activity, to some kind of massacre and that continues on. Essentially, he said every five minutes, you had to kill somebody.

Freed admitted he took a stop watching the movie theater and recorded how much time passed between the murders so that he essentially said, okay, it's a five minute fucking deal we got here. And he said they all had to fit that particular pattern and every couple of minutes you got to have something to fit that genre. Now, he no longer makes movies now a rabbi, rabbi, freed and he said that there's a great expression Hebrew which is it was good, but it's good that it was.

And so the slasher film is a sign of how we can go absolutely crazy if you just subvert something that feels tired. But anyway, get back to our doors of death. I know this one's going long. I haven't been on for a while, folks, so I think you guys deserve a little bit longer. If this is going to kill you, I do apologize. But we're going to go on. First two doors of death, they understand the horror's audience expectations. They either meet those expectations or they subvert them.

Ultimately, the first two doors, door one and door two, they respect the audience's expectations, right? Three does not. So instead of meeting or subverting expectations, the third door of death ignores them. The filmmakers who make these movies, the movies that pass through door three, they're essentially rejecting the traditions and the guidelines. And they oftentimes, they are aggressive in that.

They aggressively criticize the things that went before them, they kind of bite the hand that feeds in some ways. Their visions radically differ from what the audience expectations are. And that's usually very divisive. Some fans will flock to these movies once they see that someone has kicked over the chess board. And others get very vocal about hating that. Like, hey, that's not how you play chess, motherfucker.

Now the arguments around these movies, because of the nature of what they're trying to do, they are provocative, the arguments get heated. So you know what, for hard, truly evolved. These movies need to happen. You need to have these movies that just say, fuck it. I'm going to try something else. And some people are going to get it, and other people won't. And it very much reminds me of talking about punk rock in a documentary.

Henry Rollins is being interviewed and he goes, you know, it just takes one person to say, fuck you, I'm not going to do what you say. And then someone else goes, holy shit. That's exactly how I feel. Voice of a generation. And just like that, you move on to the next generation. And actually punk rock is a great thing to talk about with this because, you know, a lot of the people who were the original punk rockers are like, you know, I really didn't have anything against the Beatles.

I didn't have anything against Led Zeppelin and stuff. It's just, we were tired of them. And the fucking older generation wouldn't let go. They just kept holding on to the airwaves. And there was no music for us. They had those bands and they were 15 and 16. What am I getting when I'm 15 and 16? I'm getting Peter Frampton in a fucking kimono. Give me a fucking break. So they ended up making their own shit, right? And so I believe these kicks in the teeth happen because we won't let go.

And so this is probably going to be a door that's going to get me some hate mail. You know what? You've all over dime on the fucker. Yeah, ironically enough, door three movies happen when there's just too many of door one and door two movies to go around. But there's a fine line between giving audiences what they want and fucking pandering to them. And I think the phenomenon of tipping over into the pandering zone happens gradually.

You know, filmmakers in the studios, they don't want to kill the Golden Goose. But I think that might be inevitable. Why is that? Because we find a sweet spot. Finding that sweet spot doesn't happen overnight. It takes forever sometimes. Finding the sweet spot with an audience expects and wants takes time. So once you find that, it's beneficial for everyone to just stick to it. I don't need to move after right here.

This is the place where if we scratch, we're getting the itch and everybody's really happy. You know, nothing succeeds like success does. So the audience is happy to get that right? They want the itch scratched. They want what they want. They're happy to get what they want. But unfortunately, as time goes by, you know, the audience ages. The sweet spot becomes comfortable and nostalgic entertainment. And the industry will stay there for them. Hey, if that's working, let's just keep doing that.

Rocky 12 sounds like a great idea. And then just like that, everything stays the same. Now, horror movies in particular, I think, do stagnate in complacency. It's so funny because we're the bad boys, right? We're the outlaws. And yet that sweet spot starts to rot pretty quick. Nobody notices it except for the next generation coming into their own. The next generation just doesn't relate to what their parents love. I don't know what it is.

I don't know if there's any way we can keep from having it happen. I mean, it's like trying to figure out why certain music hit you when you're young. And then music will always be a big part of your life, but it will never be like that moment when you suddenly felt like you'd be long because you heard that song and you suddenly realized it's yours. Stagnan art doesn't keep up with the changing culture. And before you know it, we become that generation that won't let go.

That keeps talking about these movies from the A's because they were so great. And yet they were great to us. And they were great to us because they were a great bookmark of the times. They were a blueprint. Often art doesn't keep up with the changing culture. It becomes a sanctuary from a changing world. So we go back to those movies. You know, I owned a lot. Let's just say a lot of movies on physical media. I will say I own these movies because they are something that I want to go back to.

