Listener Mail: Halloween Final Processing

you're both doing well. I'm writing to you from Poland, where all the trees are now beautifully colored, winds are getting cold, and nights are longer and longer. I love autumn, with its atmosphere that suits horror and folk tales so well. I was very impressed with your two partner on the Holy Undead, and hearing those tales and stories reminded me of one that searched elated around my hometown. I grew up in a reasonably small town in the south of Poland,

where you have mostly forests, hills, bogs and meadows. It's rather picturesque, but can also get a bit spooky. My town has a population of ten thousand people and it's rather old. Oldest written record that mentions it dates back to the fourteenth century, where it's called by its current name, though in Latin. We have a few local legends around, but one always creep me out more than the others.

You see, my town has two parishes. The older one was established in eighteen seventy and the other around the nineteen eighties. Here comes the twist. It's not the old parish that has a creepy tail attached to it, Smiley face, and I assumed like sinister Smiley face. The church from the eighties. For a long time was simply a wooden bungalow with a cross mounted on the roof. It's been that way until the priest that was in charge of it raised enough money to build a new, proper temple.

He oversaw the construction and with the money that was left, he ordered a graveyard to be built in the proximity of the church. He was a standout man. I actually met him as a kid. He was harsh and very devoted, but just and good with children. But he also had crippling diabetes and eventually he died because of it, I will never forget his last mass, where he mumbled prayers and could barely stand behind the altar. Like I said, he was devoted and wouldn't let anyone talk him out

of doing his job as long as he could. Due to reasons unknown to me, he did not consecrate the graveyard that he built. It's widely known across my town that he wanted to, and the fact that he didn't was one of his biggest regrets. So the tale that I wanted to tell you, but I felt compelled to make into an intro to is that his restless spirit

haunted the graveyard demanding it be consecrated. His body was actually the first one to be laid to the ground over there, which I always found to be quite something. So legend says that if you'd venture into the yard at night, you could have met with the ghost of a priest asking you to do all you can to consecrate the land. The ghost would go on and say that no soul will ever leave the place until it's

properly consecrated. Eventually, the new priest came over and the first thing he did was he went to the graveyard with a bucket of Holy Water smiley faith. Uh, it must have laid the old priest spirit to rest, because all the accounts of him haunting the place ended there. I've never seen the ghost nor went to the cemetery at night, but I know a lot of folks who swear they've seen the apparition. When I was a kid,

I believed it without asking any questions. Now, though, I think of it as a creepy and wholesome tale from an otherwise quite boring corner of the world. I hope this email wasn't too long and you've found some entertainment reading it. Stay spooky and happy Halloween. Me. How wow, So a a thoroughly authentic modern story of the pious undead. This is quite similar to the to the tales we were talking about in the episodes. Yeah, this is quite

a treat. Uh. The one thing I like in this one is that it's one of those ghost stories that involves the ghosts specifically asking the living to do something on behalf of the ghost. I don't think any of the other tales had that, or maybe I'm forgetting one and the other ones were just like get out of here,

this is it's ghost time. Now you know Nimes, Yeah exactly, no humans allowed, but this one it seems to suggest a supernatural set of rules, including the idea that a graveyard that is not yet consecrated is like a prison for ghosts, that the spirits cannot leave until it's consecrated, and he needs the new priest to throw the holy

water on. Yeah. This is neat because it also ligns up with a lot of modern ghost stories and ghost media where ghost is doing something and it's and it leads to the question, well, what can we do to fix this? Let's fix this? And I feel like some of the better ghost stories, like something say The Ring, subvert this by ultimately the answer of being nothing like you. You You may think you can reason with the undead,

that you cannot. Uh. This reminds me a lot of some of the stuff we talked about in the Least, the episode from last year that I believe we recently re ran, where we talked about the idea of the wilderness, like the older idea of the wilderness often being one

