May 30, 2024 • 63 mins
Like it or not, failure is a part of creation, invention, and art. Sometimes, failure forces improvisation that creates something amazing; other times, not so much.
So, I wanted to look at failure in horror: how some filmmakers overcame major setbacks and Acts of God, but also look at the movies centered around human error, where one mistake creates a chain reaction that leads to death, dismemberment, and even doomsday!
I hope you enjoy the show!
Movies discussed:
Return of the Living Dead (1985)
The Fly (1986)
Open Water (2003)
28 Days Later (2003)
Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)
Gerald’s Game (2017)
The Descent (2006)
The Coffee Table (2022)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Hi, I'm S.A. Bradley and welcome to Hellbent for Horror, a podcast devoted to all things
related to horror, where I remind you that you used to love horror movies and you secretly
still do.
Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of Hellbent for Horror.
(00:31):
You know, I've been doing this since 2016 and I've been really blessed and really lucky.
And one of the ways that I've been really blessed and really lucky is that I haven't
had that catastrophe.
(00:53):
You know, whenever you're doing something live, live tape, you're working with other people,
you're doing anything that is involved remotely with recording entertainment of any sort, you're
bound to have that catastrophe day where nothing goes right, where everything falls
apart.
And I just had that for myself.
Now, I'm not saying that I haven't had plenty of crazy errors that have happened over this
(01:19):
time period.
I most certainly have, but I've never had a complete and total shit the bed, as it is
sometimes called.
Well, we had a shit the bed yesterday and I had this wonderful podcast all ready for
you folks coming up this upcoming week.
And my goodness, if it's not time for the gremlins to finally show for me.
(01:44):
So what ended up happening?
Well, it happened of course, as one would expect when things are really, really hectic
and tight.
So I had been trying to get a guest on for quite a bit of time, someone who's very well
knowledgeable in something that I'm not necessarily that knowledgeable about, and I really wanted
(02:05):
to explore this phenomenon with them.
And they were so open and they were so gracious and grateful with their time that they decided,
yes, let's really dig into this.
We'll go over a slew of films.
We'll talk about the history of these films.
I'd love to be able to educate people about the kind of stuff that I'm really into.
(02:25):
And let's just no holds barred.
Let's see about getting ourselves this thing, no matter how long it takes.
Oh, famous last words right there.
So anyway, we had scheduled this several times before.
It's almost as if there was some kind of curse on us.
It would be something like the post office did not get the movies that we're going to
(02:45):
watch to each other in time for us to actually be able to watch all of those films.
We changed the time for that.
And then there was another incident that ended up happening, something in scheduling.
So we had to postpone again.
And then as soon as we're ready to go, they come down with an illness.
Okay, we have to once again postpone.
(03:06):
No big deal.
We want to get this thing done.
So what happens?
I end up getting under the weather and have other deadlines.
So all of a sudden we have to postpone again.
We finally get to the point where we can actually do the editing.
And I'm so overjoyed to be able to do that.
And it's like, yes, here we go.
I can't wait.
(03:26):
And we sit down and we do essentially two two-hour episodes back to back, a part one
and a part two, where the first part is a bunch of history and then some of the movies
and we really get into the red hot stuff towards the end of the second half.
And it went perfectly.
Everything was checked.
The audio was checked.
(03:47):
The microphones are checked.
The camera was checked.
All this stuff on both sides.
And we just railed through this.
My guest was eloquent.
It was so knowledgeable.
My guest was so much fun and so game that they just continued to move forward on this until
we had gotten through all the movies that we said we're going to talk about.
And I was so happy with it.
(04:08):
Well, I said, well, I am going to have to see about getting this saved.
And I did use Zoom this time around because I wanted to get some video as well as audio
on this.
And so you have to wait a while to get that kind of four hours of footage essentially
downloaded from the cloud.
So I knew I wasn't going to be able to take a look at the footage and listen to it that
(04:33):
night.
So went to bed, super happy, woke up in the morning and it was a total catastrophe.
For my guest, everything was great.
Their sound was just fine.
Their visuals were great.
The video was just fine.
It was me with all of my wonderful equipment here.
(04:54):
Somewhere along the line, there was some kind of error that happened.
I'm not going to blame Zoom.
The bad artist blames the tools.
But we ended up having my microphone, my wonderful microphone that gives this nice sound, no
longer was connected to the Zoom.
And it looked around and tried to find a microphone to use and it ended up using the auxiliary
(05:20):
microphone on my camera.
So I'm listening to this and I'm hearing me in a can somewhere underwater and I'm
lisping and I'm wavering in my voice and it sounds like I'm 3000 miles away and I nearly
die.
I'm like, Oh my God, we just spent all this time trying to get to this and finally schedule.
(05:46):
He gives me an entire night of his life to be able to do this.
And I just screwed the pooch.
Ended up in this spot where there was nothing really usable.
And I spent most of the day in shock trying to fix it with whatever tools I have.
And as good as the stuff is that's out there, you know, sometimes you just reach that point
where you go, perhaps this isn't working.
(06:09):
And so with that, I didn't want to miss another episode.
I'm trying my best to make sure that this show has what it had a long time ago, which
was a consistency and we lost that for a while.
I lost that for a while, getting caught up in doing many other projects.
And so I really want to dedicate myself to making sure that this show goes when it's
(06:32):
supposed to go out.
And so the thing that wouldn't get out of my mind was failure, the power of failure
and how failure is in anything that is artistic, any artist endeavor.
There's a certain amount of failure that's involved.
It's the idea of actually getting back up and working on it again, learning from those
(06:55):
mistakes that is where the creative process actually starts to get some great energy.
And so I wanted to look at failure in horror.
Now what do I mean by that?
Well, there's a whole bunch of different things I mean by that.
But what I'm really wanting to look at is how certain horror movies talk about human
(07:17):
error, that the story itself is for the want of a nail, a horse was lost.
But also the idea that there are so many different ways that failure gets used, how it can be
creative at times.
Sometimes it actually works in our favor to have the failure that occurs.
Sometimes it slows us down.
Sometimes it gives us something interesting.
(07:39):
There are many movies that include things that were mistakes on set because it works
for the movie.
So we're going to talk a little bit about that today.
I have a few movies that I want to talk about that talk directly to the idea of human error.
If you're an artist, well, if you're a human, you know, the to err is human, to forgive
(07:59):
is divine, pick yourself back up as an entrepreneur, to take whatever is left and mold it into
something new, that's being an artist.
And you know, it happens a lot in many different ways.
Sometimes the failure does glean some creativity nobody really expects.
You get something that was thoroughly unexpected out of the ashes of a dashed hope.
(08:23):
Don Coscarelli is a great example.
So Don Coscarelli had made a few films, Jim the World's Greatest and Kenny and Company
before he decides to make a horror film.
And the first thing that he wants to do is he wants to do something wicked this way comes.
He reads Ray Bradbury's book and he absolutely loves it.
(08:45):
He talks to his producer, Paul Peppermint, and they're like, let's do this.
So they try to get the rights and of course they find out that they cannot get the rights
from Bradbury.
I believe that they're already sewn up by someone else.
And they had all of this forward motion with it and it just fell right to the ground.
What they loved about the book was the idea of these kids being the protagonists.
(09:10):
And so they decided, well, how can we do a horror movie?
So at that point, Don Coscarelli remembers a dream that he had.
And that dream is what ends up being Phantasm.
I believe the dream was that the silver sphere came out of the wall in his house.
It was chasing around.
(09:30):
There's some kind of strange device built into the wall.
And then he started building the story around that.
But the reason that Phantasm happens is because plan A fell through and suddenly it's like,
what are we going to do?
Well, let's try plan B. What's that?
I'll let you know later.
And in fact, Coscarelli went into the Northern California mountains to a cabin that his family
(09:54):
had and just sat there and wrote and wrote and wrote until he had Phantasm.
So there are times when the failure, the mistakes, the oddities tend to work in your favor.
Yes, believe it or not, sometimes force majeure, the act of God, can actually weirdly help
(10:16):
a movie get past some roadblocks and actually find its way towards greatness.
You know, even a movie as great as Alien, a bona fide masterpiece, the original Alien
from 1979, that thing went through a whole bunch of errors and failures and accidents
(10:38):
and weird mistakes from a script that no one was really excited by except for one scene
to having a new director in there that wasn't really respected by any of the crew, to having
a character change from male to female, to actually having one really big act of God
(10:58):
in casting that I think really helped the movie.
It's one of those things that I really love hearing about, and that's the story of John
Hurt as Kane.
So John Hurt was supposed to be in the film early on.
He was courted by Ridley Scott, but unfortunately, John Hurt was not available at the time because
(11:19):
he was supposed to be shooting a film down in South Africa.
So reluctantly, they ended up getting someone else.
And they ended up getting someone really good, John Finch, another fine actor.
However, John was sick, and he continued to get sicker and sicker as the movie was getting
ready to shoot, that he had to be hospitalized like the day before they were to start shooting.
(11:43):
So Ridley Scott is now without one of the key characters in the film.
He has no one to play him.
And he finds out, he hears that, weirdly enough, John Hurt is in London.
He's supposed to be in South Africa.
So what ends up happening is that John Hurt tries to go down to Africa, and he is stopped.
(12:07):
He's told by the authorities that he is persona non grata.
He's not allowed or welcomed in South Africa, and he has no clue why.
Well, what ended up happening is there's another actor named John Hurd, H-E-A-R-D, another fine
actor who was an activist, and he was very anti-apartheid.
(12:29):
And so just the way things are, John Hurt, John Hurd, they sound the same.
They're not written the same.
It's H-E-A-R-D and H-U-R-T, but actor and those last names, they somehow mixed it up,
and they thought that John Hurt was John Hurd, and therefore he was not allowed to do the movie.
(12:52):
And of course, as that happens, he's in London, and Ridley Scott runs over to speak to him,
and they spend all day, all night talking about the movie.
And he says, will you do this?
And Hurt says, yeah, sure, I trust you.
Just have a car ready for me when we're going to be shooting.
When are we shooting?
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow?
(13:12):
Okay, great.
So without any kind of real prep, John Hurt comes to the film and does that magnificent
performance and really sells the entire sequence with that chestburster.
Another famous act of God is the shark in Jaws.
You know, if Steven Spielberg was able to make Jaws the way he wanted to, if that shark was
(13:35):
actually working all the time, I don't think we'd still be talking about Jaws as much as we are.
Literally having the shark never work for him, Spielberg had to work around that,
and he ended up coming up with all these magnificent, suspenseful ways to make it seem
like the shark was there when there was nothing there.
One of my favorites is rarely talked about, but it's when the shark is going through
(14:00):
that little cove that's there.
The boats in the background rock back and forth.
And that's kind of how you know that something's under the water, just going.
And those wonderful little subtle things weren't going to be there.
It was going to be something like, I don't think it was the kittener boy, but maybe it
was.
There was either him or the guy who was in the boat that gets his leg bit off and everything
(14:25):
like that.
One of the two of them was going to be in the jaws of the shark as the shark's head is above
the water, and this guy's just dangling out of the mouth.
The idea just kind of blows my mind.
It would have been so corny.
I'd love to see it as a Turkey Day movie, but it certainly wouldn't be what Jaws is
(14:46):
today.
