Episode 769: Season of the Witch (1972)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Projection Booth podcast is sponsored by Scarecrow Video. Try
out Scarecrows worn by mail service. Choose from over one
hundred and fifty thousand films and give Blu rays, four
k's and DVDs delivered directly to your door. Visit scarecrow
dot com today.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Oh j is.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Folks, It's showtime.

Speaker 4 (00:23):
People say good money to see this movie.

Speaker 5 (00:25):
When they go out to a theater.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
They want clothed sodas, pop popcorn in.

Speaker 5 (00:30):
No monsters in the Projection.

Speaker 6 (00:31):
Booth, everyone for tend podcasting isn't boring?

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Got it off?

Speaker 5 (01:05):
The least qualified person to understand a dream is the dreamer,
which brings us to you.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Oh god, jeez, Tony, you scared the hell out of me.

Speaker 7 (01:22):
Hm, Chalice durable knives or oh which is tools?

Speaker 5 (01:50):
You know?

Speaker 8 (01:51):
I'm just interested in it.

Speaker 9 (02:13):
I don't know you're the one.

Speaker 10 (02:16):
I'm a witch, one of them.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Welcome to the Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White.
Join me once again. Is Ms Rain Alexander.

Speaker 4 (02:37):
Hey, everybody.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Also back in the booth is Father Malone.

Speaker 5 (02:41):
I'm a hungry wife.

Speaker 4 (02:43):
I'm a hungry white.

Speaker 5 (02:44):
We're both hungry wives.

Speaker 4 (02:45):
Hungry wives.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
We wrap up October twenty twenty five with the Look
at George A Romeros underappreciated nineteen seventy two film Season
of the Witch. The film stars Nicholas Cage and Ron
Promo You how dare also known as Jack's Wife or
Hungry Wives. The film stars Jan White as Joan, a

(03:08):
bord suburban housewife whose husband leaves for long business trips
and who's grown up daughter, Nikki, doesn't need her anymore.
Unsatisfied and disenfranchised, Joan plays at being a witch in
order to have some fun and get some control over
her life. We will be spoiling this film as much
as we can, so if you don't want anything ruined,

(03:29):
just turn off the podcast. Come back after you've seen
the movie. Pretty readily available, we will still be here. So, Rain,
when was the first time you saw a Season of
the Witch? And what did you think?

Speaker 4 (03:40):
You know, this is one of those movies that I
convinced myself I had seen before i'd actually seen it.
I had deja vu, which is so interesting given the
nature of this film. So I really honestly cannot tell
you when I first saw this movie. The first time
I saw it, I thought I had already seen it,
but the fact I f like it ventures into scandalous

(04:04):
early seventies softcoreror. Clearly, I hadn't seen this on network
television the way that I thought that I kind of had.
So I really cannot tell you. I can say that
I've watched this with regularity for the last ten years.
I love this movie.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
So much and fother them alone. How about yourself.

Speaker 5 (04:25):
I first saw this movie on videotape as a young
man in the nineteen eighties. Once The Zombies at a
Pittsburgh Paul Gann's book about Georgia Marray's retrospective of George
Mayer up until that point came out, I had to
find every Romero film and this was the most intriguing
one because it was called Season of the Witch, even
though he lays out that it's not particularly a horror film.

(04:47):
And I had a sympathetic video store clerk who would
order movies that I was obsessing about. So I got
Season of the Witch then, and I fucking hated it.
I was fourteen, and I wanted more. I wanted bub
and I wanted the Creep show Creep and Fluffy, and

(05:08):
I wanted zombie zombies and this movie barely hints at horror,
and my mind are reielded it. I have a far
differing opinion about the film now, thank you very much.
But that you asked what when I thought what my
thought was, I was like, I took it back and
I was like, I'm sorry I made you order this.
That's what a little prick IY was.

Speaker 4 (05:29):
So funny you weren't ready for the feminist Awakening movie,
which you know arguably is a horror movie.

Speaker 5 (05:35):
It was that I needed monsters. That's that's what I
That's what I needed from joeg Ramiro at that time.

Speaker 4 (05:40):
You wanted witches, you wanted like hearts and a hand
and like all of that.

Speaker 5 (05:45):
Yeah, I'm down for the feminist angle. As long as
they're fucking They're slaying motherfuckers by the end of the movie.

Speaker 4 (05:51):
That's what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
So when did you come around to this film?

Speaker 5 (05:55):
You know, I've been a Ramero obsessed with my entire life,
and once I keyed into his actual strength as a filmmaker,
which is his editing prowess, rewatching this movie, it's such
a joy and realizing that this actually despite the presence
of Night of the Living Dead and there's always Vanilla

(06:15):
and all the industrials. This is his first film. This
is the first film that he wrote and he directed
and didn't have anyone else's hand in the pot. Obviously,
I got older, so I knew it's not a fucking
horror movie, and I knew Romero was this filmmaker who
yearned to break free of the genre bonds. So reevaluating

(06:37):
it then, you know, I slowly began to love it.
I actually think it's one of his better movies. All
of those that the more personal films from the nineteen
seventies are now and at least with Martin. Martin's always
been my favorite, but this is creeping up because you
can feel him more in these movies than you can
you know, you know, like The Craziest For God's Sake,
which is around this time.

Speaker 4 (06:57):
I think that I've had the benefit of reatless back
with Romero in such a major way, and I'm able
to look at his films like and look at the
politics of his films in such an interesting way. The
amusement Park being another one that crept up out of
obscurity in recent years that are talking about actual interesting things,
I mean, like and that's what I think the best

(07:19):
of all horror does is just talks about these like
really really horrible, horrible underpinnings of the things that we
do as humans and enact on each other as humans.
And so I don't think this is divorced from horror,
but it's definitely not the kind of thing where you
just want to see, you know whatever, Freddy Krugery eviscerating

(07:40):
a child and Nimaron elm Street eighteen or whatever.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
Yeah, I said, it's a horror film, and yeah, we
recently talked about the film in My Skin, and we
kept going back and forth. Is it a horror film?
Is it not a horror film? Season of the Witch
is not a traditional horror film insofar as yeah, there's
not Witchcraft and the hearts and the hands and all
the those kind of things that we're talking about. This
is not the points he had in The Long Nose

(08:04):
type of which. This is much more of a horrible
situation that our main character is in and her just
trying to get some sort of identity. And I really
prefer the title Jack's Wife to Season of the Witch
or Hungry Wives. I know I love Hungry Wives in
a way, but just that whole like Oh, we're gonna,

(08:26):
you know, sell this as a cannibal film, you know,
because witchcraft and cannibals go together really well as well.
You know, you think of those ladies from Clash of
the Titans and they've got that big cauldron and there's
a hand coming out of it, those kind of things.
But yeah, this is much more of I mean God. Also,
when we talked about In My Skin, I couldn't help
but get so ingrained in the opening credits. The opening

(08:50):
credits for this movie. I don't want to say it's
the best part, but it's a masterclass. It is just
amazing these opening credits. I love the way they're shot.
I love of the symbolism in them. I love the
use of the sound effects and the music. Everything is
coming together and just telling this story. The opening credits
could just be an experimental film onto itself and just

(09:12):
be like, Okay, that's it, We're done. And the opening
credits come in multiple parts, it's not like it's just
one segment. You've got the opening where you see the
forest and you're not really sure what's going on and
you're starting to see the credits there, and then you
go into more of this sequence of a man reading

(09:33):
a newspaper walking through this forest. He seems to have
very much a purpose. And then this poor woman behind him,
who is I guess six paces right. The old woman
stands six paces behind the man though he's moving branches
and they're just smacking her back in the face. She's
getting cut by these things. I just love how this

(09:54):
tells this story. And that's before we even go into
this whole dog imagery, much less the tour of the
house part that we get. I mean, this is just
freaking fantastic. I love the opening to this movie.

Speaker 5 (10:08):
It could be argued that Ali Vermero's credit sequences to
a point basically tell you everything that you're about to see.
And you, as you said, you could stop there the
Night of the Living Dead, how spare it is, and
just the shots of rural Pennsylvania like that's it's an
empty world we're gonna get, you know, and you're right,
it is like an experimental film. And the editing, I'm

(10:31):
gonna say it a lot, probably in the episode, but
his editing style is so crazily cool, and I know
it's because he cut his teeth making not just industrials,
but before that, like when he really got his start,
he was working for the news agencies, where he was
cutting you know, five or you know, seven minute reels
of local patter from shots of like a bridge is out,

(10:53):
and he had to make everything sort of concise and wonderful.
Once he gets his own palette here, and as I said,
this is the first time he gets to go really
and be as expressive as he wants and be as
evocative of the filmmakers that I think influenced Vermeira the most.
Like I think it's not French new Wave, but certainly
the European flavor that infected American cinnamon in the early sixties.

(11:16):
Ramia was always trying to sneak it in in every feature,
and I think that plays a lot into this opening montage.

Speaker 4 (11:24):
It echoes the way that John Waters was making films
in the same time, you know, really like I'm going
to do my take on Boon, Well, I'm going to
do my take on Fastbender or Fellini, but like in
this like uniquely American kind of way. Absolutely, I fully,
fully agree with you on that.

Speaker 1 (11:42):
This tells the story of the movie and really encapsulates
that you have her walking past this baby and you
find out later on that she lost a baby past
this little girl, and you're like, okay, she's kind of
losing her little girl or little girl is growing up,
and then hell yeah, just this whole idea of like
her in the car and her husband coming around the

(12:05):
car and trying to get her out and she locks
the door. He eventually has her open up the door,
and then he smacks her in the face with a
newspaper like she's a dog, puts a leash on her,
basically takes her inside of a kennel. Basically it's their
life together because we've got the little baby before we
see the little girl, and I could be screwing up.

(12:28):
It might actually be her on the swing rather than
her little girl, but it's like it feels like it's
telling like this whole their marriage together and then where
she's at and then once they go from that kennel
into the house, Holy fuck. I just love it. The
whole thing being done like a commercial and just like
welcome to your new house. It feels just like a

(12:50):
game show winner or something, just like oh, here you go,
here's everything that you need, and just showing her the
pointlessness of it, especially when he's.

Speaker 5 (12:59):
Like the ladies.

Speaker 7 (13:00):
Of course, we're available for luncheons and teas and bridge
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 5 (13:10):
Oh your figure shopping and visiting.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
Before she then sees the old version of herself. And
it's just like, if you don't get out of this rut,
if you don't get away from that stack of checks
that's going to run your life for the rest of
your life, you're gonna end up like this old woman
that she literally can't get away from every time she
turns around. There, so that old woman. And I love
those things where she's lifting her hands up and then

(13:35):
you see the old woman lifting her hands up and
it's done very very well. And I like that makeup
effect on her too. That just makes her look like
a desiccated husk.

Speaker 4 (13:46):
But I also don't think she looks that bad. I mean,
that's the other part about that is the like, am
I all right? Well, you know if that's where I
started and that's where I ended up, that's not so bad, right,
Like she's not that desicated, And like we're in into
thinking about how horrible it is for a woman to
be old, right by whatever measure old means, whether it's

(14:07):
thirty five or fifty five or older in that way,
like she was like, what would she looked? Maybe late
forties to me, maybe early fifties.

Speaker 9 (14:15):
That's not that old.

Speaker 5 (14:16):
Oh, I didn't think she even looked that old, like
you know, of course there was a sliding scale by
nineteen seventy two or something like that, right, she was
old fucking news by then.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
You know.

Speaker 5 (14:29):
I mentioned Martin, which is a follow up to this film,
and I think is actually a great little book end
to this film, because you know, I think Martin is
his most personal film and certainly more from a male perspective,
and this is Romero trying to stretch his female perspective
with the with the feminist movement going on around him.
And he was certainly a cool guy, he was of

(14:50):
the movement, right. But what's funny is between the two movies.
The sort of dream sequences in Martin are very gothic
and slow motion and hypnotic, and the film itself is
very frantic, and it's exactly the opposite here. Her dreams
are horrifying and everything else is almost to a crawl,
like a camu, like lulling you with its evil.

Speaker 4 (15:14):
You know, thinking back to that opening sequence. It wasn't
until doing some later reading that and watching that it
became clear to me that there was a lost child, right,
somebody maybe who died in childbirth or early age, and
that was supposed to be that baby that she sees
in that opening sequence. For years, I've been watching this

(15:35):
is just a movie about empty nest syndrome, right, I
fully just read that baby as her daughter that's like
now in conflict with her, and you know, and kind
of vanishes, and so, you know, I spend a lot
of time when I watched this movie really trying to
place myself back in nineteen seventy two, which was before

(15:57):
I was conscious and certainly before I was politically but
like what it meant to be a woman in that time.
Like we're through the sexual revolution, as it were for
the United States, but this is still before women have
the right to have an abortion, before we're able to

(16:17):
like have her own checking accounts without a man involved.
And that's one of the underpinnings. I think we should
talk about this later, just the underpinnings of the finances
of this film. The scene where she puts down her
master card right at the witch store, that was a
revolutionary act. She couldn't have her own credit card in
nineteen seventy two.

Speaker 5 (16:38):
I'd like to point out that the card, if you
look closely, is George Romero's card.

Speaker 4 (16:43):
Of course it is, of course it is. This is
the situation under which she's laboring. The second wave of
feminism gets a lot of shit, which is absolutely deserved
for you know, it's the limitations of its opinions, and
we can talk more about what that means later, But
at this same time, we're talking about a generation of

(17:03):
people who really did not have economic liberation. They do
not have that kind of emancipation. And once you're done
with your reproductive role, what else is there for you
in this world?

