The 10 Best Horror Movies of 2025 and ‘Black Phone 2’

Summary

The Big Picture – “The 10 Best Horror Movies of 2025 and ‘Black Phone 2’”

Podcast: The Big Picture (The Ringer)

Hosts: Sean Fennessey, Chris Ryan

Guest: Alex Ross Perry

Date: October 21, 2025

---

Overview

This episode dives into the current state of horror cinema in 2025, offering spirited reviews, critical reflections, and debates about the year’s genre highlights. Sean and Chris, joined by frequent guest and filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, cover the highly anticipated “Black Phone 2,” discuss the health of horror franchises and anthologies, dissect trends like exposition overload and “elevated” horror, and deliver an enthusiastic run-down of the year’s best—and most twisted—flicks. The conversation is rich with recommendations, loving critiques, and playful banter, making it a must-read for horror buffs and movie fans alike.

---

Major Discussion Points & Insights

Recent Movie News and Industry Buzz

• Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” Trailer (00:32–04:45):

  • Sean and Chris muse about the value of trailers, with Chris expressing appreciation for directors like Nolan and PTA who master the art of the teaser, lamenting trailers that give away too much.
  • “[Nolan] is so good at cutting trailers…an art unto themselves.” – Chris Ryan (03:04)
  • They speculate on whether “Odyssey” will live up to monumental expectations following “Oppenheimer.”

• Michael Mann’s “Heat 2” & De-aging (05:31–08:44):

  • Updates on Mann’s “Heat 2”: Mann moving studios for creative freedom, de-aging discussions, and delays.
  • Chris compares his nervous excitement to the hypothetical “Daniel Plainview Prison” sequel.

• Tony Gilroy’s “Behemoth” & Ava Victor Casting (09:11–10:27):

  • Gilroy’s first feature since “Duplicity,” with Pedro Pascal and Ava Victor.
  • Sean: “Tony Gilroy hasn’t made a movie since Duplicity…one of the great [profiles] in recent history.”

---

Deep Dive: “Black Phone 2” (10:56–22:00)

[Begin: 10:56]

Plot: Gwen (15) receives supernatural calls and visions involving a killer (the Grabber, Ethan Hawke), facing him at a wintry youth camp alongside her brother, Finney.

Key Impressions:

• Strong Opening, Disappointing Payoff:
  • The first 45 minutes praised for atmosphere and Derrickson’s visual flair, but the film falls into the trap of excessive dream sequences and heavy-handed exposition.
• Structural Issues:
  • Momentum gets bogged down by attempts to retroactively connect the sequel’s storyline to the original—especially through long, dialogue-heavy scenes explaining mythology and backstory.
  • Chris: “Too many dream sequences…relying so much in the first act on mood and creep that the second act…is a tough example of something plaguing horror movies: overreliance on expository dialogue.” (13:23)
• Supernatural Turn & Retcons:
  • A major retcon changes the fate of the kids’ mother to tie her directly to the Grabber, making the trauma more visceral but feeling forced.
• Villain Dilemma:
  • Discussion of the “mantle” problem: Should the Grabber have become supernatural, or should the villain role pass to new characters, “Ghostface”-style?

Box Office & Franchise:

• Despite negative reviews, the film is a commercial hit, outpacing Blumhouse’s other recent horror offerings, suggesting inevitable sequels.

Notable Quote:

• “It’s really hard because it seems like Derrickson just wants to make a very different movie…But he needs what he hopes will be an iconic villain.” – Sean Fennessey (13:41)

---

The State of Horror in 2025 (22:00–36:41)

[Begin: 22:00]

Trends & Challenges:

• Franchise Fatigue and Exposition:

  • Modern studio horror often bloated by explanations and convoluted mythology.
  • “A lot of it just feels very barren…overindexed for the trauma of the characters instead of the scares of the movie.” – Chris Ryan (34:03)

• Auteur “Elevated Horror”:

  • Top-tier horror this year from auteur-driven projects: "Sinners", "Weapons", "28 Years Later."
  • Chris: “Three of my five or six favorite movies of the year are horror movies…Sinners, Weapons, 28 Years Later all auteur-driven…with huge swings…” (26:56)

• Diminished Middle Class:

  • While the elite “festival horror” is thriving, the mid-budget, fun, and inventive horror space (the “Sleepaway Camp” and “Shocker” category) is struggling, with most success coming from either prestigious directors or very low-budget indies.

• Streaming and Shudder’s Role:

  • Shudder cementing itself as the primary curator/distributor for indie/experimental horror, often leading to limited theatrical runs before exclusivity on streaming.

• “Trauma” and “Elevated Horror” Fatigue:

  • Hereditary’s influence means many new films trade scares for psychological suffering, sometimes at the genre’s expense.
  • Sean: “These movies don’t actually have scares every 15 minutes anymore…”

---

The Year’s Standout Horror Films: Recommendations & Reviews

VHS: Halloween (36:41–41:00)

• Anthology reliability: “One of the only reliable things in my life that every year Shudder gives us a new VHS movie.”
• Alex Ross Perry’s Segment “Kid Print”: Lauded as "very fucked up" and a highlight of this installment.

Other Recommended Titles

• Dangerous Animals (39:11):

  • A shark horror film with a sadistic twist—killer uses sharks as weapons.
  • “It’s one of the first…where a killer utilized as a tool a shark as the weapon.” (39:44)
  • Jai Courtney’s villain is singled out as a standout.

• Bring Her Back (41:31):

  • Dark, “talk to me”-style story of a woman enlisting dark web rituals to resurrect her child. Gritty, potent, but perhaps too bleak for some tastes.

• Strange Harvest (43:27):

  • A true-crime style supernatural procedural—blending realism and horror.

• Shelby Oaks (46:26):

  • Noted for its clever use of found footage/YouTuber narrative structure, but criticized for breaking its own conventions.

• Night of the Reaper & Marshmallow (49:07):

  • Two Shudder standouts focused on camp, slashers, and horror-comedy. “Night of the Reaper is…a riff on House of the Devil and Scream and babysitters/serial killers.”

• Invader (49:48):

  • Short, disorienting “run-and-gun” horror film by Mickey Keating and Joe Swanberg, compared to the Dardennes, Haneke, Harmony Korine.
  • “If you turn this on and you get about five minutes in and you feel like you need to throw up because of the camera work, stop the movie, because it doesn’t get any better.” – Chris Ryan (51:26)

• Companion (55:06):

  • A sci-fi tinge, failed to find a box office audience due to odd release timing.

• Good Boy (55:28):

  • A dog’s-eye view of a serial killer, notable dog performance.

• Descendant, Jimmy & Stiggs, Bleeding (56:00–59:31):

  • Among the year’s best in the sci-fi, splatter, and vampirism-as-addiction subgenres, respectively.

• Lighter Fare (59:51):

  • Fear Street: Prom Queen, Marshmallow (again), Clown in a Cornfield – for more fun, group-friendly horror.

---

Horror Villains, Franchises, and the Need for Innovation (25:26–27:46)

• Sean argues that successful eras in horror aren’t defined only by villains but by bold ideas and execution (Michael Myers, Freddy, Jason are the rare exceptions).
• Chris: “Do you think a healthy horror ecosystem is powered by its villains or by form…?” (24:58)

---

Segment: Horror Anthologies and the VHS Halloween “Kid Print” (65:09–93:42)

Special Guest: Alex Ross Perry

• On Creating “Kid Print”:

  • Inspiration from a real 1990s Blockbuster promotion.
  • “Just that weird level of quiet combined with analog video hiss…and 30 years later makes it feel creepy.” – Alex Ross Perry (66:54)
  • Alex’s horror comes from grounded, real-world fear—namely, child abduction, rather than the supernatural.

• Process and Philosophy:

  • Flexibility, fast turn-around, and the practicalities of horror anthology production.
  • “My only criteria was: I just need to make the thing that when it ends, I’m turning and I’m saying, that one was great.” (72:11)

• Anthology Structure:

  • Discussed the merits of one-director vs. multi-director anthologies.
  • Trick ‘r Treat (2007, Michael Dougherty) cited as modern gold standard for single-director anthologies.
  • VHS praised as an annual streaming event and for supporting new voices.

• Anthology Recommendations & Analysis:

  • Highest ranked: Kwaidan, Dead of Night, Tales from the Hood, Black Sabbath, Creepshow, Three Extremes.
  • Noted how anthology viewing is relaxing and communal (“great for parties, but Kid Print will ruin your party vibe!”).

• Industry and TV Cross-Pollination:

  • Anthologies have become rare in theaters, now mostly streaming-driven.
  • TV efforts at horror anthologies (Twilight Zone reboot, Channel Zero, Black Mirror) often fail to catch on.
  • Personal horror viewing rituals: “horror hangover” after Halloween (101:10).

---

Memorable Quotes

• “Too many dream sequences…not psychologically fascinating…relying so much on mood and creep that the second act…is a tough example of something plaguing horror movies: overreliance on expository dialogue.” – Chris Ryan (13:23)
• “If I do it, could you guys just not address it?” (on going bleach blonde for a Halloween costume) – Sean Fennessey (23:25)
• “These movies don’t actually have scares every 15 minutes anymore. Like, I think we’ve really gotten away from the reliable rewards of this genre.” – Chris Ryan (36:18)
• “What scares me? That’s what I want to make. I don’t find demons upsetting...my thought was just, as a parent, this is upsetting to me. If I’m going to make something to get under your skin, my starting point is what upsets me.” – Alex Ross Perry (68:36)
• “It should be a surprise how awful it is. It’s obvious where this is going because this is a 20 minute segment...but what you should be surprised by is it went further than you thought.” – Alex Ross Perry (75:08)
• “If you give people the prompt of ‘make a 20 minute Halloween thing’...some will do trick-or-treating and some won’t. For me, that’s narrative justification for why I’m keeping it lean and grounded.” – Alex Ross Perry (79:05)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Christopher Nolan & Industry News: 02:02–10:27
• Black Phone 2 Deep Dive: 10:56–22:00
• Horror Trends & Ecosystem: 22:00–36:41
• Best of 2025 Horror Recommendations: 36:41–65:09
• Anthologies & Alex Ross Perry Interview: 65:09–119:06

---

Final Reflections

• 2025 is a paradox for horror: auteur-driven genre films are peaking, but mainstream and mid-level horror are struggling with formulaic storytelling and exposition overload.
• VHS: Halloween continues to be a bright spot for inventive horror storytelling.
• Horror anthologies—whether single- or multi-director—offer unique challenges and pleasures, serving as a proving ground for new talent and creative ideas.
• Horror “hangover” post-Halloween is real; fans and filmmakers want more natural calendar alignment for releases.