where it's it's wild out there. It maybe it has rules, but it's not rules you can understand, um, And we get into a more modern understand where it's like, oh, we know them basically how they the wild work, and we can we can you know, try and do things to to follow those laws or fix things, etcetera. And I wonder if we see a similar thing here with the with the idea of the wild world of the Spirits. Yeah,

that's interesting, And you mentioned the Ring. I mean, I think there are a few stories I can think of. They're sort of like this where um, where if there is a logic to the wild World of the Spirits and there are rules there, the extent to which you can grasp the rules and leverage them is only enough to sort of like get you personally out of trouble, not to sort of make everything right eight, which ultimately is the resolution in the Ring. Right, it's the you know,

you can't really like fix the problem. You can only sort of help the help the evil spread, and that will at least save your skin for the time being. All Right. This next message comes from Matt. This is on our pair of episodes on the invention of the chainsaw. Matt says, good day, Fellas regarding your sawe adjacent chainsaw episodes, which were excellent. I thought you'd be interested to hear about a particularly interesting and potentially deadly chainsaw slash logging

related phenomenon known as the barber chair. The name alone falls in line with the seasonal theme. I think a barber chair refers to a particular result of improperly cutting the front hinge point of a tree, causing unintended pressure in the middle of the trunk elsewhere. I'm not a professional, so please take this description with a large pinch of salt. The result is that the tree splits upwards and falls somewhere overhead of the intended felling notch, and not necessarily

in the direction intended. I've seen it happen on smaller trees while cutting trails through the bush. Even small ones can still be dangerous, but I imagine it's quite scary. On larger ones. It can also ruin what would otherwise be good lumber. There are many reasons professional arborists warn people about the dangers of an improperly cut hinge. Maybe someday a horror director will utilize the barber's chair on film. Thanks for the episode, Matt, uh and so, Matt, I

had no idea about this. Thank you for letting us know, because I looked this up and it is astonishing and scary.

So it is as Matt describes, for in some cases, you can be sawing horizontally into the trunk of a tree, and if the circumstances are right, the tree can start to fall over before you have cut all the way through, and this leads to the the trunk splitting vertically, so like part of the trunk peels off of the rest of the trunk and flips up like a like a hinge or like a like a trap lever, sort of

springing up out of nowhere. And I've seen I've watched some videos of this happening in real time while people are taping themselves sawing through trees, which I guess is you have to be lucky enough to be recording the sawing through anyway, which would normally not be something that people would think to film. But uh yeah, it looks really scary when it happens suddenly, like the tree starts

kind of twisting in a way that isn't expected. And in both of the cases I saw the the sawyer who's working the chainsaw gets out of the way fast enough to not be harmed. But I've also seen illustrations of how loggers could be killed by this. For example, if the hinge that pops up when the trunk splits up the vertical axis, it can basically pop up like a big you know, a big smacking arm and like hit you in the head and kill you. Yeah, I hope.

One of the big takeaways from our chainsaw episodes and these are I think things that were that either I kind of learned or were you know, strengthened for me. Is that Okay? In our culture, we might think that that the saw the chainsaw is kind of our right, you know that it's like, of course I need a chainsaw, or I should get a chainsaw, or something needs sawing in my backyard. I should just go get one, and

I can do this. But you know, regardless of what your decision happens to be on a matter like that, like, respect the saw. Respect the fact that it is a tool that can can potentially be dangerous or put you in a dangerous position, and uh, you know you should you should absolutely take it seriously. Yeah, the saw and

the tree. Respect the tree. Yeah, yeah, because the tree too is one of those things where when the tree is is healthy and standing up still as they do most of the time, it's easy to forget, like how dangerous they can be if they are suddenly in motion. Yeah, exactly, And and especially in this case, if they're in motion in a way that you didn't expect. So you may be taking proper safety p cautions in in terms of no one being down line of the tree in the

direction that you're expecting it to fall. But if you have one of these barber chair incidents, the tree could be exerting sudden violent force and directions that you did not plan. Yeah. Now, as for seeing the barber chair in a horror movie, I I don't really want to see that. I think if you were to tell me, yes, we finally we've made a chainsaw horror movie and it's about realistic chainsaw injuries and chainsaw related fatalities, I feel like, no,