So speaking of Turkey Days, in case that needs an explanation to folks, I have a few
friends and we like to watch movies on Thanksgiving, the day after Thanksgiving, that
are movies that many people would call B, C, to grade Z movies.
(15:10):
And we watch them because we still kind of love them and we love them warts and all.
A lot of times the problem is the script.
A lot of times it's the acting.
Sometimes it's all of it.
Sometimes the idea itself is so wrongheaded or just the execution.
But it's a mindset, right?
The mindset is that we kind of love watching the movies anyway, and we forgive a lot of
(15:36):
stuff if you're entertaining.
So there are a lot of movies out there that we love but do have errors in them.
Most of them are just kind of funny.
Since we're just talking about Alien, there is one in there as well, which is the
disappearing Jonesy the cat.
So Jones is the cat and towards the end of the movie, Sigourney Weaver is trying to find
(16:01):
the cat and then get out of the ship.
She finds the cat.
She has a cat carrier, puts the thing in the carrier and is running out of the place.
So of course, they're not going to keep the damn cat in that thing over and over and over
again.
But the design of the carrier is like clear plastic windows on it.
(16:22):
So there are times whenever there's like a flash or whenever the flames are going by,
you can see that she's just carrying an empty container.
And it's even funnier because once you realize that there's not a cat in there, you start
to realize how she's carrying that.
And I don't know if Sigourney Weaver had ever had a pet cat up to then, but she's just
swinging this thing.
(16:43):
Any cat that would be inside there would be like being hit by centrifugal force off of
the walls of it.
But you don't notice it until you notice it.
And there are those kind of things that are in several movies that unless you're looking,
you don't see it.
But once you do, it's always indelibly there.
It certainly doesn't destroy the movie.
Some of them are really small, like in Halloween, the original Halloween, when you're first
(17:07):
seeing the house and you're the camera killer's eye view and you're going around the house
as a jack-o'-lantern on the porch.
And it's glowing rather brightly.
And that's because there's a big light bulb inside of it.
It's plastic.
And if you look, you can see the big cable that's there, the power line that's hooked
(17:30):
into it, into the side of the house.
And it's like a coiled snake there.
It's so quick.
If you blink, you don't even notice it.
There's also the fake glass that's used in the movie when Laurie is in the laundry room
and she's being attacked by the Sheik.
And she smashes her hand through the glass.
(17:51):
It's very obvious, the way that the glass looks reflected through the light, that you
can tell exactly where her hand is going to go because it just doesn't fool anybody
the way that the light is bouncing off of this piece of candy glass.
There's little errors like that that are all over all types of movies.
There's things like Renee Zellweger in Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where she's
(18:16):
running around and she's doing a lot of her own stunts.
She's in her dress and she's jumping over things.
And every so often, her chest flies up and you can see that she's wearing knee pads because
she's doing all these stunts.
So she's either a roller derby queen in the movie or it's just one more thing that made
it past the editor at that point.
There are things like Pumpkinhead in the movie Pumpkinhead, where you have this really fantastic
(18:40):
looking creature.
However, every so often, you can see the stunt person's sneakers sticking out of the bottom
of the costume, down the cuffs of the legs.
And I'm sure that was done for safety and stuff.
But I guess you just got to watch how you frame stuff.
(19:01):
And it's not only in the movie.
The thing that I think is always amazing, if you can find old copies of Pumpkinhead,
the DVD in the VHS box, if you look on the back, the artwork shows scenes from the movie.
And of all things, they picked a shot where you can see the little white sneakers at the
(19:21):
bottom.
So it's like sometimes you just can't even believe what you see.
Sometimes there are accidents that happen on the set, on camera, that ended up making
it into the movie because it actually enhanced what was going on.
There's a scene like that in Scream with Matthew Lillard, where he has been stabbed by Skeet
(19:43):
Ulrich.
Okay, spoiler alert.
I hope you've seen Scream by now.
But if not, sorry.
I won't say any more about who they are.
But there's two guys stabbing each other for some weird reason.
And at one point, they're trying to get in touch with the police.
And they're having problems getting through on the phone.
And Skeet Ulrich throws the phone across the kitchen.
(20:06):
And Matthew Lillard is woozy from lack of blood.
He's like crouched over this table.
And the phone cracks him right in the back of the head.
And that was not planned.
And Matthew Lillard turns around and goes, you hit me in the back of the head with a
phone, you dick.
And that's kind of a legendary line at this point.
(20:27):
You know, when I have a day as inept as yesterday was, I can really be hard on myself.
There's no getting around it.
I essentially turned myself into the poster for Screamers.
I turned myself inside out.
But, you know, sometimes I can sit back a little bit and I can take a little bit of
(20:51):
solace in things like knowing that Stanley Kubrick fucked up as well in his movies.
And it's there for everybody to see.
Yes, that's right.
Even the perfectionist Stanley Kubrick makes mistakes in his movies.
And sometimes they actually make the final cut.
Now, what's interesting in this one is that it's his perfectionism that bites him in the
(21:12):
ass.
So it's in The Shining.
And it's in the opening sequence, the opening credit sequence, which is breathtaking to
watch.
It's, of course, the helicopter aerial shots where the Volkswagen is making its way through
the Colorado mountains.
And what we see in the lower right hand corner of one of the shots is the shadow of the
(21:35):
helicopter that's taking the aerial shots.
Plate is dead.
But the funny thing is, it's there now.
Well, I think it might be taken out now.
They may have changed things now.
We have different TVs, different aspect ratios.
But what ended up happening was that Kubrick shot the movie in an open mat format.
(21:57):
So open mat is a technique where you mat out the top and the bottom of the film frame in
the movie projector itself.
So when you're seeing the projection inside of the movie theater, of course, in 1980,
that's where you're going to see the movie.
It's cutting out part of the image.
But Kubrick, being a wise guy, knew about pan and scan in VHS, right?
(22:22):
So he knew his movie was going to get seen at a time when there was going to be a different
formatting being done.
So open mat allowed for more of the frame to still exist.
And when they're doing pan and scanning, there's not that much of a scan because there's
more image that they're able to suck from the sides and, you know, the way that the
(22:44):
square was.
So in the movie theater, we're not going to see that shadow at all.
Kubrick's wise and scientific enough to realize that it's going to be covered by the bars
that are inside the projector itself.
That's going to give that aspect ratio.
But when it went to home video, oh my goodness, guess what?
They're using the entire image to be able to fill up that square.
(23:06):
And when they do, we get to see that helicopter.
So what do you know?
It's the things that you find out about in this crazy world.
But anyway, those kind of errors are just happening all the time in movies.
There's so much complexity that's going on.
It's amazing that there aren't more mistakes than there actually are.
But what I really wanted to talk about here is the idea of failure as it plays out in
(23:30):
horror movies.
Now, I guess you can honestly say that horror and failure tend to go together.
Just about every horror movie is going to have some form of human error or failure inside
of it.
Just the idea of people not taking the right road is like 75% of the horror movies that
(23:52):
are out there.
When I brought this up to a friend, he said, well, you know, I think you can pretty much
say every one of the Hammer Horror films could be talked about because in the end,
every time the Baron's castle explodes or it's set on fire, it falls on somebody.
You know, there's always this thing where there's hubris which is crumbled inside of
(24:13):
the horror movie.
But I wanted to talk about some of the ways that failure is kind of like part of the DNA
of the movie itself.
It's not just a plot furtherance in some way.
It has the sense of, as I mentioned before, the want of a nail, the horse was lost, good
intentions going bad, stupid mistakes that anybody could make, things that are a little
(24:37):
bit more than just getting lost.
So the first movie that I want to bring up that deals with failure in such a way, I think
is the epitome of kind of what I'm trying to talk about here.
This movie from beginning to end is essentially a treatise on our failures as a human race,
(25:00):
how our foibles and our follies are going to be the end of us, how human error is going
to take us out.
And it's not going to be any major big deal thing that's going to happen.
It's not going to be any high-minded ideals.
It's going to be ineptitude.
It's going to be bureaucracy.
It's going to be people who don't know what they're doing being in charge.
(25:22):
It's going to be laziness.
It's going to be cluelessness.
All of this stuff plays into the hilarity of Return of the Living Dead.
Now, this is a movie that most horror fans of a certain age can probably quote verbatim,
but this is a film that deserves that.
(25:42):
So how does the world end?
How does the world end, not with a bang, but with a whimper?
Well, that whimper might come out of Louisville, Kentucky.
The end of the world starts on the 3rd of July, 1984, 1730 hours Eastern Daylight Time.
And what does it look like?
Is there chaos?
No, it's two guys waiting for their shift to end at a medical supply company.
(26:08):
We've got Frank, who's the veteran shift manager, and he's teaching the ropes to young
Freddy, who's a punk rocker who's just trying to get himself a summer job, it seems.
And we get to see the banal, mundane world of learning about all of this stuff that could
be creepy to anybody else, like map dogs and PT, perfect teeth on corpses.
(26:32):
And of course, while they're going through all of this and wasting time waiting for the
end of their shift, Frank decides that he has to show off a little bit.
And he decides to show how there was a weird mix up from the government and some stuff
got sent to them that was supposed to go to another place.
And it's down in the basement and it's top secret.
(26:56):
And you know what?
It's a good way to end the night.
So let's go on down there and take a look.
He takes Freddy down there and he tells the story of essentially Night of the Living Dead,
as if it's an actual thing that had happened.
And what is going on here?
Well, you've got two guys who don't really know a whole bunch about what's going on,
(27:17):
looking at something that was left by the ineptitude of the government,
bad paperwork, bad delivery systems.
We got a 55-gallon drum with a corpse inside of it, soaking in trioxin.
And it's made by the Army Corps of Engineers.
So we know it's going to fall apart.
(27:37):
It's going to leak.
The gas sprays all over Frank and Freddy and you know we're in for big trouble.
What's funny about this movie, what I love about this, this is my reading of it,
is that the end of the world happens mainly because two guys don't want to lose their jobs.
They want to cover up the fact that they've made a big mess.
(27:59):
I mean, instead of it being gas and dead bodies, it was just like they spilled a bunch of paint
and they had to try and get the paint out of there before the big boss came back.
Whatever it might be, it's guys trying to slide stuff underneath doors,
pretend that nothing happened, try and save face in some way.
(28:20):
And it doesn't just stop with them.
Every level of management that they go up is another problem.
Someone just trying to cover it up and trying to see about saving face
and also just trying to make sure that nobody finds out what's going on.
Even the military is just another line of management that's trying to hide what's going on.
(28:46):
As the higher up the totem pole, there's still some guy, some general sitting somewhere that
his entire job is waiting to find the thing that he has to throw away.
I love that this movie is just one escalating mistake after another.
Things just get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And you can't seem to put the genie back in the bottle, no matter what these guys try to do.
(29:09):
And I think the thing is that all of it is kind of pointless.
It's a moot point.
The reality is once that gas, once trioxin escapes from that tank, it's over.
Game is over.
It's going to end inevitably with them being nuked at some point.
(29:32):
And the nuking isn't going to do anything either.
Because as we see at the end of the movie, as soon as all of those smoke clouds go up
into the sky, they end up in the rain clouds.
It rains and boom.
Now we've got an even bigger population that's being covered by trioxin laden rain.
And so the reality is we're screwed already by the weird intentions that we've had before.
(29:58):
The mistake, the real mistake that is in the movie that is the only one that could have
been avoided is to not make trioxin in the first place.