Speaker 1 (17:17):
Real quick, I wanted to point out that when I
am talking about this movie, I am not sure exactly
which version I'm talking about, because I've seen both the
what is it? An hour and forty two minute version
which has the title Jack's Wife, as well as the

(17:38):
almost ninety minute version that has the title Season of
the Witch. And it's interesting because I think I like
mostly the Jack's Wife cut as well, because it is
a little bit more straightforward, even with the opening credits
that I keep talking about I am referring to that

(17:59):
version because those things like oh, here's the checkbooks, here's
the handyman, here's the you know, and like getting all
of those characters introduced right up front. That happens within
the first five minutes of the Jack's Wife cut. Meanwhile,
in season the Witch cut, that dream sequence is being
broken up by different things we're seeing, like the dinner

(18:22):
party with the mad libs, We're seeing her with this psychiatrist,
and I'm not even sure if that psychiatrist is Those
scenes are in the Jack's Wife cut, So it's interesting
the differences I kept looking for, Like I rag on
Tim Lucas a lot, but like the thing that video
Watchdog used to do for me so well was going

(18:42):
through and saying, in this version, you see this, and
then you see this, and just like running through those
I kept looking for, what are all the differences between
the cuts, because it's interesting to me that you would
think that the shorter version of the film would just
be a shorter version of the film, But it's a
kind of a radical re edit in different points. And
I don't know if I necessarily like that, even though

(19:04):
I will say for as much as I like this movie.
Sometimes it gets a little long in the tooth. There
are some scenes that are just really super talky. But
the more I watch this movie, the more I like
those scenes especially. I mean, and I think it was
just because it makes me uncomfortable. The scene with her
friend and ray Lane where he gives her a joint,

(19:24):
fake joint. Sorry, nobody in the audience can see me
making quotation fingers. That scene is so uncomfortable, but it's
such a great scene, and it is so critical to
this film.

Speaker 4 (19:37):
It really is. You may have your fantasies about your
revenge against Gladys Kravitz, right, but this is the manifestation
of that, really in so many ways, and it's so uncomfortable.
You don't want her to suffer. You don't want to
be gas lit by your like fake weed.

Speaker 5 (19:55):
It's the worst prank to play on somebody, honestly, where
that you allow them to behave in this for you know,
like I'm altered, like ah. And then what's worse to me, though,
is that she tells her like I just let it lie,
let everyone play along. You were high. Absolutely, I'll see
you tomorrow. You go sleep it off.

Speaker 1 (20:14):
Oh I should also say, bring you brought up the
baby at the beginning, and that's one thing that's critically
missing from the shorter version is the discussion she has
with her daughter about having had this baby beforehand.

Speaker 8 (20:27):
My brother died before or after I was born. Before
you knew that, well, I always figured, but I wasn't
really sure. In fact, I was never sure that i'd
even be able to carry a baby. I was never
sure i'd even be able to carry you. Yeah, but

(20:48):
I didn't know, like maybe you were because you hadn't
been able conceive it.

Speaker 7 (20:52):
Something was wrong, getting old or something. But I know
I told you.

Speaker 8 (20:56):
We've talked about this before.

Speaker 10 (20:58):
I just wasn't sure.

Speaker 2 (20:59):
If that was before the baby died.

Speaker 8 (21:01):
That song, But you're saying I never told you. No,
I'm not well, you certainly are not looking mother.

Speaker 10 (21:06):
I'm really sorry.

Speaker 7 (21:07):
I just wasn't sure. Now you probably did tell me.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
I'm sorry, again, showing her vulnerability and also introducing that
relationship or non relationship she has with her daughter. So again,
I think it's just really critical that we look at
the longer version of this.

Speaker 4 (21:23):
I totally agree, and I mean it. It also gets at
that idea that if her firstborn was a boy, I mean,
we're still dealing with what the patriarchy demands, right, So
she produced a boy, it didn't survive, and now she's
got a girl and that's it. Like, you know, it's
like there's a sad Trump. There's a sad Trombon aspect

(21:45):
to it. Unfortunately, because that is nineteen seventy two.

Speaker 5 (21:48):
As you said, Mike, it would seem that a shorter
version of the film is not the director's cut. And
I think a good rule of thumb with Georgia Merrow
is if there's a longer version, that's his version every
single time. You know, he's the most economical of filmmakers.
So if a director's cut exist, the closest you're going
to get to it, and none exists for this movie.
I know that there was at least a three hour version.

(22:10):
There's talk of the five hour version, which is crazy.
It's just that's just a fucking general assembly. But I
bet there's a three hour version and then Ramera cut
it down and then cut it down again, you know.
I mean, how many versions of fucking Dawn of the
Dead did we watch for your podcast on that like seven?

Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yeah, and that's before the Italians got.

Speaker 5 (22:29):
A hold of it.

Speaker 4 (22:29):
But you know, I said this during the Tank Girl podcast,
I want the four hour version of this. I would
love nothing more than just lay it all out, show
me everything you shot, show me all your ideas, George
and Nancy. I would love to know more about Nancy's
role in this development of this. You know she was
a producer, she's in there.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
Well, how strange is that they're shooting the film in
the house of the woman of the of the parents
of the woman who would become his next wife.

Speaker 5 (22:59):
Oops, it would be creepy if it wasn't fucking Christine
Romero or Christine Forrest, who is so wonderful.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
I'm so curious if those humble lamps that are featured
so prominently in this film, if those actually belonged to
her parents, but those were given me nightmares, if those
were in my house, and that it just captures that
the whole decor of this movie. And I know a
lot of this is sada is shot on sets, but
a lot of it is shot in houses. This captures

(23:27):
nineteen seventy two fashions and ugly decor better than any
movies that I've seen in a long damn time. And
you know, you watch something like, Oh, isn't it funny?
How like in Edward Scissorhands there's the big fork or
spoon and those kind of things, and like, yeah, those
were kitchy things and I remember those. But you look
at just the bric a brac and like, especially that

(23:50):
cocktail party scene. It just oh, the woman with the
big flup in her hair and she's got that horrible
top and oh my lord, it just takes me back.

Speaker 5 (24:03):
If you want a genuine snapshot of a time period,
go to the independent film where they had to bring
their own clothing and use their own adornments.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
Oh yeah, and they probably dressed to the nines for
something like this, where it's like, oh, this is a
party scene, you better dress nice. So yeah, here, let
me put on. It's just some of the most iesore
outfits I see, dare you. It was all elegant in
nineteen seventy two, it was swelligant. I really appreciate what

(24:33):
he's doing with the way that he lays out the story.
We get more of the husband in the dream sequence
opening sequence than we do in the rest of the movie.
It feels like he's kind of barely there even like
her life. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5 (24:49):
You're speaking earlier to like her usefulness, Like she's had
the kid now and she's maintained that house, but he
was never there to begin with and now doesn't have
the kid either. What is her purpose now containing the
house and getting beaten?

Speaker 10 (25:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (25:03):
Right, both emotionally and otherwise.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
Yeah, it's very smart to show us that newspaper because
you just get that idea right there of the violence
that's in their relationship and that has that potential, and
you get that little flash of a dream sequence when
her before she wakes up and find her finds her husband.
What doing calisthenics at the side of the bed. It's

(25:27):
so weird.

Speaker 5 (25:29):
That was great man. That scared the shit out of me.

Speaker 4 (25:31):
Scariest shit.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
Yeah, I don't know which is scarier. That's kind of
like jump scary moment or him popping up over the
side of the bed. It's like, whoa, what are you doing?

Speaker 5 (25:40):
Honey?

Speaker 4 (25:41):
Oh, it's definitely when he popped up, because who needs
that scariest scary scary bad.

Speaker 5 (25:45):
Enough he's home, never mind acting like a demented jack
in the box.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
Got to reminded me of the jump scare that we
had in that Tales from the Dark Side episode that
Tom Savini directed.

Speaker 5 (25:58):
Oh, the rasin one with the wolf.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
With the wolf. Yeah, and that like long Cheney thing
that he shows because you get.

Speaker 5 (26:04):
Just right the mannequin head just because you just.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
Get that flash it feels like, you know, unless I'm
remembering it incorrectly, but.

Speaker 5 (26:11):
It was a flash frame much like Romero employees.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
Which is great because then that also plants this idea
of the supernatural, but also the dreams that she's going
to have later on where she's being pursued by this
creature basically, you know.

Speaker 5 (26:25):
And that's another thing I like about this movie and
another reason I think it's a book into Martin. Both films.
In this case it's a witch. In Martin, it's a vampire.
And in both cases it's completely open to interpretation whether
or not they actually are those things. And I know
in Romero's case he had answers for both of them,
but he did not care what your answer was, Like

(26:47):
I phrased that incorrectly. He encouraged you to make your
own mind up.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
Talking about nineteen seventy two, And I've talked about this
so many times before, and I apologize to the audience,
but just going back to just how strange their late
sixties early seventies were and just this weird void of
spirituality that was happening, people questioning their faith, New Age

(27:11):
stuff coming up. I mean, cults were really big. I mean,
you know, bigger than Christianity, which is the biggest cult around.
But just this whole idea of like, oh, well, we're
going to fill our lives with something other than just
traditional religion.

Speaker 5 (27:27):
Sammy Davis Junior is a Satanist.

Speaker 4 (27:30):
It's also the transformation of what Flower Children into Evangelicals, right,
So we've got that motion happening at the same time,
like these just this search for like whatever, this spiritual anchor,
and I feel like this is all through this film, right,
And you know, I mean I wasn't raised Catholic. I'm like,

(27:51):
I'm aware of Catholicism. How could you not be? But
at the same time, like I've always wondered, are just
horror movies scarier if you're Catholic? Is Season the which
more of a horror movie if you come from a
Catholic place?

Speaker 5 (28:04):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (28:04):
Maybe maybe, I don't know. I can't say for sure.

Speaker 5 (28:08):
You know, I listened to the Joe Dante's podcast movies
that made me all the time. And anyone who brings
up The Exorcist will Joe Dante will immediately chime in
and ask if they're Catholic, because the determining factor for
him is whether whether or not that movie actually scared us,
whether you're Catholic or not. And in that movie, that
movie's a little obvious in that it's dealing with priests
and it's sort of all sort of in your face.

(28:31):
But Romero, you know, he was Catholic, and we get
a lot of religion in a lot of his movies,
and for some reason, it just feels the same level
of dread. Sort of the way he looks at the
what it lurks as evil feels very very familiar to me.

(28:52):
It feels like somebody who has dipped their hand into
the Holy water on Sunday mornings. I don't know that
that it's as a resident and here because religion is
just another stumbling block against her, whereas it's not. You know,
it's a little more pronounced than something like Dawn of
the Dead, where we're watching the desiccation and fall of
all religion, but sort of pointed in a way. Maybe

(29:15):
it's all in my fucking head. But and I want
to feel a kinship with George Romero. It's just that
I do feel like there are just hints of the
ritual and the tie to the past and the slavery
to that that sort of permeates his work and at
least resonates with me on a level that I think
I understand.

Speaker 4 (29:36):
Kind of on that note, I'm just looking at my
notes for this, and there's a moment that I think
is kind of a key to this entire film, which
it's positive as a Catholic idea, but it's something that
was really part of my own upbringing as a Mormon
child too. And it's when one of the women responds
to Joan saying, you Catholics. The academic thought is just

(29:59):
as is doing it.

Speaker 5 (30:01):
The sin is the thought.

Speaker 4 (30:03):
So she's having all these nightmare she's having these dreamscapes
which are just as bad as actually manifesting this in
real life. Is actually going to the witch store and
you know, seeing the guy with a funny mustache, Like,
love that guy, fantastic, He's so great. I want to
go to that store. But you know, like I think
that this is really the key to it. This is

(30:24):
the whole movie. She's thought about this, and now she
thinks that something else is possible. And if I don't
get the sense that she's hung up on her own Catholicism,
but like that's her origin point in the same way
that we're talking about nineteen seventy two is an origin
point for you know, feminist economic liberation as well. This

(30:46):
is where we're starting. If I think about this something
else as possible.

Speaker 5 (30:50):
The idea of the Catholicism about thought being the sin
is that thought is an action. And one of the
things he's dealing with here is whether or not this
new sort of focus on herself is opening this doorway
to this other power she's tapping into her own femininity.
She is interested in this younger man, this boyfriend of

(31:10):
her daughters, and manifests that. But at the same time
she fucking calls him. Is the power that it manifested
itself because she wanted it to happen? Or is it
fucking motivated her to actually put in action what she
wanted to begin with.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
It's funny that you use manifest in that way, because
that is so what I hear a lot of the
kids these days saying, where it's like, I'm gonna manifest this,
I'm gonna manifest that, and it's just like, all right,
I guess that's your new little religion thing. You're just
gonna put those thoughts out into the world and then
good things are gonna come back to you. It's just
as spiritual void as this is. And we were talking

(31:50):
about the sin. I mean, I'm trying to think if
there's a play or anything else where. It's just like
the mother lusting after the daughter's boyfriend and that all
through here where it's like, I don't know why she's
so turned on by Ray Laying, especially after he humiliates
her friend. But when she goes back to her house
and she's on that big old bed all by herself,

(32:12):
dressed up to the nines with that crazy blue eyeshadow,
she just starts feeling herself up and I'm like, okay,
I know who you're thinking about, lady. And you get
that great shot of the bull totem on the mantle,
and I'm just like, oh, how virile this is. That's
so awesome. There are so many awesome shots in this movie.