---

Essential Watchlist (2025 Highlights)

• Black Phone 2 (Scott Derrickson)
• Sinners, Weapons, 28 Years Later (Auteur-driven successes)
• VHS: Halloween (Shudder anthology; “Kid Print” by Alex Ross Perry)
• Dangerous Animals (Sadistic shark horror)
• Bring Her Back, Strange Harvest, Shelby Oaks (Varied strong indies)
• Night of the Reaper, Marshmallow, Invader (Indie/experimental standouts)
• Companion, Good Boy, Descendant, Jimmy & Stiggs, Bleeding (Variously in sci-fi, splatter, social commentary)
• Fear Street: Prom Queen, Clown in a Cornfield (Teen/slasher fun)
• Bone Lake, Which Board remake, Hell of a Summer, Looky Lou (Further recommendations for completists)

---

Closing Note

This episode is a deep well of recommendations, critical perspective, and horror genre love, punctuated by the chemistry of its hosts and the wry, creative energy of guest Alex Ross Perry. Whether you’re a diehard genre fan or just need an October movie night pick, this conversation has something twisted for you.

Transcript

[Chris Ryan]

Foreign.

[Sean Fennessey]

I'm Sean Fennesee.

[Chris Ryan]

I'm the Grabber.

[Sean Fennessey]

This is the Big Picture, a conversation show about horror. It's October and you know what that means. CR is here to talk about the scariest, most depraved and most delightful horror movies of 2025. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by friend of the POD and filmmaker Alex Ross Perry. Alex, of course, a staple of our Halloween programming here on the show. Many people have been asking me, when will you have Alex back to talk about awful shit?

[Chris Ryan]

Many people be like, who needs Chris? If you've got Alex, oh, you've got Tracy Letts.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Like, what's the problem?

[Sean Fennessey]

No, the Grabber is still at the top of the mountain here on this show. Thank you for grabbing Chris. But Alex, I will say this year, unlike previous years, he has actually contributed to horror filmmaking. He has a segment, what a contribution in the new VHS Halloween film. It's called Kid Print. We'll talk about his contribution. We'll talk about it. Anthology horror movies, which is something that Chris and I also really enjoy. I think Alex has the record for the most appearances of a guest on the POD ever.

[Chris Ryan]

Okay.

[Sean Fennessey]

I think he's in the like, realm of 12 or 13 at this point, which is pretty extraordinary. So Martin Scorsese challenges yourself. You have a lot of work to do, sir. Okay, That'll all come up very shortly on the show. This episode is presented by LinkedIn ads.

[Chris Ryan]

Sometimes marketing gets wasted on the wrong people.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Like if you see an ad for.

[Chris Ryan]

Movie themed dog sweaters when you don't even have a pet.

[Sean Fennessey]

Reach exactly who you need with LinkedIn ads. With a network of 130 million decision makers, they can help you target by job title, industry, company size, or even skills. It's one of the reasons LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B return on ad spend of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them.

[Chris Ryan]

Try it out. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com TheBigPicture Terms and Conditions apply.

[Sean Fennessey]

Okay, Sierra, before we talk about horror, was there, was there any news that you wanted to break down? I, I, I don't ever get to do news banter with you. I, I listen to you and Andy and I'm like, God, if just for a day I could sit in that chair, the green walled seat, and watch.

[Chris Ryan]

This guy look at off brand Internet sites and screenshots.

[Sean Fennessey]

Let me pull up variety.com and he ran my podcast.

[Chris Ryan]

I wish I was looking at trades. Come on, man.

[Sean Fennessey]

What are you looking at?

[Chris Ryan]

At all sorts of places. Message boards. I'm looking at dark web movie news sites.

[Sean Fennessey]

Okay.

[Chris Ryan]

Turns out that we're going to get an Odyssey trailer in December.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I don't know.

[Sean Fennessey]

What, you learned this on a dark website?

[Chris Ryan]

No, I'm just saying, like world of real. I'm looking all around there, you know, and it's. That's the rumor is Odyssey trailer incoming. Full trailer.

[Sean Fennessey]

Christopher Nolan's next film. You famously have a fraught relationship with trailers now. You don't want to watch them, you don't want the exposure.

[Chris Ryan]

I feel like with the Odyssey it's okay.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Well, but why?

[Sean Fennessey]

Because you're going to go right? Like why do you need to see anything?

[Chris Ryan]

Okay, well then I won't watch it.

[Sean Fennessey]

I just want to tell you what to do. I'm challenging what you suggested on the show.

[Chris Ryan]

I think with something like this, with no one specifically. He is so good at cutting trailers, just like PTA is so good at cutting trailers that they are an art unto themselves. What I don't like is three and a half minute comedy trailers that give away every joke or action movie trailers that give away every set piece. But with Nolan, it's going to have a rhythm. It's going to have a kind of vibe to it that I really want to and I hope to see a lot more of the cast too.

[Sean Fennessey]

So just gut check. The film is now about nine months away. Ten months away.

[Chris Ryan]

You didn't buy one of those tickets, did you?

[Sean Fennessey]

I didn't, no. I already did a rant about how I don't really love the like 10 months in advance thing. I'm with you. I. Do you think that this movie is going to live up to our expectations in a variety of ways. Nolan is coming off of arguably the most impressive achievement of his career in Oppenheimer. Not just as a film, but it made nearly a billion dollars. He won best picture and best director at the Academy Awards and he confirmed himself as a legendary all time film.

[Chris Ryan]

World leaders took important lessons from it.

[Sean Fennessey]

Well, I mean, perhaps that is the case. Unfortunately this is a tough act to follow. It is. Any trepidation. Is your excitement through the roof?

[Chris Ryan]

Uh, I think it's cool that he is arguably taking the only biggest, bigger swing that he could have taken in a sort of huge myth like this. Because it would have been, I, I would have been fine if he was like, I have a little like tenety kind of thriller idea or like we had talked about, should he do, like, a horror movie or something? Pallet cleansing like that. But this is about as big of a of a shot as you can take after something like, well, I want to depict the making of a nuclear bomb.

[Sean Fennessey]

I listened to him on the Directors Guild of America podcast because he interviewed Benny Safdie. Did he? About the Smashing Machine? Because, of course, Benny Starr was one of the stars of Oppenheimer, and he loved the Smashing Machine. Nolan. And he said, I don't think you'll see a better performance than the Rock and the Smashing Machine. I don't know if I completely agree with that, but I really liked the Rock's performance in that movie as well. And it was a really cool conversation because you can't imagine two filmmaking styles more different than what Safdie does and Nolan does. And Nolan, you can see, is literally asking him questions to acquire information. Really. And he's not saying, I'm gonna use any of what you're sharing with me. But his curiosity, I think, makes it a really cool conversation. And I don't suspect that the Rock is gonna show up in the Odyssey, but you never know.

[Chris Ryan]

No, I mean, it would be weird if they had, like, all these actors and then they were like. And then there's a special appearance by.

[Sean Fennessey]

The Rock that would be a bit strange. Other news you mentioned. Michael Mann said that he's pro AI.

[Chris Ryan]

No, Michael Mann.

[Alex Ross Perry]

This.

[Chris Ryan]

He got tarted as this. He received an award at a French film festival over the weekend. I believe it was in Lyon, but I can't remember.

[Sean Fennessey]

You weren't there.

[Chris Ryan]

I was not there. I was hanging out with you. Uh, but there he. He gave some updates, but he talked about needing to move it from Warner Brothers to Amazon in order to make it the way he wants to make it. It will have a theatrical release. He's gonna shoot it next year, he says. And he talked about de Aging. Now, I think if it's okay for your beloved Marty, it should be okay for my beloved Mikey.

[Sean Fennessey]

The. The act of de aging.

[Chris Ryan]

Yes.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah. I mean, I, in. In theory, have done well.

[Chris Ryan]

It does.

[Sean Fennessey]

The Irishman. It's not done all that well. So that's. That's one of the big criticisms.

[Chris Ryan]

It may have been a little earlier, you know, if. If the Irishman had been done now, would it have looked better? I don't know.

[Sean Fennessey]

I'm not sure. But we were talking about the tools that were being used, and there was suggestion that he would use art, that someone would use artificial intelligence.

[Chris Ryan]

Somewhere along the line, it Was like, Michael Mann's going to use AI to D people. And I think that might be like adding something to something that he didn't say.

[Sean Fennessey]

I see.

[Chris Ryan]

That being said, it does sound like he is shooting the whole boat, like, of Heat, too.

[Sean Fennessey]

Can we just pull back?

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

Because we've been talking about this for three years. I mean, will Heat two happen?

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

And every time it comes up, it's the only time I've ever seen you get tight on Mike.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

Like, you.

[Alex Ross Perry]

You.

[Sean Fennessey]

I don't know.

[Chris Ryan]

I like, what would be the heat, too, for you? What would be your. What would be your thing that's so precious and it excites you so much, the idea of getting more of it, but the possibility of it being at all like, I don't know, like, that your original enjoyment of something would be.

[Sean Fennessey]

Like, probably like the continuing adventures of Daniel Plainview.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

You know, Exactly. And it was like, yeah, we're gonna go back to the well and see what Daniel's 70s are like.

[Chris Ryan]

Or like, he does prison time in Leavenworth for killing Eli or something.

[Sean Fennessey]

Now that is a movie I would watch.

[Chris Ryan]

Daniel Plainview Prison.