Once we do that, that's the big fucking failure.
So we go from dark comedy and pitch black satire to something that's a little bit more
(30:26):
tragic, maybe a lot more tragic.
Something that we can empathize with a little bit more.
Something that we can't stand from the outside and point inward at someone.
And that would be Jeff Goldblum's character Seth Brundle in David Cronenberg's The Fly.
I think we've got a lot of things going on in the movie that we haven't been able to
all been in the situation where we are hoping to be seen for what we've brought to the
(30:49):
world.
Especially if you're someone who considers themselves a bit of an artist, you want to
be seen.
You want to be heard.
You want someone to validate what's been going on.
And Seth Brundle is a scientist who's come up with some really interesting ideas, but
it doesn't seem like anybody's really taking him seriously.
We first see him, he's at a party being held by financiers, and finally he gets someone
(31:15):
who wants to actually talk to him.
And that is Veronica Quaife, who is a reporter for Particle Magazine.
He's flattered.
He finds her attractive.
So there's the mixture of being validated that you actually are being seen for the work
that you're doing.
People are having interest.
Maybe you can actually talk people into understanding what you're doing.
(31:38):
And it's also not too bad that the person who understands you suddenly is someone that
you are attracted to.
So what's he working on?
He's come up with teleporter pods.
He's calling them telepods.
They disintegrate matter in one spot.
They transfer it across space and then reintegrate it, put it all back together.
The puzzle piece comes back together in another spot.
(31:59):
And this could be the invention of the century if it's actually real.
So what happens?
Well, Seth is able to take Veronica and show her the telepods and show her that theoretically
this can work.
In other words, physically certain things are able to transport, but it's still not
(32:21):
completely tested and it's not completely reliable.
We have things like it's too synthetic.
There's a copy being made, but it's not necessarily the exact copy of what was sent
through.
There are sometimes flaws.
You don't want to be a rhesus monkey and be put through that thing because, oh my goodness,
(32:42):
we get to see what happens there.
But you know, where does the frailty come in?
Where is the human flaw coming in?
Where is the failure?
Well, a lot of the flaw comes from the lack of self-esteem.
The feeling that you're never good enough.
The doubt that comes into the mind of someone who's doing something pretty brilliant.
(33:05):
And so what ends up happening through the story is that Seth becomes deeply connected
with Veronica.
He falls in love with her.
She seems to fall in love with him.
And instead of that being comforting to him, it fills him with even more doubt.
He's not sure what's going on.
She has a boss that it's obvious that she had a thing with at one point and that boss
(33:30):
kind of needles Seth just a little bit, just to make him realize that maybe there's a reason
for there to be a little bit of doubt.
So the end result of this is that Seth becomes highly vulnerable and Seth becomes someone
who is so worried about losing this relationship that he becomes paranoid about it.
(33:55):
And what's interesting is if you look at this movie, if you've seen the film, and I'm
certainly hoping that you did, there is this very insectile thing that happens, right?
The insect brain starts to take over.
And the insect brain isn't a completely separate brain.
It is a distillation, a laser focus to one primal thing.
(34:22):
And so the paranoia that the Brundle fly has later in the movie is just an amplification
of the paranoia and doubt and anger that Seth Brundle has in his normal human form.
But within that vulnerability that is going to get him eventually turned into Brundle
(34:45):
fly, here's someone who makes mistakes.
You know, he probably shouldn't have drank that night, right?
He probably shouldn't have taken the chances that he decides to take, but he takes them
because he's not on his game.
He's imbalanced.
He is completely worried about where his relationship is going to be going.
(35:07):
And so he drinks.
And oh, by the way, before I go too far on that, he's already not exactly what I would
call working in the best conditions.
This guy is doing all of this experimentation stuff in essentially an attic.
So it's not necessarily like there's not a lot of sterility going on here.
(35:30):
But anyway, he gets drunk and he gets inside of the telepod and what's in there with him,
but he leaves the door open too long.
Whatever it is, he's got to fly in there with him.
And of course, as a scientist, this is like a major fuck up.
I mean, not only on the actual physical thing that happens in the storyline, but just the
(35:55):
idea of him being a man of science, someone who wants to be in control of all of the elements
for any of the experiments that he's doing, for him to have a fly in the room is kind of
a big deal.
And so it becomes an even bigger deal when he absorbs it.
It's one of those movies that I think really does talk to the frailty that we have.
(36:19):
The idea that failure is just one bad decision away.
It's one bit of lack of confidence away.
It's one bit of paranoia away.
We can find ourselves going down that path.
Another movie that talks to the idea of failure has to do with something that was based on
(36:45):
a crew incident.
And the idea that this actually happened just creeps me out so much because it shows how
fallible systems are as well.
And how lucky we are most of the time when the systems actually work and just how tenuous
our grasp on safety is.
(37:06):
Now, with that said, sometimes we take chances and that's a little bit of what this movie
is all about.
The movie is open water and it's based on a true story of two scuba divers who were accidentally
stranded in shark infested waters after their tour boat leaves them behind.
So what this movie does really well is, first off, one of the reasons that it's as effective
(37:31):
as it is, is that it barely feels like a move.
It's shot on digital video.
There are only a few characters in it.
It feels more like a documentary in the way that it's shot.
In some ways it feels a little bit like found footage.
And the actors are good.
They're not known actors.
Let's put it that way.
So they're kind of every people.
(37:53):
And they go out to the Caribbean and they decide that they're going to spend the day
scuba diving.
But it ends up becoming a not very good decision.
And little did they know that it was going to happen that way.
What ends up happening just seems so real.
Of course, now we know that it was real.
It ends up being a miscount.
(38:15):
It's someone manually counting how many heads there are back on the boat.
And just a little bit of a mishap on people moving items into different areas of the
boat, hiding certain things, just trying to keep them safe.
That makes it seem that maybe those people weren't there in the first place.
(38:35):
Whatever it is, too few people working on the boat, too much craziness happening.
Whatever it is, we find this moment where even though the guy's a little bit unsure,
you can tell that he kind of feels as he's counting everybody's heads that maybe the
count is off.
They still go away.
And the rest of the movie is just a fait accompli.
(38:58):
And it works so miserably well.
These two people are just out there, Susan and Daniel, bobbing away.
I call this bleeding for Godot.
There's just these two people that are out there just bobbing along, waiting for that
boat to come back.
Pretty sure that boat's going to happen.
When is the boat coming by?
(39:19):
Well, it's going to be pretty soon, I'm sure.
As they're slowly being picked to pieces by different various fish, and of course, the
sharks that are getting closer and closer.
I think this movie really bothers me because there's someone to blame, sure.
But it's not as if there was anything diabolical that happened.
(39:40):
It's something as simple as crossing the street and who knows what happens.
It creates a car accident that you get hit by a piece of debris and you're injured.
It's that kind of thing.
It's almost like the blind, bloody-eyed fate that is out there, that is swinging at all
of us, finally connects.
(40:02):
And so I highly recommend Open Water if you haven't seen it, but it's not one of those
feel-good movies.
Sometimes the failure that is there for us is when we're not being true to ourselves,
when we're not really taking care of ourselves, we're doing things for other people, we're
(40:23):
putting ourselves in risk situations to better and benefit them.
And that failure to take care of yourself, to really have a good, strong sense of self
and stand up for yourself, can be decades old.
This could be going on for years and years.
And every time it's lessening your spot in the argument.
(40:50):
And I think that's one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about Gerald's Game, which
is without a doubt one of the more harrowing ways of having a human failure show up right
in your doorstep and you can do nothing about it.
So those that don't know what Gerald's Game is, we have two people, a couple, they've
(41:12):
been married for a long period of time.
Jesse and Gerald decide to go to, I think it's their little isolated lake house, and
they decide to try and spice up their marriage a little bit.
Well, Gerald does.
I'm not necessarily sure if Jesse cares at this point.
But what we get here is that to spice this up, Gerald decides to surprise Jesse by pulling
(41:40):
out a pair of handcuffs.
He decides he's going to do a little bit of BDSM with her.
And he connects her one wrist to the handcuff, the other end of the handcuff to the bedpost.
And before he can put the second one on, Jesse finally starts to stand up for herself.
A little bit too late, it seems, and says she doesn't want to do this.
(42:04):
Now, unbeknownst to her, he's kind of ODing on Viagra because he wants to have a really
good time.
So he has been taking a few of the pills.
He's downing them with water.
And as he starts arguing with her, because of course her saying no becomes an argument,
he has a heart.
And he drops dead right there on the edge of the bed where she can't see him.
(42:29):
She's stuck without being able to get to a key.
The handcuff is deeply on her wrist.
The other part is on a very thick bedpost.
And time is passing.
And then a dog comes into the room.
And left with herself, Jesse starts to, shall we say, recalibrate what the past was like.
(42:57):
Starts to reenact all these times that she's been put in these kind of positions.
First, it starts with poor, poor pitiful me.
And then starts to become this thing of a sudden realization of what she's done to herself and
for herself over the years.
Now, metaphorically, that's really cool.
(43:18):
One of the things that makes the movie so tense is that the idea is so damn simple.
And it's not that hard to believe that it could possibly happen to you.
We all make concessions for other people.
We all are people who don't really thrive very well in confrontation.
Some of us have a better attack mechanism with it.
(43:40):
But I think a confrontation for most of us is something that we're averse to.
We prefer to get away from it.
And we sometimes leave ourselves put into certain positions because of that.
Sometimes we bite our tongues a little bit because of our position.
Because of what we might lose.
(44:01):
And I think Gerald's game talks a lot about that kind of thing.
And it's not hard for us to see ourselves being put, maybe not in a handcuff situation,
but maybe in a situation where we've gone along with something that someone wanted us to do,
or wanted us to say, and it ends up coming back on us.
And sometimes it takes the person down, like Gerald goes down in a heart attack.
(44:24):
But a lot of times, you know, folks who are asking us to do certain things,
they're using us as the shield for the bullet that's out there waiting to get people.
So yeah, failure all over the place.
The failure of being able to take care of ourselves.
Failure of putting ourselves as a priority.
Respecting ourselves enough to be able to do that.
(44:46):
Boy, if that doesn't talk to something that most artists really have a deficiency in,
I don't know what does.
Another movie that really touches on the dangers of allowing other people to have agency over you.
(45:11):
Relenting and relinquishing control to someone else.
Allowing the fates to go where they want to.
And that movie is The Descent.
The story centers around six friends, six women, who are extreme outdoor adventurers.
And there's a tragedy one year, and they get back together the next year,
(45:33):
trying to reunite, trying to find that old energy.
And things just get a little bit worse.
Our main character is Sarah.
And Sarah is suffering from major depression and grief and shock,
because the event that they were at last year ended in tragedy.
Her son and her husband were both killed in a head-on collision car accident.
(45:56):
She survived, but she was just a shell of her own self.
And so her friends decide that they're going to take her on one more excursion.
We get the feeling that Sarah would normally be one of the leaders of this group.
In fact, her and Juno seem to be duels.
Kind of a Janus mask of each other.
Whatever they do, they seem to do together.
(46:17):
And everyone else kind of falls into place,
doing their particular roles and doing their roles rather well.
But now Sarah is just a shell of herself.
And Juno is now the dominant figure in the group.
And she's bound and determined that she's going to give everyone a fantastic time
and try and somehow heal Sarah.