(32:33):
There's one I meant to talk about earlier where she's
I think she's getting ready, and you see her on
the left side of the screen. There's a mirror in
the middle of the screen, and there's another mirror to
the right up on the screen, and you see her
face in that mirror, and like her upper body. But
then in the right hand mirror you see her feet

(32:55):
and it's like, what an amazing angle you had to
do with that mirror to shoot it so that you
can see her feet in that reflection. I mean, it
almost looks like an insert. I know it's not an insert,
but it almost looks like it. And then to see
her then start to move in one plane and then
see her kick off her own slippers and stuff in
the other, just like this is so unusual, but I

(33:18):
love it.

Speaker 4 (33:19):
It feels real to me. I'm a trans woman of
a certain page, and I mean just that disidentification and disembodiment,
this fragmentation of one's own body felt so familiar. And
so I mean that scene strikes me every time, not
just from like the technical aspect, because like, holy fuck,

(33:41):
like how cool, but you're able to make that work somehow,
But like it's also it's not just cool, it's very meaningful.
It's very resonant, and you know, and maybe it's a
generational thing. Maybe it's these days aren't going to resonate
with that kind of fractured embodiment. But it works for me.

Speaker 5 (34:02):
And this is his last film as his own cinematographer,
so it's it's the last time he's actually operating in
the camera. So these are all his shots, all his lighting,
all his setups. And obviously Mike Gornett sort of picks
up the mantle after this and sort of takes the rein.
But I'm gonna keep saying it like I hated the
movie when I was young, and now I feel so

(34:22):
fucking guilty of it because it is really pure Romero.
You know, he this is he raised that money, and
you know, they fucked him out of the money, and
he persevered and he kept doing it, and he's literally
it's you know, it's it's like El Mariachi. He's he's
shooting it, he's directing it, he's editing it, he's producing it.
It's I don't know, it's just kind of a marvel.

Speaker 4 (34:42):
Yeah. Was it what two hundred, two hundred, two thousand
dollars or something that this ended up being?

Speaker 7 (34:46):
Right?

Speaker 5 (34:47):
It was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars was promised
if like they were gonna make, they were gonna match
his one hundred thousand dollars, and then they just fucked up.
And he's like, well, I guess we're making our two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars movie for a hundred thousand,
and it looks like a two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
It looks like a five. It's like a five hundred
thousand dollars.

Speaker 4 (35:01):
Ever, be honest, it really looks amazing, and not even
like discounting it for its age, or for its time
or for any of that, I feel like it looks
gorgeous throughout.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
That's the one thing that makes me a little sad
is that we're you know, I keep touting this longer version,
but it looks worse than this shorter version as far
as the video quality goes. And I'm like, can't we
do something about like that? Can you do like a
fan edit or something where you replace all of the
bad stuff in the longer one with the good stuff

(35:35):
from the short one. But yeah, it would almost Again,
It's kind of that thing that I'd like, like we
were talking about Metropolis a few months ago, where it's like, oh,
here's the footage that they found in Brazil, and look
how shitty this is. But at least it tells me
this was the stuff that was found. This was not
extant in all of these other prints, and it's like, Okay,

(35:56):
it's kind of shitty, but I really do like knowing that.

Speaker 4 (36:00):
It's good to have that stuff available. I mean, that's
why I would love to see the longer version of this.
There are just so many ideas that are in this
film that are important to me as a viewer, as
a political thinker, as an artist. That would be my
you know, that's what I want. You know, It's just
not going to be for everybody, and it doesn't need
to be. Would I have resonated with this film when

(36:21):
I was twelve, sixteen, twenty two, No, I don't think
at any level I would have. I needed to have
some age to really feel this, you know. I mean
in that way, I feel like it's really a film
for me.

Speaker 1 (36:35):
Yeah, I found them alone. You shouldn't feel guilty. I
know you're Catholic, but you shouldn't feel guilty for not
liking it right off the bat, because yeah, there's so
many movies I saw when I was younger where I'm like,
I have no reason to be watching this. I have
no right to be watching this, and I know this
was not made for me. But then I can come
back to it twenty years later and be like, Okay,

(36:56):
now I finally get it. Like I imagine going back. You know,
this kind of remind me of The Ice Storm, the
Anglee film, and I'm like, well, maybe if I go
back to that now, I'll like it more than just
seeing Sigourney Weaver dressed up like a dom That was
the only thing I liked in the first time I
saw it.

Speaker 5 (37:12):
So, you know, I've never seen The Ice Storm. I'm
just gonna write that down.

Speaker 4 (37:16):
It's a really good connection with this film.

Speaker 5 (37:18):
I thought about that.

Speaker 4 (37:19):
I mean, there are a ton of films that I
kept thinking about as I was watching the film for
this podcast that I didn't make time for. I didn't
make time for Martin, I didn't make time for The
Ice Storm. I did make time for the Love, which
we can talk about later about Like, there's so many
filmic linkages. I mean, like, you know, what's his name?
The little playboy guy is talking about missus Robinson all

(37:39):
the way through, right, they're talking about Rosemary's babies and folks,
So this is like a culturally conscious film.

Speaker 5 (37:49):
He does that again in Martin, where Romero himself appears
as a Catholic priest and is talking about how hilarious
he thought the Exorcist was.

Speaker 4 (37:59):
I don't know, certainly know what that does other than
like really situate situated in a time and place, gives
our playboy a little personality because he's living this like
fantasy world where I guess he's like a cool Dustin Hoffman.
Maybe I guess, I don't know, or you know, I
can handle missus Robinson.

Speaker 5 (38:17):
It also accomplishes the Sam Raimi West Craven feud of
yours is just a movie. Mine's the real deal.

Speaker 4 (38:25):
Touche touche.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
Going back to that spiritual void that I was talking
about earlier. Oh, we're just going to go in this
bookstore and there's all these books about witchcraft. I mean
you could literally go into and maybe they had these
in other places. Well, I'll say, I want to say
F and M. I'll say a Woolworth. You could go
into a Woolworth and there would be books like that

(38:48):
at the checkout or in their little paperback rack that
they would have, and this party that they go to
where it's terror reading. Parties like that still happen today.
I know that my mom, who are an atheist, she's
been to a lot of parties where there were tarot readings,
and just this rings so true to me when I

(39:10):
see this scene of the you know, well, don't give
me money, you know, maybe send me a check and
just the whole pattern that the woman has, and you
can tell she's told these jokes like a hundred times,
like oh if only I had a hundred like you,
but instead I have a thousand. You know, it's like, Okay,
you've told this joke many many times, Like it really

(39:31):
feel like you going through your steps with this and
just that whole cold reading thing that she's doing. Oh
this mysterious man. It's like, all right, you're just handing
people what they want to hear, you know, rather than
I mean that's how I always feel about this stuff,
Rather than it is like oh it's spiritual and oh
they made this connection and stuff. I'm just like, no,

(39:52):
I'm not really buying that. It's just more of like cool,
send me more money when you get home, wait until
after wait until you know these seeds in your head,
and then send me this stuff. But yeah, I just
love this whole idea of the tarot party that they're
going to and her picking up the uh to be
a witch A primer.

Speaker 4 (40:12):
Father Malone, Mike, I do have a confession to make.
Uh Oh, I'm a witch. But I have done tarot readings.
I have done tarror readings a lot. I've done her
tarot parties.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
Like I said, that still happens today.

Speaker 4 (40:25):
Right exactly, it does still happen today. This movie helped
me set my rates as a reader. So I found
it very, very very helpful because like I did hit
a place where I'm like, I need some other income streams.
I'm going to open this up. What do I even do?
Your Like, I don't feel right about asking people money
for this because part of it is performance hard. Part

(40:48):
of it is reading the cards and kind of interpreting
and working with somebody to kind of like think about
what this might be representative of. There's storytelling, you know,
it's like as an artist, like I felt it as
an art practice more than anything else. But it also
found it very very effective and I found a lot
of clients that were really great to work with, and

(41:08):
this movie really was like, Okay, well, if I don't
have to like, oh ah, my time is worth fifty
dollars an hour, I can let them tell me what
they think this is worth to them. And I found
I've always found that really really helpful as a practitioner,
as somebody who is engaged to a certain extent in
that world.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
That's awesome. I love that this helped you with your
rate setting.

Speaker 5 (41:31):
That's great movie as instructive as it is enjoying enjoying
it is it is like I.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
Was saying, there are some scenes that get really really talky.
Maybe we could trim here, maybe we could trim there.
But again, the more I watch it, the more I'm like, no, no,
this definitely needs to be here. All of this stuff
adds up. Yeah, I appreciate what he's doing with us,
and to see her journey, to see how she changes
through this, that she does start to take the witchcraft

(42:01):
as a way of having an identity. That that's the
thing that she says at the end, I'm a witch
Like she's able to have that statement, But then you
get that undercut of that's Jack's wife. At that point,
Jack doesn't even exist anymore. There is no Jack. Jack
is dead, but yet she still carries that weight of

(42:23):
Jack's Wife with her. That's why I think that that's
a way better title than anything else. I mean, Season
of the Witch is cool, especially since you have the
Donovan song in the movie, which was such a surprise
to me. When that came up, I was like, really,
oh he could afford that. But of course I think
the song was a little bit less money than you

(42:44):
are being charged now.

Speaker 4 (42:46):
It gave the film the name, so you know, there
is that benefit. I go back and forth on it
so much. What I feel weirder about having to say, oh,
one of my favorite movies ever made is called Jack's
Wife versus what are the other possible titles?

Speaker 6 (43:01):
Right?

Speaker 4 (43:02):
I mean, yeah, I know Hungary Wives was developed as
something to sell it as like something it wasn't, you know,
like a scandalous porn when it was really more of
a rape movie for example. But Hungry Wives does sound
pretty fucking cool, but it does convey like a kind
of a what cannibalism or you know, something along those lines.

(43:22):
Season the Witch ultimately is pretty generic. But no, I
do agree with you, like, if we want to talk
about the political impact of this movie, for it to
be called Jack's Wife, it does the job.

Speaker 5 (43:34):
And you know, Romero, if it conversationally referred to it
as Jack's Wife for the rest of his life, there's
something to be said for that. I think Season of
the Witch is a fine title for the movie, except
here's the thing. Hungry Wives is the best title for
the movie, honestly, but only if Romero had come up
with that. And that's not him, that's the distributor who
did that. He settled on Season of the Witch precisely

(43:57):
because they had the soundtrack of the song on the soundtrack.
But it should be Jack's Wife just as a pure
piece of entertainment, you know, it's such a thematic thing.
Like the last line is there because it's the goddamn
title for Gris's sake.

Speaker 4 (44:12):
Obviously, there are a lot of other women who presumably
are wives in the film, but like, I really only
see one clearly hungry wife in this movie, right, why
is it hungry wives? I will see a sequel where
they all fucking create a coven. I want surely to
actually hit a reefer and like, really lot loose, Well,
we all want to say on you're putting me.

Speaker 5 (44:34):
On they're hungry wives, because that's way more appealing to
a desperate, horny guy who's going to the drive end
later that night.

Speaker 1 (44:43):
The one filmmaker that I have mentioned that this also
reminds me quite a bit of is Polanski and the
scenes where she's being attacked by the masked man and
that horrific mask that he's wearing, so reminds me of
Repulsion and Atherine Deneuve going through her psychosis in that apartment.

(45:04):
And you get that amazing shot of all the hands
coming out of the wall, and I think we all
know that we see that again in the Day of
the Dead, that amazing shot where she turns and all
the hands come out. It's so cool. Ever since I
saw he Repulsion, I'm just like, oh, okay, now I
know where Romer got that. I don't say he's ripping

(45:24):
off Polansky. I think it was much more of an
homage to Polanski. Totally different circumstances as well, but I
really feel that this the sequences of her being terrorized
in her own house, and especially his use of the
wide angle lens in some of me these shots, you know,
going all the way back to the opening credits. Again,
you get a lot of that wide angle lens, like

(45:45):
the fish eye lens to help distort and show you
that things are off kilter. You get a lot of
that in the rest of the film as well as
these nightmare type sequences are very you know, using the
hand held camera, so you just get that confusion and
that panic going with her. You just identify with Joan

(46:07):
through so much of this film. I mean we literally
start in her head with the dream sequence and we
just continue on through the rest of this experiencing what
she's experiencing.

Speaker 5 (46:18):
Ramara was a great editor alert and his philosophy for
cutting was always what is the scene trying to tell
us that's how the cutting should go. So if it's panicky,
the cutting is panicky. He's not trying to call attention
to it. But it does seem to fit every fucking sequence,
you know, Like, so I don't know that I want
to throw that in.

Speaker 4 (46:38):
There's a good essay. If it doesn't already exist, probably should,
which is about how this film is in conversation is
in direct response to the misogyny that we see in Polansky,
that we're even beginning to see in Polansk at that point,
for you know, from The Tenant to Rosemary's Baby into Repulsion, Like,

(46:59):
all of these films are still treading in that same
water in the same way that The Graduate was. Arguably,
like we look at the ways that counterculture was still
kind of wrestling with patriarchy or not. This is a
film which is I think is responding to those notions,
even if it's not fully conscious and fully like work

(47:21):
through its own politics.