[Sean Fennessey]

That's maybe a movie Michael mann should make. PTA's prison movie. Wow, that sounds fabulous. There's not a lot of. There aren't a lot of things like that in the world. For me. I think Heat is a pure genre movie, so it makes sense for it to have a follow up, you know? Yeah. And, you know, we both read the book. Book's pretty cool. It's got some flaws. It does seems like it's happening. It seems like this movie is going to happen. And I'm just fascinated to make that podcast with you. That's how I feel.

[Chris Ryan]

That's how I feel.

[Sean Fennessey]

I'm looking forward to seeing it, but.

[Chris Ryan]

Me too.

[Sean Fennessey]

You know, it'll be. It'll be cool.

[Chris Ryan]

I'll tell you what I'm going to get hyped up is when we start getting like, weird telephoto lens set shots of Leonardo DiCaprio or Adam Driver or whoever the person is going to be appearing in this.

[Sean Fennessey]

Do you feel that you need to be emotionally supported throughout this process or do you feel like you're gonna, you know, headlong Jon Snow single sword into battle.

[Chris Ryan]

I think that I. He is not like Star wars for me. It's like, I. I'm okay with whatever winds up. I don't think I'm gonna be. Need kick loves you can. And if it comes out and it's got flaws like Ferrari had flaws which movie I really liked but is obviously not on the same level as Thief and Manhunter and Heat. I'm going to be open to criticism.

[Sean Fennessey]

Okay. Think your lashes have hit their limit? Discover limitless length and full volume with Maybelline's Sky High Mascara. The Flex Tower Brush bends to volumize and extend every single lash from root to tip. And the lightweight bamboo infused formula makes lashes feel weightless now in eight bold shades so you can take your lashes to new heights every day. Visit maybelline.com to shop Sky High Mascara now.

[Chris Ryan]

I wanted to mention one other thing to you. Tony Gilroy, one of my favorite writers, one of my favorite filmmakers did andor did Michael Clayton did the Bourne Legacy has a new film he's read Readying, which I'm very excited about. It's called Behemoth and Pedro Pascal is going to be and it was originally going to be Oscar Isaac, but now it's going to be Pedro Pascal. And announced another cast member, Ava Victor, who I know is a favorite of yours.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, they were on the show earlier this year to talk about their great movie Sorry Baby and I just love the idea of Ava going into the Hollywood system. Actually when we talked they mentioned a bunch of movies that they had recently seen and they were not of the Sorry Baby variety. It was like sinners 28 years later. And Ava was like I just want to be inside of movies like this. And now they might be. That's very cool. I Tony Gilroy hasn't made a movie since Duplicity. That's a really long time ago. Was Duplicity the movie that he was profiled in the New Yorker for? I believe he was, yes. I think it was one of the great semi recent history that's a long ass time ago now Duplicity, one of those movies that Amanda and I have always said if you made it 99 more times out of 100 it would be improved. I think.

[Chris Ryan]

Exactly.

[Sean Fennessey]

But it was like there was just kind of some didn't quite totally come together as you would like not to.

[Chris Ryan]

Put you on the spot. What's a recent film that you feel like falls under that rule like after the Hunt?

[Sean Fennessey]

Well, the script is just not there for that movie. I think you should see that film. It's because somebody who has a lot of problems with the woke mob, I think that there might be a lot in there that you would be interested in hearing about. I mean Maybe Black Phone 2 is an interesting example. Shall we use that as a segue?

[Chris Ryan]

It's a great segue.

[Sean Fennessey]

Man. So Black Phone 2 is the new horror hit of the season and it's really one of the only major horror releases this month, which is I find curious. So it's directed by Scott Derrickson. He directed the Black Phone as well, which was adapted from a story by Joe Hill. This new one is written by Derrickson and C. Robert Cargle. They wrote the previous film as well. It stars Ethan Hawke, our boy Mason Thames, Madeline Agraw, Jeremy Davies and Demian Bashir. Yes. The setup for the movie is bad dreams haunt 15 year old Gwen, who we saw in the previous film, as she receives calls from the black phone and sees disturbing visions of three boys being stalked at a winter camp. Accompanied by her brother Finn, they head to the camp to solve the mystery, only to confront the Grabber. Yep. A killer who's grown even more powerful in death, played by Ethan Hawke. Yes. Ethan Hawke behind a mask. Or is he. We may have a Mandalorian situation on our hands. We'll talk about that a little bit. CR what did you think of Black Phone 2?

[Chris Ryan]

This is a tough one, man. First of all, this is one of those. It's so over. We're so back. I guess this is.

[Alex Ross Perry]

We're so back.

[Chris Ryan]

This movie did really well. I always love seeing horror movies do well. I'm happy Blumhouse has some numbers on the board. So just as on a point of pride thing, I'm really excited about it. The first 45 minutes to or so of this film I was like, it's pretty interesting. This is pretty cool. I think it has a really good setup scene with. Well, I. Are we spoiling or.

[Sean Fennessey]

Sure, we can get into the details.

[Chris Ryan]

Gwen's mother calling from the past on a frozen lake camp in. In Colorado and kind of has a neat little setup. Derrickson does some really fun stuff with switching from an almost like abusively high definition shooting style with the present tense stuff to a really like scrappy 16 or 8 millimeter dreamscape kind of style when Gwen is having dream sequences. But there are just too many dream sequences. And there are. They're really repetitive. They don't go anywhere. Psychologically too fascinating. Their. Their symbolism of them is not particularly interesting. And then what happens is the film is relying so much in the first act on mood and creep that when it gets to the second act, it makes the choice to explain this really, really elaborate new connective tissue between the first film and the second film and everybody's newly acquired sort of purpose in this second film. And it's a really tough example of. I Think something that's plaguing horror movies right now, which is this over reliance on expository dialogue to connect possible franchises rather than just telling a scary story.

[Sean Fennessey]

It's really hard because it seems like Derrickson just wants to make a very different movie from the first movie that he made. But he needs the first movie one because he's got what he hopes will be an iconic villain. We'll talk about that. And also wants to create the opportunity to continue to tell the story. The Grabber died at the end of the original Black Phone film. And so he has to come back from the dead in some way, which then makes this a supernatural story. In the first film, there is this sense of psychic powers and a relationship to the dead, but not really from the Grabber's perspective. It's more from the kid's perspective, these two, this brother and sister who are at the center of the story. So they come back and the movie makes a couple of, I think, really bad choices. One, there's a huge retcon from the first film, which is that were meant to believe that Gwen and Finney, these two kids, that their mother has committed suicide and so that they have this native trauma, and that's what's, like, destroyed.

[Chris Ryan]

Jeremy Davies character, he's, like, drinking all the time. Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

And so they're just a broken family, and there's not too much time spent on explaining that. But this movie goes back and shows us that because their mother has actually witnessed the Grabber in the act of committing crimes, that he then identifies that she has seen them. She has seen him and his brother at work. And so he goes out and he kills her and then stages a suicide attempt in their garage, which then the family believes that's what happened to their mother. You know, he's not really staged the suicide attempt of the many other children that he's killed. This is just kind of a convenience of storytelling to then motivate Gwen and Finney to become more invested in the story and then to create this long arc. It's also an opportunity for the Grabber to go into this dream world. Yeah. Where he can do his. His killing a la Freddy Krueger and.

[Chris Ryan]

His ability to basically be only visible to Gwen, but physically manipulate her to other people. So there is a cool scene in a camp. A lot of this movie is set in, like, a. Basically a Rocky Mountain youth camp. So you have your mess hall and your cabins and everything. And Derrickson gets a lot of cool imagery and a lot of cool vibe coming out of that. It's a really good idea to do summer camp but at winter. But there's one like cool set piece where Gwen is being thrown around and, and attacked by the Grabber. But only you know, the view when the other people come in, all they see is Gwen like flying around and, and about to get thrown into industrial ovens at a youth camp.

[Sean Fennessey]

Sure, absolutely. Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

And so that, that was a cool moment. But there is really I. I think we'll probably both identify the same moment where this movie turns over to Damien Bashir and he is given the really unfortunate task of having to explain all the crimes that the Grabber committed while he was a counselor at, at the camp.

[Sean Fennessey]

The.

[Chris Ryan]

The nature of, of like these three missing boys. They come up with this idea that it. They need to discover the boys bodies to release them from the darkness purgatory that they sure. And that they will also then by doing that take away the Grabber's power. And then there is another long conversation with Finney and Damen Bashir that is also about the mom and is also about like the respons and you. I. I honestly like there should be a statistic for like how long did this, these two scenes feel versus how long what their runtime. And it honestly felt like 35 minutes.

[Sean Fennessey]

I mean this is really one of the major problems with the movie is it's one hour and 55 minutes and it feels longer than that. And horror movies should not be boring. If A Nightmare on Elm street is the framework for this, the inspiration for this, there's not a single Nightmare on Elm street movie that is over 97 minutes with the exception of New Nightmare, which is this like seventh film in the franchise riff on the existence of monsters in filmmaking. And the movie's just too long and it's too worried about having to make everything make sense because I think the filmmakers and the writers know that it doesn't make sense that you actually can't make this story and you can't make the Grabber supernatural in this way and make it, you know, comfortably coherent. When you're testing a movie like this, I wonder what it would have been like if they would have stripped out a lot of the exposition if we would have just been like it's a crazy ride and somehow the Grabber has grabbed more powers and we were just comfortable with that. And they didn't worry too much about making sure that we know that they know that this is kind of incoherent.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Right.

[Sean Fennessey]

But it really slows the movie down really dramatically and it seems like, maybe.

[Chris Ryan]

The Ethan Hawke grabber character needed to be supernatural in the first one or in the second one. The grabber needs to be a mantle that killers take on. And then he has become infamous in serial killer, you know, war, and, you know, like, Ghostface. People take on the mask and take on the behavior and haunt, you know, different areas.

[Sean Fennessey]

Are you volunteering as tribute to be the next grabber?

[Chris Ryan]

No, I'm just saying, like, this is where you kind of like to get to a crossroads in a franchise. You need to make a decision. Are we gonna, like, break all rules and then spend a lot of time trying to explain the new rules of supernatural grabbing?

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes.