(46:38):
And heal something else as well, which is going to come out
as they go deeper into this three-mile hole in the ground.
So the story's supposed to be taking place, I believe, in the Smoky Mountains.
But it's obviously Scotland.
But hey, it looks really cool and really lush.
(46:59):
So where the human error starts to come in has to do with Juno.
Now, Juno is an extremist.
And she also wants to try and shake the doldrums out of Sarah.
And she believes that she can do that by putting her through some really good hard work.
So she decides to take the group to a unmarked cave.
(47:22):
One that's not really on the system from rangers.
The problem is she doesn't tell the rangers.
She doesn't tell anybody who is co-hosting with her.
Nobody knows that they're going to a different cave system
than the one that she actually wrote permits for.
So the rangers, everybody else, they're going to be looking for them at another cave not very close.
(47:48):
Now, this doesn't come out and be a problem, of course, until it is.
And what happens?
Well, I think you can kind of figure out what happens when they're down there.
Chaos reigns.
There is a cave-in.
And in that cave-in, the way out, the way that they came in is sealed.
So the group has nothing else that they can possibly do
(48:10):
except go deeper and deeper and deeper into this cave system.
And as they do, they start seeing things like old expedition hooks in the walls from climbers.
It must be like 50 years ago.
But there's nothing else.
They don't know if they ever got out.
And there's some scurrying sounds.
(48:33):
Now, obviously, it seems that there would be nothing down there.
But Sarah swears that she sees figures in the shadows when the lights go by.
So this error by Juno causes a chain reaction, which is essentially looking at
how the relationships and friendships of everybody has gone over the years,
(48:54):
and how many times Juno has kind of caused people trouble.
So everything's starting to deteriorate as they're running out of oxygen, all of that stuff.
These women who were friends, everything starts to come out.
All the old problems.
There's a lot of resentment and mistrust that's built up over the years.
(49:16):
And it's always been small potatoes, quite honestly.
Not worth their argument until it is.
And wouldn't you know it, three miles down the earth is the perfect time, I guess,
to have a complete and utter blow-up of what's going on.
But of course, they don't have enough time to be able to resolve and work things out.
Because there's something down there with them.
(49:38):
And it's pretty damn vicious.
But it may not be as vicious as the women themselves.
It's a very interesting film.
One of the last great creature feature kind of movies that I've seen in a while.
And if you're looking for a movie that really makes you feel claustrophobic,
The Descent is it.
(50:05):
So another way I want to take a look at the brief history of failure, as I am here,
is a different form of failure shown in some horror movies.
And that's the failure of good intentions.
Things that seem like they're going to do good,
and what they end up doing is absolutely destroying everything.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say.
(50:28):
And I think these two movies that I'm going to talk about today,
certainly prove that case.
The first movie is The Fearless Vampire Killers, a Roman Polanski film.
That's probably not as well known as his other works.
But this is one really funny and one really dark movie.
(50:49):
So the movie takes place in Transylvania.
And essentially you have two vampire hunters.
One that's an elderly professor,
and the other that is kind of his assistant who's not too sharp.
He's not the sharpest pencil.
And they end up going to this village looking for vampires.
And they come with the academic concept of what a vampire is.
(51:11):
And they meet real ones.
And they meet a lot of opposition to any kind of change inside this village.
People don't know what the hell they're talking about.
So when they come in and someone dies,
and they die in a way that seems as if they've been bitten by a vampire,
and they may come back and turn into vampires,
they start telling them,
(51:31):
well, you got to put a stake in the guy's heart.
And the guy's wife, the guy who's died, his wife's like,
you want me to put it where?
What are you telling me?
So the idea, the conceit of this movie is that
the people who have the knowledge cannot convey the knowledge to regular folk.
(51:51):
And the regular folk are starting to succumb to an actual evil.
And so these guys are ill-equipped to be the vampire killers that they are.
Now, the thing that makes this into a total failure
is that their good intentions are to try and rid the world of vampires.
(52:12):
And they go in with only so much data, so much skill.
And what they end up doing is inadvertently taking it from this small village
where these vampires have been living for who knows how long,
vampires from all over the world tend to come to this place.
And they feed once a year on some sacrifices.
(52:33):
And so it's almost like there's a perfect little ecosystem
that doesn't have to be fucked with.
But these guys come in with their good intentions.
And before you know it, they've essentially spread
the vampire disease to the entire planet
because they don't check their wagon
as they're heading out of the mountain village
and they go into the populous.
With all their knowledge, they still take someone
(52:55):
who's been infected into the normal populous of the world.
Mainly because one of them really likes them.
So the entire world's going to go down the drain
because one guy really finds someone who's been bitten kind of sexy.
Well, that seems like the perfect way to end the world, doesn't it?
(53:18):
The next movie shows, once again, the path of good intentions
basically wreaking havoc to a point where we have a semi-apocalypse.
And that movie is 28 Days Later.
And everything about this movie I loved.
But it starts with something very interesting.
We see a terrible lab experiment going on
(53:41):
where there are these scientists who have strapped down all of these apes.
And they're just showing these apes a bunch of violent images
over and over and over again,
allegedly anesthetizing them, creating something called The Rage,
which is poetic zombieism, I guess.
But the thing that's really interesting is this is a contained system, right?
(54:03):
And then what happens?
Animal rights activists break into the place
and decide they're going to let the monkeys loose.
Seems like a pretty good idea, right?
Except that they're already infected.
And they're infected with something that is highly communicable
and it is also a highly dangerous thing to let a rabid monkey out of a cage,
(54:25):
which they soon find out as they start getting torn to pieces by these monkeys.
As there is blood passing between the two of them,
this Rage virus starts to spread like wildfire amongst these people.
Anybody who comes into that lab, of course, is going to get infected as well.
And there's a chain reaction, which we don't necessarily see.
(54:46):
We wake up with the main character who's been in the hospital in a coma for quite a while,
finding out 28 days later, hey, look at that, raise a beer,
that the world has changed completely.
Now, I really love this idea that in a way,
it feels almost like there's no bad guy.
(55:08):
This is just a misunderstanding, a mistake that is made.
But the reality is this goes all the way back to Return of the Living Dead, right?
The big mistake was making trioxin in the first place.
Once trioxin was made, it was just a matter of time until some bumbling happens.
So, the bumbling in the first movie in Return of the Living Dead is that
(55:30):
it's all bureaucracy and people forgetting where things are and bored people
working outside of their pay level, causing all sorts of chaos.
But in this one, it's essentially saying that the system has already created our destruction
and they're keeping it self-contained, right?
It's all under control as long as everybody does the right thing.
(55:53):
But the reality is everything has to go absolutely perfectly.
There's no idea of what we can do as an afterthought.
What is the plan B?
And so, we have painted ourselves as a culture, as a society, as a civilization
into a corner where everybody has to do the right thing just to survive because
(56:16):
we've put some kind of Damocles sword above us.
We didn't really ask for it, but it's there.
And nobody can be perfect all the time.
And unfortunately, we have created a system that has these kind of things in them built in.
Well, they're going to make a bomb.
We better make a bomb.
(56:37):
And before you know it, we have escalation and everybody has one.
Everybody has 7 million of them.
We don't know what to do with them, quite honestly, as they age and as we age.
And can the technology keep up with the deterioration of these things?
Can it keep up with the idea that people are willing to do crazier and crazier things?
It seems to make a point.
(56:58):
Well, not to get too overly political or philosophical about this thing,
but I think that's why horror movies are so much fun and so good and so cleansing.
We have these nagging concerns, these anxieties that we can do absolutely nothing about,
but we can address them in a movie.
And when they are addressed correctly, like 28 Days Later does,
(57:22):
you really feel that something profound has been witnessed by you.
And you feel something inside of you shift just a little bit.
Maybe it's nothing more than, I'm not the only one.
Oh, I'm not the only one who feels this way.
And that can be a very beneficial thing to have in your life.
(57:47):
And you know what?
I'm actually starting to feel a little bit better about failure now that I've spent all
of this time talking about different forms of failures that there are in the horror film.
And yes, I do believe that horror films allow us to take a look at the things that make us angry,
make us sad, make us anxious, and give us a safe outlet to be able to maybe not work
(58:12):
these things out, but at least acknowledge them and say, yeah, me too.
I go through the same thing.
Now, I'll leave you with one last movie.
And try not to kill me when you see it.
It's brand new.
And it is, shall we say, a movie about an epic fail and multiple failures that just
continue to compound until you can barely breathe by the end of this movie.
(58:37):
And what's funny is that it's actually been touted as a dark comedy.
Yeah, I would say it's a pretty dark comedy.
So the movie is The Coffee Table.
And in the very beginning, I will say that it was very much a comedy.
Because you have this, it's like an aggravating comedy.
(58:57):
You have a couple, a married couple, go to a furniture warehouse store.
So yes, it's like a furniture outlet kind of store.
So it's not going to be a high end thing.
But the husband, he's decided he wants to get this really nasty looking coffee table.
So it's gaudy.
(59:17):
It's fake gold.
It's got these weird art deco women, naked women, that are the arms or the legs of it
portion of this thing is a plate of glass, a big sheet of glass that is allegedly unbreakable.
So says the salesman.
It is to laugh.
I mean, I've never heard of unbreakable glass, period.
(59:40):
But this becomes a bone of contention.
This coffee table is a symbol of a argument that's been long coming between these two people.
So this couple has recently had a child.
And it's obvious that it has altered the relationship quite a bit.
And the steam is just building up.
(01:00:02):
The pressure is just building up.
So the father, the husband says, you know, honey, you were able to name the kid.
It's a name I don't like, but you name the kid.
You pick the paint color that's in the house.
You pick the furniture that's in the house.
All of this stuff, the place just is completely controlled by you.
(01:00:22):
This is what I want.
I want this one thing, which is like, you want that.
That's the thing that you want.
He's like, yes.
And of course, he's not really wanting it, but he can't go back now.
This argument has continued.
So he has to save face.
So when the wife walks away saying, do what you want.
He looks at the salesman and says, you know, I can't back down on this.
(01:00:47):
Because how expensive is it?
It's expensive.
It's like, OK, let's just do this.
So that's where I'm going to stop talking about this movie.
There's this wonderful comedic element there, right?
And this turns into epic fail after epic fail after epic fail.
I don't know how long into the movie you might be laughing.
(01:01:08):
Maybe you'll laugh later.
I like to consider this kind of like an off color joke, like a really
gross joke that you might tell somebody.
And when you're telling the joke, the person might laugh and you'll laugh.
But the joke's only 10 seconds long.
This is an hour and a half of living in the imagery of the really bad, gross joke.
(01:01:32):
I'll leave you with that.
And I want to thank you for listening.
I'm feeling a little bit better about failure, folks.
I hope you do too.
Every artist has to go through it.
Every person has to go through it.
You know, get mad, have that moment.
But then relish in the recovery.
I mean, just because you made a few bad choices or you may have fucked up in some way.
(01:01:53):
You know, it doesn't mean the end of the world now, does it?
Does it?
Until we speak again, stay hellbent.
And thanks for listening to the show.
Hellbent for Horror was written and broadcast by me, S.A.
Bradley and produced by me and Lisa Gorski.
You can find more on our website, hellbentforhorror.com.
(01:02:17):
And I'm also on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash hellbentforhorror.
And my Twitter handle is hellbenthorror.