Speaker 5 (47:22):
Tell me more about the graduate.

Speaker 4 (47:24):
We've got, you know, what's his name, the Dustin Hoffin
character Benjamin, who you know is like kind of caught
in this in this world of success and what ladder
climbing and all these these kinds of things, and he's
caught between what is like traditional like love girlfriend marriage
in this like seduction situation, which we would not have

(47:48):
seen a counter of that in cinema until like much,
much much later. Right, we don't see the term the
reversal of that that power structure happening, or like the
power structure, I guess should say, right, So, like you know,
what we have in Benjamin is like this like this
fulfillment of a fantasy that you know and you know,

(48:12):
I love Mike Nichols. But at the same time, like,
this is a film which is poking at these at
these things, and this leads to having our playboy character
in Hungry Wise being like really trying to make himself
be the cool Benjamin Braddock right like I'm going to be.
I'm not going to be as like weird and nerdy
as that guy was. I'm going to nail Missus Robinson,

(48:34):
and I'm not going to feel weird about it.

Speaker 5 (48:36):
I hadn't thought of it that way. I'm gonna have
to reevaluate that graduate movie.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
That's another one you can go back to over and
over again throughout the years, and as you change, that
movie changes.

Speaker 5 (48:48):
It's been some time, so it's going to be a
whole different fucking movie. I'm gonna hate it. I guarantee
you I'm going to hate it now.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
The very first time I saw the movie, I remembered
it having a happy ending. So that's how off base
I was, because now that that movie does not have
a happy ending, I don't think the movie change. I
think I change.

Speaker 4 (49:07):
Who doesn't want to be in the back of a bus.
That's what I want to say about that.

Speaker 5 (49:10):
I thought it was a happy ending.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
Then it's so romantic. Yeah, well, you look at their
faces as that bus is pulling away.

Speaker 5 (49:18):
I know they're in existential dread at that moment, but
at the but you know, I saw it was like
seventeen or something like that. I'm like, yeah, young Love exactly.

Speaker 1 (49:26):
Yes, we had very similar experiences in all of the research.

Speaker 4 (49:32):
I didn't do like the most successive research in this film.
I'm really shocked that at no point have I encountered
somebody talking about the fact that our lead character in
this film is named Joan Mitchell, who even at the
time was a really known quantity artist painter, you know,

(49:53):
like a super super super famous painter. I have no
illusions that this is not a character who like is
like associating herself with an artist. But I just think
it's so so interesting that we've got this character who's
inhabiting a name which is known to so many outside
of you know whatever, the cinematic world, like is a

(50:14):
known quantity in the art world who arguably was kind
of a feminist icon. You know, it's wild to me
that nobody's talked about this.

Speaker 5 (50:21):
I don't know the person, so I'm sorry, because I
would talk about it if I knew the connection, but
I'm deficient in my cultural knowledge.

Speaker 4 (50:30):
Yeah, I mean she's like kind of this this abstract
artist who was working in worlds that were, you know,
similar to like like a Jackson Pollock. You know, these
like really wild, figurative, very colorful images, right, which is
a little bit counter to what we're seeing in this film,
which was just so demurreor you know. And maybe I'm
a little more conscious of this because there was a

(50:52):
pretty big Joan Mitchell retrospective that happened a few years ago.
But at the same time, like, it's so interesting to
me that we've got this. What is it like to
live under the weight of a more famous name? I
guess is kind of what I'm thinking about this, Like
if she's aware, because it doesn't come up with a home,
she's aware there's a super famous artist with her name,

(51:14):
and she's just kind of like moving through this drab world.
Is that some kind of weight that would drag you down?
I kind of think it might. I think it might.

Speaker 5 (51:24):
I wish I had had that knowledge watching it.

Speaker 4 (51:26):
Because that now you do, you can go back and
go through it and be like, Okay, okay, let's think about.

Speaker 5 (51:32):
That little things like that are fucking important, you know,
Like it's true. Do you know that the song Hello
My Baby, Hello My Honey is a parody of the
newly coined eating for telephones. Yeah, Like they were trying
to popularize the word hello, and some fucking wise asses
wrote this song about it, like idiots saying hello all
the time?

Speaker 4 (51:52):
Now, huh amazing, and now we just do it.

Speaker 5 (51:57):
Holy No, you have the wrong number five two for six.

Speaker 9 (52:02):
I suspect you need more practice working your telephone machine.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
All right, guys, let's go ahead and take a break,
and we'll be back with a pair of interviews. First,
we'll hear from Peyton McCarthy simmis, author of that Very Witch, Fear,
Feminism and the American Witch Film. We'll also hear from
Professor Adam Lonstein of the University of Pittsburgh's Horror Studies Archive,
and we'll be back with both of those right after

(52:25):
these brief messages. Looking for something superior to streaming a
place with more than five times the selection available on
all streaming services combined, check out Scarecrow Videos rerunt by
mail service. Select from an unparalleled collection of over one
hundred and fifty thousand films and get Blu rays, four
k's and DVDs delivered directly to your door. Get in

(52:47):
at it now at Scarecrow dot com, and rediscover the
wonders of physical media. Can you tell me a little
bit about yourself and how you got interested in films?

Speaker 9 (52:58):
I am a film critic and a programmer as well
as an author. I've always been into spooky shit, but
it took me a while to get in movies. I
didn't have cable or anything growing up. I didn't really
have a TV. Eventually we got a VCR and my
mom would let me go to Blockbuster and play around
in the kid's equivalent of the horror section. But my

(53:19):
godfather was the manager, and so that was really my
ind When she wasn't looking, I'd get to mess around
with Briday the thirteenth very rarely. And then I was
originally going to be a sociologist actually, but then I
realized that involved math and that sucks. So I took
a class. I went to Columbia and I took this
Culton exploitation class. That totally changed my trajectory because I

(53:41):
realized I could do sociology with movies and it would
incorporate my love of art. I make films with my
fiance as well. I edit for money. It was like, Oh,
I can put all these things together and dig in
a way that I'm really passionate about.

Speaker 1 (53:54):
You seem to write for a lot of different venues.
What are some of the ones that you write for.

Speaker 9 (53:59):
I'm in the Brooklyn Rail a lot. I do a
lot of Room Morgue. I was just in the Hollywood Reporter,
which was really exciting. Been in Auto Straddle a bunch.
Because I do a lot of work with queer film,
I try to be as broad as possible, Like I
just did Fangoria and that was really exciting. So the
horror stuff I try to move around. But I also

(54:19):
like writing about documentary, So I did something for bright
Light's Film Journal and we'll see where it goes from there.
I love being a freelancer. It really gives me the
opportunity to zoom around and try out different modes and styles.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
I don't want to put you on the spot, but
I saw that you just did a piece about or
recently did a piece about mcab and Missus Miller, and
I just saw that because they're touring that four K
restoration around. What did you have to say about that film?
Because I find it fascinating.

Speaker 9 (54:47):
It's such a beautiful film, not just in terms of
the cinematography, but it's so sensitive and its portrayals of
Missus Miller. Right, this is a story that really centers
a particular female gaze and female personerspective on the plight
of this woman who is just totally incapable of making
her way in a world that's designed to prevent her

(55:09):
from doing so. So what I wrote about was the
way drugs operate in the movie, her kind of tragic
descent into addiction because she's forced to throw in with
this man who is just systematically incompetent. And it's a
great movie about failed masculinity and pride and the fact
that he feels that he needs to operate in a
certain way, not only to be a man in the world,

(55:31):
but to be a man for her. And so as
his failure in a society that's forcing him to do
one thing leads to her failure in a society that,
were it not for misogyny, she'd be very successful, she
uses drugs as an escape patch into operating as more
of a traditional woman like whenever they have sex, she
needs to smoke some opium, and they shoot her in

(55:53):
such a striking and beautiful way where there are these
close ups on her eyes, her hair's down in a
way that it never is otherwise, and she becomes markedly girlish,
and that's the only way she can let others in.
And so I just find that to be a really
compelling tragedy, that femininity operates as a kind of addiction
or habit that she has to use. It's destructive when

(56:15):
she wants to be a business person. It's just gorgeous.

Speaker 1 (56:18):
That was one step short of crazy? Was that your
first full length book?

Speaker 9 (56:22):
That was my first book? Yes?

Speaker 1 (56:24):
Can you tell me a little bit about that and
how that came together?

Speaker 9 (56:26):
That book actually started out as a joke because I
was doing my Masters and I was taking a class
on conspiracy theory, and I told my professor that National Treasure,
the Nick Cage film, was the ultimate text on American conspiracy.
And he said, I've never seen that film. You're young,
and I said, I'm sorry. It's a classic. And then

(56:48):
I rewatched it and started digging into it a little bit,
and I realized that it really does work in such
an interesting way to playfully unpack how we talk about
conspiracy theory in America. So the basic premise of the
book is that I use the movie as an entry
point into different modes of conspiracy right where it's like
in America, they're everywhere. They're the fabric of our nation,

(57:12):
not only in terms of questions of like revolution and
how you form a government without a monarchy, but also
in terms of just our weird quasi doomsday cult religious society. Right,
So I talk about the way we think of conspiracies
as a joke or a game that we like to play. Right,
everybody loves going on YouTube and watching like flat Earth

(57:34):
videos and being like, that's nuts, what are they thinking?
But then we all go home and everybody does something right.
Whether you don't step on a crack or you do Cairo,
there's something operating in your daily life that's conspiratorial. And
then I look into the way audiences have engaged with
this movie, and it turns out that nine to eleven

(57:54):
truthers love National Treasure. Qan On adherents love National Treasure.
So it kind of unpacks from the most ironic to
the most serious engagement with conspiracy theory to prove that
really any text has a lot of meaning underneath the goo.
And I also just love Nickcage, so it was a

(58:15):
pleasure to write.

Speaker 1 (58:16):
And tell me, how did your latest book, That Very
Witch come about?

Speaker 9 (58:20):
This book was a passion project that took me the
better part of a decade. I started writing it in
earnest during COVID when I noticed a pattern in like
the quote unquote like elevated horror cycle. Right, you have
all these eight twenty four films with the same ending
where these supernatural women find themselves triumphing at the end

(58:43):
of the movie. And if you watch any classic horror movie, right,
that's kind of the premise, is like the Stephen King
line of like, horror movies are fundamentally conservative, they're recuperative,
the bad guys lose at the end, and then people
like you and me get to enjoy the fun part
in the middle where they recavoc Right. But in these movies,
the women don't lose at the end. And I found

(59:03):
that really striking, not just when it happened once, but
when it happened to you again and again. And when
I looked around outside it was twenty twenty. Everything was
going wrong, you had massive political and social unrest. And
then I looked back at the dates when these movies
were released. If you look at Suspiria, if you look
at the Witch, it's, oh, this is the anti Trump

(59:24):
feminist movement. So when you started pulling those parallels, I
realized that you couldn't fully understand that unless you went
all the way back to the beginning of which filmmaking,
because I already knew that, like Victorian feminists used the
witch as a symbol in a similar way. So it
takes you on a very long journey through the history
of which cinema, drawing parallels between the history of feminist movements,

(59:47):
the capsule history of the cinema of any particular moment
in time, the political movement of that period in time.
And then I used the Witch films as kind of
case studies to examine how women are being perceived have
been feared or not feared in any particular moment in time.
And yeah, it took me about seven years to do five,
if I'm being generous, But I'm really happy with how

(01:00:11):
it came out, and particularly since there's so many books
on witches in the movies. But I discovered very quickly
that very few of them were a linear narrative arc.
So it's not essays. It's a whole book with a
story that goes through it. And I think that people
have responded really well, so it's been really nice.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
I think that the structure of the book is great,
and I especially like that you do kind of chunk
things up into separate eras, as it were. And I
do really appreciate that because, like you're saying, it responds
to political movements, so you get what was happening in
the late sixties, early seventies, one of my favorite times
to be around, you know, the eighties, the nineties, the
two thousands. I mean that Vivich the Witch came out

(01:00:52):
in twenty what seventeen or at least I remember it
coming out around then, right around the time of the
Me Too movement. Yeah, I love just how important Rosemary's
Baby is to so much of this. But you go
all the way back to Hackson and the Silent Films,
which is fantastic to see how you carry that through
line all the way through this whole entire book. So

(01:01:14):
what were some of your biggest challenges for this one?

Speaker 9 (01:01:17):
Carrying all of that history around with you for so long.
I did feel going back to my conspiracy theory book,
I felt crazy writing the outline for this was an
insane project, and I think something that helped me cohere
it was that, in a lot of ways, is a
story about belief and the capacity for belief that people

(01:01:38):
have in themselves, in the supernatural, in others. What power
do we allow each other and what power can we
find for ourselves? But the places where it got sticky
were the places where that power began to ebb and
a conservative counter valance began to rise. So the eighties,

(01:01:58):
going into this project, I thought, this will be no problem.
The satanic panic is happening. Obviously, witches are going to
be everywhere, right like they're going to be big and
scary and ugly, and they're actually not. It's really fascinating
when you look into it that in periods of backlash,
I discover witches are not afforded the same power. They're disempowered.