that does not sound good. You keep your final destination chainsaw. Maybe I'm trying to imagine how that would be used in a plot. I mean, like, is there a pivotal tree cutting down scene, Like his leather face chasing somebody and he has to cut down a tree to get to them, but then the barber chair smacks him and

defeats him. Um, you know, I'll tell you what if someone his heart set on creating a film like this, I'll tell you that Michael Shay wrote a short story I think it's called Uncle Tugs that had some some chainsaw mishaps in it because the plot had to do with like loggers in northern California, and there was like a grow house and also some sort of vengeful ghost, and I believe the vengeful ghost was causing some accidents to occur, and so that would actually be a pretty

decent story if someone wanted to find some sort of narrative structure in which to fit a whole bunch of chainsaw accidents. Well, speaking of chainsaw accidents, the next message that we're going to read also does mention these, so before warned. All right, this is from Kenneth Hi Robin Joe. Excellent episode on the invention and history of the chainsaw. I had been planning to write in a few days ago, but the unexpectedly early birth of our first child put

thoughts of an email on the back burner. Congratulations. Kenneth continues, I had a couple of thoughts regarding chainsaws, the first of which was the dramatic and near fatal experience of a friend's husband, a tree surgeon by trade, he was at work removing heavy, overhanging bows from a large urban oak. The section who was working on was high above the streets, so he ascended using a cherry picker, then made his way through the branches and secured himself to the trunk

with a harness. Unfortunately, at some point in the tree's long history something substantial had been secured to the branch. As it grew, It had entirely absorbed a thick steel bolt. When his chainsaw reached the hidden metal, it kicked back violently, biting deep into his thigh and nicking the femoral artery. It was only through the quick thinking of his colleague, the speedy arrival of the fire service, and close proximity

to a hospital that his life was saved. Oh, this gets right into something you mentioned in the episodes that the one of the main sources of direct injuries from chainsaws being kicked back. Yeah. And here, yeah, this sound, this unseen metal hidden within the tree branch. And yeah, you do see plenty of this in a not only in an urban environment, even rural environment. You see you see trees growing around metal be it. Uh, you know weird.

I've certainly seen weird poles position near trees and on trees, and you see trees growing in and around fencing. So that's that's interesting and terrifying. I'm glad they turned out Okay, Yeah, the tree just swallows stuff. So yes, like Rob said, very glad to hear your your friend's husband was all right? Can it continues my second thoughts since the Texas chainsaw massacre and the Evil Dead were so central to the episode,

uh was about chainsaws as weapons? I know Rob has a bit of a soft spot for games workshop models, and it's impossible to talk about Warhammer forty thousand without considering a space marine welding a chain sword. I've included a photograph of a space marine apothecary, basically a battlefield medic,

bearing one of these weapons. If you look closely at his wrist, you'll notice he's also equipped with a smaller medical chainsaw, though I'm assuming this is for on the spot amputations rather than obstetric I'm assuming that the space marine apothecary is not strongly informed by real life medical science. No. I think if memory serves, one of his primary jobs is to remove the gene seed from a corpse. I

don't know that the real lore masters out there. We'll have to uh tell me if I'm correct on that. So I'm not even sure he's supposed to save lives as much as like, let's get that important uh gene thinging out of the dead body. Um. Anyways, the space Marine apothecary does not have a Hippocratic oath. Probably not, Kenneth continues, I'm not sure a chain sword would be

a particularly effective weapon. You probably couldn't use it like a traditional sword, as pairing and violent striking attacks would cause damage to the mechanism. It would probably have to be brought to bear on vulnerable points without great chopping swings. I do enjoy the idea of the chain sword as a futuristic melee weapon. It's in the vein of the viral blade, lightsaber and monofilament edges of other sci fi weapons, but it is typically over the top, fitting the brutality