But it's a sanctuary from a changing world. It is a place that I know I can find an equilibrium, right? So those kind of movies don't represent the younger generation or their reality. We don't really get how much the world has changed. The little stressors. We don't get the little anxieties. We don't get the little weirdness and the complications of the absurdity, the things that don't make any fucking sense if you grew up like in the last 15 years.

There's changes that we don't get because as we're older, we just go up. Another change. We just sidestep it. We're back to thinking about what we're going to have for lunch. But if you're young, there's this fucking thing that looks really huge right in front of you. A lot of times, until the old generation finally lets go of the reins, these movies don't represent the younger generation or their reality. So anyway, my movies, my horror movies weren't for the younger generation.

They just didn't connect them the same way. So what happens if the youth starts to feel neglected? That neglected audience is just dying to have something that they can call their own. And hey, once again, we go back to that punk rock comparison that I mentioned. The future belongs to the new generation, folks. Well, you like it or not. And sometimes when those changes happen, it's like a real break, right? It's a drastic break. It can be pretty seismic.

One sheet of Andrew, Andalusian Dodd, 1929. The first surrealist film essentially. It's not a full length film. It's like 27 minutes. But Andalusian Dodd premieres in Paris, Louis Bounwell, Salvador Dolly. They're the creators of it. And they lead the theater while the movie is going on. They go into the street and they start filling their pockets with rocks. In case the audience becomes physically violent over what they saw.

So much to Dolly's chagrin, he was actually hoping that there was going to be a riot. There wasn't one. It said people came out and they were confused. They were like, what the fuck did we just see? However, some people, they didn't riot. They went to the police because it was obscene. It should be banned. While there was slight nudity, there's a really graphic bit of violence that most people know about the sliced eyeball.

But the thing that makes it feel obscene or dirty or unclean is that it doesn't follow a structure that everybody expects. It completely ignores expectations. It could give a fuck with the audience thought it wanted to see. And it decided to try something else. Something that was stewing underneath the culture the entire time. So it wasn't just some kind of weird thing that was easily dismissible. This was something that stuck to people's ribs afterwards. They may not have liked what they saw.

You can have something that you really have a strong opinion of. And you can still find yourself falling in love with it later. Because it is so against the grain of expectations at that time, so that it is somehow taking us in a direction we don't expect, it starts with a violent reaction and then it becomes a passionate reaction. And quite a let's face it, right? Or when it is at its best, rocks the boat, makes everybody uncomfortable. And it does so. You know, it takes a decade or so.

Innovations coming from fresh young people. Subversives are usually young. There aren't sentimental about contemporary drama. And they usually start right where the previous episode starts, stop being innovative in energy. As soon as we started wanting our bellies rubbed, that's when this new breed comes in. The new breed can love the heart and soul of the movies that we champion for them. They may love the revered classics in some way, but they clearly see what doesn't work anymore.

I said this in my last book, I believe, which is if you are young and you don't understand why the exist was supposed to be scary because cultural norms have changed drastically and we're in a more secular world, that's not your fault. However, if you are someone who lived through the exercise and are still watching horror movies now and you openly disregard the changes that are happening, you refuse to see anything good in them, that's your fucking fault.

In horror though, regime changes are how the genre advances. It's like you kind of need a coup, I guess. I think it was inevitable that you get a movie like the Blair Witch Project. The American horror movie landscape of the 90s, I'm going to do a podcast in the future because I've shat on the 90s a lot. Everybody I know shits on the 90s, compared to the 80s, it's a very barren decade of horror films. But there are some really good ones in there.

I think I should really acknowledge some of those. But for the sake of this conversation, we're going to talk about how the silence of the lambs wins best picture and all of a sudden horror movies become psychological thrillers. Everything's about serial killers. Every movie seemed to be in a box office about serial killers. I mean, there were some brilliant ones. I still love David Fincher's 7. And yet for the most part, we just got a lot of repetitions of the same story.

The Minus Man, Color Knight, California, with a K. Those were pretty much just, oh, we're going to get in on that craze and they focused on one thing. And then we have West Cravens. Yeah, it's self-referential scream, but it's also brilliant. I will champion scream all the time. It was what was needed. Things started to look up after scream. But whenever you have a spectacular box office, which is what scream did, it really handicapped low budget independent horror films.

So scream inadvertently created a template that was medium budget studio films, teen models from television, the WB, we used to joke about all the time, WB television models, headlining revenge stories. So you had like, I know you did last summer and urban legend. So there's a lot of gloss. There's a lot of glamour and it didn't feel very original. The studios and distributors, they just let the smaller independent horror films sit on shelves.