(01:02:20):
They're presented in a little bit more of a silly light.
And so the only big witch films of the eighties
that are witch films per se are Elvira Message to
the Dark and the witches Vastwick. Obviously you have the
never ending cycle of the Witchcraft series, or you have
Conan the Barbarian where things move into a more fantasy

(01:02:40):
direction for the Witch. But trying to articulate exactly how
that works was really confusing and counterintuitive, because if there
are so many witches in the culture, why aren't they
in the movies. It's a confusing question, but it also
gave me a lot of great opportunities. I love a
slasher as much as anybody else, but watching them in
three sixty p on YouTube on a loop forever was

(01:03:03):
hard without the breaking up process of watching like twenty
twenty and Heraldo and vibing with the actual Satanic kin
of specials because it really spoke to everything I was
talking about. And that's part of the answer too, is
like why would you need witches in the horror movies
when you have Heerldo on TV doing it for you?
If people think they're in the classroom, then they don't

(01:03:24):
need to go to the multiplex.

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
Well, obviously, with this episode, we're talking about Season of
the Witch, and that kind of fits into a very
interesting time in America as well as into Romero's filmography.
You know, you do talk a little bit in there
as far as Rosemary's Baby in What's sixty eight? This
is coming out in seventy two. In one the poor
woman is being tortured by witches and the other one

(01:03:47):
she is or trying to embrace that. I mean, how
do you feel that the feminist movement affected these films
or other outside forces helped shape the narrative.

Speaker 9 (01:03:56):
The reception to Rosemary's Baby was very interesting because for
a lot of people, and this speaks to Polanski as
a director as well. Right with films like Repulsion, he
say what you will about the man, but he does
center a very particular kind of feminine perspective. They're very
subjective films about women in trouble, and so Repulsion is
a very empathetic film in a lot of ways, and

(01:04:18):
Rosemary's Baby carries that forward, where the New York Times
found themselves really shocked by the fact that this is
a movie where you're dealing with the horror of being
in this poor woman's shoes. It was a really important film.
Another wonderful author just put out a book called Scream
with Me, where she argues that Rosemary's Baby was really
important for putting people into the perspective of a pregnant

(01:04:40):
woman around Roby Wade, which is obviously very true and
very important, and I talk about that a little bit
as well. But the thing that's notable from my angle
where I talk a lot about the counterculture and the
radical feminist politics of the moment is a lot of
radical feminists were not impressed with Rosemary's Baby at all,
which leads to songs like why didn't Rosemary by Deep

(01:05:02):
Purple right where the chorus is why didn't Rosemary ever
take the pill? So for some people, they just thought
that Rosemary's Baby was not going far enough in nineteen
sixty eight when the politics and the culture are moving
so fast and so unexpectedly, And there are a couple
of films that come out afterwards that kind of serve
as passit correctives for that. So a film I just

(01:05:24):
programmed anthology here in New York is The Mephisto Waltz.

Speaker 11 (01:05:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:05:29):
I love that movie. It's so good and Jacqueline Bissett
is wonderful. Because critics dismissed that movie as a boring
rehash of Rosemary's Baby, which I think is a lame take.
But the one thing that anyone positively said about it
that I could find is that they were frustrated, this
critic with the fact that Rosemary does not know what's
happening for most of that movie, and the note there

(01:05:51):
is she should have caught on faster, which like fair unfair,
say what you will. But Jacqueline Bessett's character in The
Mephisto Waltz is a corrective to that fact, in that
she knows the entire time. She's never taken in and
she is hissed right, and so she becomes a witch
as a kind of payback and erotic paybacked against her husband.

(01:06:12):
The Poor befuddled Ellanalda Season of the Witch is another
excellent movie for that because George Romero wrote it. He
said explicitly that he wrote it as a response to
the feminist movement of his moment. He was seeing what
was going on. He was seeing what was going on
in the context of the occult Revival, which is this
period in the late sixties and early seventies where mysticism

(01:06:34):
and supernanpheulism and neopaganism were coming into prominence. He was
noticing that in bookstores you could pick up little primers
called how to be a witch for however much money
and then become a practitioner if you wanted to. And
you see a scene of that in the movie that
I just adore, where she gets a cauldron and a
knife and a bell and a book bebooking candle and

(01:06:56):
pays for it with plastic at her at a store.
It's great. Yeah, this movie is very responsive to its
cultural and political moment. I think it's very feminist. It's complicated,
It's politics are complicated, and Romero had a lot of
weird things to say about it, but yeah, it's a
really excellent capsule of that moment in time.

Speaker 5 (01:07:14):
For that reason.

Speaker 1 (01:07:15):
Yeah, when we talked about Rosemary's baby on the show,
we talked a lot about Guy and just how Guy
was gaslighting her so controlling, and remember we were talking
specifically about how he was writing down when she was
having her period and when she was going to be ovulating.
And actually some male listeners really objected to that, and

(01:07:36):
they didn't think that that was creepy at all. And
I just felt that that was so creepy and so controlling.
And I love that the name of you know, the
original name of season of The Witch, Jack's wife doesn't
even give her a name. It's that whole Missus de
Winter type of thing, you know, like no name for
this person.

Speaker 9 (01:07:54):
And that's still a through line in the film. Right,
she says, I'm a witch at the end of the movie.
It's awesome, she's coming into her power. But in the
background of that party, people are still referring to her
after she I assume spoilers are fine on this podcast,
but after she kills the guy, right, she kills this man,
and people are still referring to her as Jack's wave.
It's beautiful. It's such a great incisive commentary on the

(01:08:17):
way women are treated. And this, to me, this movie,
more than anything else, is an exploration of middle age
for women. It's about the fact that she is being
treated as nothing by her husband because she's no longer
sexually appealing to him, because she's I don't know how
old Jen was, maybe like forty, so she's socially dead.
Because it's it's nineteen seventy two. Amali Haskell had just

(01:08:40):
released from Reverence to Rape and talks extensively about the
way cinematically speaking women of that particular age were being
presented as non existent cardboard cutouts, jokes or people to
be cheated on. Right, So this movie is great for
that as well, because it's a movie about dealing with
the non personhood of femininity passed her prime and yeah,

(01:09:02):
it's really sensitive and elegant in that way as well.
And part of that is the title. Although, as I recall,
the origins of this movie are fraught as well, because
he couldn't get me funding and so he put in
all these soft core sex scenes that made jan White
not want to do it because she was just a
commercial actress. I think she was on she was selling

(01:09:23):
soap at the time when he approached her and she
was like, I'm not going to be able to get
work if I do porn for you. I don't care
if you did a big movie like that doesn't matter.
And he was like, no, it's just for funding, We're
not gonna do it. And then Jack Harris, who was
the distributor of Where the Blob Later, but who did
all of these softcore things and exploitation things, vastly mismarketed

(01:09:47):
the film. First is Jack's Wife, but then better and
more fun Hungry Wives, and the tagline was Cavier in
the kitchen, Nothing in the bedroom. It's just beautiful. It's
very indicative of the exactly the kind of commentary he's
making in the movie that the movie was then turned
around to be, like, you want to watch people have
sex in a suburban location, a.

Speaker 1 (01:10:07):
Little suburban roulette or ice storm for you. I mean
even calling it hungry Wives, because so many times when
you think of witches, you're always thinking of cannibal.

Speaker 9 (01:10:16):
Witches in terms of its depictions of domesticity too, Like
she makes dinner a couple times, but really she's the
thing that's poignant about it is that she's not allowed
to be a wife at all. If you want to
try and get deep about Hungry Wives as a title,
even though Jack Harris was not trying to get deep
about it, the hunger here is that she's not allowed

(01:10:37):
to be a wife. Like her husband isn't home, her
daughter's off to college, she's alone most of the time.
You don't really see anyone eat much of anything. People
pop pills and drink martinis with other women who are
talking about how no one pays attention to them, right,
And I kind of betty for Dan, since I guess
they are hungry wives.

Speaker 1 (01:10:57):
Lonely women are dangerous though too. I mean, the whole
idea of you the unmarried women, even in something like
practical Magic, it's like, oh, something has to happen. We
have to get some sort of male in here to
make these women domesticated.

Speaker 9 (01:11:11):
Yeah. And then there's that line, that great line at
the end, because she kills him and then the cops
show up and she says it was self defense because
she didn't know he was coming home, And one of
the guys has a great line where he's they get
everything from us in the end. Goddamn women, they're going
to take it all right. At the end of the film,
she looks so much happier and younger, and she's wearing

(01:11:35):
an outfit that she likes. You don't know, maybe she's
been dressing for her husband the whole time. A lot
of women did that and still do. And so she
just looks fabulous with this turquoise eyeshadow and a big
hair do, and and it really is just like they
in that moment of singleness of being herself. She The
irony of the Jack's Wife thing that keeps happening is

(01:11:55):
she was never really Jack's wife in a practical way,
but now that she's single, she come into herself in.

Speaker 5 (01:12:01):
A new way.

Speaker 9 (01:12:01):
She's been freed of the trap that's been holding her back.

Speaker 1 (01:12:04):
What were some of the other contemporary movies that dealt
with witchcraft?

Speaker 9 (01:12:08):
So one that I'm a champion of that I haven't
gotten to talk about much is a little film from
out of I think El Paso called Mark of the Witch.
It's not like a well loved movie. It's by a
director named Tom Moore who mostly did theater and TV,
but it's like a teeny tiny, little budget co ed

(01:12:32):
horror movie about a college age student and her boyfriend
who are in a class on magic and superstition, which
is a huge through line here, right. It happens in
Season the Witch, where he's her younger lover is a
I think he's a TA for a class on superstition, right,
and that in earlier films like Night of the Eagle

(01:12:54):
or even Bell Booking, Pandle, where you've got all of
these professors talking about superstition in that a cult revival way.
But anyway, they're in this class on magic and their
teacher is a skeptic, and he accidentally unleashes the ghost
of a witch who was killed and she possesses this
young woman's body, and she goes from this very demure,
sweet girl to this sexually dominating, murderous baddie who wreaks

(01:13:20):
havoc on everyone starts. Sleeping with the professor is like
coucking the boyfriend and just running everyone's business.

Speaker 5 (01:13:27):
It rocks.

Speaker 9 (01:13:28):
It's an exploitation movie, right, So it has its problems.
The pacing is nonsensically bad, but it's great, So I
try to champion that one and bring it up when
I can because it's lesser seen. But the Mephisto Waltz
is another good example, obviously, like the towering examples in
the genre are the Devils and don't look now, those
are just classics. They're perfect, they're feminists, they're empowering. Performance

(01:13:51):
has its own witchy subplots, which I love. But then
another huge one that I'm going to be potentially talking
about in October at lecture is Beladonav's Sadness. It's just amazing,
and it's politics are great. It's based on a French
historians tract on witchcraft called Satanism and Witchcraft, so it's

(01:14:13):
very unlike inspired by medieval parrot cards. So it's an
incredibly beautiful, deeply thought out, overtly political movie about women's
empowerment and disempowerment that draws through lines between the Middle
Ages and the way women are treated, then all the
way through to the present, these great psychedelic montages that
take you to New York and you see some disco dance.
It's just it's perfect. So, yeah, those are some big

(01:14:36):
ones that I highlight, and what little one.

Speaker 1 (01:14:38):
It must have been a little difficult too to navigate
those waters, because I know myself, I'd be tempted to
go into more vampire typed films or even some of
the nonsploitation films that were happening because that was kind
of the golden age of that as well, or even
mixing those. I mean, we're about to talk about al
ju Karta as well, so it's like kind of a
little bit of both. But you know, to stick with

(01:15:00):
just the witch theme. I mean, that's very admirable, and
I know it didn't feel like you had any shortage
of material to cover.

Speaker 9 (01:15:08):
The best thing anyone said to me about this book
is that once you read it, you realize that everything
is a witch film and you'll never unsee it. Ever,
and it's so true. It's so true because women are
treated as witches if they have any sort of power.
I've argued elsewhere that The Substance is a movie about
being a witch. That's part of why I tried to
keep it very American focused, like I'll talk about some

(01:15:31):
movies that had impact in America or were influenced by
American politics and culture. But I needed to keep it
incredibly narrow, otherwise it would have become like an all
the Colors of the Dark dictionary, and that's just not
the project I wanted to do, and wanted to try
and keep it to a very particular set of points.
But yeah, they're everywhere, and there's so many excellent films.

(01:15:52):
I've just watched Miss forty five the other night, and
that moment when her nosy neighbor is she's a witch.
I just it's ever ending and for good reason.

Speaker 1 (01:16:02):
And a little bit of nuns plitation in that one too.

Speaker 9 (01:16:04):
Yeah, yeah, the nuns plitation one's definitely like the first
Omen is a witch film, arguably, but it's more nunsplitation.
They don't call her a witch to the devil, a daughter.
It's all mushy because supernaturalism is brought, particularly in the
context of the sixties and seventies that we're gonna that
we talk about here, right, It's like the ideas that

(01:16:25):
kind of encapsulated witchcraft were very broad. So I also
talk about Kerry as a witch film, and that's not
intuitive to a lot of people, because even though Kerrie's
mother refers to her as a witch, the powers she
has are not things that we today associate with witchcraft.
She's telekinetic, right, But in the sixties, ESP was something

(01:16:46):
that was commonly associated with witchcraft. The DoD and the
CIA were experimenting with mk ultra, but they were also
hiring psychics, and they were talking to Sybil Leak because
they were worried about the ESP gap with the Soviet Union,
which just rocks, right. But yeah, it's complicated for that reason.
So I guess I did have to pick and choose
a little bit because Carrie feels like a good example

(01:17:08):
of the themes I'm looking at, even a little further
from the point.