Please hit that subscribe button to get H4H hot off the press.
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And now for some Hellbent for Horror news.
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(01:02:40):
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(01:03:02):
Something horrible beautiful for you or that someone special.
The link to the merchandise store is on our website, hellbentforhorror.com.
And until we meet again, stay hellbent.
Hi, I'm S.A. Bradley and welcome to Hellbent for Horror, a podcast devoted to all things
related to horror, where I remind you that you used to love horror movies and you secretly
still do.
Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of Hellbent for Horror.
(00:31):
You know, I've been doing this since 2016 and I've been really blessed and really lucky.
And one of the ways that I've been really blessed and really lucky is that I haven't
had that catastrophe.
(00:53):
You know, whenever you're doing something live, live tape, you're working with other people,
you're doing anything that is involved remotely with recording entertainment of any sort, you're
bound to have that catastrophe day where nothing goes right, where everything falls
apart.
And I just had that for myself.
Now, I'm not saying that I haven't had plenty of crazy errors that have happened over this
(01:19):
time period.
I most certainly have, but I've never had a complete and total shit the bed, as it is
sometimes called.
Well, we had a shit the bed yesterday and I had this wonderful podcast all ready for
you folks coming up this upcoming week.
And my goodness, if it's not time for the gremlins to finally show for me.
(01:44):
So what ended up happening?
Well, it happened of course, as one would expect when things are really, really hectic
and tight.
So I had been trying to get a guest on for quite a bit of time, someone who's very well
knowledgeable in something that I'm not necessarily that knowledgeable about, and I really wanted
(02:05):
to explore this phenomenon with them.
And they were so open and they were so gracious and grateful with their time that they decided,
yes, let's really dig into this.
We'll go over a slew of films.
We'll talk about the history of these films.
I'd love to be able to educate people about the kind of stuff that I'm really into.
(02:25):
And let's just no holds barred.
Let's see about getting ourselves this thing, no matter how long it takes.
Oh, famous last words right there.
So anyway, we had scheduled this several times before.
It's almost as if there was some kind of curse on us.
It would be something like the post office did not get the movies that we're going to
(02:45):
watch to each other in time for us to actually be able to watch all of those films.
We changed the time for that.
And then there was another incident that ended up happening, something in scheduling.
So we had to postpone again.
And then as soon as we're ready to go, they come down with an illness.
Okay, we have to once again postpone.
(03:06):
No big deal.
We want to get this thing done.
So what happens?
I end up getting under the weather and have other deadlines.
So all of a sudden we have to postpone again.
We finally get to the point where we can actually do the editing.
And I'm so overjoyed to be able to do that.
And it's like, yes, here we go.
I can't wait.
(03:26):
And we sit down and we do essentially two two-hour episodes back to back, a part one
and a part two, where the first part is a bunch of history and then some of the movies
and we really get into the red hot stuff towards the end of the second half.
And it went perfectly.
Everything was checked.
The audio was checked.
(03:47):
The microphones are checked.
The camera was checked.
All this stuff on both sides.
And we just railed through this.
My guest was eloquent.
It was so knowledgeable.
My guest was so much fun and so game that they just continued to move forward on this until
we had gotten through all the movies that we said we're going to talk about.
And I was so happy with it.
(04:08):
Well, I said, well, I am going to have to see about getting this saved.
And I did use Zoom this time around because I wanted to get some video as well as audio
on this.
And so you have to wait a while to get that kind of four hours of footage essentially
downloaded from the cloud.
So I knew I wasn't going to be able to take a look at the footage and listen to it that
(04:33):
night.
So went to bed, super happy, woke up in the morning and it was a total catastrophe.
For my guest, everything was great.
Their sound was just fine.
Their visuals were great.
The video was just fine.
It was me with all of my wonderful equipment here.
(04:54):
Somewhere along the line, there was some kind of error that happened.
I'm not going to blame Zoom.
The bad artist blames the tools.
But we ended up having my microphone, my wonderful microphone that gives this nice sound, no
longer was connected to the Zoom.
And it looked around and tried to find a microphone to use and it ended up using the auxiliary
(05:20):
microphone on my camera.
So I'm listening to this and I'm hearing me in a can somewhere underwater and I'm
lisping and I'm wavering in my voice and it sounds like I'm 3000 miles away and I nearly
die.
I'm like, Oh my God, we just spent all this time trying to get to this and finally schedule.
(05:46):
He gives me an entire night of his life to be able to do this.
And I just screwed the pooch.
Ended up in this spot where there was nothing really usable.
And I spent most of the day in shock trying to fix it with whatever tools I have.
And as good as the stuff is that's out there, you know, sometimes you just reach that point
where you go, perhaps this isn't working.
(06:09):
And so with that, I didn't want to miss another episode.
I'm trying my best to make sure that this show has what it had a long time ago, which
was a consistency and we lost that for a while.
I lost that for a while, getting caught up in doing many other projects.
And so I really want to dedicate myself to making sure that this show goes when it's
(06:32):
supposed to go out.
And so the thing that wouldn't get out of my mind was failure, the power of failure
and how failure is in anything that is artistic, any artist endeavor.
There's a certain amount of failure that's involved.
It's the idea of actually getting back up and working on it again, learning from those
(06:55):
mistakes that is where the creative process actually starts to get some great energy.
And so I wanted to look at failure in horror.
Now what do I mean by that?
Well, there's a whole bunch of different things I mean by that.
But what I'm really wanting to look at is how certain horror movies talk about human
(07:17):
error, that the story itself is for the want of a nail, a horse was lost.
But also the idea that there are so many different ways that failure gets used, how it can be
creative at times.
Sometimes it actually works in our favor to have the failure that occurs.
Sometimes it slows us down.
Sometimes it gives us something interesting.
(07:39):
There are many movies that include things that were mistakes on set because it works
for the movie.
So we're going to talk a little bit about that today.
I have a few movies that I want to talk about that talk directly to the idea of human error.
If you're an artist, well, if you're a human, you know, the to err is human, to forgive
(07:59):
is divine, pick yourself back up as an entrepreneur, to take whatever is left and mold it into
something new, that's being an artist.
And you know, it happens a lot in many different ways.
Sometimes the failure does glean some creativity nobody really expects.
You get something that was thoroughly unexpected out of the ashes of a dashed hope.
(08:23):
Don Coscarelli is a great example.
So Don Coscarelli had made a few films, Jim the World's Greatest and Kenny and Company
before he decides to make a horror film.
And the first thing that he wants to do is he wants to do something wicked this way comes.
He reads Ray Bradbury's book and he absolutely loves it.
(08:45):
He talks to his producer, Paul Peppermint, and they're like, let's do this.
So they try to get the rights and of course they find out that they cannot get the rights
from Bradbury.
I believe that they're already sewn up by someone else.
And they had all of this forward motion with it and it just fell right to the ground.
What they loved about the book was the idea of these kids being the protagonists.
(09:10):
And so they decided, well, how can we do a horror movie?
So at that point, Don Coscarelli remembers a dream that he had.
And that dream is what ends up being Phantasm.
I believe the dream was that the silver sphere came out of the wall in his house.
It was chasing around.
(09:30):
There's some kind of strange device built into the wall.
And then he started building the story around that.
But the reason that Phantasm happens is because plan A fell through and suddenly it's like,
what are we going to do?
Well, let's try plan B. What's that?
I'll let you know later.
And in fact, Coscarelli went into the Northern California mountains to a cabin that his family
(09:54):
had and just sat there and wrote and wrote and wrote until he had Phantasm.
So there are times when the failure, the mistakes, the oddities tend to work in your favor.
Yes, believe it or not, sometimes force majeure, the act of God, can actually weirdly help
(10:16):
a movie get past some roadblocks and actually find its way towards greatness.
You know, even a movie as great as Alien, a bona fide masterpiece, the original Alien
from 1979, that thing went through a whole bunch of errors and failures and accidents
(10:38):
and weird mistakes from a script that no one was really excited by except for one scene
to having a new director in there that wasn't really respected by any of the crew, to having
a character change from male to female, to actually having one really big act of God
(10:58):
in casting that I think really helped the movie.
It's one of those things that I really love hearing about, and that's the story of John
Hurt as Kane.
So John Hurt was supposed to be in the film early on.
He was courted by Ridley Scott, but unfortunately, John Hurt was not available at the time because
(11:19):
he was supposed to be shooting a film down in South Africa.
So reluctantly, they ended up getting someone else.
And they ended up getting someone really good, John Finch, another fine actor.
However, John was sick, and he continued to get sicker and sicker as the movie was getting
ready to shoot, that he had to be hospitalized like the day before they were to start shooting.
(11:43):
So Ridley Scott is now without one of the key characters in the film.
He has no one to play him.
And he finds out, he hears that, weirdly enough, John Hurt is in London.
He's supposed to be in South Africa.
So what ends up happening is that John Hurt tries to go down to Africa, and he is stopped.
(12:07):
He's told by the authorities that he is persona non grata.
He's not allowed or welcomed in South Africa, and he has no clue why.
Well, what ended up happening is there's another actor named John Hurd, H-E-A-R-D, another fine
actor who was an activist, and he was very anti-apartheid.
(12:29):
And so just the way things are, John Hurt, John Hurd, they sound the same.
They're not written the same.
It's H-E-A-R-D and H-U-R-T, but actor and those last names, they somehow mixed it up,
and they thought that John Hurt was John Hurd, and therefore he was not allowed to do the movie.
(12:52):
And of course, as that happens, he's in London, and Ridley Scott runs over to speak to him,
and they spend all day, all night talking about the movie.
And he says, will you do this?
And Hurt says, yeah, sure, I trust you.
Just have a car ready for me when we're going to be shooting.
When are we shooting?
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow?
(13:12):
Okay, great.
So without any kind of real prep, John Hurt comes to the film and does that magnificent
performance and really sells the entire sequence with that chestburster.
Another famous act of God is the shark in Jaws.
You know, if Steven Spielberg was able to make Jaws the way he wanted to, if that shark was
(13:35):
actually working all the time, I don't think we'd still be talking about Jaws as much as we are.
Literally having the shark never work for him, Spielberg had to work around that,
and he ended up coming up with all these magnificent, suspenseful ways to make it seem
like the shark was there when there was nothing there.
One of my favorites is rarely talked about, but it's when the shark is going through
(14:00):
that little cove that's there.
The boats in the background rock back and forth.
And that's kind of how you know that something's under the water, just going.
And those wonderful little subtle things weren't going to be there.
It was going to be something like, I don't think it was the kittener boy, but maybe it
was.
There was either him or the guy who was in the boat that gets his leg bit off and everything
(14:25):
like that.
One of the two of them was going to be in the jaws of the shark as the shark's head is above
the water, and this guy's just dangling out of the mouth.
The idea just kind of blows my mind.
It would have been so corny.
I'd love to see it as a Turkey Day movie, but it certainly wouldn't be what Jaws is
(14:46):
today.
So speaking of Turkey Days, in case that needs an explanation to folks, I have a few
friends and we like to watch movies on Thanksgiving, the day after Thanksgiving, that
are movies that many people would call B, C, to grade Z movies.
(15:10):
And we watch them because we still kind of love them and we love them warts and all.
A lot of times the problem is the script.
A lot of times it's the acting.
Sometimes it's all of it.
Sometimes the idea itself is so wrongheaded or just the execution.
But it's a mindset, right?