No, they show things just to show these bigger budget films. So you had this gloss, you had this perfect panaglide kind of thing to movies, you had people that had perfect skin. You had soundtracks that were completely from the beginning to the end of the movie, hard rock to medium rock songs. And so those gloss and there's templates all over the place. And that all changes when the Legend of the Blair Witch captured everybody. So I love the Blair Witch.

I think it gets a really bad rap and I think part of that bad rap is because it is so experimental and was so different and people felt absolutely betrayed. And Water Sanchez and Daniel Myrick are the creators, co-creators of the Blair Witch and they invented the Legend of the Blair Witch back in 1993. They're attending the University of Central Florida. Now they may have invented it then but the Blair Witch project is the first horror film of the New Millennium 1999.

It's the one that breaks cleanly from all the overused glossy conventions that were in the 90s. That whole end of an era, you could feel it. I don't think this horror movie gets recognized as the game changer it really was. I mean, not only did it kick off the fan footage of Jean Raul which you know, your mileage may vary but there's some brilliant stuff that goes on in there. A lot of crap but brilliant stuff as well.

Not only did it kick off the sub, found footage of Sub-Generance, not the first but it kicked it off. It did so in a very experimental fashion. It captured something uniquely visceral. That most, that try to repeat its structure and its magic miss. Somehow they can't get that unique visceral feel. The Blair Witch project is easily one of the most experimental films ever released in the mainstream theaters.

The Witches and Myra came up with the idea when they realized that they both felt that documentaries about hauntings and possessions were scarier than movies, horror movies that were about them. The documentaries, the ghost hunters, the people walking into the houses with those fucking shaky cams, they found that more realistic, more authentic, more like the news, right? So they came up with an idea that combined the two styles, the horror movie itself and the documentaries about hauntings.

So they ended up writing a 35 page framework screenplay. That's all it was to that movie. It was about three film students who went missing in 1994 in the Black Hills of Maryland while they were making a documentary about the legend of the Blair Witch which the two came up with in 1993 and just kept building on the entire time until they got this movie made. Now the three film students in the movie were never found. That was the pitch that was there.

Their equipment, their shot footage were found a year later and the footage is the movie that you're watching. Now I did want to mention something because you'll hear people say that the last broadcast is the first found footage movie or they'll mention Cannibal Holocaust as a found footage movie. And I disagree. They have found footage aspects. Large swaths in the film are you watching film footage? But there is bookends that are not just like two or three minutes.

There's like a whole big portion of a movie, a setup. Everything that is a normal traditional setup of a movie starts and ends Cannibal Holocaust. And it ends the last broadcast, in fact the last broadcast is a documentary about a documentary. And so Blair Witch is the only one that starts with a little card that tells you what had happened. And the rest of it is literally the narrative of whatever was on the videotape as well as the film.

If you're really looking at what the first found footage movie was, may I bring you to David Holsman's diary? That's 1966, I'll say. It's essentially a guy who's an actor who realizes that he's not getting any work so he decides to make his life a movie. He has a film camera and he's speaking directly into it and people walk in and they're like, what the hell is wrong with you? And then he starts filming people that don't know that they're being filmed and it starts turning into a stalker film.

It's more of a comedy, but at the same point I would say that's the fatterst found footage film. David Holsman's diary, you heard that here first. Anyway, let's get back to the Blair Witch. Why I think that this is the one that really kicks off the found footage is that literally the whole thing is found footage. There's no actor saying we found this footage. There's no interviewing people, the only interviewing that's happening is the footage that was shot by the people who are missing.

So narratively we are literally in the only universe that exists in the woods. So most of the action, all of the dialogue was going to be created on location with actors who had solid improvisation skills. They had to improvise very, very strongly. In fact, I think they had to do all sorts of stuff for the screen tests. The actors themselves are going to be recording the movie using a 16 millimeter film camera, a nogger sound recorder, and a high eight camcorder.

So already the most experimental and risky thing that you could do. Oh, let's just put the equipment in the hands of the actors. Let's not give them dialogue. Let's leave them notes. And essentially I think they had things like it was an eight day shoot. So the actors camped out there in the woods for the entire duration of the eight day shoot. They would wake up to clues found in film canisters that gave them GPS coordinates to the next location. They got lost. Fuck it.

That's now part of the movie. The actors had no clue what they were walking into. So essentially if you're an actor in this movie, you are on a live stage performing the live for eight days without a break. They're walking in. So everything that's happening, how are you not going to become more and more sense of that? How are you not going to have the lines between reality and fantasy blur? They had no clue what they're walking into.

They'd get woken up in the middle of the night, something stalking them at the campsite. It's literally happening to them. Suddenly they have to react to people banging on the size of the tent. Suddenly you have to react when somebody's hiding behind a bush. What the fuck is that? What the fuck is that? Literally wasn't supposed to happen. She ended up seeing one of the people, one of the filmmakers crouching down. She just runs off into the woods.