Speaker 1 (01:17:12):
Yeah, we just spoke about the film Sweet Sweet Rachel,
which kind of falls into that as well, because that
starts with psychic phenomenon. But then is it really is
it Luis Lasser as a as a witch, you know,
or is just does she have psychic powers? So you're
skirting that line a lot.

Speaker 9 (01:17:30):
Part of it's the politics. I'd probably argue, right, what
is the magic? What is the power doing for the
woman in question? Is it using her or is she
using it? And how is it being directed? Probably helps
a lot and a lot of the movies I talk about,
you don't really think about the devil that much, and
you don't really think about Hovens that much. Sometimes you do,

(01:17:51):
But the movies where it's like a single witch with
power to change something are to me like the purest
witch films. Cannibalism Margaret Qualley's character is eating to me
more from the inside out. It's great.

Speaker 1 (01:18:05):
I'm curious how much you had to go into that
As far as the cannibal aspects of witchcraft with some
of these movies.

Speaker 9 (01:18:11):
Well, I'm gonna be talking about it a little more
on another podcast soon in terms of Rosemary's Baby. But
something else that I was trying to draws it through
line is that in terms of America's fears of feminist empowerment,
the thing that comes up most is a very particular
kind of sexualized witch. It's a witch with a particular

(01:18:33):
kind of erotic power. The substance is interesting because it
does the tripartite goddess thing with Sue and Elizabeth and
Monstro is the see right. But when you see the witch,
the iconic image from the Witch is not the crone
who eats Sam. It's thomasin floating up into the air,
or even for that particular chrome, she starts out looking

(01:18:55):
like a sexy pin of Red riding hood figure in
the woods. Because American politics are so concerned about regulating
the female reproductive body, that character comes up a lot
in these kinds of films, and in that context, cannibalism
becomes more metaphor, right, It's like a man eater instead

(01:19:16):
of a woman who eats men. So I don't get
into it that intensely, but it does obviously come up
in a lot of these films I could have talked about.
There are some I didn't talk about at all, like
The Witches with a Fabulous Angelica Houston, which is all
about this kind of cannibalistic like basically the BFG of
wanting to eat children, and it just didn't feel as

(01:19:37):
relevant to my line. But it is very much a thing.

Speaker 1 (01:19:41):
Well, yeah, I think of Rosemary eating that raw meat,
or even we just talked about raw and how the
character in that has that transformation as she tastes blood.
It's a very carey moment when she gets the blood
dripped on her and then she's eating the meat raw
from the refrigerator, very you know, Roseman. So I was like, Okay,

(01:20:01):
I see this playing into it, even though I don't
necessarily think she's a witch, but you know, it definitely
plays in a lot of those same areas as well.
And it's so much about that self empowerment.

Speaker 9 (01:20:12):
When I think about that one, I think a lot
about Jennifer's Body, which is a movie. People ask me
a bunch of times like is this in the book.
Jennifer's not a witch. She's a demon. She's a badass
and I love her, but she's not a witch. But
it's the same thing right where. And she's great because
she says the quiet part out loud. In terms of
the politics of these things, she's not eating people, she's
eating boys. So both brows like that too.

Speaker 1 (01:20:35):
I mean, so, yeah, this must be your time of
the year coming up here with programming stuff for October
and just hopefully more people picking up this book and
enjoying more discussion of witchcraft and in the movies. I mean,
it's just such a perfect timing year for this.

Speaker 9 (01:20:50):
I've got a couple of things I'm programming in October.
I've got a lot of lectures coming up. I'm really
I love The Fall. I think we are all spooky
people love the Fall. Also getting married in October, so
that's congrats. Yeah, it's going to be thank you. It's
going to be really busy in Salem. No less.

Speaker 1 (01:21:07):
I've got some friends that live up there and they
say it's just a mad house in October.

Speaker 5 (01:21:11):
It is.

Speaker 1 (01:21:12):
Well, congratulations on that, and congratulations on the book. Do
you know what you're going to be working on next?

Speaker 9 (01:21:18):
I have a couple projects kind ofly lined up. I'm
working on a novella that's exploring it's not witchy, but
it is definitely gross and gory and feminist. And I
have an essay collection i'm building out that I will
hopefully have more info on soon, exploring a similar related
history from a different angle. So lots of projects. I've

(01:21:41):
got a couple chapters from this book that I'm eager
to share in different ways. So I'm going to publish
them as scholarly articles, some of them and some of them.
I think I have one coming out in Rumorgu soon
on the Curse of the blair Witch, So that'll be
really fun too. That's it good be that we don't
talk about enough now?

Speaker 1 (01:21:58):
Is that the sequel that was so beligned when.

Speaker 9 (01:22:01):
It came out that Oh god, that movie had such
a weird title. No Book of fat is kind of
the blair Witch is actually really interesting. It was the
tie in documentary on the Sci Fi Channel that they made.
They were approached by Sci Fi and they made it
using a lot of cut scenes from the film. Originally,
it wasn't just gonna be found footage. They were going

(01:22:22):
to do cutaways to like talking heads and things of
that nature. But it provides the viewer with a kind
of feminist history of the Blair Witch herself. It's very cool. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:22:33):
Have you ever seen the Scooby Doo projects.

Speaker 9 (01:22:35):
Yes, it's so funny. Scooby Doo is the best. Scooby
Doo was actually, probably, if not my first entry point
into Witches, maybe my second. With the Hex Girls and
Scooby Doo in the Witch's Ghost Love the Hex Girls. Yeah,
and they're vampires too.

Speaker 1 (01:22:52):
Well. Peyton, this was so great talking with you. I
hope we can do it again sometimes I'd love to
have you back on and talk about a movie that
sounds wonderful.

Speaker 9 (01:22:59):
Thank you so much for pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:23:01):
And where's the best place to keep up with you
in your work?

Speaker 9 (01:23:03):
You can follow me on Instagram at hate Place, payt
p Lace and you can get my book on Amazon
or on Barnes and Noble wherever books are sold.

Speaker 1 (01:23:27):
Before we even start to talk about the Romera archives
and season of The Witch, I wanted to know a
little bit more about you, and if you could refresh
people on your backstory and how you came to Pitt
and how you came to be such a an icon
in the horror field.

Speaker 6 (01:23:42):
I feel like I'm the very lucky story of the
kid whose childhood obsessions became their career. I loved horror
films from the very earliest age and pressed in all
kinds of different inappropriate settings to be allowed to think
and and write and talk about horror whenever I had

(01:24:03):
the chance, and I persisted with that impulse through all
of my years of schooling and into my graduate school
years and wrote a dissertation about the modern horror film
and its relation to these moments of historical trauma like
the Holocaust Orshima of Vietnam. That became my first book,

(01:24:24):
Shocking Representation. And that was all at a time when
it was much less thinkable than it is now to
call a field called horror studies something that is an
actually existing entity, and I feel filled to be part
of the horror studies community at this point. Certainly, when

(01:24:45):
I was doing those initial forays into horror, I had
very little sense that there would ever be such a
thing as a horror studies community, But now there is,
and I'm thrilled to announce that I am now the
founding an inaugural director of its newly established Horror Study Center,
the first center of its kind in the world, with

(01:25:07):
our mission to explore the horror genre in the most
ambitious and wide ranging ways as we can, and to
forge as many alliances and collaborations as we can with
every level of horror community. That means fans, that means scholars,
that means practitioners, that means artists, And I'm looking forward

(01:25:30):
to that wonderful work ahead.

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
What does that mean for people at large, and especially
for scholars like myself.

Speaker 6 (01:25:37):
The Horror Study Center, in my utopian vision of it,
I really want and hope for it to be the
kind of resource that it existed when I was younger.
It would have made things for people like me a
little easier. I felt like I had to fight battles
all along the way to convince people that no, I

(01:25:59):
was not a lunatic, and that studying horror does not
automatically mean you are a mentally ill potential serial killer.
That horror can teach us just the way any field
of knowledge can teach us, and in fact, maybe it
has more to teach us than many fields of knowledge do,
because it is primal and visceral to our deepest, most

(01:26:21):
meaningful experiences and feelings, especially the things that we have
trouble admitting or confronting in ourselves, in our society, in
our culture. So the center really aims to serve as
much as it can. So we are hoping to organize
and are organizing events that imagine horror very broadly, everything

(01:26:45):
from sort of photography exhibitions that have to do with
historical moments of horror like the Holocaust, to screenings by
visiting filmmakers, archival presentations by authors, all of this in
the hopes that people can point to the Horror Study

(01:27:08):
Center and say, hey, horror studies, that's a real thing,
and that's something that's okay to do and indeed maybe
is exciting to do. And so we'll have as many
of these events as possible available in some kind of
hybrid format for people who are not in the Pittsburgh area,
and we will be collaborating with institutions all across the

(01:27:32):
country and the world to make things happen in places
that are not just Pitts Now.

Speaker 1 (01:27:37):
Is it any coincidence that also at the University of
Pittsburgh is the Ramera Archive.

Speaker 6 (01:27:43):
It is no coincidence at all. We would not have
a Horror Study Center if we did not have a
Horror Studies Archive at the University Library System Department of
Special Collections at pit And the way that Horror Studies
Archive got started was with the donation of the George
Romero collection. And this is Romero's materials, his stuff, his scripts,

(01:28:09):
his outlines, his correspondence, his props. Even in certain cases,
we've got the monkey from Monkey Shines in our co
h in addition to some other choice memorabilia. But most importantly,
I think the archive demonstrates the price that George paid

(01:28:32):
for being a truly independent filmmaker. If you look at
Romero's filmography, and we'll get into more of this later,
there are gaps in years where there's not a lot
of films that are coming out, and that's not because
he's not working. He is working feverishly every moment of

(01:28:53):
his career, from the very beginning to the very end.
He was always working. But there were years where much
harder to get his projects produced. And one of the
reasons that was difficult is that he really had a
strong sense of the way he wanted to do things,
and that meant that certain projects could not be realized

(01:29:16):
in the way that George had imagined them. And that
archive is just such an eye opener in that way.
There's over two hundred scripts in that archive that never
became films. That just gives you a sense the bare
bones level of statistics about what George's career was like.

(01:29:37):
And I think that for me is a very educational
and moving aspect of the George Romero collection in Pits
Horror Studies Archive.

Speaker 1 (01:29:48):
I mean it seems almost impossible that he would make
something like Nadel Living Dead, and there wouldn't be just
dump trucks full of money coming from Hollywood saying make
us our next hit.

Speaker 6 (01:29:59):
And I can actual remember a vivid moment with him
personally when I first got to Pittsburgh. George was still
living in Pittsburgh at that time, and he had just
made a film, Bruiser, that never got a theatrical release.
I think it's a very interesting film that deserved a release,
but it didn't get one. So we screened it in

(01:30:20):
Pittsburgh for its US theatrical premiere. George brought his own
personal print and it was gorgeous. We had a crowd.
But in the Q and A afterwards that I did
with George, he said, and this was his style, to
be his candid and honest in front of a huge audience,
he said, you would think that the guy who made

(01:30:41):
Night Living Dead would have it made He's but honestly,
and this is the year two thousand, he said, I'm
worried about how I'm going to send my kids through college.
That's where I'm at. And I appreciated his honesty and
I felt for him too. Of course, and I think

(01:31:02):
one of the reasons he was able to be that
honest too, is that he was in Pittsburgh. He was
in his home base, and he very much saw everyone
in that audience as family, and you can feel that
in the films.

Speaker 1 (01:31:14):
Also tell me a little bit about that post Night
a Living Dead, and especially when it comes to There's
Always Vanilla and Season of the Witch, I always feel
like there's that connection, not just with the the actors,
but just that kind of poverty that he was going
through trying to make these movies.

Speaker 6 (01:31:32):
A lot of people have written the narrative of George's
career in a way that looks something like this, There's
Night Living Dead an incredible phenomenal success, not just at
the level of financial success, which of course he never
saw dollars from because of copyright problems, but a cultural watershed,

(01:31:55):
the kind of film that's going to live forever because
it not only captures there's cinematic excellence, it captures a
zeitgeist cultural moment. So to hit a home run out
of the gates like that is very unusual, even more
unusual to have that be an independent film coming from Pittsburgh.

(01:32:18):
So he beat all the odds his first time out,
and then there was this sort of sense of I
think like the years in the Wilderness, and those are
the years of There's Always Vanilla, the amusement Park, Season
of the Witch and the Crazies, and then George gets
a new lease on life with Martin, which is a

(01:32:41):
kind of a critical success at a level that sort
of puts him back on the map and opens the
doors to Dawn of the Dead, and then everything is
history from there. But these are the years in the
Wilderness with the amusement Park and Season of the Witch
and the Crazies and There's Always Vanilla. And I really
think these films are gradually being re discovered and reevaluated

(01:33:08):
it and I'm very happy for that because I actually
think these are not years in the wilderness. These are
the years in the laboratory where George was really figuring
out what his vision is and even more specifically, what
is the connection between his social consciousness and his esthetic

(01:33:31):
project of making cinema and horror cinema in particular. These
films I think are actually crucial to understanding that project.
And you could not get a film like Martin or
Donna the Dead or any of the great films that
followed without George having done that work in the laboratory,

(01:33:53):
and I think Season of the Witch out of those three,
is a particularly fascinating experiment in the laboratory. If we're
going to run with this metaphor.