of the grim Dark setting better. It brims with the implication you alluded to that the weapon itself is hungry, that the only the slightest touch can cause catastrophic damage, even getting away from the user. In its eagerness to be about its purpose. It is a brutal weapon, unlike the more civilized lightsaber, even though the latter would be even more devastating. Anyway, Thanks for the amazing show. Keep up the great work, Kenneth. It sounds like Kenneth throwing

cold water on my Texas lightsaber massacre idea. Yeah, well, you know, it would be uh well, it would be a lot of clean cuts, that's the thing. As for the chain swords, I actually did have a note about chain swords in the notes for our chainsall episodes, but then I decided not to say anything about it because I'm like, God, they don't want to hear anything about Warhammer in this episode. But but not true enough. There there are a lot of chain swords in there. I'm

not sure. Surely chain swords pop up another fiction, um, but this is the main in place you see them. Yeah, I don't think they would particularly be practical weapons, even if you try to explain them away with a bunch of like, you know, high tech materials and you know, uh, you know, super well designed um uh you know, chain

and so forth. But it does fit this sort of this grim you know, at times overly macho vibe that that Warhammer forty has going for it and probably ties in well to a lot of the you know, the satire. I think that was originally intended by the world. But anyway, Kenneth, thanks for writing in, and once more, congrats on the kiddo. Okay, Rob, you ready for a couple of messages having to do with weird house cinema, or at least adjacent to it. Let's do it. Okay, let's see how about this one

from Nathan Nathan says Hi, Joe, Robert, and Seth. I was recently watching the cinematic masterpiece Christine. Not long after re listening to your episode on The Ship of Theseus, which is one of my favorites, I started wondering about the lore of the movie. And if you're not familiar, this is a movie about I don't know, a demonic car. That guy, a guy has a kind of unhealthy obsessive

relationship with Okay, moving on. If the car had been completely restored every single part, would it still be so murderous? Or is the car possessed on a deeper level? We're asking the tough questions here, uh, Nathan Nathan then says, I also really enjoyed your recent episodes on the invention of the chainsaw. However, I can't believe you didn't mention Paul Bunyan. The nineteen fifty eight Disney short is a classic,

even for someone like me who isn't the biggest Disney fan. Anyway, you guys do a great job, and again, thanks for keeping me entertained on my boring overnight grocery job. Nathan. Well, Nathan, I did not have time to watch the whole short before we uh we started recording here, but I clicked around and saw some moments of it. One of the things that really got me is it starts off by and I love the animation style, by the way, so

it does look great. But it starts off by showing a shadow of the title hero, Paul Bunyan, looming over a map of North America, and I noticed something I thought was really interesting. I was like, Wow, they chose to depict Paul Bunyan with long hair that he wears in a bun And I was like, could that be

a choice connected to the name Bunyan. But then I realized I had simply been misled by the silhouette he's actually wearing some kind of wool cap that has like a pom pom or a gathered up section on the top, so he doesn't have a bun. But I thought that would have been cool. Um, And I guess, you know, in the broader sense, not that unusual. Tons of kinds of like bun and topknot hairstyles have been common for

men and plenty of cultures throughout history. But would it would have been interesting to see Paul Bunyan in a cartoon from the fifties with a bun alas I vaguely remember this cartoon looking at these stills, but I guess it's not one that I watched a lot, or maybe we didn't have on VHS. Yeah, I think it's like seventeen minutes long, So I don't know what was the venue for showing things like this in the fifties. It's like shorter than I obviously much shorter than a feature

length movie. Would this like play in a movie theater or play like before a feature film? I don't know. That sounds like a question for our producer, Seth, what do you know? Reporting from from a few minutes later, Seth did have the answer Seth knows everything about animation. Well, I don't want to put too much pressure on him,

but he does often have the answer here. Uh so, apparently these shorts were originally compiled into feature films and uh so, you know you'd have Paul Bunyan alongside some other shorts of a similar type and and that would be shown as a feature in theaters. But then later I guess they were split up and shown in other ways. But also, like I said, I did not have time

