July 6, 2017 • 60 mins
Once in a while a movie comes along that's so forward-thinking it changes the way that horror is done. A new subgenre is spawned, new tropes are established, and audiences are more terrified than ever.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's us Josh and Chuck, and we want
you to know we are coming somewhere near you. We're
sure if you live in North America this year.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
That's right, We're going on tour, and uh, why don't
we just rattle through these dates?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Toronto August eighth at the dan Forth Music Hall.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Chicago August ninth, the next day at Harris Theater.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Then we are taking some time off to recover after
that two day grind. We're hitting Vancouver the Vogue Theater
September twenty sixth, followed by Minneapolis.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
We're going to be at the Pantagious Theater again on
September twenty seventh, that is correct, yep. And then Austin
Chuck on October tenth at the Paramount Theater.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yes, and very special show in Lawrence, Kansas at Liberty
Hall on October eleventh, yep.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
And then we're going to do a three night stand
October twenty second, twenty third, and twenty fourth at the
Bellhouse in Brooklyn, New York. And then Chuck, take it.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Home, well take it home literally, because we are finishing
up November fourth right here in Atlanta the Bucket Theater
and this is a very special benefit show and all
the proceeds we'll be going to Lifeline Animal Project of
Atlanta and the National Down Syndrome Society YEP.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
And for more information in Dubai tickets, just go to
s y SK live dot com. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Charles W. Chuck, Bryant Tudy.
(01:33):
His middle names Wayne, middle names Malcolm. There we have.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I always forget about that Malcolm.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Yeah, Wayne named after Wayne Cooin.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Right, Uh no, John, Wayne, and you were named after
Malcolm in the Middle.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
That's right, right. Frankie Munis is my namesake. I hope
he's okay. Early.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Brian Kranston too. I used to love that show.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Oh it's a great show. I watched it like within
the last couple of months. I was cleaning the house
and put it on Netflix and still great. Yeah, yeah,
it's really it is a good show.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
So you clean your house, you put on your VR
goggles and just cue up Malcolm in the Middle.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
No, I did walk around and bump into things and
right exactly, but I put on like a huge feather
duster suit. Yeah, so you're just cleaning and bumping into things.
That's right, That's how I do it. Wow, yeah, it
works kind of Well, someone's going to take that idea. Yeah,
they like the Sharknado.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Yeah, but they should just they should sell that suit
with a purple drink.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
I think you just get one spot on the floor,
really really clean.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
What are you going to title this one, by the way,
because this was your pick, and we title our own shows.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Some horror films that change the genre?
Speaker 2 (03:00):
All right, and you should add this aka how could
you guys forget blank?
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah? Yeah, we should say like this. First of all,
this is a Grabster article, So it's Grabster's list. Sure,
and he knows what he's talking about. If you look
at some of the entries, some don't even have source tags.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Whoa, he's just like, I just know he should just
trust Grabster.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
But we even took his list and carve some out
and put some in. So this is how about this?
This is Josh and Chuck's idea of some horror films
that change the genre, featuring the mind of the Grabster.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yes, in other words, it is not a complete list
of every horror film that changed the genre, yes, because
I would argue that well, and actually I see Grabster
put Texas Chainsaw Masaker in there.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
He said that if this were a top fifteen list,
that would be in there. So would Alien.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, he has that Alien ring and the US remake ring,
and I would lobby for Well, Psycho didn't make it
onto his list, which but we're going to put that in.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
And there was one more.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Oh, even though I didn't really think it was that great,
the movie Saw, I think kind of changed horror films,
and that's what this list is, not best horror films,
but things that kind of changed the game. Yeah, it
seems like Saw kind of kicked off.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
That that torture porn, Yeah, didn't it. I can't remember
if it was that or Hostile, one of the two.
It was definitely one of the two. For a subgenre, well,
it's pretty accurate, actually it is. But most of these
are movies that either.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Were the first of its kind and maybe did start
a subgenre, or movies that were so popular that they
just you know, kind of rewrote how people view horror movies.
Some of them because of marketing, some because they were
really good movies, some because of box office but all
of these, I don't think anyone could argue did not
(05:08):
change the genre.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
How about that? Yeah, I think that's well put, dude.
And before we get started speaking of horror, I want
to give a plug to my friend Toby's movie that's
coming out. He's a producer on a movie coming out
call The Ghost Story.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, Toby, when we met Toby, well you knew Toby
before me, of course, because he's your friend and I
know him through you me, so really yeah, but he
was he was small time doing short films and stuff.
And since that time, and this has been within the
last like since we've been doing this podcast, he's now
big time.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Yeah. They did Pete's Dragon, Yeah, and then yeah they
have this this they did Ain't Them? Bodied Saints was
I think the one that they kind of broke out with,
which I love that movie, and then this one is
definitely kind of falls into that same look and mood
and feel. It's called The Ghost Story, and I think
it comes out in July, and I think it's labeled
(06:08):
a drama rather than horror or even supernatural or thriller.
But the reason I tie it into horror is because
A twenty four is releasing it and A twenty four
is killing it with horror movies lately. Yeah, that's a
good that's a good outfit. They did The Witch, they
did The Black Coat's Daughter. Have you seen that? No,
(06:31):
it's on Amazon Prime. It's on Amazon Prime right now, dude.
It's one of the best horror movies I've seen in
a while. I think The Witch is probably my favorite
right now. Black Coat Starter is a close second. And
then last night I saw it Comes at Night in
the theater and it comes at night. Actually upset my
(06:52):
stomach that ending? Did it?
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Was?
Speaker 1 (06:55):
It was that rough? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I think we were at a place with horror movies
that we haven't been in a long time, like a
really genuine good spot. Yeah, Like the whole torture porn
sort of era is over and the found footage thing
is so played.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Oh man.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
But I think we like with movies like The Witch,
I think we've really like there are some really creative
uh it follows Did you see that one? Yeah, Like
some just really creative ways of bringing scares that I
haven't seen before.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Get Out. That was amazing to get Out, Man, I
still I haven't seen it. You're gonna love it. I'm
envious of you. It's really it's great movie chucking. I
love it.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Well, I don't get to the movies much anymore, and
the only time I could was a couple of weeks
ago and I liketed to see Wonder Woman.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Yeah, not a good choice.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
So a long way of saying congratulations to Toby and
his new film.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Well it's funny. We also need to congratulate Toby too,
because Toby just got married. Toby and Nell are now married,
so congratulations to them as well.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
So this is this new movie with a his directing
partner David.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Lowry yeah yeah, and Rooney Mara going yeah, they definitely do.
So it's gonna be good. I'm looking forward to it. Awesome. Okay,
so let's get started. Thanks for indulging that. Thank you everybody.
So the first, the first movie on our list is
what's widely considered the first horror movie, and it's a
(08:24):
nineteen twenty movie out of Germany that basically was the
first film that undertook what's the artistic movement known as
German Expressionism. Yeah, it's called The Cabinet of Doctor Kalighari.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, I mean some say, like you said, it was
the first horror movie. Some say it was the first
cult film. It well, just you may not be able
to get tough the whole thing if you're not into
silent movies, but you should queue up a little bit
of it and watch a little bit of it because
it's hugely impactful and still to this day like very
(09:03):
disconcerting to look at because of it how ominous and
weird it looked, Yeah, just physically looked.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Yeah. Like the sets that they built are obviously constructive manufactured.
They were not in any way, shape or form, going
for realism. They were going for surrealism for sure. Yeah,
And so like the staircases are at crazy weird curves
and angles, and like everything from the house, the house's
rooftops to the blades of grass are super pointy and sharp,
(09:37):
and the shadows that they employed were just perfect. You've
never seen a better use of shadows than this. They
didn't get in the way, They just created this mood.
And it was the first movie to really kind of
do that, to just take to use the camera for
something other than capturing realism. And for that reason, it's
(09:58):
considered the first horror movie because that that's such a
standard part of horror, whether large like in large part
like in a Tim Burton movie, or in small part.
You know where you're you're using small spaces to create claustrophobia.
The idea of using the set to mess with the
viewer's mind, I think is born in doctor Kaligary's cabinet. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
It's almost like they took a child and gave them
construction paper and said cut out scary things, right, and
then like like that movie The Baba Duke, I think
the actual book within The Baba Duke was hugely inspired
by this. The actual movie itself. The plot is about
a side show operator, a hypnotist who has a patient
(10:44):
that he takes around to the side shows with a
sleep disorder. Supposedly he's been asleep his entire life, and
he uses this patient to commit murder.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Right, he's like a sleepwalker, yeah, somnambulist.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
So that in itself is a pretty frightening plot. And
to think about that being cooked up in nineteen twenty
when there were really not such things that you think
of as horror movies is pretty impressive.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
And then some of the deeper critiques I've seen of
it was like the explanation for why the filmmakers chose
like these weird odd angles to kind of depict insanity
or that kind of thing. Yeah, was rooted in World
War One. The horrors of World War One had just
been seen and revealed and recently taken place, and it
(11:33):
upended Europe in general and especially Germany as well. And
that the idea is that they might not have had
this idea, They might not have had this desire, this
drive to create this this weird set and in fact,
this weird movie had World War One not happened.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, there's this writer, Jeff Saparito, who kind of put
it this way about German expressionism because that wasn't exactly
sure how to define it, but you're kind of rite
on the money.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
He said.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Germany was largely isolated from the rest of the world
following World War One, so expressionism therefore became confined to
the country. Refers to a number of creative movements from
World War One through the nineteen twenties. Expressionist works examined
the current and future state of the culture through bold
and artistic creations of creativity, and often explored topics of madness, betrayal,
(12:24):
and other intellectual concepts. And nothing encapsulates these ideas more
than the cabinet.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Of Doctor That's basically what I said. Yeah, you did
you read that or were you just that? I don't
know if I read that one or not. It sounded
kind of familiar. Yeah, no, just say you came up
with that. So the idea of the set just creating
like a creepy tone and texture to everything that was
(12:54):
Doctor Calgary. That's how it changed the genre.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah, yeah, Tim Burton say thank you.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Yeah. Have you seen Coraline? No? But I know it.
It's they did that to very good effect.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
You know, I think Hodgman does a voice in that, doesn't.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
He he does, He does the dad. He did a
spectacular job because you actually forget it's Hodgman while you're
watching it. That's impossible. All right, Chuck, Moving on, that
was nineteen twenty. We're going to fast forward all the
way to what nineteen sixty nineteen sixty three. If you're
talking about Blood Feast, Well I wasn't, but.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Lets Simon Abrams of Roger Ebert dot Com says, this
Blood Feast is a terrible film, and a historically important
one too. Yep, And I think that's sort of the
deal with Blood Feast. It is not good by any accounts.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Did you watch any of it? Yeah, sure, it's not good. No,
it's not good. It's terrible.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
It was written basis on a fourteenth page outline, didn't
even have a script.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
It's got the same cold, cloying technic color of like
an early Hawaii five zero episode.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah for sure, directed by Herschel Gordon Lewis and producer
David F. Friedman, And basically the idea was this, these
guys did not see films as art. They saw them
as a business and thought you were foolish if you
thought it was anything else. So they sat around they
brainstormed movies that they thought no one else would make.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Yeah. Because they started out making like Porky's esque type movies. Yeah,
and they were doing fine with that. But apparently they
were successful enough with it that there started to be
imitators and the market was crowded. So they said, where
can we go make movies that no one else is
gonna make?
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, because we want to shock people, essentially. So a
couple of ideas they had that did not make the
list was con Man evangelists and Nazi torture, which were
later made exactly and they finally said, you know what
no one's really done yet is hardcore gore yep, Like
(14:58):
everyone always cuts away when the knife come and you're like,
what if we showed the grossest glorious stuff imaginable on screen?