[Chris Ryan]

Or can we just have a grabber in every movie who's, like, a new guy?

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

And it's like, oh, he done it.

[Sean Fennessey]

If you're a really. If you're a big fan of horror or a big fan of the Nightmare on Elm street films, the obvious inspiration for this movie is Dream warriors, which I just happened to watch, like, a month ago.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

And Dream warriors is the third Nightmare on Elm street movie directed by Chuck Russell. Really underrated, like, to some people, maybe even me, the best Nightmare on Elm street movie. And it's about a collection of teenagers who come together to battle Freddy, and they have something in common, and they're bonded by, you know, this. This. These haunting experiences that they're having. But the movie is really fun and has a sense of humor and has a real sense of, like, play with the gore. This movie is deathly serious. Like, aside from Hawk kind of hamming it up in the vocal performance, there's not really much to laugh with.

[Chris Ryan]

I didn't think the first one was much of a laugh. Right. But it did have James Ransome briefly featured in Black Phone 2 and had that weird, like, oh, you're trying to make, like, River's Edge or.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes. Well, I felt the Goonies was, like, a part of what they were going for in this one, where it was sort of like, the kids go on an adventure, but it's not fun.

[Chris Ryan]

You gotta have a lot more fun than that.

[Sean Fennessey]

I know it's rough. I mean, it's ultimately not successful. And yet it did succeed at the box office. And we've talked about it before. Blumhouse had been on this pretty strong cold streak. Jason Blum went on the Town podcast after Megan 2.0 didn't do well at the box office just this year. If you look at the performance, Black Phone in one weekend has already outpaced every single film they've released. Wolfman made $34 million worldwide. The Woman in the Yard made $23 million. Drop made $29 million. And Megan 2.0 made $39 million. All those films, to me, are subpar. And Black Phone 2 is subpar. They do still have five nights at Freddy's 2 coming, which most people assume is gonna be huge. The first film I didn't get, I just didn't get it at all. I didn't play the video game. I didn't think it was interesting. I didn't think it was scary. I didn't think it was fun. It felt like a kind of, you know, Leo and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood meme for kids who are now who played the game when they were 11.

[Chris Ryan]

Actually, keeping Hollywood alive is creating that sensation. I know.

[Sean Fennessey]

I know. And that's. And that's unfortunate. But the grabber is not. He's not Freddy, and he's not Jason. He's not. You know, he's not. Is he gonna. It seems like there will be a Black Phone three because of the success of this film, in part because this has been an apocalypse at the box office in October. It's been a very bad month for movies. This is usually a pretty cool month.

[Chris Ryan]

Which is sad because there's actually a couple really good things in the theater.

[Sean Fennessey]

Good films. Yeah. Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

Tron Ares.

[Sean Fennessey]

I mean, what'd you think of that? You should show up to a screening of Tron Aries and announce yourself as Jared Leto.

[Chris Ryan]

I was just gonna make that joke, but I'm not dressed, but not changing my look at all.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

And going with the bad brother hat. Yeah, that'll be great.

[Chris Ryan]

Just be like, what's up, guys? Me, Jordan Catalano. Some controversial things written about me.

[Sean Fennessey]

What's your favorite, Leto?

[Chris Ryan]

Panic Room.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, That's a good one.

[Chris Ryan]

He's really good in Panic Room.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Sorry.

[Chris Ryan]

I don't know why I just was like, look at me, Jared Leto. You can still do it.

[Sean Fennessey]

Get a single on Chris Jack right now. He's gonna look down the barrel and tell you about Panic Room.

[Chris Ryan]

Jared Leto and Dave Dombrowski.

[Sean Fennessey]

So let me sidetrack here, since we're thinking about Leto. I love Leto in Fight Club as well, because it seems like Fincher is really like, I'm gonna fuck this pretty boy up. Which is one of the funniest things about that movie. For Halloween, Alice has decided she's going as Elsa, but elsa from Frozen 2. Okay, but so she wants her mother to go as Anna, her sister, and she wants me to Go as Kristoff the Prince. Right.

[Chris Ryan]

Or is he the Anna's love interest? Okay, is there a lumberjack in Frozen?

[Sean Fennessey]

Not exactly. No. That's not how it works. But she said if you do, you have to dye your hair blonde.

[Chris Ryan]

You can still do it.

[Sean Fennessey]

And, you know, Leto famously bleach blonde in that film. If I just walked in one day, bleach blonde.

[Chris Ryan]

You know who's really making that work right now?

[Sean Fennessey]

Who?

[Chris Ryan]

Hitmaker and I.

[Sean Fennessey]

He's gone bleach gray.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

But I think it was shock white for a minute. Okay, was it?

[Sean Fennessey]

I thought it was bleach gray, like on purpose. Like a stylistic choice. And I agree it looks. Tim looks amazing right now.

[Chris Ryan]

I think you could do it. I think it would be like intervention time, though. Like, it would be like, is Sean okay?

[Sean Fennessey]

Could you guys. If I do it, could you guys just not address it?

[Chris Ryan]

I think that. I mean, yeah, I think that would be amazing.

[Sean Fennessey]

Maybe we should cut this out and then I'll do it and then we'll play this in the future so we can know why. Okay, I'm gonna consider that. So grammer was Ethan. How many days did Ethan Hawke shoot on this movie?

[Chris Ryan]

He has been promoting it. He has talked about his hopes for the franchise. Yeah, I just spoke with Ethan Hawke for the Lowdown a couple weeks ago.

[Sean Fennessey]

Wow. Must be nice.

[Chris Ryan]

Was a delightful, delightful hang.

[Sean Fennessey]

He's the man.

[Chris Ryan]

And he's like one of the great interview subjects. He's such a racontour. I really do feel like somewhere he and Pedro Pascal are our fist bumping and drinking pina coladas and just being like, who would have thunk it?

[Sean Fennessey]

Like.

[Chris Ryan]

Like, this is the fucking best gig in the world. Somebody is in that mask. If Ethan Hawke spent all this time trudging around the snow, then, like, he's the realest real one there is.

[Sean Fennessey]

If you were a child murderer, would you want to come back and seek revenge on he who killed you?

[Chris Ryan]

I guess. I mean, what else were you gonna do?

[Sean Fennessey]

Like, I don't know, just get in.

[Alex Ross Perry]

The mind, catch up reading.

[Sean Fennessey]

Burning in Eternal Hell.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I think that would be the other option.

[Sean Fennessey]

Right? You can't just, like, there's no Malcolm Gladwell books in the eternal Hell are you talking about? Yeah, blink. Huh?

[Chris Ryan]

This is really, really provocative.

[Sean Fennessey]

If only I'd known when I was child murdering, I could have used some of these tools.

[Chris Ryan]

I wanted to ask you, though, with the grabber. So, like, your mileage may vary on him, but do you think a healthy horror ecosystem is powered by its villains? Like a healthy horror moment is powered more by villains or is it more by form? Like when we have a found footage run, when we have a tongue in cheek comic kind of run. Like, what do you think? Or do you think like, man, we always need to know that in two years the Grabber is coming back.

[Sean Fennessey]

Each new era is not defined by a great villain, but it features a great villain. So if you look at Leatherface and Michael Myers, if you look. But you know Night of the Living Dead is a horde.

[Chris Ryan]

Sure.

[Sean Fennessey]

It's not a single character. The zombie is the idea. And then it becomes this portal for social point of view. But you know, Freddy and Jason and then I guess you could say Ghostface. But to me, the script of Scream is what makes it so special. The ideas, the way that they're executed by Craven. And then in the 2000s, you know, you could probably point to Hereditary get out. Maybe earlier in the century you could point to Saw and I was going.

[Chris Ryan]

To say Jigsaw, probably.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

So I mean, those characters are there, but I feel like there's a very select few. Freddy and Jason are probably the ones that you cite the most, though Bill is a huge Michael Myers fan, for example. Those are the ones that you point to and you say like, these are the definitional guys of the 80s. But to me it's more like, is the movie strong? Is the movie's ideas and execution strong enough? And that's the thing that sets us on a new course. It might be time for a new course in horror. Like I, I, I. That's kind of how I want to pivot into this conversation with you about the year. Because this year, I think, is a paradox.

[Chris Ryan]

It really is, because I, I think, I think there, there's a question we have to answer. Is horror too good?

[Sean Fennessey]

Now this is what I've been thinking as well. We have an insane imbalance between greatness and everything else.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

And if you just. Three of my five or six favorite movies of the year are horror movies. I love horror just as much as you do. I can't remember the last time this was true, But Sinners weapons, 28 years later, all auteur driven. Not quite original, but close to original projects, backed by big studios with huge swings, tons of ideas, wild performances, an incredible layering of music and thematic ideas, and formal attempts at big, you know, emotional moments. And these movies are great. And the first two are massive hits. Yeah, like exactly what we're always talking about.

[Chris Ryan]

Yes.

[Sean Fennessey]

You know, we're just empower somebody with it with an Idea who's a great filmmaker and let them run. So hooray. Right?

[Chris Ryan]

That's what we all we ever wanted. We did it and we've been banging the drum for years. Not that this has anything to do with us about how directors should be diving into this genre because it's a place you get to do so much different stuff. And if you just provide even less than half a dozen scares, audiences will go wherever you want.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes.

[Chris Ryan]

And. And Weapons is a great example of that.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Where.

[Chris Ryan]

What are there, like three jump scares? Three scares in that movie?

[Sean Fennessey]

Yep.

[Chris Ryan]

And people are mesmerized by it. Sinners. You pretty much see what's coming. I mean, that's also a reliable horror thing. Is like, yeah, I know what I want and I know you're going to give it to me. And I know there's going to be a vampire siege in about two hours. Play some music. I'm here.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yep.