The most realistic fucking thing that could happen at that moment. I felt the chills. This was the idea of fucking I'm getting out of here. So the shaky camera, all of that, none of that is an affectation. This is all literally happening to these people. The only thing is that they're never at risk. The only big thing outside of that is that they are actively reacting. When people are banging on the tent, they're going to go, fuck you, you're not paying me enough. Take two. They react.

That is stunning if you really think about it. There's real anxiety. There's real exhaustion. There's real fear of getting recorded in that film. It was raw. It was strange. It kept the audience off-balance throughout. Sometimes literally off-balance like they're in her ears. We're no longer working because of the shakingness of the shaky camera. It's funny how quickly our eyes and our brains get used to stuff like that.

There's been so many movies that have done the shaky camera and stuff like that. You can say that was a blur which was worse. I don't really think so. I think what is worse is that everything feels very real in the Blair Witch project. That combined with the sea sickness of that shaking camera was astonishing. It's a very similar to that found footage films that came after the Blair Witch project. Just haven't really replicated.

There's been a few that have been really good, but they've done it in their own way. This movie was about as far from what I know what you did last summer was as you could possibly get. But I think another key ingredient that made the movie a hit was the filmmakers willingness to engage with the technology that was at the changing times. They engage with the technology of all of them, the internet. In 1999, that information highway, it's still pretty new.

Nobody knew the untapped power that was there. They knew how to search it. They knew some things. You're getting connected. There were bulletin boards and stuff like that, but didn't really understand the power that there was. How everyone started to really find quick ways down rabbit holes. The Blair Witch was the first movie to be effectively marketed primarily online. Production created a website. That website is notorious. Fashion itself, like it was a true crime, missing person database.

It was for a documentary, perhaps, had links to stuff that looked like authentic looking police reports. There were forensic photos. Of course, the very famous missing poster of the three film students, right? The poster for the movie at some points. It was definitely in the ad campaign a whole bunch of times. There were interviews on that site. There were clips of the found footage. The public relations team dug so deeply into this kind of thing. They went with it so deep.

They method marketed that they got the IMDB listings for the three actors to read missing presumed dead. That's pretty fucking phenomenal. That's crazy as well. By the time the film got widely released, that website, that really strange Blair Witch project website had like 160 million hits already. So of course, some people believe the story was real. That the movie was on a documentary, nothing else, and that the actors were actually missing. And there was backlash.

A lot of the backlash that there was against the Blair Witch project was fans feeling duped. They bought into something that wasn't real. The same thing, however, if you're going to attack Sanchez and MyRick, you may as well go after that Orson Wells guy. Same thing happened in 1930, 80, the live reading of H.C. Wells' War of the Worlds on CBS Radio. Some folks lost their minds. Some wanted Congress to get involved. Other people ate it up. Couldn't wait to find out what was happening more.

And even funnier with that is that if you ever listened to the actual War of the World's Broadcast, every break they're saying this is a reenactment. This is an act. This is based on this book. And they just did it with a sense of urgency. Wells understood the technology of going from theater to radio and understood that radio was live and that news was going to be read in a certain way that there was an inflection that was different between the news and the entertainment pieces.

So the Blair Witch Project ignored every popular trend at that moment. It did not have WB people on there. It didn't have a lot of music. It was contemporary. It didn't have shiny, beautiful photography. All those trends were gone. The audience expectations were completely shattered. And it became a phenomenon. It helped make the founder of Summajanra this kind of legacy. When movies behind the third door of death are like a language waiting to be discovered, right?

They're like the lingua franca for a new generation. But for the older generation, it's just fucking gibberish, right? The younger audience finds a story from their own lived experiences. They have an antidote to the old classics that keep getting shoved down their throats. The third door is an arctic, right? It's an arctic break from tradition, from wisdom. Sometimes these movies are not always wisely made. Sometimes it goes against the philosophy of how we make movies.

It goes against what we consider arm morality. These movies, they see the world through a lens that, quite honestly, many times the older generation is going to be blind to. So I mentioned Bonnie and Clyde earlier. I think I mentioned it a couple times. So we're going to come back to Bonnie and Clyde to make an example before I move on to the thing that's going to get me all the hate mail. So the example about Bonnie and Clyde, Bonnie and Clyde, 1967, direct by Arthur Penn.

Now the true story of Bonnie, Parker and Clyde Barrow was mythical, right? Everybody, you know, in America knew Bonnie and Clyde. It was also cautionary tale. Things don't go well when you go against John Law. People used to buy tickets. In fact, I was at State Fairs where they would have the car, the couple was gunned down in. And it's at 130 bullet holes and you could pay a dollar to go count every one of the 130 bullet holes.