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Yeah, and even still they didn't show so like one
of the first murder woman stabbed through the eye and
then the murder hacked her legs off of the machete, right,
And they didn't show the knife penetrate the eye. They
didn't show the machete making contact with the skin. But
what they did in blood Feasts and what made blood
Feasts the first of its kind was they would show
(15:30):
the what came after that. They would show the brains
on the ground. Yeah, they would show the entrails like
on the knife. They would show the leg being you know,
that had been dismembered, being put into a bag, and
like the wound that was left by Yeah, like that.
This was huge. No one had ever done anything like
that on film before. No, and it paid off.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
They depending on who you asked, the budget was anywhere
from like twenty to thirty grand, and it made between
seven and thirty million dollars. Like I said, depending on
where you get your info, but by all accounts, it
was a huge financial success, yeah, compared to what they
paid to make it.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Yeah. And they shot it in I think six days
or something down in Miami. Yeah, based on a fourteen
page outline. There wasn't even a scripted as an outline,
and basically it was like, murderer goes and kills this girl. Yeah,
next girl, murderer comes in, kills girl, cuts off leg
that kind of thing, right.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yeah, I mean, if it matters the movies about a
serial killer caterer.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Yeah, that's it. There's your plot right there. Yep. But
the the it was just such a revolutionary movie that
the censors at the time there wasn't such a thing
as the MPAA hadn't been formed yet, and there was
basically no one except for local censors overseeing movies. Yeah,
so you know, you could be playing in one town
(17:00):
all audiences, and then the next town over it could
be banned. But the censors had never seen anything like
it and they didn't know what to do with it.
So yeah, it was hugely successful commercially too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
And another big impact it had was it inspired a
generation of special effects. But basically, let's be honest, young
boys who were doing this on their own Super eight
films right, and said, wait, I can get a job
doing this.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yep. So including Tom SAVIGNI I think was inspired by it,
wasn't he? Or was he inspired by? Yeah? I think
he was inspired by Blood Feast? Oh wow? And then
we should also give a mention to the Granguin, y'all?
Is that how you think it's pronounced? Sure? Grand Guien y'all.
It was a theater in Paris, I believe, from the
(17:49):
late nineteenth century onto I think nineteen sixty two, so
the year before Blood Feast came out it had closed up.
But it used to do this stuff on stage. It
was like a gore fest and there was lots of
like blood and sex and like depraved themes in the
plays that were put on at this theater. People loved it.
(18:11):
They were crazy for it. And this was kind of
like the Grand Guignol tradition put onto film for the
first time and hoooray for that. You want to take
a break, Yeah, let's do it, all right, Charles, we're back.
(18:52):
So nineteen sixty or nineteen sixty, not eight.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
I've got nineteen sixty eight in front of My Face
and that could be no other movie. The Night of
the Living Dead classic George Romero film. Romero was a
TV director, making TV commercials commercial director.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Rather, he was also making short films for Mister Rogers
neighborhood at the time. Yeah, and he was young. Yeah,
I don't know how old he was, but he was
pretty young guy still, I guess.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
I think when he made Shot and Not of the
Living Dead, he was like twenty six or twenty seven. Wow,
So yeah, by any standard, that's still pretty young, unless
you're twenty three.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
So he had he and his buddies were like, let's
make a horror movie, but let's not make a stupid
horror movie. Let's make one with like an actual plot
that explores like deep themes too, like a good movie.
Let's let's make the first good horror movie.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Well yeah, so, and we'll delve into that little more.
But that was definitely a different thing at the time.
And the other different thing was that all the horror
movies up to that point they were called the Universal
monsters from Universal Studios, you know, all the kind of
the classic Frankenstein and Dracula and Creature from the Black
Lagoon and the Werewolf, and that was where that was
(20:12):
mainstream horror. And George Romero comes along and says, how
about zombies? And everyone said, what in the world is
a zombie? And he said, well, let me define that
for every future generation of movie and TV goers and love.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Yeah. And there had been zombie movies before, but they
had been things like like doctor Kaligari's Cabinet, somebody who
was under the control of something someone else or something
like that, there was a hypnotist or this was like
the first time what we think of as zombies. Wherever
introduced like flesh eating ghouls who were dead and come
(20:53):
back to life. Yeah, just what you think of as
a zombie. This guy started that genre, like you said. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
They shot it outside in Pittsburgh on about one hundred
and fifteen thousand dollars budget, ended up grossing twelve million
domestic not bad, and I think close to twenty worldwide,
and was eventually selected by the Library of Congress for
preservation in the National Film Registry.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
It's a good movie. It's a very good movie.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
He shot it in black and white to save on cost,
even though color was the standard by that point, and
black and white is also a little more forgiving for
rudimentary special effects. And one of the revolutionary things he
did was cast a black actor as the lead and
for no other reason than hey, this guy Dwayne Jones
(21:43):
is really.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Good, exactly right. Like, he didn't go back and go, oh, well,
you know, our hero is black, so we need to
make the whole thing of meditation on race and have
him confront racism. It was just here's the script, and
then the guy playing the lead just happens.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
To be right, and he was the best guy in
the auditions. And you know, in nineteen sixty eight, this
didn't really happen. You didn't just cast a black guy
as a lead actor for no with no like ulterior motive,
basically right.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
So I read this review from the time from nineteen
sixty nine, the year after it came out, Young Roger
Ebert went and watched it and made a review, and
he wrote a pretty pretty interesting review, which is basically
it was about the reaction of the audience. And he
went to a Saturday matinee that was populated almost entirely
(22:34):
by ten eleven year olds. Oh wow, and they were
used to seeing the creature from the black Lagoon or
Frankenstein or you know, just movies that any kid could
handle and could enjoy watching and you know, fun, scary
kind of stuff. Yeah, and he said, that's how that
(22:55):
was how the crowd reacted for the first half of
the movie. But then about the point where and here's
here comes spoilers. Everybody, if you haven't seen Night of
the Living Dead, to set yourself in the knee with
a hammer. You the the teenage couple go to get
gas and when their car blows up and is engulf
(23:17):
and flames, they die. They're burned to death. He said.
Right about that time, the tone, the mood of the
theater changed and there was no like gleeful screaming anymore.
Kids were starting to like not move and we're afraid
to like move in their seats, and some were quietly
crying to themselves. And from that the whole, the whole
point on, it just got worse and worse for these
(23:39):
little kids watching this movie.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
So it was a huge impact on horror movies a it.
Like you said earlier, it was kind of the first
one to really sort of delve into other issues like
if you look up like significance of neither the living
dead or meaning of nighted living dead or something like that.
There score of articles that have been written over the
(24:02):
years of how it was a metaphor for the Vietnam War,
or an allegory about distrust of authority or the collapse
of traditional family. And I think Romero said, like, I
didn't necessarily mean all these things, but you can certainly
find it in the movie.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
That is art. Like, one of the great revelations of
my adult life is that the artist, the writer, the songwriter,
the author rarely intends to imbue as much meaning into
their work as people take from it. That that's part
of art is interpretation, isn't that neat? Like you don't
(24:41):
if you're a writer, If you're a young writer right now,
who's just sitting there racking your brain for how to
insert metaphor and meaning into this, Just write your story
and people are going to find it for themselves. Yeah, agreed.
I wish somebody had told me that. When I was younger, I.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Had teachers that said stuff like that. Oh I did,
like good college professors in English that would when students
would argue like I think he means this, he would say, like,
you know, he may or she may not have meant anything.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Right, that's the revelation I had teachers that would just
go wrong.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
The other thing about Night Living Dead is it spawned, obviously,
the the zombie genre and sequels, Don of the Dead,
Day of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, the
Walking Dead remakes.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Shout out Stephen Yune. Yeah right, why not? I'm still
into the Walking Dead. You Yeah, we talked about this, Yes, yes,
O listens.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Anyway, zombies are I think still hot and we can
so hot. We owe that all to mister Romero, master
of the genre.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Yep. Took one more thing too, that that Nia Living
Dead did that they weren't the first, but very famously
Romero did was kill off his hero senselessly and shockingly.
Yeah at the end, good point, thanks man. Okay, so
let's move on. Like I said nineteen seventy three, yes
day after Christmas, if you've ever.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Been in Washington, d C. At the end of M Street,
you might have noticed very during the daytime, ordinary set
of stairs. At nighttime, maybe they look creepy to you
because those are the Exorcist stairs.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah. I'm trying to conjure the music in my head,
but all I'm coming up with is the Unsolved Mysteries music.
It wasn't quite right so close, but it's not it.
I'm so unsatisfied right now.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
So The Exorcist was based on a book by William
Peter Bladdie who wrote this in nineteen seventy one, and
then in seventy three the movie was made. And there's
I think I referenced not too long ago a great
Mark Maron interview with William Friedkin where he talks about
the audition process for Linda Blair. So you should go
(27:05):
listen to that because it was pretty insightful. But The
Exorcist really kind of changed the game in that it
was a it spawned a bit of a subgenre of.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Demonic movies. Sure I were like religious based, yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Even though I guess Rosemary's Baby was before that. But
the Exorcist was such a mega hit and it was
nominated for Best Picture, the first horror movie to be
nominated for that.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
And so it was just like it was a big deal.
It was. It sold six million tickets in about two months. Yeah,
it's amazing. This is a horror movie, right, and it
came out of nowhere. Apparently the effect they had on
audiences was extremely pronounced. There was a woman in Boston
who had to be carried from the theater and she
(27:57):
goes it cost me four dollars, but I only lasted
twenty minutes. So we're like, that's the stories of that
got around and people wanted to see you know, this
movie can't be that scary, and they went and they
were like, oh my god, that movie is that scary. Yeah,
and it holds up too.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
I mean, special effects are they'd never quite hold up.
But it's still a very creepy movie. Very famously, Linda
Blair played the little girl who was possessed by a demon,
and the the heavy hitters were called in to exercise
this demon, including a Max van Seadao who was only
(28:38):
forty four when he played this guy in his easily
in his seventies.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah, is he Benjamin Button? Well, no, they made him up. Wow,
they did a great job.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, which I don't see why they felt the need
to do that, I know they God, who else did
they almost cast? Oh? Brando? They almost cast Brando, but.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
That would have been a colossal mistake.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Well Friedkin said, you know, as soon as you do that,
it's a Marlon Brando movie.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah, And I think it's a picture, a Brando picture. Sure,
that's what they said.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
And he'd wanted to be a Brando picture. He wanted
to be the Exorcist, so you said.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
It was based on a book from two years before
by William Peter Bladdie. He apparently was known as a
comedy writer and he wanted to do something different.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
He said, Hey, wouldn't it be funny if the little
girls had spun around? And she keeped green.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Bile, Wait, wall you hear what I ever do with
a crucifix? So he actually wrote the book because he
wanted to scare America back to church. That was his
aim with the book. He believed that there was real
evil going on in the world and that part of
it was because of a loss of faith or a
(29:50):
loss of religion, I guess, And that's what he wanted
to do with it. And when the movie came out,
there was a huge pushback from religious authority. He's like
Billy Graham said, he believed the movie itself was possessed
by a demon. I'm not sure how that would happen,
but that was like a huge thing at the time,
and a lot of a lot of other religious establishment
(30:13):
types were like, don't go see that movie. It's evil.
But there were some who who were part of part
of religion, major organized religion, who kind of saw through
it and said, no, no, this is it's good that
we're talking about this. That there were telling people, you know,
or people are seeing that there there's such a thing
(30:34):
as like good versus evil literally combating on earth, you know,
when people are talking about this and thinking about it.