to watch this whole thing. But skipping around, there is a fun scene where Paul Bunyan walks through a four and he's just mowing down trees by swinging his axe back and forth like it's a weed eater, and then he walks back over the ground he has cut down, stomping on all of the stumps to to sink them

down into the earth. And uh and also Nathan doesn't mention it, but I assume this is part of what he's referring to as saying that this would have been a good thing to fit into our episode on the Chainsaw, because there's a part where Paul Bunyan it looks like he has to compete against a guy who shows up with a steam powered saw. So it's like, yeah, it's the war against the machines, though shot not make a saw in the likeness of man now. As for his

Christine question, I don't know. That's that's always a fun one. At what point if you were to totally strip the car apart for parts, you know, would would those parts make other cars haunted? I don't know. You could also apply this to a haunted house story. So if you were to tear down the house and rebuild the house in the same spot, is it still haunted? Often I think movies would say yes, just maybe, like the ground

is haunted. What if you dug up all the ground and moved to the earth away, is it still the geographical coordinance or haunted? Yeah? I don't know. I guess the idea is there's gotta be something that latches onto the idea of the ghost. You know, it's there's gotta be some something where there's a forge connection. So if you took the car apart, like the ghost would have to in a sense choose the thing that he wanted

to continue to haunt, because that's our a call. In the book, it's more about like there's a dude, a dead dude who haunts the car. And then in the movie they kind of made the choice to make it be more like the Cars Is Alive, which I think I ultimately liked more. Um but uh but yeah, so like the ghost has to choose, like what are you gonna be? Uh? Do you want to be the tires? You want to be probably the steering wheel, you know, or the or some like the engine block. I don't know.

Steering wheel gets a lot of love. Yeah, I want to be the hood ornament. That would be good too, you know, it's very symbolic. All right, here's another one. Lion comes to us from Brian, Hey, Robert, and Joe. I'm a longtime fan of your podcasts, and after hearing Rob mentioned that he watched Black Sabbath on AMC Plus, I signed up for a trial, which led me to then watching House by the Cemetery. I was obviously pretty excited that you chose it for your next episode of

Weird House Cinema. While you both did a great job of describing the surreal weirdness of that movie, I assume he means House by the Cemetery. I believe you left out mentioning two incidents that were so jarring to my girlfriend and me that we had to rewind just to confirm we hadn't misunderstood them. The first was that, despite Norman and his family having had no previous relationship to the titular house, there was a quite large photo of

that very house in their apartment in Manhattan. It's the one Bob is looking at while his mother packs in the beginning. It is rare for a family to have a twelve by twelve photo of a house they've never seen before hanging in their living and then subsequently move into the house and never wants address it. Yeah, and also that that photo has Bob explicitly tells his mother that the photo was talking to him, and she seems

interested in this fact. Yeah, there's there's absolutely no way to answer this question in a way that makes sense, Like like no matter like what sort of mental hoops you jumped through to to try and make it work, It just gets it just gets more confused, but Brian continues. The second was when the realtor says to Norman, as they are arranging to rent the house, quote, of course you've been there before, haven't you. Dr Boyle. Norman gets a guilty look on his face while Lucy gives him

a suspicious eye. He halfheartedly denies the allegation and moves on. We took the meaning of this to be that doctor Boyle had had sexual trysts in the home like his former colleague, and the realtor was accidentally exposing this in front of his wife. We were laughing pretty hard, because what sort of realtors says, I, if you've had an affair in this home, No to prospective client who knows

it's never addressed again. I just thought you might enjoy knowing that the movie made even less sense than you had already believed. Wow, I did not even notice that second one. Um, I remember the second one. I didn't even think about the idea of it being like an affair situation. I was just confused by it, like because they're like, you've been there before, right, you came with

your your daughter? Because this was another thing. He said, you came here with your daughter, write and he's like, no, I have a son. So I was. I was thinking it had something to do with the ghosts and the idea that like, not only are they like another family to come to the house where they're kind of like an echo of the family that had been there previously, Like the house attracts a certain type. You've always been the caretaker here. Yeah, that kind of that sort of thing.