[Chris Ryan]

28 years later, completely amazing ideas about grief and loss and parenthood and childhood. And as long as you get an iPhone, Halo running around, a naked zombie, Alpha, we're down, you know, we're down for whatever. So I think we've been advocating for really interesting filmmakers to get involved and it's still a reliable place for me at least to discover new voices and new filmmakers. But there's something strange about when that upper tier, that top end of the genre is getting almost sucked up by like some of the best filmmakers we have alive. And then that middle part that I think is the reason why you and I became fans of it in the first place is so that we can watch Sleepaway Camp or we can watch, you know, Shocker or whatever is. It's just not reliably as entertaining. It's like, I'll still go see it and I still get cheap thrills out of some of it. And I find that like now I'm almost like exclusively being entertained by like the lower rung independent low, low budget stuff than I am. The, like the Drops or the Megans or the Night Swim or what was the pool movie?

[Sean Fennessey]

That was Night Swim.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah, Night Swim was. That was this year, wasn't it?

[Sean Fennessey]

No, that was a couple of years ago. Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

Was it?

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

Anyway, that should be a fun year.

[Sean Fennessey]

It was like until dawn came out.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Right.

[Sean Fennessey]

That was just not very good. It was a video game adaptation from Sony. Did you really?

[Chris Ryan]

I thought it was okay.

[Sean Fennessey]

I thought it was really bad. I think studio horror is in this weird place where you don't just need a solid filmmaker, you need a great Filmmaker at times, with some exceptions. One of the key exceptions for me is Final Destination Bloodlines. That was ip.

[Chris Ryan]

That's exactly what we're asking for, though.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes, but that is something that had sat on the shelf for a while. People had forgotten about. Told this story a few times, but when we saw it at Cinemacon, I was like, oh, shit.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yes.

[Sean Fennessey]

They actually are letting them do crazy stuff with this movie and take chances. And it was a relatively modestly budgeted movie that went on to be a pretty massive hit this year. You know, you've still got the Conjuring Last Rites, which I didn't think was very strong ultimately, but I think may turn out to be the biggest movie in the Conjuring franchise.

[Chris Ryan]

I'm sure it is, but it suffered from a lot of the same stuff that I thought Black Phone 2 did, which is just like endless, endless amounts of exposition.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah. And baggy and long. Osgood Perkins is an interesting character in this discussion.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

The Monkey is one of the most successful horror movies of the year, coming off of the success of Long Legs. I like Long Legs more than the Monkey. He has another movie coming in a month called Keeper. I do not know why Keeper is coming out on November 14th and not October 24th. I wish we could. We need to have an intervention with the studios. Why are we putting horror movies in November? I know you're competing against each other, but please, please, in October, when I'm obsessed with seeing horror. As many horror movies as I can. Let's try to put them there.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

It's like avoiding Shark Week if you're a shark.

[Alex Ross Perry]

You know what I mean?

[Chris Ryan]

Like, we gave you a whole month.

[Sean Fennessey]

It's very strange. Oz fits into the Coogler Kreger mold. You know, he is an auteur, He's a writer, director. He's on like his. He's sticking with horror. He's on like his eighth horror movie.

[Chris Ryan]

And was. Wasn't he also in the the Texas Chainsaw Sweepstakes?

[Sean Fennessey]

He was, yes. And he was not ultimately selected, right?

[Chris Ryan]

It was Jason Molner.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, I. I like. I really like Oz as a filmmaker. I think it's basically like story dependent for his movies. And those are kind of the big fish this year. The smaller stuff has been a bit more of a disappointment to me. I've tried to watch a lot. I think it's been. It has. I haven't been as adventurous, I would say. Yeah. In terms of what I'm finding, I can remember a couple years ago, a number of films I Saw that were just posted to YouTube. And I haven't. I haven't gotten that deep this year with new stuff, but I don't have as much like, huge passion projects. And the other thing that I think is that Shudder has kind of continued this dominance of acquisition where most of what you'll want to see if you're a big fan, ends up on that service eventually. Eventually in any given year. And there's this interesting thing happening where I think in the aftermath of In a Violent Nature and Late Night with the Devil and those movies doing pretty well theatrically, they have sort of started pushing more of their films into theaters.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

Which I think is great.

[Chris Ryan]

Hell House lineage, I think, is in.

[Sean Fennessey]

Having a theatrical run. Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

Which is kind of unheard of, you know, for Hell House. I mean, I'm sure it had brief appearances, but not like this movie is out for like, three weeks before it gets to shutter after Halloween or like.

[Sean Fennessey]

Or October. October 30th. Yeah. Yeah. Good Boy is currently in theaters right now. The dog horror movie Dangerous Animals had a stretch in theaters earlier this year, so there have been a few.

[Chris Ryan]

I have another point that I'd like to just throw out there. I don't know if you've noticed this. I. I, like, I did a little bit of more cramming this year, but my wife and I have kind of kept up the usual rhythm of like, one or two times a month. I just go to. I. I go to, like, some reliable review sites. There's a really good columnist, Eric Pipenberg in the New York Times, who does five horror movies to stream right now every month. And that's a really useful tool. But she and I, my wife and I still watch like two horror movies a month. It has been a bad year. And one of the reasons is there's two. One I think is production based, where you're still seeing the after effects of COVID and strikes and stuff like that, where a lot of the setups but a lot of the executions just feel very barren. Like. So it's really, really relying on isolation. One or two handers creep over actually being able to show anything scary. So a lot of, like, something went bump in the night when you don't really see the bump unless it's like in a shadow somewhere. And furthermore, I think the long tail of Hereditary has really started to affect a lot of the movies that I usually would enjoy where it's just way, way, way too much about the trauma of the characters instead of the scares of the movie. I'm really down for the balance. But I think we've really over indexed for like 90 minutes of somebody mourning their dead mother and five minutes of finding out that their mother is a ghost.

[Sean Fennessey]

I always point to the Strangers as the best example of this, of the complete mystery of the terror of that movie. And that's part of the why it's so effective. And now we find ourselves in 2025 with the Strangers Chapter 2, which features a huge origin story about how the Strangers came together to begin killing people. And it's like, I don't want that.

[Chris Ryan]

Right.

[Sean Fennessey]

Let those strangers kill people and be strangers. Be a stranger to me. Don't be a friend to me. Stranger who kills. And there's just a little bit too much explanation. And I'm trying to figure out what it is. I understand certainly the huge impact that Hereditary made and a handful of other.

[Chris Ryan]

And like the elevated horror idea.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, that whole run. We've talked about that before. Every. Every year we talk about this. That comes up because you can feel it kind of baked into the premise where you can almost feel the filmmaker in the room with the executive and saying like, so this happened because of this. And I reflected on this in my personal journey and I thought it would be important. And all of those feelings are valid.

[Chris Ryan]

But respectfully keep it out of my horror films. You know, And I. This is what happens is like part of the allure of this genre is that you can fit so many different things. You can trojan horse them in because you're like, I have scares every 15 minutes.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes.

[Chris Ryan]

These movies don't actually have scares every 15 minutes anymore. Like, I think we've really gotten away from some of the reliable rewards of this genre. So I remain obviously steadfast a fan. I've probably watched more horror films than any other kind of movie this year, but I just found it a little bit more difficult to find some hidden gems for you.

[Sean Fennessey]

Let's get into the things that you did. Like, we can do some obvious stuff to start, you know, VHS Halloween is out.

[Chris Ryan]

One of the best of the series.

[Sean Fennessey]

This is one of the only reliable things in my life that every year Shudder gives us a new VHS movie and has a new sub theme every time they're hit or miss. You know, I. I wasn't as crazy about VHS beyond as I was VHS 94 VHS. Halloween's pretty good. Did you have any favorite segments, Kid Print? Yeah, Alex's is. Is very fucked up.

[Chris Ryan]

I know we're gonna talk to Alex, but I wanted to ask you. I was listening to you and Amanda. Talk about Roofman. Does Kid Print go into Girl dad movie of the year? How do you fucking feel watching that, for whatever reason?

[Sean Fennessey]

Well, it helps to know Alex.

[Chris Ryan]

Sure.

[Sean Fennessey]

It helps to know what lights him up. It makes it a little easier to disassociate from some of the horror of that film. And that is a very horrifying film. And it exists inside of what is otherwise, I would say, a fairly antic and at times colorful and playful VHS installment. Some of the earlier films I found to be really dark and like Faces of Death. Yeah, they're really, really intense. The franchise, like, attracts a lot of different kinds of filmmakers, international filmmakers, men, women, and this one in particular, because you've got Halloween parties and trick or treating and candy and Halloween music. Like, those are all components of this movie. And so it feels a little lighter and brighter. And we both love Halloween. There's nothing better than just like, wandering around Los Angeles in October and just taking in the vibe. It's just so. It's really great out here. But Kid Print is fucked up and. And Alex went for it, and I, I salute him for that.

[Chris Ryan]

What else within VHS or just in general from this year?

[Alex Ross Perry]

Sure.

[Sean Fennessey]

If you have any others you want to cite.

[Chris Ryan]

I liked the Kuchiku one. That was really good setup.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, well, there's some girl dad stuff in that one too.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

But this was a really great effort on this series. I have a couple that I bet you and I. I think these, I think Dangerous Animals and Bring Her Back are probably what, Aside from like the big box office ones that we talked about are probably the ones most people have seen or enjoyed. So Dangerous Animals, A Sean Burns really sadistic shark movie.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes.

[Chris Ryan]

Now, shark films don't always have to be horror films. They can be thrillers, they can be survival movies. I felt like this one was much more of a serial killer horror film that happened to feature Sharks 100 and was diabolical. And really, you know, if you think you like shark movies, I dare you.

[Sean Fennessey]

Well, it's. It's one of the first. I, I couldn't think of another example. I'm sure this exists somewhere in the history of shark movies, but I'd never quite seen a movie where a killer utilized as a tool. A shark as the weapon.

[Chris Ryan]

Yes.

[Sean Fennessey]

As his machete or his axe or, or his, you know, knife, glove. Yeah. And Jai Courtney is just on one in this movie. I, I'm, I, I think I'm a little more mixed on this movie than you are, but I think Jai Courtney is incredible and is a great villain.

[Chris Ryan]

It's a really great idea. There's a. Also like a. I. I thought effective, but probably. Maybe this is. What you're talking about is the main character is this. This girl want. American girl wandering Australia, surfing, kind of like finding herself. And it's like 30 minutes of her kind of hanging out. I don't know if that maybe bothered you or was it just all the stuff on the boat?