And so in that sense, the Exorcist like really kind
of went to bat for organized religion. Oh interesting. I
saw another criticism of it though, that that said one
of the themes of the movie that the book hadn't really intended,
(30:55):
but the movie picked up on and expounded on, was
intergenerational conflict. That it was Reagan the child represented the
younger generation who was at war with the establishment, and
that it even goes so far as to where her mother,
the actress the movie that she's working on is about
(31:17):
campus takeover by young radicals. Uh So that's kind of
a theme that was apparently part of the subtext, but
was a major part of it in the movie at least. Interesting. Yeah,
I thought so too, because apparently, I mean, you think
of intergenerational conflict. Now. Apparently in the late sixties and
early seventies it was sharper than it probably ever has
(31:38):
been before or since.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, the only other thing I got is that the
green stuff that she projectiles was Anderson's pea soup and
a little bit of oatmeal, Dexter.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Anderson's pece soup. We'll bet you can't get that anymore, Chuck.
Let's do Jaws and then we'll take a break. I
love talking about Jaws. Yeah, I mean, Jaws is on.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
You know, I did my top favorite movies list at
one point on our website, and I listed Jaws is
my favorite.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Movie favorite of all time.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, I mean that list changes, but it's Jaws is
always in my top five. I can watch it anytime
it's on. It is one of the I've often said
it's a perfect movie, and what I mean by that
is there's just not a misstep. Like the casting was perfect,
the acting was great, the script was great. It played
(32:32):
out just perfectly throughout the film. He, like Spielberg, was
just a master storyteller with that movie.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
You were talking about how young George Romero was in
Night of the Living Dead. Spielberg was twenty six when
he made Jaws. He was thirteen years old. He and
he was apparently scared to death when he finished filming.
The schedule had been for fifty five days. It went
to one hundred and fifty. Yeah. He had I think
(33:02):
been allotted four million dollars. He ended up spending twelve
million on it.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah, largely because a shooting on water is notoriously difficult,
and b the shark, mechanical shark they use was legendarily wonky,
and how it are not wonky but wanky wonky.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
It didn't work. It rarely worked.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
So they spent a lot of time and burnt a
lot of hours trying to get this shark to do
its thing, and so much so that it didn't even
make that many appearances in the movie. I think they
even kind of scaled it back, and that ended up
being better for the movie because you didn't get.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
As much shark. I looked up the urban legend about
the shark being named after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce, and apparently
it's true. Really, Yeah, Bruce Reiner was the name of
Spielberg's lawyer, and that was the nickname for the mechanical
shark on the set was Bruce, that's pretty funny. So
with Jaws, right, we're talking about horror movies that changed
(34:06):
the genre. Jaws not only changed the horror genre, it
changed movie making to this day. Yeah, and in multiple ways,
multiple massive ways. It changed the entire film industry almost
single handedly. Yeah, it was at the time.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
There was no such thing. You take it for granted now,
but there was no such thing as a quote unquote
summer release.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
No, a lot of theaters close down because ac wasn't
in every theater and people didn't want to sit around
in a hot movie theater for two hours.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Yeah, a summer release or a tent pole film or
a blockbuster feature like Jaws was the first one of
all those.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
At the time, when Jaws came out, they used to
release a movie on maybe one two screens in say
New York or LA for a week, and then it'd
make its way to you know, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago for
a few weeks, and then eventually it'd make it to
your small town six eight weeks later. Yeah, that was
(35:13):
how movies were released, not Jaws. Jaws was released on
four hundred and thirty five screens across the country, which
is huge, which is part of the part of the
summer blockbuster release playbook now.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yeah, and it was also the first movie to spend
lots and lots of money on marketing, and so I
think the studios were like, wait a minute, you spend
some dough on marketing, you release this thing wide. You
can make a ton of money in the first month
that a movie's out, and you're kind of set like
after that, it's anything else is gravy. Yeah, and that's
(35:49):
after the first week or two probably, Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Yeah, the whole the whole point of blockbuster now is
to get that opening weekend, to make all your money
back in the opening weekend, and then everything else is
gravy on top of it. Right, Jaws was it didn't
make its I don't know. Maybe it did make its
money back in the first weekend because it hit one
hundred million dollars in like seventy eight days or something
incredible like that, because it was the first movie to
(36:13):
hit one hundred million dollars and it did it in
just a couple months. Even.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, it eventually went on to make to about two
hundred and sixty million dollars domestically, which is I mean,
that's a great take. Now, yeah, you know, much less
the mid nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Sure, for a twelve million dollars spend, for sure.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
My only beef here is that I would not consider
Jaws a horror movie.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
I think it's an adventure film. Yeah, I guess you're right,
with a scary antagonist. Yeah, but it's amazing how much
I quote that movie in my day to day life.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Yeah. Just just just Shark. That's a great that's a classic.
All Right, let's take a break.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
I'm going to meditate on that line, and we'll talk
about a few other scary movies, including one that was
originally titled scary movie.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Okay, moving on to Halloween. Halloween Chuck nineteen seventy eight.
I believe Halloween.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
Yes, John Carpenter, the youngish John Carpenter, who originally titled
this movie The Babysitter Murders.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
No, A little on the nose.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, a pretty terrifying title, I guess. Young Jamie Lee
Curtis her very first movie.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Was it really? Yeah? Well, she went on to become
known as the scream Queen for all the horror movies
she was in.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Totally and this was shot in twenty days in South
Pasadena as the Midwest, and it's credited as being birthing
the slasher genre.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah, it did, so there were slasher films before it.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown. It was like based on
a true crime story actually in Texas, one called Black
Christmas The Grabster Sites from nineteen seventy four. I haven't
heard of that one, but the idea of a faceless
almost a like non entity entity coming at you and
(38:44):
relentlessly stalking you, being impervious to harm, as the rabster
puts it, and just coming at you again and again
trying to kill you. That was that was all established
by Halloween and it was done like too great effect
as well.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Yeah, and it holds up. It's still scary. Michael Myers,
of course, was the Killer. The music that John Carpenter scored.
I mean he scores most of his movies himself, but yeah,
very iconic, basic thing. I think he only took a
couple of days to come up with it. But like
the Michael Myers character and the mask are so iconic.
(39:22):
The music is so iconic. You know about the mask,
right Chatner? Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
I went and check that one out too to verify
that it was true, and it definitely is true that
Michael Meyer's mask is actually a Captain Kirk star Trek
mask painted white. Yep. That is history. Yep.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
The in the script when it came to the mask,
it just said pale, neutral features of a man.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
Yeah, which makes the whole thing even creepier because he's
an implacid or is that the right word. I don't know.
He's just it's just almost like a just a an
emotionless killer. Oh yeah. It made the fact that he
was merciless, ruthless, pitiless, and arbitrarily killing people almost all
(40:11):
the more pronounced because his expression never changes.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Well, to me, the two things that were creepiest about
Halloween was the expression never changed because of that mask,
and he did not run, like oh yeah, he would
just walk, and you still got the feeling like you
can't outrun this guy even though he's walking.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
That was another creepy part about it. It follows with the
walking aspect of it, Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah yeah,
in the same way that like twenty eight Days Later
was freaky in that it took zombies and made him run. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Or I remember when I saw Friday the thirteenth, I'm sorry,
Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time, and Freddy
Krueger was running around. I was like, that's not what
scary dudes do.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yes, scary dudes don't try now.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
They walk very creepily towards you and still somehow gain
speed on you even though you're running for speed.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Well, Freddy scared me to death the first time I
saw that movie. Yeah. No, first one was a pretty
good one. But Halloween established this, Like you said, it
established the slasher genre, and everything about slasher films still
today all rooted in Halloween John Carpenter's tropes.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Yeah, and again, like you said, there were a couple
of other slasher films before, but none of them grossed
close to fifty million bucks.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Wow, is that how much Halloween made?
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, forty seven million domestic about a three hundred thousand
dollars budget, so it you know, it's sort of like
with The Exorcists, like there were other movies that sort
of did this thing before, But when you have a
huge hit that does it is when it sort of
redefines the genre because if it's money, yeah, and that's
all there is.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Everyone starts paying attention after that. All Right, what's next?
What's next, my friend, is a movie that came out
when I don't know, were you still in college. No,
you must have just been out then I was out
a few years. Okay, well, card, let's around our college era.
This movie came out, because up to this point, everything's
(42:04):
come out either when we were little or before we
were born. This one was right in our wheelhouse. It
was the Blair Witch Project, which came out in nineteen
ninety eight. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
And one of the big things that Blair Witch Project
did well two things, really, It established the found footage
genre or subgenre that is so overplayed now in the
viral marketing campaign. And that's how I came upon it.
I remember very specifically being in the apartment of Scott
at Pallito, who you know, sure he shot our TV show,
(42:36):
one of my oldest friends, and I was sitting in
his apartment on Claremont Avenue Indicator and I happened upon this.
And this was pre Facebook. I don't know how I
found it, you know, before things were being shared around, right,
And it happened upon this website, the very first Blair
Witch Project website, and I was like, dude, come over
here and check this out. This is the scariest thing
(42:58):
I've ever seen. Yeah, And I remember the website set
it up as if it was real, and that this
found footage thing. It's so overdone now it's hard to
go back in time and remember when it was fresh.
But I remember looking at it and being like, did
this happen? Did they really find this footage of this
murder in the woods? Like well, I got to see this.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
That was the rumor that this was actually real, man.
And this is like you said, I mean, this is
before the found footage genre, So people were being exposed
to this concept for the first time, and we're kind
of falling for it. I mean, first all, you're either
in college or you're just recently out of college, so
you're maybe slightly more gullible than you are ten years old.
You're ready to believe it. You want to believe, right,
(43:41):
So yeah, the idea that this was actual found footage
it just made it all the more enjoyable and people
were buying into it. Then. I think the other part
of it, too, was that the filmmakers, partly because they
didn't have the budget for actual effects, left a lot
of the scariest parts to your imagination.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, nor did they have the talent to make a
good narrative film?
Speaker 1 (44:04):
I guess. I mean they worked on a sixty four
page script, which I was surprised that it was that
that big. But they shot it for eight days, and
originally they were going to make it like a documentary
about the found footage, right, and then one of them
had a flash of perspective. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait,
let's just release it like it's found footage. And that
(44:26):
was that. The rest was history.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah, and I'm poking fun. That was not very nice
at all. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick or Mirrick, the
co directors, they they should be credited with a truly
ingenious campaign and invention that.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Well, they weren't the first to come up with found footage, right,
there were some films before. I've never known how to
pronounce it, Mondo Kanye or Mondo Kine. I think, Connie,
it's from nineteen sixty two and it was supposedly a
documentary about like some like weird tribal rituals. I think
there's head shrinking maybe involved, and it purported to be
(45:07):
like real footage. Yeah, same with Cannibal Holocaust. Man, if
you've never seen Cannibell Holocaust. Go out and watch it
right now. Very disturbing, and it's so disturbing that the
director of the movie was charged with murder because they
believed that the actual murders depicted they were so realistic.
(45:28):
They thought that it was a snuff film basically, but
it was supposed to be a documentary as well, so
there was an idea of like found footage or documentary
style horror movies that had come before, but nothing like
The Blair Witch where it was just straight up these people.
We found their old camera and this is what was
on it.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Well, and they were smart enough to kind of dig
up an old thing that never went huge.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
You know.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
They're like, hey, man, like these other movies, they never
really hit it big, and they it was a timing thing.
They they I mean, hats off for them to them, Yeah,
good for them, and to them.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Nice going, all right, chuck scream.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, scream. I teased that it was originally titled scary movie.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
I'm glad it wasn't because scary movie is awesome. Well,
it's scary movie ever would have been called, maybe it
would have never been made, or maybe they would have
called that Scream. Oh yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
So Scream was a very big deal when it came out.