You're looking at the car that these two people were killed and gunned down by all these people. So there's this weird kind of, I don't call it hero worship, but there is this whole thing of like there's a luredness to the Bonnie and Clyde idea, a very idea that you go count bullet holes in a car. Tells me something's a little bit strange. So Penn's movie, Arthur Penn's film, two outlaws become folk heroes. And Warren Beatty is playing Clyde Barrow.

And in this film, it shows the establishment is what's crooked. And it doesn't care about the common Americans struggling in the Great Depression. They care about the banks. That's what the government is. So the barrel gang and the bloody crime spree that they're going on, it's kind of shown as a justifiable liberation.

And it's kind of shot like a reverent kind of road movie, you know, on the road to Morocco or something like that, it was comedic elements until somebody gets shot in the face, until someone gets gunned down until 130 bullets go through two people. Old-fashioned establishment film critics did not get this movie. So the New York Times had Bosley Crowther. And he was the velvet rope guy. He was the guardian of taste coming out of the New York Times. And he lost his fucking mind on this movie.

So I have his review here. This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth. So Arthur Pan essentially took a very recognizable symbol, turn its meaning on its ear. And he did that to make a commentary that the older generation of Bosley Crowther didn't get. Boomers that were dealing with maybe going to Vietnam completely understood.

So he didn't get it, Bosley Crowther, because he was part of the problem. I bring all of that stuff up. I bring up how generations sometimes just get outraged when there's this change that happens. So you know, Blair Witch Project used technology, right? Growing technology internet, incorporated that raw look of Ghost Hunter videos, and ended up creating this whole big phenomenon and started found footage revolution.

So a skin of a rink embraces both how technology and the anxiety of life altering current events can radically change how we tell stories. I think it's easily one of the most divisive and controversial horror films of the 21st century. Most members were so polarized in their opinions of this movie. I mean, many actually found it a very terrifying experience, tapped into their own personal nightmares, just as many openly hated it.

And even debated whether it qualifies as a legitimate film, many people thought it's merely a stunt. It's a cynical marketing ploy. Which ever opinion wins out, I guess that's for history to decide. It's going to play through as it does. I've watched it a couple times now. I have to say the first time I had to watch it in compartments and pieces. Skin of a rink actually kind of opened my eyes. My response to skin of a rink opened my eyes to the gulf between generations of viewers.

Because I went on Facebook after watching and I said, well, skin of a rink was kind of strange. I guess I can't wait until the sequel, rinked inca do, and making fun, being funny, being silly. And I started getting instant messages from fans. People who listened to this show. And they were like, I thought you were like the Vanguard guy. I thought you were like no velvet ropes. I thought, and you're just shitting on this thing. And this thing is terrifying. And what's wrong with you?

And I was like, wow. They called me on my shit that a lot of times I sit there and I say, the problem is you're not allowing yourself to be open to the experience. You don't have to like it, but you have to respect it. And I wasn't respecting it. I was going down the thing of the people who would look at gwerneca because his gwerneca can go, I could draw that. That was essentially how I was reacting. So I didn't want to be in that way anymore. One thing is for sure about skin rink.

It struck a nerve. And it wasn't a singular movie, an aberration, a weird thing like people just didn't know what they were doing. It wasn't an embarrassing fluke. It was a micro budgeted film that caught on to the liminal horror subgenre. It paved the way for other films that challenge the traditional narrative structure in general. The idea of a beginning, a middle, and an end, as hard as it may seem to believe that that is actually a new narrative style. That is succeeding.

That has to do with liminal space, liminal horror. Now saying that skin muret challenge traditional narrative structure might be an understatement. I mean, it refused to play by the simplest of expected story of telling rules. The idea of having that defined beginning, middle, or end. movie doesn't begin as much as it kind of wakes up disoriented from like a long nap. It's the first thing that you see is a grainy low light image. And it's like as if shot from the old 1980s camcorder.

We're in a dark hallway. We're at carpet level with the only available light coming from cracked open bedroom doors. The only sound is this hollow audio that you can tell us from unseen room somewhere deep in the house. And this audio is coming from public domain cartoons that they could play on a loop. It's on a VHS loop on television. Very reminiscent of growing up with a TV for me and for the generation after me, kids growing up where their parents aren't watching them.

They're just watching the same VHS tapes over and over again. Look of the movie unfolds at literal eye level perspective of the two preschool age children. I think they're four and six. And the story is that they wake up and slowly realize their parents are missing. And they're homes, the windows in the house, the front door, the toilet at one point disappear. They're just out of the house. There's just a blank space where they were. There's more wall where they used to be window.