Speaker 1 (01:34:04):
What makes it fascinating for you? Because I've got my
own opinions, but I want to hear yours.

Speaker 6 (01:34:09):
It is a film of incredible cinematic energy. This is
the last film that George made in this way, which
is he's the writer, he's the director, he's the cinematographer,
he's the editor. He is really making this film in
an artisanal way, and these are roles that he would

(01:34:30):
go on to share with other great collaborators. And I'm
not taking anything away from the later films that have
the incredibly brilliant work of people like Michael Gornick and
Pad Bouba. But there's something special in the feel of

(01:34:51):
the film because it really is George's in a hands
on way. You can feel it in the editing, you
can feel it in the com position of the images,
in its rhythm. You really have a deep sense that
this is a George a Romero film, even if it's
got no zombies, and it's got no gore, and it's

(01:35:16):
got no horror in the traditional sense, but it's got
plenty of George A. Romero, and I think that's one
of the reasons I treasure it. And then a connected
reason is that I really think it's accurate to describe
this as a great feminist horror film. And for all

(01:35:36):
the credit that George has been given over the years
for making socially conscious horror films, I don't think there's
been enough of a sense that way back in nineteen
seventy two, seventy three, George made a feminist horror film.
And I think that's really a powerful accomplishment, a powerful statement.

(01:35:59):
And it's not surprised to me that one of the
greatest events we've staged in Pittsburgh in recent years in
relation to George's work is we had a screening of
Season of the Witch at the Andy Warhol DM and
our special guest to talk about the film is the
brilliant feminist experimental filmmaker Peggy Awak. And Peggy grew up

(01:36:21):
in Pittsburgh and she prenticed with George. She was a
production assistant on Creep Show and for her this film
is her favorite of George's, and I think one of
the reasons is because she saw in it shades of
the work she would make herself, which is a career

(01:36:41):
very different than George is, of course, but it was
a career enabled by George in many ways.

Speaker 1 (01:36:46):
I definitely can see that. Especially the opening credits, for me,
are just a masterclass when it comes to experimental filmmaking,
the way he uses sound, the editing of it, just everything.
I have a feeling that when we have our discussion,
I'm going to be spending so much time just talking
about those opening credits, because they are wonderful.

Speaker 6 (01:37:04):
I have no problem with that, because I share your enthusiasm,
and I do think this is a film worth savoring,
especially at the level I would call almost tactile. There's
something about the way it moves that is profoundly satisfying
and masterful.

Speaker 1 (01:37:25):
I'm very curious about the different versions of the film.
I've seen two of them. Is there any chance that
there's a more complete version of that, or is like
the longest one, the longest one that we'll ever have.

Speaker 6 (01:37:37):
This is one of the sort of holy grails of
the George Romero Foundation, which we're lucky to have as
a resource that is committed to restoring, preserving and celebrating
George's work, and so finding out more about how much
we can see of Season of the Witch always been

(01:38:00):
high on the agenda for the Rameiro Foundation, so in
the success the Foundation has had thus far with Bring It,
for example, making the amusement Park a film that nobody
had seen and nobody had heard of, into a film
that many Romeo fans and beyond are now familiar with
and can easily access. I'm hopeful about a future moment

(01:38:24):
where we will see more of Season of the Witch,
but I unfortunately don't have any concrete information right now
about what we might be able to look forward to.
So that's something that remains a mission. But I can say,
as someone old enough to have been a kid when

(01:38:45):
VCRs first flooded the market, I remember just being thrilled
by the idea that I could see Seeds of the
Witch at all, even though it was a horribly terrible
print and cut. And what we do today in terms
of the Arrow Video DVD is so much better than that.

(01:39:10):
I try to focus on being grateful for the stuff
we have rather than the things that we don't, but
I share your desire for wanting more of this film
because I can tell that no matter what we think
about that footage, ultimately as stuff George would have rather
had in or out, I think it's going to shed

(01:39:31):
light on the project and be worth exploring.

Speaker 7 (01:39:35):
For sure.

Speaker 1 (01:39:36):
You know, I kind of lost track of this story,
But what is the deal with Martin as far as
that longer version.

Speaker 6 (01:39:42):
That is the happy story of a sort of urban
myth that became true. For years there was this sort
of story and George would do his version of telling
it where there was a much longer cut of Martin
that he preferred that had been lost to the mists
of time, and he wishes he could see it because

(01:40:04):
what's his personal favorite among his films. It really was
a missing link for him to not be able to
see that version. And just very recently this mystery print
did turn up, and through the help of some very
generous friends of their Marrow Foundation and the Horror Studies

(01:40:29):
Archive at pitt and I'll just mention Greg Ncataro's name
as a hero in this story, we were able to
acquire the print of Martin and now it is living
where it absolutely should, which is in the archive at HIT,
and it's a complicated situation in terms of getting to
see it because right now, the stipulation is that to

(01:40:52):
watch it you have to come physically to Pittsburgh and
study it in the archive. It is not yet available
for any kind of commercial screening or even non commercial screening.
And this is part of the conditions that Richard Rubinstein,
the producer, put on the film. And I understand his
stance because I've watched this print and it is fascinating.

(01:41:16):
It's three hours long, so it's twice as long as
the final cut of Martin. It is not a better film.
It is fascinating, and none of those sequences that were
cut are bad in any way. They're fascinating, but they
don't belong in the final film. They are sequences that

(01:41:37):
add to our fascination with things we already know. They
are not sequences that make the film a better film.
So I understand Richard's desire that people understand this as
an artifact to be studied rather than a new, better
version of the film itself. That's where that stands right now.

(01:42:00):
It's possible perhaps in the future that will change, but
that is the situation now. So for people who really
want to see it, please come to Pittsburgh and make
an appointment with the Department of Archives and Special Collections.
We are an open archive. You do not have to
be a pit student or faculty member or to use it.
You don't have to be attached to a university. You
just have to make the appointment and you'll be able

(01:42:23):
to watch it.

Speaker 1 (01:42:24):
That's fantastic. Are there films that have more materials around
them in the archive than others I mentioned? There have
to be, but I'm always curious as far as is
it the newer things that have more or is it
the older things that have more?

Speaker 6 (01:42:38):
Because of the nature of the materials and also because
of George's his personal predilections around his stuff, This was
not a guy who dwelled in the past. He was
always looking towards the future. He was always working. He
never had a sense that I should be holding on

(01:42:58):
to these things for posterity. He really felt like the
only thing he was interested in is what's the next
project and how do I get to it. It was
never about what did I do in the past and
what does it mean? That was never his focus. So
what that means is that we tend to have more

(01:43:18):
things that are more recent because there was less time
to get rid of it. With certain exceptions, he clearly
did save something. So like one of the real treasures
in the archive is we have his shooting script from
Neither Living Dead that he annotated himself on the set.
That's an amazing thing that I'm so glad he held onto.

(01:43:43):
But that really is a little anomaloust in many ways.
For example, the materials we have from these years in
the wilderness are not as substantial as the materials from
the years going forward with any archive. Wish for the
things that could be there. But I think you also

(01:44:04):
were lucky in the sense that we have to work
with the things that we have and make knowledge from them.
And in certain ways, I think we'd be daunted if
we actually had everything, because how would you possibly get
any kind of handle on it. So unfortunately I can't reveal,

(01:44:25):
and I would love to if we had it. Here
are documents from Season of the Witch that give us
a different take on the movie and give us a
better sense of sort of its genesis and where it
came from and the changes it went through. It's just
not well represented in this collection, unfortunately, but again that
is not to say that future moments may bring us

(01:44:50):
more materials. Anybody out there. This print of Martin was
languishing in somebody's farmhouse in Pennsylvania for decades, and so yeah,
anybody who's got Season of the Witch stuff or any
of Georgiea's stuff. The these bring it to the attention
of the Romero Foundation, the Horror Studies Archive. It hit

(01:45:12):
because the stuff belongs here. It's going to be safe
and protected in perpetuity, and people will be able to
study it. But it won't be sitting in your basement.
It will be with people who care about it or
learning important things from it.

Speaker 1 (01:45:27):
Yeah, I know, with somebody like the Robert Altman collection
at the University of Michigan. I don't know if he
had a service or what it was, but there were
so many clippings and just every review of every movie
that he made. Same thing with the Bormann papers. I
just can't see George Romero even having the cash to
be able to do that.

Speaker 6 (01:45:46):
No, he didn't, and it wasn't interesting to him. My
sense of Altman is that he always had a sense
that he was going to be part of history, part
of film history. And I just don't think George thought
of him self in that way. We have what we have,
and there's opportunities out there. You mentioned the Altman Archive

(01:46:08):
at the University of Michigan. I think there are ways
in which if we put together archives like the Altman Election.
I know that Michigan American Mavericks Collection has also recently
acquired Jonathan Demi's materials. To see those sorts of archives
with filmmakers who are working similarly and that they're working independently,

(01:46:30):
often in America, in similar periods of time, but then
comparing the different kinds of not just the films that
they made, but like the kinds of careers that they
had and the sort of archival legacies that they left behind.
I think we could all learn from those sorts of
comparisons as well.

Speaker 1 (01:46:48):
So where's the best place for people to keep up
with the whole horror studies thing? I'm so curious about this.

Speaker 6 (01:46:53):
The website that leads you to everything is www. Dot
matters dot org and that's the official newsletter and event
resource listing for the Horror Studies Center at PIT and
through there you can get to the other links that

(01:47:14):
will bring you to the more formal Horror Studies Center, websites,
and inflammation. It's brand new in terms of its official
establishment and approval, but it is very old in terms
of the fact that we've been doing activities and events
and curricular initiatives for a long time now. So the

(01:47:36):
Horror Study Center, even though it's new, is already at
full throttle, I would say, And we've got tons of
events coming up and visiting speakers and special screenings and
all kinds of opportunities for student scholarships and you name it.
Really were involved with it, and so we're very much new,

(01:47:59):
but we're also very much running already.

Speaker 1 (01:48:03):
Professor Lowenstein, thank you so much for your time. This
has been great.

Speaker 6 (01:48:06):
Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to talk
with you. Mike and I appreciate all of your interest
and devotion to films that matter, and it's hard work
and we all appreciate it. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:48:22):
All Right, we are back and we are talking about
Hungry Wives season of The Witch, Jack's Wife, whatever you
want to call it.

Speaker 5 (01:48:31):
Are we going to drive into the cineplex that we're
watching it at home? There's there our choices.

Speaker 1 (01:48:36):
Yeah, from what I understood, they never actually released it
as Hungry Wives. It was the poster, it was the trailer,
because that's probably what I put in last week's episode
was Hungry Wives the trailer, because I love lurid trailers,
and especially ones that play very well with radio. You know,

(01:48:56):
I love finding radio ads for old movies.

Speaker 5 (01:48:58):
But it's a great trailer.

Speaker 1 (01:49:00):
The video trailer for it is a fantastic I love it,
and I do have to say I really like what
they did. Is that the aero set that they put
out where they do have both of the versions of
the film, and there's some good extras, really nice interview
with our main character or sorry, I should say with
our main actress, jan White. I thought they did a
really good job on that, and I think the only

(01:49:21):
thing that could make it better is if somehow they
could make the Jack's Wife cut look a little bit better.
Or yeah, to our point from earlier, just find the
whole damn film. But stranger things have happened, you know,
like Professor Lowenstein said, you know, we didn't think we
were going to find Martin, but we now have it,
and Rain I think maybe you and I should meet
halfway in Pittsburgh sometime and watch a long version of Martin.

Speaker 4 (01:49:44):
Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 5 (01:49:46):
I love that can fly out there, don't leave me out.

Speaker 4 (01:49:48):
Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it live, Let's do
a live projection.

Speaker 7 (01:49:52):
Do it a lot, fuck it, do it lot.

Speaker 1 (01:49:56):
This period of time, like you were saying before, I
believe it's father him alone talking about like this kind
of you know, as Professor Lowenstein said, time in the woods,
you know where it's like these films that between Night
of the Living Dead and what Down of the Dead
or Martin. I guess Martin fits into that.

Speaker 5 (01:50:17):
It's really Donna the Dead. Martin gets can kind of
be lumped in with there's always Vanilla Jack's wife, the
Crazies Martin, then Donna the Day. So in most people's minds,
George Romero made two movies Knight of the Living Dead
than Dawn of the Dead and then everything afterwards. But yeah,
so this is the missing this is his his missing
weekend away from.

Speaker 12 (01:50:36):
Yoko or with Yoko. Apparently, well no, no, Yoko is horror.
Oh okay, it's where he should actually be. He should
not be hanging around with fucking Harry Nielsen.

Speaker 4 (01:50:47):
For a year, I kept thinking about how he was
shooting mister Rogers wonderfully. That's how as a child watching
mister Rogers Neighborhood, I'm just like, oh, this is like
from out in the world. I couldn't conceive of it
as being something shot on like a sound stage in Pittsburgh.
And yet and yet not only was that the case,

(01:51:09):
but George fucking Romero The Street.

Speaker 5 (01:51:12):
You should check out his NFL film The Juice is Loose.
It's horrifying.

Speaker 1 (01:51:17):
I will I'm kind of interested in that, just to
see what he was doing, and also just as an
artifact of the time.

Speaker 5 (01:51:24):
Oh man, it's great. His NFL films are fucking fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:51:27):
I believe it because he knows how to shoot the
shit out of stuff, and especially like you were saying,
the budget on this film being basically halved and making
it look so good, and that he, you know, to
our points from earlier, probably shot so many hours of footage.
It's like, what are you doing save that money?