The mindset is that we kind of love watching the movies anyway, and we forgive a lot of
(15:36):
stuff if you're entertaining.
So there are a lot of movies out there that we love but do have errors in them.
Most of them are just kind of funny.
Since we're just talking about Alien, there is one in there as well, which is the
disappearing Jonesy the cat.
So Jones is the cat and towards the end of the movie, Sigourney Weaver is trying to find
(16:01):
the cat and then get out of the ship.
She finds the cat.
She has a cat carrier, puts the thing in the carrier and is running out of the place.
So of course, they're not going to keep the damn cat in that thing over and over and over
again.
But the design of the carrier is like clear plastic windows on it.
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So there are times whenever there's like a flash or whenever the flames are going by,
you can see that she's just carrying an empty container.
And it's even funnier because once you realize that there's not a cat in there, you start
to realize how she's carrying that.
And I don't know if Sigourney Weaver had ever had a pet cat up to then, but she's just
swinging this thing.
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Any cat that would be inside there would be like being hit by centrifugal force off of
the walls of it.
But you don't notice it until you notice it.
And there are those kind of things that are in several movies that unless you're looking,
you don't see it.
But once you do, it's always indelibly there.
It certainly doesn't destroy the movie.
Some of them are really small, like in Halloween, the original Halloween, when you're first
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seeing the house and you're the camera killer's eye view and you're going around the house
as a jack-o'-lantern on the porch.
And it's glowing rather brightly.
And that's because there's a big light bulb inside of it.
It's plastic.
And if you look, you can see the big cable that's there, the power line that's hooked
(17:30):
into it, into the side of the house.
And it's like a coiled snake there.
It's so quick.
If you blink, you don't even notice it.
There's also the fake glass that's used in the movie when Laurie is in the laundry room
and she's being attacked by the Sheik.
And she smashes her hand through the glass.
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It's very obvious, the way that the glass looks reflected through the light, that you
can tell exactly where her hand is going to go because it just doesn't fool anybody
the way that the light is bouncing off of this piece of candy glass.
There's little errors like that that are all over all types of movies.
There's things like Renee Zellweger in Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where she's
(18:16):
running around and she's doing a lot of her own stunts.
She's in her dress and she's jumping over things.
And every so often, her chest flies up and you can see that she's wearing knee pads because
she's doing all these stunts.
So she's either a roller derby queen in the movie or it's just one more thing that made
it past the editor at that point.
There are things like Pumpkinhead in the movie Pumpkinhead, where you have this really fantastic
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looking creature.
However, every so often, you can see the stunt person's sneakers sticking out of the bottom
of the costume, down the cuffs of the legs.
And I'm sure that was done for safety and stuff.
But I guess you just got to watch how you frame stuff.
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And it's not only in the movie.
The thing that I think is always amazing, if you can find old copies of Pumpkinhead,
the DVD in the VHS box, if you look on the back, the artwork shows scenes from the movie.
And of all things, they picked a shot where you can see the little white sneakers at the
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bottom.
So it's like sometimes you just can't even believe what you see.
Sometimes there are accidents that happen on the set, on camera, that ended up making
it into the movie because it actually enhanced what was going on.
There's a scene like that in Scream with Matthew Lillard, where he has been stabbed by Skeet
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Ulrich.
Okay, spoiler alert.
I hope you've seen Scream by now.
But if not, sorry.
I won't say any more about who they are.
But there's two guys stabbing each other for some weird reason.
And at one point, they're trying to get in touch with the police.
And they're having problems getting through on the phone.
And Skeet Ulrich throws the phone across the kitchen.
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And Matthew Lillard is woozy from lack of blood.
He's like crouched over this table.
And the phone cracks him right in the back of the head.
And that was not planned.
And Matthew Lillard turns around and goes, you hit me in the back of the head with a
phone, you dick.
And that's kind of a legendary line at this point.
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You know, when I have a day as inept as yesterday was, I can really be hard on myself.
There's no getting around it.
I essentially turned myself into the poster for Screamers.
I turned myself inside out.
But, you know, sometimes I can sit back a little bit and I can take a little bit of
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solace in things like knowing that Stanley Kubrick fucked up as well in his movies.
And it's there for everybody to see.
Yes, that's right.
Even the perfectionist Stanley Kubrick makes mistakes in his movies.
And sometimes they actually make the final cut.
Now, what's interesting in this one is that it's his perfectionism that bites him in the
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ass.
So it's in The Shining.
And it's in the opening sequence, the opening credit sequence, which is breathtaking to
watch.
It's, of course, the helicopter aerial shots where the Volkswagen is making its way through
the Colorado mountains.
And what we see in the lower right hand corner of one of the shots is the shadow of the
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helicopter that's taking the aerial shots.
Plate is dead.
But the funny thing is, it's there now.
Well, I think it might be taken out now.
They may have changed things now.
We have different TVs, different aspect ratios.
But what ended up happening was that Kubrick shot the movie in an open mat format.
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So open mat is a technique where you mat out the top and the bottom of the film frame in
the movie projector itself.
So when you're seeing the projection inside of the movie theater, of course, in 1980,
that's where you're going to see the movie.
It's cutting out part of the image.
But Kubrick, being a wise guy, knew about pan and scan in VHS, right?
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So he knew his movie was going to get seen at a time when there was going to be a different
formatting being done.
So open mat allowed for more of the frame to still exist.
And when they're doing pan and scanning, there's not that much of a scan because there's
more image that they're able to suck from the sides and, you know, the way that the
(22:44):
square was.
So in the movie theater, we're not going to see that shadow at all.
Kubrick's wise and scientific enough to realize that it's going to be covered by the bars
that are inside the projector itself.
That's going to give that aspect ratio.
But when it went to home video, oh my goodness, guess what?
They're using the entire image to be able to fill up that square.
(23:06):
And when they do, we get to see that helicopter.
So what do you know?
It's the things that you find out about in this crazy world.
But anyway, those kind of errors are just happening all the time in movies.
There's so much complexity that's going on.
It's amazing that there aren't more mistakes than there actually are.
But what I really wanted to talk about here is the idea of failure as it plays out in
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horror movies.
Now, I guess you can honestly say that horror and failure tend to go together.
Just about every horror movie is going to have some form of human error or failure inside
of it.
Just the idea of people not taking the right road is like 75% of the horror movies that
(23:52):
are out there.
When I brought this up to a friend, he said, well, you know, I think you can pretty much
say every one of the Hammer Horror films could be talked about because in the end,
every time the Baron's castle explodes or it's set on fire, it falls on somebody.
You know, there's always this thing where there's hubris which is crumbled inside of
(24:13):
the horror movie.
But I wanted to talk about some of the ways that failure is kind of like part of the DNA
of the movie itself.
It's not just a plot furtherance in some way.
It has the sense of, as I mentioned before, the want of a nail, the horse was lost, good
intentions going bad, stupid mistakes that anybody could make, things that are a little
(24:37):
bit more than just getting lost.
So the first movie that I want to bring up that deals with failure in such a way, I think
is the epitome of kind of what I'm trying to talk about here.
This movie from beginning to end is essentially a treatise on our failures as a human race,
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how our foibles and our follies are going to be the end of us, how human error is going
to take us out.
And it's not going to be any major big deal thing that's going to happen.
It's not going to be any high-minded ideals.
It's going to be ineptitude.
It's going to be bureaucracy.
It's going to be people who don't know what they're doing being in charge.
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It's going to be laziness.
It's going to be cluelessness.
All of this stuff plays into the hilarity of Return of the Living Dead.
Now, this is a movie that most horror fans of a certain age can probably quote verbatim,
but this is a film that deserves that.
(25:42):
So how does the world end?
How does the world end, not with a bang, but with a whimper?
Well, that whimper might come out of Louisville, Kentucky.
The end of the world starts on the 3rd of July, 1984, 1730 hours Eastern Daylight Time.
And what does it look like?
Is there chaos?
No, it's two guys waiting for their shift to end at a medical supply company.
(26:08):
We've got Frank, who's the veteran shift manager, and he's teaching the ropes to young
Freddy, who's a punk rocker who's just trying to get himself a summer job, it seems.
And we get to see the banal, mundane world of learning about all of this stuff that could
be creepy to anybody else, like map dogs and PT, perfect teeth on corpses.
(26:32):
And of course, while they're going through all of this and wasting time waiting for the
end of their shift, Frank decides that he has to show off a little bit.
And he decides to show how there was a weird mix up from the government and some stuff
got sent to them that was supposed to go to another place.
And it's down in the basement and it's top secret.
(26:56):
And you know what?
It's a good way to end the night.
So let's go on down there and take a look.
He takes Freddy down there and he tells the story of essentially Night of the Living Dead,
as if it's an actual thing that had happened.
And what is going on here?
Well, you've got two guys who don't really know a whole bunch about what's going on,
(27:17):
looking at something that was left by the ineptitude of the government,
bad paperwork, bad delivery systems.
We got a 55-gallon drum with a corpse inside of it, soaking in trioxin.
And it's made by the Army Corps of Engineers.
So we know it's going to fall apart.
(27:37):
It's going to leak.
The gas sprays all over Frank and Freddy and you know we're in for big trouble.
What's funny about this movie, what I love about this, this is my reading of it,
is that the end of the world happens mainly because two guys don't want to lose their jobs.
They want to cover up the fact that they've made a big mess.
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I mean, instead of it being gas and dead bodies, it was just like they spilled a bunch of paint
and they had to try and get the paint out of there before the big boss came back.
Whatever it might be, it's guys trying to slide stuff underneath doors,
pretend that nothing happened, try and save face in some way.
(28:20):
And it doesn't just stop with them.
Every level of management that they go up is another problem.
Someone just trying to cover it up and trying to see about saving face
and also just trying to make sure that nobody finds out what's going on.
Even the military is just another line of management that's trying to hide what's going on.
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As the higher up the totem pole, there's still some guy, some general sitting somewhere that
his entire job is waiting to find the thing that he has to throw away.
I love that this movie is just one escalating mistake after another.
Things just get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And you can't seem to put the genie back in the bottle, no matter what these guys try to do.
(29:09):
And I think the thing is that all of it is kind of pointless.
It's a moot point.
The reality is once that gas, once trioxin escapes from that tank, it's over.
Game is over.
It's going to end inevitably with them being nuked at some point.
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And the nuking isn't going to do anything either.
Because as we see at the end of the movie, as soon as all of those smoke clouds go up
into the sky, they end up in the rain clouds.
It rains and boom.
Now we've got an even bigger population that's being covered by trioxin laden rain.
And so the reality is we're screwed already by the weird intentions that we've had before.
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The mistake, the real mistake that is in the movie that is the only one that could have
been avoided is to not make trioxin in the first place.
Once we do that, that's the big fucking failure.
So we go from dark comedy and pitch black satire to something that's a little bit more
(30:26):
tragic, maybe a lot more tragic.
Something that we can empathize with a little bit more.
Something that we can't stand from the outside and point inward at someone.
And that would be Jeff Goldblum's character Seth Brundle in David Cronenberg's The Fly.
I think we've got a lot of things going on in the movie that we haven't been able to
all been in the situation where we are hoping to be seen for what we've brought to the
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world.
Especially if you're someone who considers themselves a bit of an artist, you want to
be seen.
You want to be heard.
You want someone to validate what's been going on.