And they're left alone. They're unable to escape the house. They're hearing voices. They're asking them to come upstairs. They think it's the parents voice. They go up there and mom is just sitting on the bed and mom's gone. And there's these long shots of this. I mean, is it mom? Is it something up there that's the skies is mom? The skies is dad. Why would mom tell the kid to stick a razor blade in its eye? And the movie goes through all this shit and these really long, long shots.

And then it just ends. The movie doesn't end as much as it just kind of falls back to sleep in a way. The final image lasts over a minute. It's a dark room. There's a barely perceptible face within that room. It's telling us to go to sleep. And what's interesting is that that face in the last scene, it's kind of like a Rorschach test. People who were scared that were completely connected and engrossed in that film saw the face.

Those who are watching the movie and couldn't wait for it to fucking end, they saw no face. They were just, I think they were looking at their watches. So the thing is that movie goes on for 100 minutes. So for 100 minute running time, Skitt and Rink comprises just completely of very long static shots, minimal dialogue, super little plot development, total disregard for traditional audience expectations all the way around. I mean, some of the creative choices are fucking perverse.

They're just downright perverse. Not only is the entire film shot from the vantage point of toddlers, which means most of the movie is about a foot or two off the floor. But most of the time, we only see the children from behind. We never in the entire movie see a full human face. And that would help us connect emotionally to the characters. But we can't really see them. We're constantly in this state of anxiety. Will this shot ever end? Will this sound ever end?

Will we ever see these kids faces? And Skitt and Rink is trying to disconnect from every narrative device you can think of, including time. It's a movie that was made in 2022. It feels like it's trying to look like it was filmed in 1972. And in many ways it does feel that way. But the title card says it takes place in 1995 for no reason that I can think of. It just is. So there's no windows, there's no doors. So all the light is artificial.

It's all the glow of a TV screen, all the lights that are there, the night lights that are stuck in the outlets. So if all the lights are artificial, we see no daylight. We have no idea how much time, how much story time passes, right? Are these children alone for hours? Are they alone for days? Is it years? We and the children are in a cinematic limbo. And that lack of certainty, the lack of any continuity, story resolution, there is none.

All of that stokes some very vocal hatred for the movie. And yet many horror fans with all of that that I've just told you found it viscerally terrifying and groundbreaking. And Skitt and Rink affected them far more than most traditional horror films did. And people get interviewed about this, people who are fans, if you go on websites, go on Reddit and see what people are saying about Skitt and Rink.

When you find this group, they're like, this works so much better than traditional horror films. This envelopes me in a way. So there are other liminal horror films. So Skitt and Rink may have popularized it. I won't say it's the first liminal horror film, but it popularized it. And then you had movies like The Outwaters, movie called Come True, Any's Men. We're all going to the world's fair. And in a violent nature, these movies dedicate themselves to, they're really about an emotional feeling.

It's all about what you feel. It's not about what you think about. It's not about comforting you in that way. There's no comfort in these movies. So they're dedicating themselves to this emotional feeling. Really, I think the feeling is this just nightmare sense of dread. They pick dread, this energy, this feeling, over, say, narrative structure, any kind of horror movie tropes. Although, believe it or not, there are like two really effective jump scares in there.

It took me viewing two to find them. The first time it was amazing how disconnected I was from this movie. I just couldn't get it. Couldn't penetrate it. I had to take it in quarters. I think I would watch for 20 minutes and I had to get up and walk around. You know, stuff like that was happening. Then the second time I wore really good headphones, I turned off the lights, and it is amazing the difference in how that movie worked.

Anyway, these movies just don't care about the narrative structure. They don't care about the tropes that are usually there. Limital horror movies are ghost stories, they're haunted houses, they're demonic possessions. They can even be slasher's, right? But they just jettison everything except for the bare bones of the framework. So I'm using this term limo-har. I may have used it on the show before. I know I've said it in interviews. I've been asked about this often. What the hell is limo-har?

So let me give a quick definition, hopefully quick, because I know this show has gone long. Limo-har really, it's existing various incarnations for a long time. It's been in the margins of storytelling. So liminal refers to a state of transition, right? The spot between going from here to there. So liminal spaces are usually something tangible, like airport terminals, long hotel hallways that have a lot of corners. But they can also be tangible, but they can also be abstract.

So a liminal film can be about something like a state of grief. It can be about depression. It can be watching a prolonged illness. The horror that is generated is when we find ourselves trapped in that transitional space. You're only supposed to spend a certain amount of time in a airport terminal, a hotel hallway. You're only supposed to be sad or depressed or ill for a transitional time period, a short period of time. Then we're trapped in that transitional space. We can't find our way out.