[Sean Fennessey]

It's a little slow going. I mean, I had seen the trailer for this movie. I too, love all shark films. And this setup, the cold open of the film of the couple, the tourist couple that gets on the boat and encounters Jai Courtney. That sequence is in the trailer.

[Chris Ryan]

Oh.

[Sean Fennessey]

And when I saw that, I was like, this is gonna be fucking sick. This is gonna be a movie where a guy keeps inviting people onto boats and feeding sharks. And it's not really. It's more of a surv. It is more of a serial killer survival final girl kind of film. And it just is a little bit. I found it to be a little bit baggy, but I thought Jai Courtney was amazing and the general conception of it was really cool.

[Chris Ryan]

Now, speaking of shark films, have you seen Beast of War?

[Sean Fennessey]

No.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Okay.

[Chris Ryan]

That's apparently, like, Australian soldiers stranded in the water. Sharks come from them. But I've heard good things about that.

[Sean Fennessey]

That's like my Portuguese man of war story. Yeah, yeah. You don't want that. What you don't want to be is on a boat and stuck in a place where there's creatures in the sea and they're interested in you. I just rewatched Creepshow 2. Do you remember.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Have you seen Creepshow 2?

[Chris Ryan]

Not in a long time.

[Sean Fennessey]

Do you remember the raft where the four kids swim out to the raft and there's like a something in it, looks like an oil slick.

[Chris Ryan]

I do remember that.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah. It's a good one.

[Chris Ryan]

Bring her Back. Has it grown shrunk in your memory since you've seen it?

[Sean Fennessey]

I'd like to rewatch it. I think I went in with not the best headspace after Talk to Me. I really like what the Filippos are about as filmmakers. I just thought they took an incredibly dire energy into the movie, and I think some people like that and sometimes I like it. So maybe I'm being a hypocrite.

[Chris Ryan]

I think this is representative of what I was talking about with, like, the. There was the sort of long tail of hereditary where I thought. Talk to Me had some of the. What a great fucking time. This movie is like, plenty of just absolute misery in that film too. But had a lot of, like, kids at a party around, going too far and just a lot of, like, cool shit until it gets really, really, really dark. Bring her back almost instantaneously is an absolute slog.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

Now it's. It's got really. A really good Sally Hawkins performance. It's very well made, incredibly disturbing scenes, but had the promise of being like a woman. Finds, like, a resurrection method on the dark web and is trying to bring back her dead child by, like, basically fucking around with foster children. And I was like, this is twisted.

[Sean Fennessey]

It's the rare movie where I wanted to see the prequel more than the movie. The prequel about the development of the rituals. You know, what we see on those VHS tapes in the beginning, which. That stuff is so effective and so unsettling. And the movie itself is, you know, it's a. It's a character study about grief with kids in peril.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

And it just isn't what I was hoping it would be, but I should return to it because I do think those guys are really talented. You got Strange Harvest on the list. Yeah, but this was a cool movie. I don't know if it was a scary movie, even though it is very clearly horror. Explain what Strange Harvest is.

[Chris Ryan]

So it's pretty much a note for note true crime doc. Like, if you put it up against Netflix's Night Stalker doc, you wouldn't really notice that many differences. This comes from one of the guys who worked on Grave Encounters, which is kind of a legendary. Not legendary, but a very well regarded found footage franchise from, like 2011, 2012, Stuart Ortiz. And he made this film where essentially it's straight to camera to the detectives who worked on a case of a serial killer over the course of several decades in the Inland Empire in California. A lot of the, like, Inland Empire stuff is really good. A lot of the language of the. The visual language of the movie is essentially taken straight from true crime docs. So a lot of drone shots, a lot of body cam footage, a lot of, you know, interview style, talking head exposition. And the thing that makes a difference is, like, the suggestion of, like, a supernatural, occult kind of power of this serial killer that is beyond the comprehension of the detectives. But if you. It never breaks. It never breaks its character as a. As a film. It's always this true crime doc. So I. I enjoyed it. I think I thought it was going to go up to a crazier level than it did.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, it kind of holds. It holds the tension, but never releases it. Yes, and that's an interesting choice for a horror movie that ultimately feels more like an exercise than a movie.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

But is really pretty well executed considering its budget savvy.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

You know what I mean? Like, I think that you can pitch this as two different things. You can make it probably effectively like on a low budget. And, and I thought that the, the casting of the. Of the detectives especially was like, I can't really tell if these are actors playing detectives or detectives.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah. And they have to do so much work because they're essentially explaining the movie all the way through. And that's, that's a tough gig. I, I was pretty impressed with this. I would really want to see what Ortiz does next because I think it's not easy to do something I haven't seen before in the genre. And I just have not quite seen this in that way. I wanted to talk about this in conjunction with Shelby Oaks, which is coming out this week, which is a new horror movie from Chris Stuckman. Chris Stuckman is a very well known YouTube movie reviewer and Beloved has been doing it for a really long time. And he has long had aspirations of making a movie. And he, he raised. He crowdfunded financing for his original horror movie which is also about the disappearance of a series of people. In this case a series of sort of ghost hunter, supernatural investigator YouTubers.

[Chris Ryan]

Okay.

[Sean Fennessey]

And I ultimately didn't think the movie was all that successful. But one of the reasons why I feel like I need to see it again in part because it uses a somewhat similar convention to Strange Harvest in that in its opening segment it presents as the making of a true crime documentary about the disappearance of these YouTubers. And it's really clever because they're YouTubers. So there's a lot of footage of them.

[Chris Ryan]

Yes.

[Sean Fennessey]

And a lot of footage of their investigations which the true crime documentarians can utilize to help tell the story. And then. And where the movie kind of breaks very unfortunately for me is that it transitions away from being a true crime documentary. There's a late in the film title sequence. You know, you get like 28 minutes in and it's like, Shelby Oaks. Shelby Oaks.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

And then it just becomes a traditional narrative horror film where you fall. You're following the sister of the girl who has disappeared but is believed to be alive.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Okay.

[Sean Fennessey]

And that stuff just doesn't. Doesn't work as well.

[Chris Ryan]

So he made a micro budget version of this. And then I think was it. A studio came in and was like we're going to give you more money to like kind of it seems like.

[Sean Fennessey]

There was some reshooting so Neon acquired the film. Mike Flanagan came on as an ep. You can see, I mean Stuckman if you watch his videos. Like he really understands movies. He loves movies. He really has a huge affinity for horror. He talks about horror all the time. He'll talk about the smallest horror movie in the world on his show. I have a lot of respect for what he does. It's actually kind of a fascinating testament to how hard it is to make a movie, especially an independent movie, because even if you have a good idea following through on it, making sure you have the right cast and then trying to do something different is not. That's why I think Strange Harvest is a fascinating achievement because it is trying to do something different and it holds it, it accomplishes what it wants to do. Shelby Oaks is worth checking out, but I don't know what happened because the movie was recut since it played. I want to say it Fantastic Fest last year and was picked up out of there and was re edited and maybe there were some things added to it as well. Interesting.

[Chris Ryan]

I can't wait to check it out.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, it's, it's a cool movie. The next two on your list I have not seen.

[Chris Ryan]

Okay, so there's two I want to recommend that I can't really talk about because if people have any interest in seeing part of I would say without giving anything away is like the plot twists. So one is Night of the Reaper, which is a movie from Brandon Christensen, which is kind of a riff on House of the Devil and Scream, I would say and Babysitters, Serial Killers. Really awesome opening segment. Has that. I think Shudder has been making a lot of or acquiring a lot of stuff that is 80s retro and has that kind of beginning of Halloween suburban streets, synth score, the John Carpenter font. Night of the Reaper is is it.

[Sean Fennessey]

Self conscious about all of those things?

[Chris Ryan]

I think it's self conscious about the aesthetic, but the story itself is a different beast. And I, I, I enjoyed this quite a bit. And then another one that is somewhat plot dependent so I can't really talk too much about is Marshmallow, which is from Daniel di Purgatorio and it's a comedy horror set at a summer camp where something is wrong with the and I will just let the ellipse go there. Something is wrong with some something at this point.

[Sean Fennessey]

Where is Marsh? Where can you watch that?

[Chris Ryan]

That is also on shutter, I believe.

[Sean Fennessey]

Okay.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah, so both of those are available on shutters. The one I'm most excited to Talk to you about, though, is Invader.

[Sean Fennessey]

So this is Mickey Keating's new movie. Yeah, I haven't seen this.

[Chris Ryan]

This film is produced by and features heavily as a performer, Joe Swanberg, and was made with the Swanberg ethos of Run and Gun. We're just going to, like, go out there into, like, Outer Rim Chicago and make a movie. Mickey Keating has made a bunch of really interesting horror thrillers. Carnage Park, Psychopaths. Off Season was his most recent one, which is a much more comparatively stately film about a woman who gets trapped on a. On an island off of, like, the coast of New England, I think.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes. Starring Jocelyn Donahue from House of the Devil, right? Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

This one, Invader. Here's the premise. A Mexican woman is arriving in Chicago on a bus. She is supposed to be visiting her cousin. She keeps calling her cousin, cousin's not picking up. She goes to her cousin's house. Cousin's not home, goes to her cousin's job. They're like, she didn't show up for work. She's fired. And then everything goes from there. It is 70 minutes and Mickey Keating has talked about this film in relationship to, like, the Darden brothers and Michael Hanneke and Harmony Kareem way more than John Carpenter or Wes Craven or anything else. I will say that if you turn this on and you get about five minutes in and you feel like you need to throw up because the camera work, stop the movie because it doesn't get any better. It is a punishing, like, experience.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It's.

[Chris Ryan]

It's like green grass with the Steadicam turned off. And I'd say that knowing Greengrass is not used. Steady cam. Yeah, yeah. Like swinging the camera around. There's one scene where Joe Swanberg plays a character who I, you know, you're supposed to take as Invader. He is the. He is Invader and he is swinging a hammer at, like, the floor of a house. And the camera follows the. The hammer. So it's basically going in a giant circle.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

And it's. It's pretty, like, disorienting.