The writer Kevin Williamson, and this is still the highest
growing slasher film of all time, basically Scream one.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
It was huge. I got Nev Campbell's haircut as a
result of it. Like it was a big, big pop
culture watermark. It was.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
And one of the big things about it, aside from
the boatloads of money that it made, was it spawned
a subgenre called meta horror, which is even though it
had been done by no less than its own director
Wes Craven with Wes Craven's New Nightmare two years before Scream,
it wasn't nearly as popular. But meta horror is this
(47:05):
idea and if you've ever seen Scream, you know they're
constantly just referencing horror movies, like this is where you know,
you don't go out and make out in the car
because that's where you get killed. And then they would
do that and get killed, right, although I don't think
that specifically happened.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Like don't go back into the house.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, Like all the tropes of horror movies are addressed
in the movie.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
And they're talking about them as the horror movie tropes. Yes, yeah, exactly,
meta horror. Yeah, and there are plenty of other things
that came along meta horror examples like have you seen
Tucker and Dale Versus Evil? No, it's good. Oh check
it out man, all right, that's a good movie. Zombie Land. Yeah,
(47:47):
to see that where he's rattling off all of the
things that you need to notice survive a zombie apocalypse
that he learned from zombie movies. Right. And then Cabin
in the Woods. Did you see that? One? Great movie?
It was a great movie though, it was really good.
I mean from beginning to end, it was a great movie.
Did you like Scream? Yeah? I love Scream. I liked
all the Screams. I only saw the first two.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
The second one I think might have been even better
than the first.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
To me.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
And that the second one was shot Emily worked on
that it was shot here at Agna Scott College partial right, Yeah,
you have to.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
Go back and watch it. Knowing that now I'll be like, oh,
I've driven past that place, so I got a few tidbits.
Speaker 2 (48:31):
Like I said. Initial title was Scary Movie Number two.
The Weinstein brothers initially offered it to George ra Merrow
and Sam Raimi, what else do I have here? Drew
Barrymore was originally supposed to play Sydney, the lead character,
and then she said, no, how about if I just
played that girl at the beginning, which kind of was
(48:52):
a big thing because you see Drew Barrymore And it
was a big shock when she died in the first scene.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Right, you know you can't kill off your heroin right away.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Yeah, I mean, like I remember, I remember that first
scene really really scaring me when I saw it the
first time in the theater.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
Yeah it is. It's a scary, gruesome, gory heart Yeah,
very well played.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
And then before he went to Neph Campbell, he went
out to Alicia Witz, Britney Murphy and Reese Witherspoon, and
then Neph Campbell.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
I was your christ choice, right.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
And then the mask, the iconic screen mask apparently wasn't
off the shelf mask.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Wow that made that company's money. Yeah, No, Weinstein didn't
like it. They were like, I hate that mask.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
Everything else is fine, huh, but Wes craven sord, No,
it's got to be that mask.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Don't be stupid, Bob.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
All right, we're gonna finish up with our own edition.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Here finally nineteen sixty. Yes, It'sycho. I can't believe this
wasn't in the list. I think ed I kept this
off the list to toy with somebody he doesn't like specifically,
that's the only explanation.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Yeah, because Psycho changed everything.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
Yeah, it really did. I mean it was the you
could say that it was one of the first slasher flicks.
It was an early psychological thriller. Yeah. It was based
on the real life story of ed Gean. Yeah, I
mean it doesn't exactly mirror ed Dean's life, but the
idea of being obsessed with your mother so much that
(50:33):
you will commit murder was definitely rooted in Agen's story. Yeah.
If you're not familiar with ed Geen, he not only
he was a I don't even know if he was
a serial killer. I think he only I think he
murdered one, maybe two people. But more than anything, he
was a grave robber. But he likes to dress up
(50:54):
in people's skin, women's skin and pretend he was his
own mother. Which, man, that's a lot of years on
the couchworking that one out. Yeah, or you can just
die at the hands of cops. One of the two.
And he also inspired leather Face from Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
Yeah, and Buffalo Bill of course. Oh yeah, yeah, Signs
of the Lamps.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
Yeah. One guy inspired all those, all those guys.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
So I found this article Psycho colon the Horror Movie
that Changed the Genre by Owen Glieberman or is it
Gliberman Glieber Gleiber. I think he wrote for a legendary critic,
wrote for aw for years and years, and now writes
for a variety. Oh he does, yeah, but he he
put it best. He said, well, you know, the iconic
(51:41):
shower scene, first of all, is hugely important because it
was Hitchcock really kind of ripped up the script, not literally,
but the horror movie script when he kills off Janet
Lee halfway.
Speaker 1 (51:54):
Through the movie.
Speaker 2 (51:55):
It was you just didn't do that at the time,
and we came out of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (51:59):
And we've seen that come up later on, like at
the end of Night of Living Dead or Drew Barrymore
in Scream. Hitchcock was the first one to do that.
Speaker 2 (52:08):
Yeah, And Glieberman puts it this way. He said he
was also slicing through years, decades, centuries, even of audience
expectation that the hero or heroine of a fictional work
would be shielded and protected or would at least die,
usually the end in a way that made some sort
of moral dramatic sense. And Psycho the Murder made no
sense at all, right, And he really kind of hits
(52:30):
it on the head there. It was like, if you've
never seen Psycho or heard of it, the movie's just
going along about this woman who steals some money from
her work and she's kind of on the lamb and
checks into this hotel, and you don't even know it's
a horror movie. You're thinking it's a movie about a
lady who steals money and is trying to get away
from getting caught, right, And then just out of nowhere,
(52:53):
she's hacked up in a shower and at the time,
audiences and still if you haven't seen it shocking, The
audiences were just like they didn't know what they'd seen.
Speaker 1 (53:03):
Right exactly, So you're not not only is is the
hero no longer safe? That means maybe you're not either. Yeah,
so it has it had a really huge unsettling effect.
And then Owen Glieberman points out that Hitchcock was so
smart that he even he even made a nod to
(53:25):
the the type of pat expected horror that the audience
was used to. In the house that he used for Psycho,
the Bates House. Yeah, there was this huge, rambling Victorian
mansion on a hill and there's lots of taxidermy and
it was like over over decorated and just creepy. But
(53:45):
up to that point, like that was horror. That was
what a horror movie looked like and felt like. And
this was this was kind of Hitchcock's homage to that.
But at the same time he was also putting the
heel of his shoe on it as well.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
Yeah, and that house was I mean almost a character
in itself. Like, if you've ever seen the recreation of
it in Los Angeles, I think it's a universal.
Speaker 1 (54:08):
Did you see it? Oh yeah, I never did. The
closest I came was I think when different Strokes went there.
That's the closest you got to it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (54:19):
Yeah, Man, if you've ever seen this thing in person
likes it sends a chill up your back just seeing
the thing in like a sunny Los Angeles day. Still,
that's awesome. It's such an iconic house. It's like, oh man,
there it is. That's where Norman Bates lives. He's the
most disturbed human of all time. Right, So in the movie,
of course, it was the mother character who is sort
(54:40):
of referenced throughout the movie. And it is not until
the end that you realize that there is no mother.
Mother's dead, right, there's just Norman Bates and all his
rage and hang ups.
Speaker 1 (54:53):
Yeah, so all the monster movies about giant ants and
or the creature from a Black Lagoon, monsters, things that
were and other that a normal person had to do
battle with that was gone. Now the monster had been
on screen the whole time, and you had noticed it.
And now what do you think about your neighbor who
has seemed a little weird from time to time before?
(55:15):
Could he be a murderer who thinks he's his mother
who knows? Yeah, this is what Hitchcock did to everybody
back in nineteen sixty. And you almost get like, I think,
Owen Gliberman points it out. Yeah, he does. At the beginning,
he basically says, like, we probably didn't see Psycho. If
you're reading this, you're probably too young to have seen
(55:35):
Psycho in nineteen sixty and we should all feel sad
that we didn't because it's so changed everything. Okay, we
can't do anything but take it for granted now, and
everything that's come since then has been trying to regain
that shock and horror that it instilled in audiences, and
thus far, no one's actually been able to do it.
Speaker 2 (55:57):
Yeah, and the other thing, I remember when I saw
it when I was younger. I think I saw this
when I was like fourteenish, and I think it had
this impact on just about everyone. I don't think I
took a shower for a month. I was straight up
bathtub curtain, open, doors, open, windows open.
Speaker 1 (56:15):
Making your mom watch, she's keeping watch.
Speaker 2 (56:18):
No, that would have been full circle back to sud Oh.
Speaker 1 (56:20):
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, you didn't even want to
have anything to do with your mom. No.
Speaker 2 (56:24):
Man Like it changed the shower curtain industry for a
while after that.
Speaker 1 (56:29):
Yeah, bet very good movie.
Speaker 2 (56:32):
And there were a couple of Hitchcock movies in the
last few years, two different ones, one with Anthony Hopkins
and one with Toby Jones that were both really good,
and one was about the years that he was making Psycho.
The other was about the years when he was making
The Birds, and they were both really, really good. Movies
and you should check those out too.
Speaker 1 (56:53):
You should repeat that.
Speaker 2 (56:54):
We just got a rare interjection from Knowl, So go
ahead and say it again, Josh, in case it didn't
come through.
Speaker 1 (57:00):
So Nol just said that the director of The Black
Coach's Daughter is Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in
Psycho's Son. Wow. He also did another movie now that
Noel says that, thanks Nol. It's called The Pretty Little
Thing that Lives in the House, which is another horror movie,
a ghost story. I think that was his first one,
(57:22):
and I think that might be on Netflix. It's great.
It's a really great movie too.
Speaker 2 (57:26):
Man, this has got me fired up to see some
horror movies.
Speaker 1 (57:29):
It's a renaissance of horror. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (57:31):
It's tough though, because Emily doesn't really dig it, so
I have to just find alone time to do that.
Speaker 1 (57:36):
Good to watch it in the bathroom. All right, Well,
if you want to know more about horror movies, go
watch horror movies. Go forth and let him know what
we missed. For God's sake. Yeah, if you want to
check out Grabster's list, type in horror movies on the
search bar House of Works dot com and it'll bring
up this fine, fine list that you'll disagree with. And
(57:58):
since I said disagree, time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (58:03):
This from Eric, and I'm going to call it what
he called it, Schoolhouse Rock nostalgia theory. All right, I
think he's pretty right on this just came in. Actually,
there's a hot take, hey, guys, in school House Rock.
So Josh made the statement that gen xers are most
nostalgic generation and attribute it to the success of Schoolhouse Rock.
I'm going to offer my own theory. I propose that
gen X is nostalgic mostly for pop culture because of
(58:25):
the prolifer that word of child targeted advertisements and marketing
in the seventies and eighties. Hum certainly something we've talked about.
Speaker 1 (58:35):
This theories got legs.
Speaker 2 (58:36):
While our little impressionable brains were developing, were being taught
by those who are steering pop culture to long for
and find fulfillment in the toys and other products our
cartoons were pushing on us. Now, as adults, those messages
are still deep in our psyche. We can't shake the
idea that we still really need those Star Wars action
figures to be happy, not because the toys and the
shows were so great because we had been tricked into
(58:56):
believing we need them. I have nothing scientific about this up,
just a hunch yet. What you mean there hasn't been
a study from MIT right on Star Wars toys.
Speaker 1 (59:09):
I'm kind of surprised by that as well. I thought
you were being facetious at first one. It's just took
a turn.
Speaker 2 (59:15):
Yeah, I don't know which way is up at this point. Yeah,
nothing scientific to back this up, but I'd love to
hear what you all think. See if anyone out there
is any respectable and informed input you Eric, That is
from Eric Lewin and Eric. I think that's super valid.
Speaker 1 (59:31):
Yeah I do too, Eric. I think you've really hit
upon something here. And that's all I have to say
about it. If you have a great theory, fan theory,
real life theory, whatever, we want to hear them there,
especially if it's interesting. You can tweet to us at
SYSK podcast or josh am Clark. You can post it
on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Stuff you
(59:52):
Should Know. You can send us an email the Stuff
Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com, and as always, joined us
at our home on the web Stuff you Should Know
dot com
Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
HowStuffWorks dot com.