There's no eggs at whatsoever. That's where the horror comes in. So liminal horror is like the terror of limbo. It's kind of challenging to provide a definitive explanation for anything that is like a trend, right? Why do cultural and artistic trends happen? Who knows? I think there are things that you can look at that there can be moments in time, elements that can happen, experiences, events, tragedies that can happen on a large scale that can change the course of what is expected in films.

I mentioned it before how 28 days later was able to use that look, the camera video, home video being shot about 9-11. But I think first and foremost, whether anything major had happened around the time that Skin Rink was being made, there's something pretty universal about it as well. Because even though it's experimental and how it's executed and it has those low tech visuals, there's a very minimal sound design. It's got a very primal fear from early childhood at its heart.

To do ever wake up in the middle of the night as a kid and have the house that you're in, the silence of the house scare you, the darkness of the house scare you, it's quiet. Everybody's asleep, it's your house. The only thing that's changed is the lights are off, but because it's so quiet, it gets scary. Somehow the dead of night, just the dead of night when you're a kid, turns your home into an uncanny valley.

One of the most frightening things that ever happened in my life when I was a kid was I woke up in the middle of the night and I needed a pee but I was too scared to get out of bed and I called out for my dad. Dad, silence, right? I mean, he's dead asleep. It's three o'clock in the damn morning and I go, dad and I expect him to run in like a man servant. So there's dead silence and what is my kids mind think? Dead, they're dead. Something's in the other room, it's killed them.

And so my answer is to start screaming, dad, dad, dad, and poor dad has to come in staggering, what, what, what, what? Trying to explain something that he universally already understands, but I'm like, how is he ever going to understand that I was scared by the very house I was in because it felt wrong and too quiet and too dark. Of course, he knew. So writer, director, Kyle Edward Ball found out how common that fear was.

He had a YouTube channel called Bite Size Nightmares and he kind of had a reasonably big following I guess where he would get people who are subscribers and make short movies that were kind of recreating their nightmares. And as he was doing this, you know, he had this idea, he thought it'd be like an unlimited supply of stuff.

He started to realize how many people had the same kind of nightmare setup that when they were doing these requests, they were like, I'm a kid, I wake up, I can't find my parents, I can't find my way out of the house and something's there. So it's the maze in the minotaur, right? And he realized that that was so common that he decided to make skin and ring from that framework. So technology like YouTube videos and video games, they play a big part in the cinematic language of skin-marink.

And I think why the movie started cord with predominantly younger audiences. You know, as of 2020, the gaming industry makes more money than the music and movie industry is combined. There have been several generations now where video games are the primary storytelling language. And the storytelling language does not necessarily work on the beginning, middle, and end format. There are several different types of games that are played. So you have video games and movies take cues from each other.

But if we're looking at video games, survival horror games are still our big. Silent Hill, they really took a lot of cues from movies. Silent Hill tried to be as cinematic as possible and of course that it was made into a movie. So their visual gameplay is very much looking like cinema, but they also have a very free narrative style. You know, it doesn't have the traditional motion picture style. It doesn't have the kind of narrative structure. Video games can be non-linear in structure.

They can have a sandbox open world structure where the player can enter the story anywhere they want to. And there's branching narratives that can change the story by the choice that the player makes. I mean, these dynamics mean that games aren't married to a three act narrative like most movies are. They're not married to a 90 to 120 minute story arc that most films are.

When we hear that the new generation is bored with movies, we immediately want to go to the fact that they don't have a short attention span. And I think they just have a short attention span for something that they've seen a million times, something that they don't really relate to. They just don't care. But when it comes down to something that they're interested in, they can play a video game for three weeks straight. They can watch 10 episode mini series on Netflix of hunting of Hill House.

No problem with focus there. No problem with long durations. But there's something about the three act narrative in that 90 to 120 minute story arc that can be limiting. It's not that it's dead. It's that it is limiting. So playable teaser for Silent Hill was called PT, which is playable teaser. It came out in 2014 and it featured a break away from even the things that Silent Hill and stuff had.

You're just an unknown person, you're the single player, you're in this first person perspective, you wake up in a room on the floor inside a haunted house and you walk into a hallway. And when you're in that hallway, it's a conditional loop. It keeps going around and around. You're in the same place again and again. But it redecorates and it changes every time you turn the corner.

So you start having more clue show up, weird things like some weird crazy disgusting fetus kind of things in the sink. Anyway, it gets weirder and weirder and weirder, but story really is secondary to what they're really going for on this. It's an emotional experience. So when you're playing PT, you're getting creeped out by the repetition and the fact that you just can't seem to figure your way out. So video games by their nature, right? Loosen the rules around structure.