[Sean Fennessey]

That's out of the Jack Torrance swinging the axe. What Kubrick does with that. Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

And they apparently had like a 90 minute cut and they were like, we kind of can't do this to people, you know? So it is. I think it's 70 minutes, but it is incredibly punishing. But really, really, really cool.

[Sean Fennessey]

I'm very excited. Is that vod?

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

Okay. Yeah, I. I didn't see it streaming anywhere. I'm gonna check that out. That's very exciting. You always. You always have. You always have a couple, even in a down year.

[Chris Ryan]

If you. If you want to challenge yourself and see like a really cool movie that I. I would recommend this.

[Sean Fennessey]

Okay, fall's finally here, and Nordstrom is your go to for the best of fall fashion and the hottest trends of the season. Discover new arrivals from brands you love, like Reformation Free People, Mango Addicted, Princess Polly, Madewell, and more. Perfect for refreshing your closet without overthinking your budget. And with free shipping, free returns, and easy in store pickup, shopping's never been easier. So go ahead, shop. Shop in stores on Nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app today. Used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained. One who navigates life on their own terms effortlessly. They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice an individual confident in their contradictions. They know the rules, but behave as if they do not exist. New Teen the new fragrance by Miu Miu defined by you.

[Chris Ryan]

This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Whether it's a game day or backyard fire pit or simply to enjoy delicious food with the people you love, Whole Foods Market has got you find great everyday prices on 365 brand favorites like organic tortilla chips and salsa, plus apple cider sandwich cookies.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yum.

[Chris Ryan]

And right now you can save 50%. That's right, 50% with prime on select frozen pizzas through October 28th. Visit your local Whole Foods Market today and store online.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Terms apply.

[Sean Fennessey]

A couple movies. We haven't mentioned Presence Steven Soderbergh's Ghost Story, which we talked about earlier this year on the show. Steven was on the show actually for that film, which I think is quite good. I don't know if it's scary.

[Chris Ryan]

I think it's the inversion of a ghost story.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, yeah. What do you mean by that?

[Chris Ryan]

Because it's about the ghost. It's a ghost pov and it's just about like watching people scare themselves with their emotions.

[Sean Fennessey]

I've been talking to my daughter about just kind of various monsters, you know, because when you. When it's Halloween time, you're getting a lot of the iconography and we were putting some decals up on the window.

[Chris Ryan]

Must be hard.

[Sean Fennessey]

Go. Ghost is a tricky one to explain, right?

[Chris Ryan]

Because it's like, ooh, cool. Boo. But like, what are they?

[Sean Fennessey]

I think Casper is a pretty good gateway to ghost culture because he's friendly. He is a dead boy.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

You kind of have to think about the Fact that Casper is a dead boy.

[Chris Ryan]

He got grabbed.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Casper got grabbed.

[Sean Fennessey]

But ghosts are not. It's not easy to make that work storytelling wise. I like presents a lot. Companion. I feel like Companion should have made, like, $80 million.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

At the dove.

[Chris Ryan]

99 out of 100. And, like, would you want to do over. And if Companion was coming out in a week, would people be like, what is this?

[Sean Fennessey]

Definitely was a weird release date. It was like January 10th.

[Chris Ryan]

Yes.

[Sean Fennessey]

And we could have used Companion this.

[Chris Ryan]

Month and had a lot of the movie in the trailer.

[Sean Fennessey]

That is very true. Yeah. That wasn't ideal. But I like Companion quite a bit.

[Chris Ryan]

Me too.

[Sean Fennessey]

Good Boy is pretty nifty. I thought better as an experiment than as a movie. This is a movie about a killer through the eyes of his dog. And the dog. Incredible dog performance. Like one of the great dog performances you'll ever see in a movie. It's a little inconsistent with his rules about the killer. And is the killer, like, a supernatural being or not?

[Chris Ryan]

Should we get the dog from Good Boy and the cat from Caught Stealing to have sex?

[Sean Fennessey]

What do you want them to do.

[Chris Ryan]

Lethal Weapon for.

[Sean Fennessey]

Though you were trying to match them.

[Chris Ryan]

Just, like, put them. Put them out in the world.

[Sean Fennessey]

Good Boy is cool. Good Boy is also only 73 minutes and I believe will be on shudder very soon. It's in theaters right now. You haven't seen Descendant? No. So Descendant is the new movie from Peter Salella, and it's kind of in the Benson and Moorhead family, I believe they produced.

[Chris Ryan]

This is kind of sci fi.

[Sean Fennessey]

It's more sci fi. It is also in the Girl dad hall of Fame for all the wrong reasons. It's about a guy who plays a security guard in la, and he has had some sort of trauma in his childhood. We don't know what it is. And one night he wakes up and he goes outside and a beam of light from the sky hits him. And it seems as though he's being called to by aliens of some kind and that extraterrestrials are drawing him in and invading his world. His wife is pregnant, and that is a component of what is distracting him.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Okay.

[Sean Fennessey]

It is a big allegorical stew about that. The filmmaking, though, is really, really good. And it stars Ross Marquand and Sarah Bulger, who I believe have both been in other Benson and Moorhead movies. And I think that's also streaming on Shutter right now. Pretty solid Descendant.

[Chris Ryan]

All right, I'm gonna check that out.

[Sean Fennessey]

The other thing I just saw on a plane, seated beside my child, was Jimmy and Stiggs. Jimmy and Siggs is the new Joe Bigos movie, and it is fucking crazy. It is actually kind of similar to Descendant in that it's about a guy who's a filmmaker, kind of a thinly veiled Joe Bigos played by Joe Bigos, who returns home to his apartment one night, has a few Jack Daniels, smokes a blunt, gets super high, watches a movie, goes to bed, wakes up and discovers that aliens are in his apartment and he has to murder the aliens. And it is an 84 minute splatter core neon head fuck.

[Chris Ryan]

I think I saw the trailer for this.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, I wish I'd seen it in a movie theater because I think with a crowd it would have been a lot of fun. It's very zany and jokey.

[Chris Ryan]

Did Alice, like, check it out?

[Alex Ross Perry]

Every once in a while she would turn her head.

[Sean Fennessey]

She was pretty locked in on Vampirina, which is a big hit this Halloween season. Disney streaming show about a little girl vampire that is utterly fine. I wouldn't say she's ready for Jimmy and Stiggs, which is also a movie about this friendship between these two guys and getting to a certain stage of your life and not quite being who you want to be. But the alien kills are very funny and very gross. And then the final 20 minutes is an incredible descent into craziness. I thought it was pretty cool. What else? What else is from this year?

[Chris Ryan]

I thought I'd shout out Bleeding, which is a really unique kind of. It's a vampire movie, but it's really just an allegory for opioid addiction. And the vibe of it really reminded me of Jeff Nichols shotgun stories and early Jeff Nichols stuff. And it's like way, way better than. And the performances are way better than I like you, you would need to make. But it's basically like, what if vampirism and Blood was like a drug addiction and there were addicts out there who would, like, rob each other's stashes and OD and stuff like that. And it's a pretty.

[Sean Fennessey]

My guy, Abel Ferrar already did this. He did. That's it. I'm just the addiction that's one of the greats. Yeah. Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

But this is pretty cool. What else? There's a couple that I think are really like, especially as we roll into the home stretch of Halloween, and maybe you can't go full cannibal holocaust with your. With your partner, and you want to watch, like, something kind of fun.

[Sean Fennessey]

For example.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah, there's a few that I think are Pretty entertaining. I thought Fear Street Prom Queen was like, serviceable. Pretty, pretty, Pretty decent. I mentioned Marshmallow Clown in a Cornfield is like a fun enough. Kind of like who done it. Slash. Slasher movie with a. With a good clown killer.

[Sean Fennessey]

It's an interesting companion with the I know what you did last summer reboot.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

Because they're both movies about Gen Z.

[Chris Ryan]

Yes.

[Sean Fennessey]

In Slasher Town. Yeah. And I actually think Clown of Cornfield is much more successful. Maybe because it's lower stakes and it's.

[Chris Ryan]

Having much more tongue in cheek too.

[Sean Fennessey]

I think I know what you did last summer. Thinks it's really clever and it's not that clever.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Right.

[Sean Fennessey]

Clown of Cornfield. It's a little clever. It's got some good kills. It's got clowns. Killer clowns. Just works of.

[Chris Ryan]

I know what you did last summer might have been 10 times more entertaining if they didn't have to do all the work to connect previous generations of the movies to the film that they were made. If they just done like a straight remake and Jessica Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinz had nothing to do with it, I think it would have been pretty entertaining.

[Sean Fennessey]

I tend to agree with you because they cast that movie really well. They kind of nailed all the young stars.

[Chris Ryan]

Right. Because the dude from him is in it.

[Sean Fennessey]

Tyreek Withers is in it. Yeah. You've got your girl from Outer Banks. You got what's her name? Come on. That's your favorite show.

[Chris Ryan]

I know exactly you're talking about.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

Chase wonders.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah, that's right.

[Sean Fennessey]

Is it Madeline Klein? Madeline Klein. Thank you, Jack.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

She's not in your. On your power rankings.

[Alex Ross Perry]

She's not.

[Sean Fennessey]

Doesn't rate.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Okay.

[Sean Fennessey]

I haven't seen a couple of these movies. I haven't seen Bone Lake yet, which I think is another in a long line. That's the one of like, sweet double book, the Airbnb.

[Chris Ryan]

Oh, yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

Which.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah, there's like a really, like.

[Sean Fennessey]

A.

[Chris Ryan]

Couple who's at the Airbnb. They couple arrives at the Airbnb and there's a couple there who like to, like, do a lot of pta. Pda.

[Sean Fennessey]

They do a lot of PTA meaning parent teacher association or Paul Thomas Anderson public displays of affection. Yeah. I think there's a suggestion in the trailer of some partner swapping maybe potentially, which obviously we know you're a big fan of. Which board have you seen the remake of? Which board?

[Chris Ryan]

I haven't.

[Sean Fennessey]

Have you ever seen the original? Which board?