Hey, everybody, it's us Josh and Chuck, and we want
you to know we are coming somewhere near you. We're
sure if you live in North America this year.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
That's right, We're going on tour, and uh, why don't
we just rattle through these dates?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Toronto August eighth at the dan Forth Music Hall.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Chicago August ninth, the next day at Harris Theater.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Then we are taking some time off to recover after
that two day grind. We're hitting Vancouver the Vogue Theater
September twenty sixth, followed by Minneapolis.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
We're going to be at the Pantagious Theater again on
September twenty seventh, that is correct, yep. And then Austin
Chuck on October tenth at the Paramount Theater.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Yes, and very special show in Lawrence, Kansas at Liberty
Hall on October eleventh, yep.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
And then we're going to do a three night stand
October twenty second, twenty third, and twenty fourth at the
Bellhouse in Brooklyn, New York. And then Chuck, take it.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Home, well take it home literally, because we are finishing
up November fourth right here in Atlanta the Bucket Theater
and this is a very special benefit show and all
the proceeds we'll be going to Lifeline Animal Project of
Atlanta and the National Down Syndrome Society YEP.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
And for more information in Dubai tickets, just go to
s y SK live dot com. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Charles W. Chuck, Bryant Tudy.
(01:33):
His middle names Wayne, middle names Malcolm. There we have.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I always forget about that Malcolm.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Yeah, Wayne named after Wayne Cooin.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Right, Uh no, John, Wayne, and you were named after
Malcolm in the Middle.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
That's right, right. Frankie Munis is my namesake. I hope
he's okay. Early.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Brian Kranston too. I used to love that show.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Oh it's a great show. I watched it like within
the last couple of months. I was cleaning the house
and put it on Netflix and still great. Yeah, yeah,
it's really it is a good show.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
So you clean your house, you put on your VR
goggles and just cue up Malcolm in the Middle.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
No, I did walk around and bump into things and
right exactly, but I put on like a huge feather
duster suit. Yeah, so you're just cleaning and bumping into things.
That's right, That's how I do it. Wow, yeah, it
works kind of Well, someone's going to take that idea. Yeah,
they like the Sharknado.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Yeah, but they should just they should sell that suit
with a purple drink.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
I think you just get one spot on the floor,
really really clean.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
What are you going to title this one, by the way,
because this was your pick, and we title our own shows.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Some horror films that change the genre?
Speaker 2 (03:00):
All right, and you should add this aka how could
you guys forget blank?
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah? Yeah, we should say like this. First of all,
this is a Grabster article, So it's Grabster's list. Sure,
and he knows what he's talking about. If you look
at some of the entries, some don't even have source tags.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Whoa, he's just like, I just know he should just
trust Grabster.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
But we even took his list and carve some out
and put some in. So this is how about this?
This is Josh and Chuck's idea of some horror films
that change the genre, featuring the mind of the Grabster.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yes, in other words, it is not a complete list
of every horror film that changed the genre, yes, because
I would argue that well, and actually I see Grabster
put Texas Chainsaw Masaker in there.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
He said that if this were a top fifteen list,
that would be in there. So would Alien.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, he has that Alien ring and the US remake ring,
and I would lobby for Well, Psycho didn't make it
onto his list, which but we're going to put that in.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
And there was one more.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Oh, even though I didn't really think it was that great,
the movie Saw, I think kind of changed horror films,
and that's what this list is, not best horror films,
but things that kind of changed the game. Yeah, it
seems like Saw kind of kicked off.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
That that torture porn, Yeah, didn't it. I can't remember
if it was that or Hostile, one of the two.
It was definitely one of the two. For a subgenre, well,
it's pretty accurate, actually it is. But most of these
are movies that either.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Were the first of its kind and maybe did start
a subgenre, or movies that were so popular that they
just you know, kind of rewrote how people view horror movies.
Some of them because of marketing, some because they were
really good movies, some because of box office but all
of these, I don't think anyone could argue did not
(05:08):
change the genre.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
How about that? Yeah, I think that's well put, dude.
And before we get started speaking of horror, I want
to give a plug to my friend Toby's movie that's
coming out. He's a producer on a movie coming out
call The Ghost Story.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, Toby, when we met Toby, well you knew Toby
before me, of course, because he's your friend and I
know him through you me, so really yeah, but he
was he was small time doing short films and stuff.
And since that time, and this has been within the
last like since we've been doing this podcast, he's now
big time.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Yeah. They did Pete's Dragon, Yeah, and then yeah they
have this this they did Ain't Them? Bodied Saints was
I think the one that they kind of broke out with,
which I love that movie, and then this one is
definitely kind of falls into that same look and mood
and feel. It's called The Ghost Story, and I think
it comes out in July, and I think it's labeled
(06:08):
a drama rather than horror or even supernatural or thriller.
But the reason I tie it into horror is because
A twenty four is releasing it and A twenty four
is killing it with horror movies lately. Yeah, that's a
good that's a good outfit. They did The Witch, they
did The Black Coat's Daughter. Have you seen that? No,
(06:31):
it's on Amazon Prime. It's on Amazon Prime right now, dude.
It's one of the best horror movies I've seen in
a while. I think The Witch is probably my favorite
right now. Black Coat Starter is a close second. And
then last night I saw it Comes at Night in
the theater and it comes at night. Actually upset my
(06:52):
stomach that ending? Did it?
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Was?
Speaker 1 (06:55):
It was that rough? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
I think we were at a place with horror movies
that we haven't been in a long time, like a
really genuine good spot. Yeah, Like the whole torture porn
sort of era is over and the found footage thing
is so played.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Oh man.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
But I think we like with movies like The Witch,
I think we've really like there are some really creative
uh it follows Did you see that one? Yeah, Like
some just really creative ways of bringing scares that I
haven't seen before.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Get Out. That was amazing to get Out, Man, I
still I haven't seen it. You're gonna love it. I'm
envious of you. It's really it's great movie chucking. I
love it.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Well, I don't get to the movies much anymore, and
the only time I could was a couple of weeks
ago and I liketed to see Wonder Woman.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Yeah, not a good choice.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
So a long way of saying congratulations to Toby and
his new film.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Well it's funny. We also need to congratulate Toby too,
because Toby just got married. Toby and Nell are now married,
so congratulations to them as well.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
So this is this new movie with a his directing
partner David.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Lowry yeah yeah, and Rooney Mara going yeah, they definitely do.
So it's gonna be good. I'm looking forward to it. Awesome. Okay,
so let's get started. Thanks for indulging that. Thank you everybody.
So the first, the first movie on our list is
what's widely considered the first horror movie, and it's a
(08:24):
nineteen twenty movie out of Germany that basically was the
first film that undertook what's the artistic movement known as
German Expressionism. Yeah, it's called The Cabinet of Doctor Kalighari.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, I mean some say, like you said, it was
the first horror movie. Some say it was the first
cult film. It well, just you may not be able
to get tough the whole thing if you're not into
silent movies, but you should queue up a little bit
of it and watch a little bit of it because
it's hugely impactful and still to this day like very
(09:03):
disconcerting to look at because of it how ominous and
weird it looked, Yeah, just physically looked.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
Yeah. Like the sets that they built are obviously constructive manufactured.
They were not in any way, shape or form, going
for realism. They were going for surrealism for sure. Yeah,
And so like the staircases are at crazy weird curves
and angles, and like everything from the house, the house's
rooftops to the blades of grass are super pointy and sharp,
(09:37):
and the shadows that they employed were just perfect. You've
never seen a better use of shadows than this. They
didn't get in the way, They just created this mood.
And it was the first movie to really kind of
do that, to just take to use the camera for
something other than capturing realism. And for that reason, it's
(09:58):
considered the first horror movie because that that's such a
standard part of horror, whether large like in large part
like in a Tim Burton movie, or in small part.
You know where you're you're using small spaces to create claustrophobia.
The idea of using the set to mess with the
viewer's mind, I think is born in doctor Kaligary's cabinet. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
It's almost like they took a child and gave them
construction paper and said cut out scary things, right, and
then like like that movie The Baba Duke, I think
the actual book within The Baba Duke was hugely inspired
by this. The actual movie itself. The plot is about
a side show operator, a hypnotist who has a patient
(10:44):
that he takes around to the side shows with a
sleep disorder. Supposedly he's been asleep his entire life, and
he uses this patient to commit murder.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Right, he's like a sleepwalker, yeah, somnambulist.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
So that in itself is a pretty frightening plot. And
to think about that being cooked up in nineteen twenty
when there were really not such things that you think
of as horror movies is pretty impressive.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
And then some of the deeper critiques I've seen of
it was like the explanation for why the filmmakers chose
like these weird odd angles to kind of depict insanity
or that kind of thing. Yeah, was rooted in World
War One. The horrors of World War One had just
been seen and revealed and recently taken place, and it
(11:33):
upended Europe in general and especially Germany as well. And
that the idea is that they might not have had
this idea, They might not have had this desire, this
drive to create this this weird set and in fact,
this weird movie had World War One not happened.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, there's this writer, Jeff Saparito, who kind of put
it this way about German expressionism because that wasn't exactly
sure how to define it, but you're kind of rite
on the money.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
He said.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Germany was largely isolated from the rest of the world
following World War One, so expressionism therefore became confined to
the country. Refers to a number of creative movements from
World War One through the nineteen twenties. Expressionist works examined
the current and future state of the culture through bold
and artistic creations of creativity, and often explored topics of madness, betrayal,
(12:24):
and other intellectual concepts. And nothing encapsulates these ideas more
than the cabinet.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Of Doctor That's basically what I said. Yeah, you did
you read that or were you just that? I don't
know if I read that one or not. It sounded
kind of familiar. Yeah, no, just say you came up
with that. So the idea of the set just creating
like a creepy tone and texture to everything that was
(12:54):
Doctor Calgary. That's how it changed the genre.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah, yeah, Tim Burton say thank you.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Yeah. Have you seen Coraline? No? But I know it.
It's they did that to very good effect.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
You know, I think Hodgman does a voice in that, doesn't.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
He he does, He does the dad. He did a
spectacular job because you actually forget it's Hodgman while you're
watching it. That's impossible. All right, Chuck, Moving on, that
was nineteen twenty. We're going to fast forward all the
way to what nineteen sixty nineteen sixty three. If you're
talking about Blood Feast, Well I wasn't, but.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Lets Simon Abrams of Roger Ebert dot Com says, this
Blood Feast is a terrible film, and a historically important
one too. Yep, And I think that's sort of the
deal with Blood Feast. It is not good by any accounts.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Did you watch any of it? Yeah, sure, it's not good. No,
it's not good. It's terrible.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
It was written basis on a fourteenth page outline, didn't
even have a script.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
It's got the same cold, cloying technic color of like
an early Hawaii five zero episode.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah for sure, directed by Herschel Gordon Lewis and producer
David F. Friedman, And basically the idea was this, these
guys did not see films as art. They saw them
as a business and thought you were foolish if you
thought it was anything else. So they sat around they
brainstormed movies that they thought no one else would make.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Yeah. Because they started out making like Porky's esque type movies. Yeah,
and they were doing fine with that. But apparently they
were successful enough with it that there started to be
imitators and the market was crowded. So they said, where
can we go make movies that no one else is
gonna make?
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, because we want to shock people, essentially. So a
couple of ideas they had that did not make the
list was con Man evangelists and Nazi torture, which were
later made exactly and they finally said, you know what
no one's really done yet is hardcore gore yep, Like
(14:58):
everyone always cuts away when the knife come and you're like,
what if we showed the grossest glorious stuff imaginable on screen?