They allow for a much more experimental kind of language to be used. They make experimental cinematic language more commonplace. If you're doing nothing like I mentioned in the very beginning of this podcast, the idea that you can like a comedian and if you like them so much, you start to know exactly where the rim shots are and where the punchline is going to come in. Same thing happens with movies, same thing happens with video games.

So when you can go into that more experimental language, you make the language more accessible. So you add to that the low tech look that YouTube and TikTok is normalized. There is no style in YouTube and people are watching these for hours and hours and hours and hours and it normalizes that kind of look. So something that normally would not be permissible in cinema.

Now suddenly is because of the repetition of things that we see all the time, the more commonplace entertainments going out to theater to cinemas is further down the line. It's no longer the number one thing to do for entertainment. So you have this idea with that normalization of the grittiness and looseness of the look of YouTube and TikTok, grainy and shaky footage, low light and stuff can feel more authentic. They're professionally shot and polished looking things.

It just kind of feels more authentic because there's less pretense and it's going to bring definitely benefits from that kind of mindset. And I think outside of the technical that I'm talking about, there's a very cultural, it's a societal reason that I think Skinner and Rink made the impact that it did. Directly or indirectly, it capitalized on the anxiety that we were all living through with the COVID pandemic. Lockdown in our homes for months on end, people trapped inside with each other.

There were people who were divorcing that ended up having to live with each other. People who broke up, who had to find a way to coax this because they couldn't leave the house. People were stuck with their abusers, right? All that kind of crazy shit was happening. On a limbo of liminal har, suddenly it was mirroring the real world limbo that we were experiencing. I remember walking through San Francisco in the dead of night because there's nobody out.

Walking in the middle of Columbus Street, which is a very big street, it goes through North Beach and I'm going in one spot where five major streets all converge and I walk and I can turn. I'm in the middle of the street and there's not one car in any of the streets that's moving. And all the houses are dark and I'm like, these are all like coffins. I know there are people behind there. And I'm like this ghost out there. So it was really, really creepy.

So with that, we ended up being trapped in our houses and we had this whole thing where our lives became claustrophobic. Everything was like a little traumatizing. Trapped in the houses, unable to escape some invisible monsters that was killing people. Is it in the houses, is it in our skin, is it in the air? We don't know. Some kind of weird invisible fucking thing.

So maybe the reason that fans of SkinRink, the younger generation, is so connected to this movie is because it not only taps into a very common visceral childhood fear, but it's also commenting on a very real sense of limbo from the pandemic. Even the style that expresses that existential uncertainty that we had, happening at an age which is an impressionable, only maybe 16, 18 years, maybe younger, and all of a sudden the world comes to a stop and people are dying from something you can't see.

Yeah, perhaps that started some kind of existential uncertainty for people who had no other context in life even remotely close to that. And maybe older fans hated SkinRink because limbo does not offer a resolution by nature. Limbo does not offer resolutions. And resolution is a key part to traditional story structure. So what do you do when stories don't offer a resolution anymore? Well, I don't know. I guess you kind of have to bask in it. And I don't know what the future is going to hold.

But I will say that by ignoring expectations completely, movies like SkinRink, the genre in a direction that nobody even thought was a direction to go in. And to me, that's kind of exciting. And to me, that's a place where I can find some surprise. I may not be a fan of all this kind of stuff, right? I may not be wearing SkinRink t-shirts anytime soon. But I sure as hell can respect that this is part of the evolutionary process that horror goes through. Will it continue in that direction?

Will that's anybody's guess? Will something else come out of it? Sprouting from maybe this thing that got so far and then died out, the seeds found their way into a more fertile ground and something else grows in that place. Perhaps that's what's going to happen. The thing is, whatever it's going to end up becoming, it's going to be something that will be only interesting to us if it remembers to surprise us.

So once again, the three doors of death, meeting expectations, subverting expectations, ignoring expectations, these are the things that I believe are going to make horror fans happy if you remember to surprise us even though we've seen it all, we're going to have a good time. And with that, I want to thank you all for listening for as long as you have. That it's been a pleasure being able to spew this craziness out to you.

I'm sure someone's going to have some comments or opinions about my opinions. I welcome them. I embrace them like a madman coming at me with an axe. Anyway, I hope that everybody has a magnificent Halloween. And until next time, thank you so much for listening and stay hellbent. And thanks for listening to the show, hellbent for horror was written and broadcast by me, essay Bradley, and produced by me and Lisa Gorsky.

You can find more on our website, hellbentforhar.com, and I'm also on Facebook at Facebook.com, forward slash hellbent for horror, and my Twitter handle is hellbent horror. Please hit that subscribe button to get H4H hot off the press. And if you can do a review on iTunes or whatever app you listen to us on, that really helps people get to find us. And now for some hellbent for horror news, the podcast is available on some more outlets now.

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