And Seth Brundle is a scientist who's come up with some really interesting ideas, but
it doesn't seem like anybody's really taking him seriously.
We first see him, he's at a party being held by financiers, and finally he gets someone
(31:15):
who wants to actually talk to him.
And that is Veronica Quaife, who is a reporter for Particle Magazine.
He's flattered.
He finds her attractive.
So there's the mixture of being validated that you actually are being seen for the work
that you're doing.
People are having interest.
Maybe you can actually talk people into understanding what you're doing.
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And it's also not too bad that the person who understands you suddenly is someone that
you are attracted to.
So what's he working on?
He's come up with teleporter pods.
He's calling them telepods.
They disintegrate matter in one spot.
They transfer it across space and then reintegrate it, put it all back together.
The puzzle piece comes back together in another spot.
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And this could be the invention of the century if it's actually real.
So what happens?
Well, Seth is able to take Veronica and show her the telepods and show her that theoretically
this can work.
In other words, physically certain things are able to transport, but it's still not
(32:21):
completely tested and it's not completely reliable.
We have things like it's too synthetic.
There's a copy being made, but it's not necessarily the exact copy of what was sent
through.
There are sometimes flaws.
You don't want to be a rhesus monkey and be put through that thing because, oh my goodness,
(32:42):
we get to see what happens there.
But you know, where does the frailty come in?
Where is the human flaw coming in?
Where is the failure?
Well, a lot of the flaw comes from the lack of self-esteem.
The feeling that you're never good enough.
The doubt that comes into the mind of someone who's doing something pretty brilliant.
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And so what ends up happening through the story is that Seth becomes deeply connected
with Veronica.
He falls in love with her.
She seems to fall in love with him.
And instead of that being comforting to him, it fills him with even more doubt.
He's not sure what's going on.
She has a boss that it's obvious that she had a thing with at one point and that boss
(33:30):
kind of needles Seth just a little bit, just to make him realize that maybe there's a reason
for there to be a little bit of doubt.
So the end result of this is that Seth becomes highly vulnerable and Seth becomes someone
who is so worried about losing this relationship that he becomes paranoid about it.
(33:55):
And what's interesting is if you look at this movie, if you've seen the film, and I'm
certainly hoping that you did, there is this very insectile thing that happens, right?
The insect brain starts to take over.
And the insect brain isn't a completely separate brain.
It is a distillation, a laser focus to one primal thing.
(34:22):
And so the paranoia that the Brundle fly has later in the movie is just an amplification
of the paranoia and doubt and anger that Seth Brundle has in his normal human form.
But within that vulnerability that is going to get him eventually turned into Brundle
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fly, here's someone who makes mistakes.
You know, he probably shouldn't have drank that night, right?
He probably shouldn't have taken the chances that he decides to take, but he takes them
because he's not on his game.
He's imbalanced.
He is completely worried about where his relationship is going to be going.
(35:07):
And so he drinks.
And oh, by the way, before I go too far on that, he's already not exactly what I would
call working in the best conditions.
This guy is doing all of this experimentation stuff in essentially an attic.
So it's not necessarily like there's not a lot of sterility going on here.
(35:30):
But anyway, he gets drunk and he gets inside of the telepod and what's in there with him,
but he leaves the door open too long.
Whatever it is, he's got to fly in there with him.
And of course, as a scientist, this is like a major fuck up.
I mean, not only on the actual physical thing that happens in the storyline, but just the
(35:55):
idea of him being a man of science, someone who wants to be in control of all of the elements
for any of the experiments that he's doing, for him to have a fly in the room is kind of
a big deal.
And so it becomes an even bigger deal when he absorbs it.
It's one of those movies that I think really does talk to the frailty that we have.
(36:19):
The idea that failure is just one bad decision away.
It's one bit of lack of confidence away.
It's one bit of paranoia away.
We can find ourselves going down that path.
Another movie that talks to the idea of failure has to do with something that was based on
(36:45):
a crew incident.
And the idea that this actually happened just creeps me out so much because it shows how
fallible systems are as well.
And how lucky we are most of the time when the systems actually work and just how tenuous
our grasp on safety is.
(37:06):
Now, with that said, sometimes we take chances and that's a little bit of what this movie
is all about.
The movie is open water and it's based on a true story of two scuba divers who were accidentally
stranded in shark infested waters after their tour boat leaves them behind.
So what this movie does really well is, first off, one of the reasons that it's as effective
(37:31):
as it is, is that it barely feels like a move.
It's shot on digital video.
There are only a few characters in it.
It feels more like a documentary in the way that it's shot.
In some ways it feels a little bit like found footage.
And the actors are good.
They're not known actors.
Let's put it that way.
So they're kind of every people.
(37:53):
And they go out to the Caribbean and they decide that they're going to spend the day
scuba diving.
But it ends up becoming a not very good decision.
And little did they know that it was going to happen that way.
What ends up happening just seems so real.
Of course, now we know that it was real.
It ends up being a miscount.
(38:15):
It's someone manually counting how many heads there are back on the boat.
And just a little bit of a mishap on people moving items into different areas of the
boat, hiding certain things, just trying to keep them safe.
That makes it seem that maybe those people weren't there in the first place.
(38:35):
Whatever it is, too few people working on the boat, too much craziness happening.
Whatever it is, we find this moment where even though the guy's a little bit unsure,
you can tell that he kind of feels as he's counting everybody's heads that maybe the
count is off.
They still go away.
And the rest of the movie is just a fait accompli.
(38:58):
And it works so miserably well.
These two people are just out there, Susan and Daniel, bobbing away.
I call this bleeding for Godot.
There's just these two people that are out there just bobbing along, waiting for that
boat to come back.
Pretty sure that boat's going to happen.
When is the boat coming by?
(39:19):
Well, it's going to be pretty soon, I'm sure.
As they're slowly being picked to pieces by different various fish, and of course, the
sharks that are getting closer and closer.
I think this movie really bothers me because there's someone to blame, sure.
But it's not as if there was anything diabolical that happened.
(39:40):
It's something as simple as crossing the street and who knows what happens.
It creates a car accident that you get hit by a piece of debris and you're injured.
It's that kind of thing.
It's almost like the blind, bloody-eyed fate that is out there, that is swinging at all
of us, finally connects.
(40:02):
And so I highly recommend Open Water if you haven't seen it, but it's not one of those
feel-good movies.
Sometimes the failure that is there for us is when we're not being true to ourselves,
when we're not really taking care of ourselves, we're doing things for other people, we're
(40:23):
putting ourselves in risk situations to better and benefit them.
And that failure to take care of yourself, to really have a good, strong sense of self
and stand up for yourself, can be decades old.
This could be going on for years and years.
And every time it's lessening your spot in the argument.
(40:50):
And I think that's one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about Gerald's Game, which
is without a doubt one of the more harrowing ways of having a human failure show up right
in your doorstep and you can do nothing about it.
So those that don't know what Gerald's Game is, we have two people, a couple, they've
(41:12):
been married for a long period of time.
Jesse and Gerald decide to go to, I think it's their little isolated lake house, and
they decide to try and spice up their marriage a little bit.
Well, Gerald does.
I'm not necessarily sure if Jesse cares at this point.
But what we get here is that to spice this up, Gerald decides to surprise Jesse by pulling
(41:40):
out a pair of handcuffs.
He decides he's going to do a little bit of BDSM with her.
And he connects her one wrist to the handcuff, the other end of the handcuff to the bedpost.
And before he can put the second one on, Jesse finally starts to stand up for herself.
A little bit too late, it seems, and says she doesn't want to do this.
(42:04):
Now, unbeknownst to her, he's kind of ODing on Viagra because he wants to have a really
good time.
So he has been taking a few of the pills.
He's downing them with water.
And as he starts arguing with her, because of course her saying no becomes an argument,
he has a heart.
And he drops dead right there on the edge of the bed where she can't see him.
(42:29):
She's stuck without being able to get to a key.
The handcuff is deeply on her wrist.
The other part is on a very thick bedpost.
And time is passing.
And then a dog comes into the room.
And left with herself, Jesse starts to, shall we say, recalibrate what the past was like.
(42:57):
Starts to reenact all these times that she's been put in these kind of positions.
First, it starts with poor, poor pitiful me.
And then starts to become this thing of a sudden realization of what she's done to herself and
for herself over the years.
Now, metaphorically, that's really cool.
(43:18):
One of the things that makes the movie so tense is that the idea is so damn simple.
And it's not that hard to believe that it could possibly happen to you.
We all make concessions for other people.
We all are people who don't really thrive very well in confrontation.
Some of us have a better attack mechanism with it.
(43:40):
But I think a confrontation for most of us is something that we're averse to.
We prefer to get away from it.
And we sometimes leave ourselves put into certain positions because of that.
Sometimes we bite our tongues a little bit because of our position.
Because of what we might lose.
(44:01):
And I think Gerald's game talks a lot about that kind of thing.
And it's not hard for us to see ourselves being put, maybe not in a handcuff situation,
but maybe in a situation where we've gone along with something that someone wanted us to do,
or wanted us to say, and it ends up coming back on us.
And sometimes it takes the person down, like Gerald goes down in a heart attack.
(44:24):
But a lot of times, you know, folks who are asking us to do certain things,
they're using us as the shield for the bullet that's out there waiting to get people.
So yeah, failure all over the place.
The failure of being able to take care of ourselves.
Failure of putting ourselves as a priority.
Respecting ourselves enough to be able to do that.
(44:46):
Boy, if that doesn't talk to something that most artists really have a deficiency in,
I don't know what does.
Another movie that really touches on the dangers of allowing other people to have agency over you.
(45:11):
Relenting and relinquishing control to someone else.
Allowing the fates to go where they want to.
And that movie is The Descent.
The story centers around six friends, six women, who are extreme outdoor adventurers.
And there's a tragedy one year, and they get back together the next year,
(45:33):
trying to reunite, trying to find that old energy.
And things just get a little bit worse.
Our main character is Sarah.
And Sarah is suffering from major depression and grief and shock,
because the event that they were at last year ended in tragedy.
Her son and her husband were both killed in a head-on collision car accident.
(45:56):
She survived, but she was just a shell of her own self.
And so her friends decide that they're going to take her on one more excursion.
We get the feeling that Sarah would normally be one of the leaders of this group.
In fact, her and Juno seem to be duels.
Kind of a Janus mask of each other.
Whatever they do, they seem to do together.
(46:17):
And everyone else kind of falls into place,
doing their particular roles and doing their roles rather well.
But now Sarah is just a shell of herself.
And Juno is now the dominant figure in the group.
And she's bound and determined that she's going to give everyone a fantastic time
and try and somehow heal Sarah.
(46:38):
And heal something else as well, which is going to come out
as they go deeper into this three-mile hole in the ground.
So the story's supposed to be taking place, I believe, in the Smoky Mountains.
But it's obviously Scotland.
But hey, it looks really cool and really lush.
(46:59):
So where the human error starts to come in has to do with Juno.
Now, Juno is an extremist.
And she also wants to try and shake the doldrums out of Sarah.
And she believes that she can do that by putting her through some really good hard work.
So she decides to take the group to a unmarked cave.
(47:22):
One that's not really on the system from rangers.
The problem is she doesn't tell the rangers.
She doesn't tell anybody who is co-hosting with her.
Nobody knows that they're going to a different cave system
than the one that she actually wrote permits for.