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Yeah, and even still they didn't show so like one
of the first murder woman stabbed through the eye and
then the murder hacked her legs off of the machete, right,
And they didn't show the knife penetrate the eye. They
didn't show the machete making contact with the skin. But
what they did in blood Feasts and what made blood
Feasts the first of its kind was they would show
(15:30):
the what came after that. They would show the brains
on the ground. Yeah, they would show the entrails like
on the knife. They would show the leg being you know,
that had been dismembered, being put into a bag, and
like the wound that was left by Yeah, like that.
This was huge. No one had ever done anything like
that on film before. No, and it paid off.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
They depending on who you asked, the budget was anywhere
from like twenty to thirty grand, and it made between
seven and thirty million dollars. Like I said, depending on
where you get your info, but by all accounts, it
was a huge financial success, yeah, compared to what they
paid to make it.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Yeah. And they shot it in I think six days
or something down in Miami. Yeah, based on a fourteen
page outline. There wasn't even a scripted as an outline,
and basically it was like, murderer goes and kills this girl. Yeah,
next girl, murderer comes in, kills girl, cuts off leg
that kind of thing, right.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yeah, I mean, if it matters the movies about a
serial killer caterer.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Yeah, that's it. There's your plot right there. Yep. But
the the it was just such a revolutionary movie that
the censors at the time there wasn't such a thing
as the MPAA hadn't been formed yet, and there was
basically no one except for local censors overseeing movies. Yeah,
so you know, you could be playing in one town
(17:00):
all audiences, and then the next town over it could
be banned. But the censors had never seen anything like
it and they didn't know what to do with it.
So yeah, it was hugely successful commercially too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
And another big impact it had was it inspired a
generation of special effects. But basically, let's be honest, young
boys who were doing this on their own Super eight
films right, and said, wait, I can get a job
doing this.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yep. So including Tom SAVIGNI I think was inspired by it,
wasn't he? Or was he inspired by? Yeah? I think
he was inspired by Blood Feast? Oh wow? And then
we should also give a mention to the Granguin, y'all?
Is that how you think it's pronounced? Sure? Grand Guien y'all.
It was a theater in Paris, I believe, from the
(17:49):
late nineteenth century onto I think nineteen sixty two, so
the year before Blood Feast came out it had closed up.
But it used to do this stuff on stage. It
was like a gore fest and there was lots of
like blood and sex and like depraved themes in the
plays that were put on at this theater. People loved it.
(18:11):
They were crazy for it. And this was kind of
like the Grand Guignol tradition put onto film for the
first time and hoooray for that. You want to take
a break, Yeah, let's do it, all right, Charles, we're back.
(18:52):
So nineteen sixty or nineteen sixty, not eight.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
I've got nineteen sixty eight in front of My Face
and that could be no other movie. The Night of
the Living Dead classic George Romero film. Romero was a
TV director, making TV commercials commercial director.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Rather, he was also making short films for Mister Rogers
neighborhood at the time. Yeah, and he was young. Yeah,
I don't know how old he was, but he was
pretty young guy still, I guess.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
I think when he made Shot and Not of the
Living Dead, he was like twenty six or twenty seven. Wow,
So yeah, by any standard, that's still pretty young, unless
you're twenty three.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
So he had he and his buddies were like, let's
make a horror movie, but let's not make a stupid
horror movie. Let's make one with like an actual plot
that explores like deep themes too, like a good movie.
Let's let's make the first good horror movie.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Well yeah, so, and we'll delve into that little more.
But that was definitely a different thing at the time.
And the other different thing was that all the horror
movies up to that point they were called the Universal
monsters from Universal Studios, you know, all the kind of
the classic Frankenstein and Dracula and Creature from the Black
Lagoon and the Werewolf, and that was where that was
(20:12):
mainstream horror. And George Romero comes along and says, how
about zombies? And everyone said, what in the world is
a zombie? And he said, well, let me define that
for every future generation of movie and TV goers and love.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Yeah. And there had been zombie movies before, but they
had been things like like doctor Kaligari's Cabinet, somebody who
was under the control of something someone else or something
like that, there was a hypnotist or this was like
the first time what we think of as zombies. Wherever
introduced like flesh eating ghouls who were dead and come
(20:53):
back to life. Yeah, just what you think of as
a zombie. This guy started that genre, like you said. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
They shot it outside in Pittsburgh on about one hundred
and fifteen thousand dollars budget, ended up grossing twelve million
domestic not bad, and I think close to twenty worldwide,
and was eventually selected by the Library of Congress for
preservation in the National Film Registry.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
It's a good movie. It's a very good movie.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
He shot it in black and white to save on cost,
even though color was the standard by that point, and
black and white is also a little more forgiving for
rudimentary special effects. And one of the revolutionary things he
did was cast a black actor as the lead and
for no other reason than hey, this guy Dwayne Jones
(21:43):
is really.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Good, exactly right. Like, he didn't go back and go, oh, well,
you know, our hero is black, so we need to
make the whole thing of meditation on race and have
him confront racism. It was just here's the script, and
then the guy playing the lead just happens.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
To be right, and he was the best guy in
the auditions. And you know, in nineteen sixty eight, this
didn't really happen. You didn't just cast a black guy
as a lead actor for no with no like ulterior motive,
basically right.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
So I read this review from the time from nineteen
sixty nine, the year after it came out, Young Roger
Ebert went and watched it and made a review, and
he wrote a pretty pretty interesting review, which is basically
it was about the reaction of the audience. And he
went to a Saturday matinee that was populated almost entirely
(22:34):
by ten eleven year olds. Oh wow, and they were
used to seeing the creature from the black Lagoon or
Frankenstein or you know, just movies that any kid could
handle and could enjoy watching and you know, fun, scary
kind of stuff. Yeah, and he said, that's how that
(22:55):
was how the crowd reacted for the first half of
the movie. But then about the point where and here's
here comes spoilers. Everybody, if you haven't seen Night of
the Living Dead, to set yourself in the knee with
a hammer. You the the teenage couple go to get
gas and when their car blows up and is engulf
(23:17):
and flames, they die. They're burned to death. He said.
Right about that time, the tone, the mood of the
theater changed and there was no like gleeful screaming anymore.
Kids were starting to like not move and we're afraid
to like move in their seats, and some were quietly
crying to themselves. And from that the whole, the whole
point on, it just got worse and worse for these
(23:39):
little kids watching this movie.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
So it was a huge impact on horror movies a it.
Like you said earlier, it was kind of the first
one to really sort of delve into other issues like
if you look up like significance of neither the living
dead or meaning of nighted living dead or something like that.
There score of articles that have been written over the
(24:02):
years of how it was a metaphor for the Vietnam War,
or an allegory about distrust of authority or the collapse
of traditional family. And I think Romero said, like, I
didn't necessarily mean all these things, but you can certainly
find it in the movie.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
That is art. Like, one of the great revelations of
my adult life is that the artist, the writer, the songwriter,
the author rarely intends to imbue as much meaning into
their work as people take from it. That that's part
of art is interpretation, isn't that neat? Like you don't
(24:41):
if you're a writer, If you're a young writer right now,
who's just sitting there racking your brain for how to
insert metaphor and meaning into this, Just write your story
and people are going to find it for themselves. Yeah, agreed.
I wish somebody had told me that. When I was younger, I.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Had teachers that said stuff like that. Oh I did,
like good college professors in English that would when students
would argue like I think he means this, he would say, like,
you know, he may or she may not have meant anything.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Right, that's the revelation I had teachers that would just
go wrong.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
The other thing about Night Living Dead is it spawned, obviously,
the the zombie genre and sequels, Don of the Dead,
Day of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, the
Walking Dead remakes.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Shout out Stephen Yune. Yeah right, why not? I'm still
into the Walking Dead. You Yeah, we talked about this, Yes, yes,
O listens.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
Anyway, zombies are I think still hot and we can
so hot. We owe that all to mister Romero, master
of the genre.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Yep. Took one more thing too, that that Nia Living
Dead did that they weren't the first, but very famously
Romero did was kill off his hero senselessly and shockingly.
Yeah at the end, good point, thanks man. Okay, so
let's move on. Like I said nineteen seventy three, yes
day after Christmas, if you've ever.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Been in Washington, d C. At the end of M Street,
you might have noticed very during the daytime, ordinary set
of stairs. At nighttime, maybe they look creepy to you
because those are the Exorcist stairs.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah. I'm trying to conjure the music in my head,
but all I'm coming up with is the Unsolved Mysteries music.
It wasn't quite right so close, but it's not it.
I'm so unsatisfied right now.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
So The Exorcist was based on a book by William
Peter Bladdie who wrote this in nineteen seventy one, and
then in seventy three the movie was made. And there's
I think I referenced not too long ago a great
Mark Maron interview with William Friedkin where he talks about
the audition process for Linda Blair. So you should go
(27:05):
listen to that because it was pretty insightful. But The
Exorcist really kind of changed the game in that it
was a it spawned a bit of a subgenre of.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Demonic movies. Sure I were like religious based, yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:23):
Even though I guess Rosemary's Baby was before that. But
the Exorcist was such a mega hit and it was
nominated for Best Picture, the first horror movie to be
nominated for that.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
And so it was just like it was a big deal.
It was. It sold six million tickets in about two months. Yeah,
it's amazing. This is a horror movie, right, and it
came out of nowhere. Apparently the effect they had on
audiences was extremely pronounced. There was a woman in Boston
who had to be carried from the theater and she
(27:57):
goes it cost me four dollars, but I only lasted
twenty minutes. So we're like, that's the stories of that
got around and people wanted to see you know, this
movie can't be that scary, and they went and they
were like, oh my god, that movie is that scary. Yeah,
and it holds up too.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
I mean, special effects are they'd never quite hold up.
But it's still a very creepy movie. Very famously, Linda
Blair played the little girl who was possessed by a demon,
and the the heavy hitters were called in to exercise
this demon, including a Max van Seadao who was only
(28:38):
forty four when he played this guy in his easily
in his seventies.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah, is he Benjamin Button? Well, no, they made him up. Wow,
they did a great job.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, which I don't see why they felt the need
to do that, I know they God, who else did
they almost cast? Oh? Brando? They almost cast Brando, but.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
That would have been a colossal mistake.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Well Friedkin said, you know, as soon as you do that,
it's a Marlon Brando movie.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah, And I think it's a picture, a Brando picture. Sure,
that's what they said.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
And he'd wanted to be a Brando picture. He wanted
to be the Exorcist, so you said.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
It was based on a book from two years before
by William Peter Bladdie. He apparently was known as a
comedy writer and he wanted to do something different.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
He said, Hey, wouldn't it be funny if the little
girls had spun around? And she keeped green.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Bile, Wait, wall you hear what I ever do with
a crucifix? So he actually wrote the book because he
wanted to scare America back to church. That was his
aim with the book. He believed that there was real
evil going on in the world and that part of
it was because of a loss of faith or a
(29:50):
loss of religion, I guess, And that's what he wanted
to do with it. And when the movie came out,
there was a huge pushback from religious authority. He's like
Billy Graham said, he believed the movie itself was possessed
by a demon. I'm not sure how that would happen,
but that was like a huge thing at the time,
and a lot of a lot of other religious establishment
(30:13):
types were like, don't go see that movie. It's evil.
But there were some who who were part of part
of religion, major organized religion, who kind of saw through
it and said, no, no, this is it's good that
we're talking about this. That there were telling people, you know,
or people are seeing that there there's such a thing
(30:34):
as like good versus evil literally combating on earth, you know,
when people are talking about this and thinking about it.
And so in that sense, the Exorcist like really kind
of went to bat for organized religion. Oh interesting. I
saw another criticism of it though, that that said one
of the themes of the movie that the book hadn't really intended,
(30:55):
but the movie picked up on and expounded on, was
intergenerational conflict. That it was Reagan the child represented the
younger generation who was at war with the establishment, and
that it even goes so far as to where her mother,
the actress the movie that she's working on is about
(31:17):
campus takeover by young radicals. Uh So that's kind of
a theme that was apparently part of the subtext, but
was a major part of it in the movie at least. Interesting. Yeah,
I thought so too, because apparently, I mean, you think
of intergenerational conflict. Now. Apparently in the late sixties and
early seventies it was sharper than it probably ever has
(31:38):
been before or since.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Yeah, the only other thing I got is that the
green stuff that she projectiles was Anderson's pea soup and
a little bit of oatmeal, Dexter.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
Anderson's pece soup. We'll bet you can't get that anymore, Chuck.