I guess it kind and that may indeed be the true origin is like looking to sort of, um, you know, inspiration for from other films that that FULTI might have been looking at. But I guess I'll stand by what I said earlier. If there's something that doesn't make sense in a Fulgi movie, um, very little is going to be revealed by trying. You can't make it makes sense. The nonsense is baked into the DNA of the thing.

I think another way to put that is a lot of times I don't even get the feeling that Folgi is trying to make it makes sense and failing. He's just not even trying, right, Yeah, and so it's not Yeah. So sometimes because in other movies you can sort of you can go through that mental exercise and you can I can make it makes sense because the the creator was trying to make something makes sense. Um, But but

not necessarily the case with Folgi. Oh and we have another little bit from Brian has a ps attached, Uh, quote an ad for J and B Scotch on an on a New York City bus in the beginning of the movie reminded me of what a staple it is in Jallow films. I feel like y'all could run up a pretty high acount of all the J and B bottles or ads you see in weird how Cinema movies. Just a thought, uh and then uh. He includes a link that is J and B in the movies dot

Com and says loving the episodes, Thanks, Brian. Have have we not talked about this on the show before? I know that this is something I've talked about a lot, but maybe not on Mike. So J and B is in every Italian horror movie. There's almost always a bottle that shows up somewhere. Rachel and I point these out to each other every time when we watch a Jallow movie, or just any Italian horror movie. I can scarcely remember having watched one where a J and B bottle doesn't appear.

At some point. I this might have been off my but I remember this popping up with Return of the Blind Dead, because there's the scene where they're all gonna the new fireworks man is in town. They're gonna all have a drink, and I was thinking, Oh, I'm kind of interested in where are they going to drink? Is it's something you know, um, something kind of Spanish or something. Uh, you know, it's going to be really fitting of the location or where it's supposed to take place, a nice

spin sherry or something. Yeah, but it wasn't. It was J and B. Right, I seem to recall it. Well, No, actually I wonder if that might have come up because I was expecting it to be J and B and then it wasn't. Okay, but Brian, in any case, you are absolutely correct. There almost every Italian horror movie I've ever seen has J and B in it. I don't I don't know why that is. I don't know if they had like a their National Film Board had a had a like ad relationship or something, or maybe it

was just a perfectly spontaneous replication phenomenon. I really don't know, now that I'm thinking about it. I think Return of the Living Dead just had some sort of I think maybe it's British whiskey of some sort. Okay, Return of the Blind, Yeah, return Return of the Blind Dad. So it was it was not Spanish, it was. It was something less exciting. I mean, nothing against J and B.

But yeah, no thoughts one way or another. Really, But if somebody out there is like an Italian film historian who wants to tell us why J and B is an all these movies, I would I would love to know. But that that website is pretty amusing because it is just movie after movie and like you can see there it is there's J m B in the background. All right, there's a bottle on the table. Yep, yep, they're pouring

some JMB in that scene. Oh man. One of the top entries on the blog right now is beyond the Door. That's one that I know has come up on Weird House Cinema before. That's the Italian Exorcist rip off where they're discussing baby names and and a lady quite hilariously goes, what about Steve? No knock on people named Steve? But I don't know it's funny. All right, Well, we're gonna go ahead and close the mail bag for today, but hey, certainly keep the the Halloween related listener mails coming in.

We'll continue to address those obviously, and uh yeah, so so just right in with thoughts on past episodes, current episodes, potential future episodes, UM of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the core episodes of our our Friday Weird half Cinema episodes, UM you know anything related to the artifacts on Wednesday, or just you know other listener mails that we read on Monday's Huge Things. As always to our wonderful audio

producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.