Speaker 11 (01:51:46):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:51:47):
But insteadies it's all about telling the story.

Speaker 4 (01:51:51):
But he had such good stuff, and we have not
We've talked all this time, we have not talked about
the performances. Yet, as far as I'm concerned, there is
not a dud in this cast. Everybody fucking delivers. They're
not even necessarily on eleven. They deliver. And the fact
that you know, Jane White, who basically didn't work again

(01:52:12):
talking about just like going out while you're on top, right,
I mean like which probably didn't probably did not feel
like that in terms of like career success, but in
terms of like nailing a role and just like inhabiting
it and making me believe this is what she's going
through it every every moment. I mean, you know, I

(01:52:33):
mean she could have dominated I think, you know, for
years afterwards as a as a film actor. But there's
not a moment where I drop out of this film
and think that they're just putting me on. You're just
putting me on.

Speaker 5 (01:52:49):
Rameiro always has a nice mixture of professional actors and
just obviously people on the street that he was like
this guy, this guy looks like perfect, get over here
and say these things. But he did have a knack
for casting, and I agree. I'm trying. I'm running through
my mind trying to think of a bad performance in
a Romero movie, and I really can't. I can't point

(01:53:10):
to anything and go that's bad, And in particularly this movie
should be considering. It's like, what would you know the budget?
And in Pittsburgh, what the fuck are you doing down there? Sir?
You know, like, yeah, I agree. I love all the
performances in this film. They get better every time I
watch the movie.

Speaker 1 (01:53:26):
Honestly, these could be the community playhouse kind of quality
actor but no, everybody's given it. They're all I think
that the woman that plays her friend is just the
right amount of obnoxious. And you called her missus Kravitz earlier.
That's dead on glad As Kravitz.

Speaker 5 (01:53:45):
Like all of my mom's friends growing up, that lady, like,
I certainly recognize her.

Speaker 1 (01:53:51):
The thing I wanted to go back to. And I
have seen this written and talked about a little bit,
just that whole idea though, of the leash that her
husband puts on her, and then you end the movie
with this red rope being put around her neck, and
it's just like, is she just trading in one yoke
for another? Is that why we end on the She's

(01:54:12):
Jack's wife, like she's trying to go out on her
own and trying to be a person, you know, a
fully realized person, but instead this is just another another lease.
She's allowing to be put around her neck or just
she's just playing pretend.

Speaker 4 (01:54:30):
It's a great question, and I think the ambiguity of
it is what I mean, there's so much that makes
us film interesting. So it's not like it's what makes
us film interesting, but it is an interesting note to
land on because it's not an act of like empowering
obliteration like Elman Luise or set it Off, where it's
just like, all right, we're just gonna fucking blow it

(01:54:51):
all up and let the chips fall. She's persisting somehow,
but you know, I mean, if it's all metaphorical, is
she's just starting to realize, like, oh, I've been on
a leash this entire time? How am I going to
like recognize when I'm next on Alish? And when I'm
next on Alish? How do I undo myself from this

(01:55:12):
series of Lee shows? Is kind of my reading on
it ultimately, because again it's nineteen seventy two.

Speaker 5 (01:55:19):
Yeah, And I think the ambiguity just tis back into
the magic question, the the you know, is this actually
mystical going on? Or is this all in her head?
Or is it just some sort of actualization? And you know,
the rope might be her acceptance of a different rope,
her preferred rope, until she's like further along, until no

(01:55:40):
one is saying, oh, that's Jack's wife anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:55:44):
I love the going back to the editing, Like we're
talking about the editing of the sequence where she shoots
her husband, and then you're cutting from that to the
ceremony of her being initiated as a witch, and going
back and forth between those two, and then you get
that amazing voiceover of the cop just like Oh, these women,

(01:56:05):
they'll get away with anything kind of thing. And I'm like, oh, man,
there you go, right. The misogyny, the patriarchy just like
so ingrained in this film.

Speaker 5 (01:56:15):
Holy cow, It's like a reversal of the Godfather to ending.

Speaker 4 (01:56:19):
That's what I really like about this film is that
it really does plumb the depths of what that systemic
sexism has done, and like, how far you've got to
swim up before you break the surface of that water.

Speaker 1 (01:56:34):
I don't know if I'm just watching a weird version
of this film right now, but the version that I'm
watching ends with the ceremony and a shot of the
basically like the head of the coven, like the woman
that did the terror readings, and then it just cuts
to the end.

Speaker 5 (01:56:52):
And that's the Hungry Wives version, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (01:56:55):
Yeah, that's the one hundred and one hour and forty
two minute version, which I don't like that ending because
it's just so abrupt. I mean, the ending of the
shorter version I think is way better because that's the
one that ends with the declaration and the that's Jack's Wife.
It's frustrating because that ending is better than the other ending.

(01:57:15):
And I keep touting the longer version, but the shorter
version has the better ending. How frustrating is that?

Speaker 5 (01:57:22):
Get George Ramiro on the phone.

Speaker 4 (01:57:24):
We need the projection both cut.

Speaker 1 (01:57:25):
I guess.

Speaker 5 (01:57:26):
So get out the Tarot deck or the WATA board
whatever we need to contact George Ramiro. Get this fucking sorted.
It seems like the movie to do it with.

Speaker 4 (01:57:34):
I saw an interview where he said himself, it's the
one movie he wishes he could remain. I'm sure that
that idea has changed for him a lot over time.
But like, what would his Hungry Wives, Jack's wife, whatever,
what would it look like today? Wouldn't be called Jack's
wife anymore? Would it be something else?

Speaker 1 (01:57:53):
You know? Well, I'm kind of curious his daughter is
directing things now. I'm wondering if she would be up
for doing a roommake.

Speaker 5 (01:58:02):
Maybe maybe, No, that's exciting.

Speaker 1 (01:58:06):
I mean, she's got her Queens of the Dead that's
either on shutter right now or coming to it. I
think it's by the time this comes out, it will
be on shutter.

Speaker 8 (01:58:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:58:18):
Maybe get Tina on the phone. Probably be a little
bit easier to contact than George.

Speaker 5 (01:58:22):
That's true, But I really would like to talk to George.

Speaker 1 (01:58:26):
Well, we have a witch on the show.

Speaker 9 (01:58:28):
That's right.

Speaker 4 (01:58:29):
Should I break out my.

Speaker 1 (01:58:30):
Wuigi bars if you want to please?

Speaker 4 (01:58:32):
Which was invented in Baltimore where I am right now.
There's a seven eleven in the building that the Ouiji
board was created in. So you can go to the
seven eleven in Baltimore and see the plaque that acknowledges
the space where the wage aboard was invented and deployed
around the world.

Speaker 5 (01:58:51):
I'd like to point out that it was popularized by
Parker Brothers. It was which was the factory was in Salem, Massachusetts,
where we would go to on field trips as children,
and they would give you a board game at the
end of your tour, and I accepted a Wija board,
much to the chagrin. Chagrin, no, let's say severe anger

(01:59:11):
of the nuns at my Catholic school.

Speaker 4 (01:59:14):
And this reveals the Baltimore to Stalem pipeline, which nobody
talks about.

Speaker 5 (01:59:18):
Yes, stop talking about, because.

Speaker 4 (01:59:19):
The first role of the Baltimore Baltimore pipeline is don't
talk about it.

Speaker 1 (01:59:25):
I am very surprised that Ouigi is not a eponymous name.
I thought for sure would be after like Herman Wuiga
or something, but no, apparently it's the first word that
was spelled out by medium Helen Peters Nosworthy when she
asked the board to name itself.

Speaker 4 (01:59:42):
To come to Baltimore, Well, the visit the There's also
a wigiaboard museum here. She's very cool.

Speaker 5 (01:59:47):
God, I'm coming, Yeah, come on over. I love Baltimore.

Speaker 1 (01:59:52):
Is there anything else we want to talk about? Season
of the Witch.

Speaker 4 (01:59:55):
It's so good. It's so good. I've got so many
quotes that I've highlighted, but I just don't want you know.
It's it's beautiful, it's political, it's thoughtful. There's so many
things that think about in this film.

Speaker 5 (02:00:08):
In a shout out to Steve Goren's electronic score, any
early seventies sort of electronica just really gets me where
I live. So and this sort of early attempts at
it is great, particularly like on a small independent level,
like oh.

Speaker 4 (02:00:23):
Boy, if you watch the opening sequence with your eyes closed,
which is not watching it arguably, but you just get
that score and it's so amazing.

Speaker 5 (02:00:33):
The score is amazing, and his last name is Gorn,
and that's just fucking cool because you'd want him fighting
Captain Kirk, you know in my mind, all.

Speaker 1 (02:00:41):
Right, we're going to take another break and play a
preview for next week's show right after these brief messages.

Speaker 3 (02:00:46):
Ryan O'Neil is the driver and his reputation in the
rescue run in the business.

Speaker 7 (02:00:51):
My line of work is kind of hard.

Speaker 5 (02:00:52):
To come about it.

Speaker 3 (02:00:53):
Bruce Dern is the detective, his reputation the toughest cop.

Speaker 1 (02:00:57):
In the city.

Speaker 3 (02:00:57):
Maybe you ought to be afraid of me and driven
by the need to prove they were the best. Hym O'Neil,
Bruce Dern Isabella Johnny Driver who rated R now playing
at a theater near you.

Speaker 1 (02:01:13):
That's right, we'll be back next week to kick off.
November twenty twenty five, but they look at Walter Hill's
the driver. Until then, I want to thank my co
host Father Malone and Rain. So, Father Malone, what is
the laest with you?

Speaker 7 (02:01:25):
Sir?

Speaker 5 (02:01:25):
Check out my show Midnight Viewing. It's a twice a
week show. On Mondays, we do Father Malone's Weekly round
Up where I look at everything new in streaming and
theatrical and every Friday it's the Horror Anthology Podcast. It's
a rotating show. One week it'll be a review of
Talness to the Dark Side with projection booths Mike White
and culture cast Chris Stashue. And then the next week

(02:01:46):
will be at yaoucha Fest where we're looking at the
Predator films with my partner hp SO. Check us out
Midnight Viewing. There's there's a lot of it. There's a
lot of it. It's exhausting everybody.

Speaker 1 (02:01:56):
And Rain Now about you, what's new in your world?

Speaker 4 (02:01:59):
Azra recording this. I've got an art show that's up
here in Baltimore and in the Current Gallery Current Space Gallery,
which is something I've been working on for two years.
It's called Back East. It's about repudiating the pioneer myths
of my childhood. A two Persons Show with my friend
Aaron Stellman. It's a beautiful culmination of a lot of work.

(02:02:21):
None of you are going to get to see it,
but I'm hoping that pieces of it will eminate from here.
I'm also working on the Hopkins Press Podcast. I've got
a podcast where I interview article authors for academic journals
about their research and it's really cool. I'm having a
great time on that. Check it out Hopkins Press Podcast.

(02:02:43):
It's a little nerdy and it's beautiful. We have amazing
discussions on there, and I'm sure that by the time
we record another one of these very soon, Mike, I'll
have even more news for you.

Speaker 1 (02:02:54):
Well. Thank you so much, folks for being on the show.
Thanks to everybody for listening. Want to support physical media
and great movies in the mail, head over to scarecrow
dot com and try Scarecrow Videos incredible rent by mail service,
the largest publicly accessible collection in the world. You'll find
films there entirely unavailable elsewhere. Get what you want when
you want it without the scrolling. And of course they

(02:03:16):
have season of the Witch. If you want to hear
more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
of the other shows that I work on. They are
all available at Weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our
Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit
patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get
helps the Projection Booth take over the world.

Speaker 2 (02:03:46):
When I look at MA window, many sites to see.

Speaker 5 (02:03:56):
I want to look at my window.

Speaker 2 (02:04:00):
So many different people. That strange, so strange, it's very
strange to me.

Speaker 13 (02:04:15):
You got to.

Speaker 2 (02:04:15):
Pick up every stay here, You got to pick up
every stage. You got to pick up heavy stage pitch on.

Speaker 11 (02:04:32):
Must be a season which must be a season of
a witch. Must be the season of a wish.

Speaker 10 (02:04:48):
God.

Speaker 2 (02:04:56):
When I look over my shoulder, what happens that?

Speaker 4 (02:05:01):
What do you think?

Speaker 6 (02:05:01):
I see.

Speaker 5 (02:05:06):
Some of the cat looking off. I'm sure.

Speaker 11 (02:05:15):
He's strange, so strange.

Speaker 2 (02:05:20):
He's very strange to me. You've got to pick up
every stay, You've got to pick up every stage.

Speaker 5 (02:05:35):
Be next out to make it rich.

Speaker 11 (02:05:42):
Must be the season of the must be the season.

Speaker 2 (02:05:52):
Must be the season of the Witch.

Speaker 13 (02:06:04):
Which so it must be a series of a speciation
sports series, the series of Space six on My Species
sing must spe series of Spies, series

Speaker 11 (02:06:26):
Of Expert Season, the species of the same series speed Seen,
the species of Spell six seat sees of Sea,

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Ruthie's Table 4

The Joe Rogan Experience

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 769: Season of the Witch (1972)

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Ruthie's Table 4

The Joe Rogan Experience

All Episodes

Episode 769: Season of the Witch (1972)

On Purpose with Jay Shetty