Let's do Jaws and then we'll take a break. I
love talking about Jaws. Yeah, I mean, Jaws is on.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
You know, I did my top favorite movies list at
one point on our website, and I listed Jaws is
my favorite.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Movie favorite of all time.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah, I mean that list changes, but it's Jaws is
always in my top five. I can watch it anytime
it's on. It is one of the I've often said
it's a perfect movie, and what I mean by that
is there's just not a misstep. Like the casting was perfect,
the acting was great, the script was great. It played
(32:32):
out just perfectly throughout the film. He, like Spielberg, was
just a master storyteller with that movie.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
You were talking about how young George Romero was in
Night of the Living Dead. Spielberg was twenty six when
he made Jaws. He was thirteen years old. He and
he was apparently scared to death when he finished filming.
The schedule had been for fifty five days. It went
to one hundred and fifty. Yeah. He had I think
(33:02):
been allotted four million dollars. He ended up spending twelve
million on it.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah, largely because a shooting on water is notoriously difficult,
and b the shark, mechanical shark they use was legendarily wonky,
and how it are not wonky but wanky wonky.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
It didn't work. It rarely worked.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
So they spent a lot of time and burnt a
lot of hours trying to get this shark to do
its thing, and so much so that it didn't even
make that many appearances in the movie. I think they
even kind of scaled it back, and that ended up
being better for the movie because you didn't get.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
As much shark. I looked up the urban legend about
the shark being named after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce, and apparently
it's true. Really, Yeah, Bruce Reiner was the name of
Spielberg's lawyer, and that was the nickname for the mechanical
shark on the set was Bruce, that's pretty funny. So
with Jaws, right, we're talking about horror movies that changed
(34:06):
the genre. Jaws not only changed the horror genre, it
changed movie making to this day. Yeah, and in multiple ways,
multiple massive ways. It changed the entire film industry almost
single handedly. Yeah, it was at the time.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
There was no such thing. You take it for granted now,
but there was no such thing as a quote unquote
summer release.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
No, a lot of theaters close down because ac wasn't
in every theater and people didn't want to sit around
in a hot movie theater for two hours.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Yeah, a summer release or a tent pole film or
a blockbuster feature like Jaws was the first one of
all those.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
At the time, when Jaws came out, they used to
release a movie on maybe one two screens in say
New York or LA for a week, and then it'd
make its way to you know, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago for
a few weeks, and then eventually it'd make it to
your small town six eight weeks later. Yeah, that was
(35:13):
how movies were released, not Jaws. Jaws was released on
four hundred and thirty five screens across the country, which
is huge, which is part of the part of the
summer blockbuster release playbook now.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Yeah, and it was also the first movie to spend
lots and lots of money on marketing, and so I
think the studios were like, wait a minute, you spend
some dough on marketing, you release this thing wide. You
can make a ton of money in the first month
that a movie's out, and you're kind of set like
after that, it's anything else is gravy. Yeah, and that's
(35:49):
after the first week or two probably, Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Yeah, the whole the whole point of blockbuster now is
to get that opening weekend, to make all your money
back in the opening weekend, and then everything else is
gravy on top of it. Right, Jaws was it didn't
make its I don't know. Maybe it did make its
money back in the first weekend because it hit one
hundred million dollars in like seventy eight days or something
incredible like that, because it was the first movie to
(36:13):
hit one hundred million dollars and it did it in
just a couple months. Even.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yeah, it eventually went on to make to about two
hundred and sixty million dollars domestically, which is I mean,
that's a great take. Now, yeah, you know, much less
the mid nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Sure, for a twelve million dollars spend, for sure.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
My only beef here is that I would not consider
Jaws a horror movie.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
I think it's an adventure film. Yeah, I guess you're right,
with a scary antagonist. Yeah, but it's amazing how much
I quote that movie in my day to day life.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Yeah. Just just just Shark. That's a great that's a classic.
All Right, let's take a break.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
I'm going to meditate on that line, and we'll talk
about a few other scary movies, including one that was
originally titled scary movie.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Okay, moving on to Halloween. Halloween Chuck nineteen seventy eight.
I believe Halloween.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
Yes, John Carpenter, the youngish John Carpenter, who originally titled
this movie The Babysitter Murders.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
No, A little on the nose.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Yeah, a pretty terrifying title, I guess. Young Jamie Lee
Curtis her very first movie.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Was it really? Yeah? Well, she went on to become
known as the scream Queen for all the horror movies
she was in.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Totally and this was shot in twenty days in South
Pasadena as the Midwest, and it's credited as being birthing
the slasher genre.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah, it did, so there were slasher films before it.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown. It was like based on
a true crime story actually in Texas, one called Black
Christmas The Grabster Sites from nineteen seventy four. I haven't
heard of that one, but the idea of a faceless
almost a like non entity entity coming at you and
(38:44):
relentlessly stalking you, being impervious to harm, as the rabster
puts it, and just coming at you again and again
trying to kill you. That was that was all established
by Halloween and it was done like too great effect
as well.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Yeah, and it holds up. It's still scary. Michael Myers,
of course, was the Killer. The music that John Carpenter scored.
I mean he scores most of his movies himself, but yeah,
very iconic, basic thing. I think he only took a
couple of days to come up with it. But like
the Michael Myers character and the mask are so iconic.
(39:22):
The music is so iconic. You know about the mask,
right Chatner? Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
I went and check that one out too to verify
that it was true, and it definitely is true that
Michael Meyer's mask is actually a Captain Kirk star Trek
mask painted white. Yep. That is history. Yep.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
The in the script when it came to the mask,
it just said pale, neutral features of a man.
Speaker 1 (39:49):
Yeah, which makes the whole thing even creepier because he's
an implacid or is that the right word. I don't know.
He's just it's just almost like a just a an
emotionless killer. Oh yeah. It made the fact that he
was merciless, ruthless, pitiless, and arbitrarily killing people almost all
(40:11):
the more pronounced because his expression never changes.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Well, to me, the two things that were creepiest about
Halloween was the expression never changed because of that mask,
and he did not run, like oh yeah, he would
just walk, and you still got the feeling like you
can't outrun this guy even though he's walking.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
That was another creepy part about it. It follows with the
walking aspect of it, Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah yeah,
in the same way that like twenty eight Days Later
was freaky in that it took zombies and made him run. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
Or I remember when I saw Friday the thirteenth, I'm sorry,
Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time, and Freddy
Krueger was running around. I was like, that's not what
scary dudes do.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yes, scary dudes don't try now.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
They walk very creepily towards you and still somehow gain
speed on you even though you're running for speed.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Well, Freddy scared me to death the first time I
saw that movie. Yeah. No, first one was a pretty
good one. But Halloween established this, Like you said, it
established the slasher genre, and everything about slasher films still
today all rooted in Halloween John Carpenter's tropes.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Yeah, and again, like you said, there were a couple
of other slasher films before, but none of them grossed
close to fifty million bucks.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Wow, is that how much Halloween made?
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, forty seven million domestic about a three hundred thousand
dollars budget, so it you know, it's sort of like
with The Exorcists, like there were other movies that sort
of did this thing before, But when you have a
huge hit that does it is when it sort of
redefines the genre because if it's money, yeah, and that's
all there is.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Everyone starts paying attention after that. All Right, what's next?
What's next, my friend, is a movie that came out
when I don't know, were you still in college. No,
you must have just been out then I was out
a few years. Okay, well, card, let's around our college era.
This movie came out, because up to this point, everything's
(42:04):
come out either when we were little or before we
were born. This one was right in our wheelhouse. It
was the Blair Witch Project, which came out in nineteen
ninety eight. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
And one of the big things that Blair Witch Project
did well two things, really, It established the found footage
genre or subgenre that is so overplayed now in the
viral marketing campaign. And that's how I came upon it.
I remember very specifically being in the apartment of Scott
at Pallito, who you know, sure he shot our TV show,
(42:36):
one of my oldest friends, and I was sitting in
his apartment on Claremont Avenue Indicator and I happened upon this.
And this was pre Facebook. I don't know how I
found it, you know, before things were being shared around, right,
And it happened upon this website, the very first Blair
Witch Project website, and I was like, dude, come over
here and check this out. This is the scariest thing
(42:58):
I've ever seen. Yeah, And I remember the website set
it up as if it was real, and that this
found footage thing. It's so overdone now it's hard to
go back in time and remember when it was fresh.
But I remember looking at it and being like, did
this happen? Did they really find this footage of this
murder in the woods? Like well, I got to see this.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
That was the rumor that this was actually real, man.
And this is like you said, I mean, this is
before the found footage genre, So people were being exposed
to this concept for the first time, and we're kind
of falling for it. I mean, first all, you're either
in college or you're just recently out of college, so
you're maybe slightly more gullible than you are ten years old.
You're ready to believe it. You want to believe, right,
(43:41):
So yeah, the idea that this was actual found footage
it just made it all the more enjoyable and people
were buying into it. Then. I think the other part
of it, too, was that the filmmakers, partly because they
didn't have the budget for actual effects, left a lot
of the scariest parts to your imagination.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, nor did they have the talent to make a
good narrative film?
Speaker 1 (44:04):
I guess. I mean they worked on a sixty four
page script, which I was surprised that it was that
that big. But they shot it for eight days, and
originally they were going to make it like a documentary
about the found footage, right, and then one of them
had a flash of perspective. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait,
let's just release it like it's found footage. And that
(44:26):
was that. The rest was history.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah, and I'm poking fun. That was not very nice
at all. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick or Mirrick, the
co directors, they they should be credited with a truly
ingenious campaign and invention that.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
Well, they weren't the first to come up with found footage, right,
there were some films before. I've never known how to
pronounce it, Mondo Kanye or Mondo Kine. I think, Connie,
it's from nineteen sixty two and it was supposedly a
documentary about like some like weird tribal rituals. I think
there's head shrinking maybe involved, and it purported to be
(45:07):
like real footage. Yeah, same with Cannibal Holocaust. Man, if
you've never seen Cannibell Holocaust. Go out and watch it
right now. Very disturbing, and it's so disturbing that the
director of the movie was charged with murder because they
believed that the actual murders depicted they were so realistic.
(45:28):
They thought that it was a snuff film basically, but
it was supposed to be a documentary as well, so
there was an idea of like found footage or documentary
style horror movies that had come before, but nothing like
The Blair Witch where it was just straight up these people.
We found their old camera and this is what was
on it.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
Well, and they were smart enough to kind of dig
up an old thing that never went huge.
Speaker 1 (45:53):
You know.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
They're like, hey, man, like these other movies, they never
really hit it big, and they it was a timing thing.
They they I mean, hats off for them to them, Yeah,
good for them, and to them.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Nice going, all right, chuck scream.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, scream. I teased that it was originally titled scary movie.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
I'm glad it wasn't because scary movie is awesome. Well,
it's scary movie ever would have been called, maybe it
would have never been made, or maybe they would have
called that Scream. Oh yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
So Scream was a very big deal when it came out.