So the rangers, everybody else, they're going to be looking for them at another cave not very close.
(47:48):
Now, this doesn't come out and be a problem, of course, until it is.
And what happens?
Well, I think you can kind of figure out what happens when they're down there.
Chaos reigns.
There is a cave-in.
And in that cave-in, the way out, the way that they came in is sealed.
So the group has nothing else that they can possibly do
(48:10):
except go deeper and deeper and deeper into this cave system.
And as they do, they start seeing things like old expedition hooks in the walls from climbers.
It must be like 50 years ago.
But there's nothing else.
They don't know if they ever got out.
And there's some scurrying sounds.
(48:33):
Now, obviously, it seems that there would be nothing down there.
But Sarah swears that she sees figures in the shadows when the lights go by.
So this error by Juno causes a chain reaction, which is essentially looking at
how the relationships and friendships of everybody has gone over the years,
(48:54):
and how many times Juno has kind of caused people trouble.
So everything's starting to deteriorate as they're running out of oxygen, all of that stuff.
These women who were friends, everything starts to come out.
All the old problems.
There's a lot of resentment and mistrust that's built up over the years.
(49:16):
And it's always been small potatoes, quite honestly.
Not worth their argument until it is.
And wouldn't you know it, three miles down the earth is the perfect time, I guess,
to have a complete and utter blow-up of what's going on.
But of course, they don't have enough time to be able to resolve and work things out.
Because there's something down there with them.
(49:38):
And it's pretty damn vicious.
But it may not be as vicious as the women themselves.
It's a very interesting film.
One of the last great creature feature kind of movies that I've seen in a while.
And if you're looking for a movie that really makes you feel claustrophobic,
The Descent is it.
(50:05):
So another way I want to take a look at the brief history of failure, as I am here,
is a different form of failure shown in some horror movies.
And that's the failure of good intentions.
Things that seem like they're going to do good,
and what they end up doing is absolutely destroying everything.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say.
(50:28):
And I think these two movies that I'm going to talk about today,
certainly prove that case.
The first movie is The Fearless Vampire Killers, a Roman Polanski film.
That's probably not as well known as his other works.
But this is one really funny and one really dark movie.
(50:49):
So the movie takes place in Transylvania.
And essentially you have two vampire hunters.
One that's an elderly professor,
and the other that is kind of his assistant who's not too sharp.
He's not the sharpest pencil.
And they end up going to this village looking for vampires.
And they come with the academic concept of what a vampire is.
(51:11):
And they meet real ones.
And they meet a lot of opposition to any kind of change inside this village.
People don't know what the hell they're talking about.
So when they come in and someone dies,
and they die in a way that seems as if they've been bitten by a vampire,
and they may come back and turn into vampires,
they start telling them,
(51:31):
well, you got to put a stake in the guy's heart.
And the guy's wife, the guy who's died, his wife's like,
you want me to put it where?
What are you telling me?
So the idea, the conceit of this movie is that
the people who have the knowledge cannot convey the knowledge to regular folk.
(51:51):
And the regular folk are starting to succumb to an actual evil.
And so these guys are ill-equipped to be the vampire killers that they are.
Now, the thing that makes this into a total failure
is that their good intentions are to try and rid the world of vampires.
(52:12):
And they go in with only so much data, so much skill.
And what they end up doing is inadvertently taking it from this small village
where these vampires have been living for who knows how long,
vampires from all over the world tend to come to this place.
And they feed once a year on some sacrifices.
(52:33):
And so it's almost like there's a perfect little ecosystem
that doesn't have to be fucked with.
But these guys come in with their good intentions.
And before you know it, they've essentially spread
the vampire disease to the entire planet
because they don't check their wagon
as they're heading out of the mountain village
and they go into the populous.
With all their knowledge, they still take someone
(52:55):
who's been infected into the normal populous of the world.
Mainly because one of them really likes them.
So the entire world's going to go down the drain
because one guy really finds someone who's been bitten kind of sexy.
Well, that seems like the perfect way to end the world, doesn't it?
(53:18):
The next movie shows, once again, the path of good intentions
basically wreaking havoc to a point where we have a semi-apocalypse.
And that movie is 28 Days Later.
And everything about this movie I loved.
But it starts with something very interesting.
We see a terrible lab experiment going on
(53:41):
where there are these scientists who have strapped down all of these apes.
And they're just showing these apes a bunch of violent images
over and over and over again,
allegedly anesthetizing them, creating something called The Rage,
which is poetic zombieism, I guess.
But the thing that's really interesting is this is a contained system, right?
(54:03):
And then what happens?
Animal rights activists break into the place
and decide they're going to let the monkeys loose.
Seems like a pretty good idea, right?
Except that they're already infected.
And they're infected with something that is highly communicable
and it is also a highly dangerous thing to let a rabid monkey out of a cage,
(54:25):
which they soon find out as they start getting torn to pieces by these monkeys.
As there is blood passing between the two of them,
this Rage virus starts to spread like wildfire amongst these people.
Anybody who comes into that lab, of course, is going to get infected as well.
And there's a chain reaction, which we don't necessarily see.
(54:46):
We wake up with the main character who's been in the hospital in a coma for quite a while,
finding out 28 days later, hey, look at that, raise a beer,
that the world has changed completely.
Now, I really love this idea that in a way,
it feels almost like there's no bad guy.
(55:08):
This is just a misunderstanding, a mistake that is made.
But the reality is this goes all the way back to Return of the Living Dead, right?
The big mistake was making trioxin in the first place.
Once trioxin was made, it was just a matter of time until some bumbling happens.
So, the bumbling in the first movie in Return of the Living Dead is that
(55:30):
it's all bureaucracy and people forgetting where things are and bored people
working outside of their pay level, causing all sorts of chaos.
But in this one, it's essentially saying that the system has already created our destruction
and they're keeping it self-contained, right?
It's all under control as long as everybody does the right thing.
(55:53):
But the reality is everything has to go absolutely perfectly.
There's no idea of what we can do as an afterthought.
What is the plan B?
And so, we have painted ourselves as a culture, as a society, as a civilization
into a corner where everybody has to do the right thing just to survive because
(56:16):
we've put some kind of Damocles sword above us.
We didn't really ask for it, but it's there.
And nobody can be perfect all the time.
And unfortunately, we have created a system that has these kind of things in them built in.
Well, they're going to make a bomb.
We better make a bomb.
(56:37):
And before you know it, we have escalation and everybody has one.
Everybody has 7 million of them.
We don't know what to do with them, quite honestly, as they age and as we age.
And can the technology keep up with the deterioration of these things?
Can it keep up with the idea that people are willing to do crazier and crazier things?
It seems to make a point.
(56:58):
Well, not to get too overly political or philosophical about this thing,
but I think that's why horror movies are so much fun and so good and so cleansing.
We have these nagging concerns, these anxieties that we can do absolutely nothing about,
but we can address them in a movie.
And when they are addressed correctly, like 28 Days Later does,
(57:22):
you really feel that something profound has been witnessed by you.
And you feel something inside of you shift just a little bit.
Maybe it's nothing more than, I'm not the only one.
Oh, I'm not the only one who feels this way.
And that can be a very beneficial thing to have in your life.
(57:47):
And you know what?
I'm actually starting to feel a little bit better about failure now that I've spent all
of this time talking about different forms of failures that there are in the horror film.
And yes, I do believe that horror films allow us to take a look at the things that make us angry,
make us sad, make us anxious, and give us a safe outlet to be able to maybe not work
(58:12):
these things out, but at least acknowledge them and say, yeah, me too.
I go through the same thing.
Now, I'll leave you with one last movie.
And try not to kill me when you see it.
It's brand new.
And it is, shall we say, a movie about an epic fail and multiple failures that just
continue to compound until you can barely breathe by the end of this movie.
(58:37):
And what's funny is that it's actually been touted as a dark comedy.
Yeah, I would say it's a pretty dark comedy.
So the movie is The Coffee Table.
And in the very beginning, I will say that it was very much a comedy.
Because you have this, it's like an aggravating comedy.
(58:57):
You have a couple, a married couple, go to a furniture warehouse store.
So yes, it's like a furniture outlet kind of store.
So it's not going to be a high end thing.
But the husband, he's decided he wants to get this really nasty looking coffee table.
So it's gaudy.
(59:17):
It's fake gold.
It's got these weird art deco women, naked women, that are the arms or the legs of it
portion of this thing is a plate of glass, a big sheet of glass that is allegedly unbreakable.
So says the salesman.
It is to laugh.
I mean, I've never heard of unbreakable glass, period.
(59:40):
But this becomes a bone of contention.
This coffee table is a symbol of a argument that's been long coming between these two people.
So this couple has recently had a child.
And it's obvious that it has altered the relationship quite a bit.
And the steam is just building up.
(01:00:02):
The pressure is just building up.
So the father, the husband says, you know, honey, you were able to name the kid.
It's a name I don't like, but you name the kid.
You pick the paint color that's in the house.
You pick the furniture that's in the house.
All of this stuff, the place just is completely controlled by you.
(01:00:22):
This is what I want.
I want this one thing, which is like, you want that.
That's the thing that you want.
He's like, yes.
And of course, he's not really wanting it, but he can't go back now.
This argument has continued.
So he has to save face.
So when the wife walks away saying, do what you want.
He looks at the salesman and says, you know, I can't back down on this.
(01:00:47):
Because how expensive is it?
It's expensive.
It's like, OK, let's just do this.
So that's where I'm going to stop talking about this movie.
There's this wonderful comedic element there, right?
And this turns into epic fail after epic fail after epic fail.
I don't know how long into the movie you might be laughing.
(01:01:08):
Maybe you'll laugh later.
I like to consider this kind of like an off color joke, like a really
gross joke that you might tell somebody.
And when you're telling the joke, the person might laugh and you'll laugh.
But the joke's only 10 seconds long.
This is an hour and a half of living in the imagery of the really bad, gross joke.
(01:01:32):
I'll leave you with that.
And I want to thank you for listening.
I'm feeling a little bit better about failure, folks.
I hope you do too.
Every artist has to go through it.
Every person has to go through it.
You know, get mad, have that moment.
But then relish in the recovery.
I mean, just because you made a few bad choices or you may have fucked up in some way.
(01:01:53):
You know, it doesn't mean the end of the world now, does it?
Does it?
Until we speak again, stay hellbent.
And thanks for listening to the show.
Hellbent for Horror was written and broadcast by me, S.A.
Bradley and produced by me and Lisa Gorski.
You can find more on our website, hellbentforhorror.com.
(01:02:17):
And I'm also on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash hellbentforhorror.
And my Twitter handle is hellbenthorror.
Please hit that subscribe button to get H4H hot off the press.
And if you can do a review on iTunes or whatever app you listen to us on,
that really helps people get to find us.
And now for some Hellbent for Horror news.
The podcast is available on some more outlets now.
(01:02:40):
So you can listen to H4H on Spotify.
iHeartRadio and TuneIn Radio as well as the regular iTunes, Android and Amazon apps.
And let there be swag.
H4H t-shirts are now on sale.
We have a store on tpublic.com with a bunch of Hellbent for Horror designs.
And you can have your choice of t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, coffee mugs.
(01:03:02):
Something horrible beautiful for you or that someone special.
The link to the merchandise store is on our website, hellbentforhorror.com.
And until we meet again, stay hellbent.
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