The writer Kevin Williamson, and this is still the highest
growing slasher film of all time, basically Scream one.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
It was huge. I got Nev Campbell's haircut as a
result of it. Like it was a big, big pop
culture watermark. It was.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
And one of the big things about it, aside from
the boatloads of money that it made, was it spawned
a subgenre called meta horror, which is even though it
had been done by no less than its own director
Wes Craven with Wes Craven's New Nightmare two years before Scream,
it wasn't nearly as popular. But meta horror is this
(47:05):
idea and if you've ever seen Scream, you know they're
constantly just referencing horror movies, like this is where you know,
you don't go out and make out in the car
because that's where you get killed. And then they would
do that and get killed, right, although I don't think
that specifically happened.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Like don't go back into the house.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, Like all the tropes of horror movies are addressed
in the movie.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
And they're talking about them as the horror movie tropes. Yes, yeah, exactly,
meta horror. Yeah, and there are plenty of other things
that came along meta horror examples like have you seen
Tucker and Dale Versus Evil? No, it's good. Oh check
it out man, all right, that's a good movie. Zombie Land. Yeah,
(47:47):
to see that where he's rattling off all of the
things that you need to notice survive a zombie apocalypse
that he learned from zombie movies. Right. And then Cabin
in the Woods. Did you see that? One? Great movie?
It was a great movie though, it was really good.
I mean from beginning to end, it was a great movie.
Did you like Scream? Yeah? I love Scream. I liked
all the Screams. I only saw the first two.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
The second one I think might have been even better
than the first.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
To me.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
And that the second one was shot Emily worked on
that it was shot here at Agna Scott College partial right, Yeah,
you have to.
Speaker 1 (48:24):
Go back and watch it. Knowing that now I'll be like, oh,
I've driven past that place, so I got a few tidbits.
Speaker 2 (48:31):
Like I said. Initial title was Scary Movie Number two.
The Weinstein brothers initially offered it to George ra Merrow
and Sam Raimi, what else do I have here? Drew
Barrymore was originally supposed to play Sydney, the lead character,
and then she said, no, how about if I just
played that girl at the beginning, which kind of was
(48:52):
a big thing because you see Drew Barrymore And it
was a big shock when she died in the first scene.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
Right, you know you can't kill off your heroin right away.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Yeah, I mean, like I remember, I remember that first
scene really really scaring me when I saw it the
first time in the theater.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
Yeah it is. It's a scary, gruesome, gory heart Yeah,
very well played.
Speaker 2 (49:15):
And then before he went to Neph Campbell, he went
out to Alicia Witz, Britney Murphy and Reese Witherspoon, and
then Neph Campbell.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
I was your christ choice, right.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
And then the mask, the iconic screen mask apparently wasn't
off the shelf mask.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Wow that made that company's money. Yeah, No, Weinstein didn't
like it. They were like, I hate that mask.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
Everything else is fine, huh, but Wes craven sord, No,
it's got to be that mask.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Don't be stupid, Bob.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
All right, we're gonna finish up with our own edition.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Here finally nineteen sixty. Yes, It'sycho. I can't believe this
wasn't in the list. I think ed I kept this
off the list to toy with somebody he doesn't like specifically,
that's the only explanation.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Yeah, because Psycho changed everything.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
Yeah, it really did. I mean it was the you
could say that it was one of the first slasher flicks.
It was an early psychological thriller. Yeah. It was based
on the real life story of ed Gean. Yeah, I
mean it doesn't exactly mirror ed Dean's life, but the
idea of being obsessed with your mother so much that
(50:33):
you will commit murder was definitely rooted in Agen's story. Yeah.
If you're not familiar with ed Geen, he not only
he was a I don't even know if he was
a serial killer. I think he only I think he
murdered one, maybe two people. But more than anything, he
was a grave robber. But he likes to dress up
(50:54):
in people's skin, women's skin and pretend he was his
own mother. Which, man, that's a lot of years on
the couchworking that one out. Yeah, or you can just
die at the hands of cops. One of the two.
And he also inspired leather Face from Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
Yeah, and Buffalo Bill of course. Oh yeah, yeah, Signs
of the Lamps.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
Yeah. One guy inspired all those, all those guys.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
So I found this article Psycho colon the Horror Movie
that Changed the Genre by Owen Glieberman or is it
Gliberman Glieber Gleiber. I think he wrote for a legendary critic,
wrote for aw for years and years, and now writes
for a variety. Oh he does, yeah, but he he
put it best. He said, well, you know, the iconic
(51:41):
shower scene, first of all, is hugely important because it
was Hitchcock really kind of ripped up the script, not literally,
but the horror movie script when he kills off Janet
Lee halfway.
Speaker 1 (51:54):
Through the movie.
Speaker 2 (51:55):
It was you just didn't do that at the time,
and we came out of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (51:59):
And we've seen that come up later on, like at
the end of Night of Living Dead or Drew Barrymore
in Scream. Hitchcock was the first one to do that.
Speaker 2 (52:08):
Yeah, And Glieberman puts it this way. He said he
was also slicing through years, decades, centuries, even of audience
expectation that the hero or heroine of a fictional work
would be shielded and protected or would at least die,
usually the end in a way that made some sort
of moral dramatic sense. And Psycho the Murder made no
sense at all, right, And he really kind of hits
(52:30):
it on the head there. It was like, if you've
never seen Psycho or heard of it, the movie's just
going along about this woman who steals some money from
her work and she's kind of on the lamb and
checks into this hotel, and you don't even know it's
a horror movie. You're thinking it's a movie about a
lady who steals money and is trying to get away
from getting caught, right, And then just out of nowhere,
(52:53):
she's hacked up in a shower and at the time,
audiences and still if you haven't seen it shocking, The
audiences were just like they didn't know what they'd seen.
Speaker 1 (53:03):
Right exactly, So you're not not only is is the
hero no longer safe? That means maybe you're not either. Yeah,
so it has it had a really huge unsettling effect.
And then Owen Glieberman points out that Hitchcock was so
smart that he even he even made a nod to
(53:25):
the the type of pat expected horror that the audience
was used to. In the house that he used for Psycho,
the Bates House. Yeah, there was this huge, rambling Victorian
mansion on a hill and there's lots of taxidermy and
it was like over over decorated and just creepy. But
(53:45):
up to that point, like that was horror. That was
what a horror movie looked like and felt like. And
this was this was kind of Hitchcock's homage to that.
But at the same time he was also putting the
heel of his shoe on it as well.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
Yeah, and that house was I mean almost a character
in itself. Like, if you've ever seen the recreation of
it in Los Angeles, I think it's a universal.
Speaker 1 (54:08):
Did you see it? Oh yeah, I never did. The
closest I came was I think when different Strokes went there.
That's the closest you got to it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (54:19):
Yeah, Man, if you've ever seen this thing in person
likes it sends a chill up your back just seeing
the thing in like a sunny Los Angeles day. Still,
that's awesome. It's such an iconic house. It's like, oh man,
there it is. That's where Norman Bates lives. He's the
most disturbed human of all time. Right, So in the movie,
of course, it was the mother character who is sort
(54:40):
of referenced throughout the movie. And it is not until
the end that you realize that there is no mother.
Mother's dead, right, there's just Norman Bates and all his
rage and hang ups.
Speaker 1 (54:53):
Yeah, so all the monster movies about giant ants and
or the creature from a Black Lagoon, monsters, things that
were and other that a normal person had to do
battle with that was gone. Now the monster had been
on screen the whole time, and you had noticed it.
And now what do you think about your neighbor who
has seemed a little weird from time to time before?
(55:15):
Could he be a murderer who thinks he's his mother
who knows? Yeah, this is what Hitchcock did to everybody
back in nineteen sixty. And you almost get like, I think,
Owen Gliberman points it out. Yeah, he does. At the beginning,
he basically says, like, we probably didn't see Psycho. If
you're reading this, you're probably too young to have seen
(55:35):
Psycho in nineteen sixty and we should all feel sad
that we didn't because it's so changed everything. Okay, we
can't do anything but take it for granted now, and
everything that's come since then has been trying to regain
that shock and horror that it instilled in audiences, and
thus far, no one's actually been able to do it.
Speaker 2 (55:57):
Yeah, and the other thing, I remember when I saw
it when I was younger. I think I saw this
when I was like fourteenish, and I think it had
this impact on just about everyone. I don't think I
took a shower for a month. I was straight up
bathtub curtain, open, doors, open, windows open.
Speaker 1 (56:15):
Making your mom watch, she's keeping watch.
Speaker 2 (56:18):
No, that would have been full circle back to sud Oh.
Speaker 1 (56:20):
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, you didn't even want to
have anything to do with your mom. No.
Speaker 2 (56:24):
Man Like it changed the shower curtain industry for a
while after that.
Speaker 1 (56:29):
Yeah, bet very good movie.
Speaker 2 (56:32):
And there were a couple of Hitchcock movies in the
last few years, two different ones, one with Anthony Hopkins
and one with Toby Jones that were both really good,
and one was about the years that he was making Psycho.
The other was about the years when he was making
The Birds, and they were both really, really good. Movies
and you should check those out too.
Speaker 1 (56:53):
You should repeat that.
Speaker 2 (56:54):
We just got a rare interjection from Knowl, So go
ahead and say it again, Josh, in case it didn't
come through.
Speaker 1 (57:00):
So Nol just said that the director of The Black
Coach's Daughter is Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in
Psycho's Son. Wow. He also did another movie now that
Noel says that, thanks Nol. It's called The Pretty Little
Thing that Lives in the House, which is another horror movie,
a ghost story. I think that was his first one,
(57:22):
and I think that might be on Netflix. It's great.
It's a really great movie too.
Speaker 2 (57:26):
Man, this has got me fired up to see some
horror movies.
Speaker 1 (57:29):
It's a renaissance of horror. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (57:31):
It's tough though, because Emily doesn't really dig it, so
I have to just find alone time to do that.
Speaker 1 (57:36):
Good to watch it in the bathroom. All right, Well,
if you want to know more about horror movies, go
watch horror movies. Go forth and let him know what
we missed. For God's sake. Yeah, if you want to
check out Grabster's list, type in horror movies on the
search bar House of Works dot com and it'll bring
up this fine, fine list that you'll disagree with. And
(57:58):
since I said disagree, time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (58:03):
This from Eric, and I'm going to call it what
he called it, Schoolhouse Rock nostalgia theory. All right, I
think he's pretty right on this just came in. Actually,
there's a hot take, hey, guys, in school House Rock.
So Josh made the statement that gen xers are most
nostalgic generation and attribute it to the success of Schoolhouse Rock.
I'm going to offer my own theory. I propose that
gen X is nostalgic mostly for pop culture because of
(58:25):
the prolifer that word of child targeted advertisements and marketing
in the seventies and eighties. Hum certainly something we've talked about.
Speaker 1 (58:35):
This theories got legs.
Speaker 2 (58:36):
While our little impressionable brains were developing, were being taught
by those who are steering pop culture to long for
and find fulfillment in the toys and other products our
cartoons were pushing on us. Now, as adults, those messages
are still deep in our psyche. We can't shake the
idea that we still really need those Star Wars action
figures to be happy, not because the toys and the
shows were so great because we had been tricked into
(58:56):
believing we need them. I have nothing scientific about this up,
just a hunch yet. What you mean there hasn't been
a study from MIT right on Star Wars toys.
Speaker 1 (59:09):
I'm kind of surprised by that as well. I thought
you were being facetious at first one. It's just took
a turn.
Speaker 2 (59:15):
Yeah, I don't know which way is up at this point. Yeah,
nothing scientific to back this up, but I'd love to
hear what you all think. See if anyone out there
is any respectable and informed input you Eric, That is
from Eric Lewin and Eric. I think that's super valid.
Speaker 1 (59:31):
Yeah I do too, Eric. I think you've really hit
upon something here. And that's all I have to say
about it. If you have a great theory, fan theory,
real life theory, whatever, we want to hear them there,
especially if it's interesting. You can tweet to us at
SYSK podcast or josh am Clark. You can post it
on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Stuff you
(59:52):
Should Know. You can send us an email the Stuff
Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com, and as always, joined us
at our home on the web Stuff you Should Know
dot com
Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
HowStuffWorks dot com.
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