[Chris Ryan]

I haven't.

[Sean Fennessey]

I watched it for the first time. I'D like to tell you about which board. The original film is from 1986. It's directed by Kevin S. Tenney, who made Night of the Demon. Tawny Kitaen is the star of this movie.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

Can you explain who Tawny Kitain is?

[Chris Ryan]

She was a big supermodel who appeared in the White Snake music video. Here I go again. The video is largely a performance piece by her. A dance performance.

[Sean Fennessey]

Driving on a car.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yes.

[Chris Ryan]

And then she was also the romantic interest of the actual David Coverdale of the front man.

[Sean Fennessey]

I believe they were married. David Coverdale, also one of your guys. So this movie, it's about a college student who becomes obsessed with a Ouija board and it starts to possess her. And she's eventually possessed by the spirit of a serial killer. And her boyfriend and her boyfriend's frenemy go on a journey to discover the actual history of this serial killer.

[Chris Ryan]

I love boyfriend. And a boyfriend's frenemy is set up.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah. And they're like riding around in a 1980s convertible being like, I loved her first. Genuinely terrible movie, but also a great film. There's a remake and I bring the remake up even though I haven't seen it because it is directed by Chuck Russell, who directed Dream warriors and he directed the Mask starring Jim Carrey. He's a super talented film. He directed the Blob remake, which is also great with Kevin Dillon.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

He's an awesome horror movie director and he hasn't made a horror movie in a while. And so I'm eager to see this movie. But I was wondering if you had seen it.

[Chris Ryan]

I had not.

[Alex Ross Perry]

No.

[Chris Ryan]

I didn't even know about it. The only other ones, I'll say along those same lines of like, fun for the whole family. Hell of a Summer, which is Finn Wolfhard. He co directed this movie that's basically like meatballs meets a horror movie. Fred Heckinger is in this.

[Sean Fennessey]

Quite a year for him.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah. Really? I found to be a completely entertaining way to spend a night is watching this. And then on the far other end of Absolutely Depraved is Looky Lou, which is really fucked up. Found footage. First person horror film.

[Sean Fennessey]

Where is that?

[Chris Ryan]

Stalking. I believe that is on. You gotta do VOD for that one. I believe.

[Sean Fennessey]

Okay. Wow. You're just.

[Chris Ryan]

I do the work.

[Sean Fennessey]

You never cease to amaze.

[Chris Ryan]

I scout.

[Sean Fennessey]

You really are the man. The number one person that I usually hear from when you go through this run of movies is our next guest, Alex Ross Perry. He always texts me and said CR came through again. With three or four wrecks that I had not heard of. So let's go to our conversation now with Alex Ross Perry. Foreign Alex Ross Perry is here. Alex, we're going to talk to you about horror anthologies. The. The streets have been clamoring for your appearance on a horror episode. But unlike in previous years, you actually have horror content in the world. You have a horror installment in VHS Halloween, which is called Kid Print, which many people are saying is the most depraved film of the year. Can you tell us about where it came from?

[Alex Ross Perry]

His facial expression? People are talking. People are talking. You know, you have to adjust now. The facial expressions can't just be.

[Chris Ryan]

But you were just like blanked him when he was like, it's depraved. And you were like, yes.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, it'd be better if I was like reacting like. I mean, I like people responding positively to it. And I think you might even, as you like to say, to use a Sean phrase, listeners of this show might remember in years past. I feel like I often speak very highly of the VHS franchise. And I know last year when we did the episode at the offices in, in Manhattan, I had just watched beyond and I was like, man, these things are good. Like what a, what a, what a thing they've got set up here. We watch these every year.

[Sean Fennessey]

And is that, is that how you came to be a part of it?

[Alex Ross Perry]

Sort of. I had a meeting with Shudder about something else that was going nowhere and is still going nowhere really. And I just said it straight to Sam Zimmerman, programmer of Shudder and vp. How do you guys put those VHS things together? I've always, when I finish those movies, I always think I should try to be involved with this. Then I forget about it and the next thing I know there's a new one that I'm not involved in. And I always think like I should throw my hat in the ring. And he was like, oh, we're putting this years together right now. Why would you like to be involved? And it was really one of those things where it just kind of is as simple as that. And he said, well, here's our theme. It's Halloween this year. Last year, science fiction. We'd like things to be very back to basics. No spaceships this time around. I said, this sounds right up my alley. That's the thing I'd most want to do anyway. And I had this idea. Sean, you've seen my essay Film Video Heaven?

[Sean Fennessey]

I have.

[Alex Ross Perry]

In Video Heaven, we unearthed this commercial featuring John Walsh from America's Most Wanted advertising A service at Blockbuster where you bring your kid in to have a videotape made of them being interviewed called Kid Prince. And I've always found this fascinating. And when we found this commercial, it went right in the dock. You can look these up on YouTube. If you just go on YouTube and you search 90s kid print, you'll see hundreds of people have uploaded wavy, liminal videos of themselves really being interviewed. And I think a very creepy way.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Even though the questions are, what's your favorite color? What's your favorite food? What do you like to do after school? It's just that weird level of quiet combined with analog video hiss and tracking. That plus 30 years makes something feel creepy. And I said, I always want to do something like that. Like 90s kidnapping scare. He was like, sounds great. Write up a treatment. That was January. We shot it in May and delivered in July, and it came out September. Sometimes it just works out.

[Sean Fennessey]

Let me ask you a pointed question, because had some friends over, over the weekend. Chris was among them. And I would say half of these people are interested in horror films and the other half are definitively not. And we started talking about Kid Print. And some of them know. Know you, and some of them know you. You have a family, you have a young child. And you know, this is a. This is a. This is a child kidnapping and a brutal film in some ways. And the dissonance between being a parent. You hear some parents say, like, I can't watch anything now about kids in peril because of the feelings that you have. It appears that you have really just gone the other way on that. On that one.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It depends. I. Well, I thought you were going to say. I mean, have you revealed in other parts of the show the other thing you and Chris did at this party that you've reveale.

[Sean Fennessey]

What was the other thing?

[Alex Ross Perry]

I could just read your text message.

[Sean Fennessey]

Tell me.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I believe you said we had a birthday party for my wife over the weekend. Chris and I did a tight 10. Your phrase, not mine, on a Grabber Vance 20, 28 ticket. That's right.

[Chris Ryan]

We didn't even bring this up on the Blackfoot.

[Sean Fennessey]

We talked about blackface.

[Chris Ryan]

Not because we were afraid of the political ramifications.

[Sean Fennessey]

No, no. I think if Vance really wants a chance in 28, he needs a strong second. And I think Grabber.

[Alex Ross Perry]

The grabber, yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

You know, The Black Phone 3 will probably be out by then.

[Chris Ryan]

You could immediately put the grabber in charge of child trafficking because it would be like, who would know this business better than grabber Himself.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Is this what the tight 10 consisted of?

[Sean Fennessey]

We're expanding on the material now, but thank you for prompting that. I totally agree.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Comic relief style, banter of, yeah, you know, who's going to be better at getting kids out of the country than the Grabber? That's literally what he does.

[Sean Fennessey]

I do really think of this show as like, we are the Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg. So I appreciate the comic relief.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Everybody says that about the three of you. Yeah, very much what people say. So, I mean, if you. I'm curious what the rest of the conversation you would have had was, but essentially the answer to your question is, somebody says to me, you want to make a 20 minute horror piece. You love horror. You watch hundreds of horror films. We want it to be grounded. And my first question to myself is, well, what scares me? What do I think is upsetting? Because that's what I want to make. I don't. I'm not saying what I'm about to say isn't a movie I would want to watch or like. And of course, some of the other segments in the film are this. But, like, I don't find demons upsetting because I view the risk of encountering one as being very low. I enjoy a film with demons in it. I don't view the risk of like encountering some sort of mutation. I enjoy that as a narrative conceit. It doesn't really upset me because it has yet to happen in my life or in anybody else's. My thought was just like, as a parent, this is upsetting to me. And if I'm going to make something that is designed to get under your skin, my starting point is what upsets me. And this goes back to being like 13 years old and watching Halloween. Probably 11 years old watching Halloween. And it's like, you know what's insane to me is the idea that a guy could just like walk into my house and kill me right now. Like, that's very upsetting. It's very upsetting that a guy could just like, enter my home with a knife and murder me and my family. Yeah, that's much more upsetting to me than a great many other things that I also enjoy. But my own fears are grounded. And I think this shows and the VHS franchise, obviously multifaceted. Everybody gets their own voice. There are six segments in this film, including mine, the only one that takes place in our world. Every other one takes place in a world where humans have manifested into other beings, giant babies. Magic exists in some form or supernatural. And this is all great. I love. I watch these movies every day. But that's not. I couldn't come. If I came up with. If they said pitch 20 ideas, I wouldn't get there.

[Chris Ryan]

When you push through to the other side and you're like, okay, what's upsetting to me? That's what I want to make a movie about. When you're actually in the process of writing and making the film, do you almost then, like, fully dive into, like, do you push past, like, any. Like, oh, this is creeping me out to even be writing this or making a film about this and then go fully into, like, how could I upset Alex. The viewer as much as possible?

[Alex Ross Perry]

I think it's just kind of shooting from the hip. You know, the script on the. You know, Your script is 25 pages long. You don't have real estate. And it's not like I want every moment to be calibrated for maximum. It's just like, my whole criteria on this is I've seen every one of these films, and this is now the fifth in five years, produced by the same team of producers shepherded by guy named Josh Goldblum. And my criteria is just, you watch these films. I watch them every year. A segment ends, I turn to my wife and I say, that one was really good. Or I turned to her and go, I really couldn't wait for that one to be over. And my only criteria was like, I just need to make the thing that when it ends, I'm turning and I'm saying, that one was great. And that was all I was really thinking of is, like, when this ends, Whether it's the first or the last or somewhere in the middle of the whole piece, I just want to be able to say, like, if I hadn't made that, I would think, wow, that one. That was it. That was what I wanted. And I don't. I mean, I really just didn't think that much about it. It's a very boring answer.

[Sean Fennessey]

But it's like, this is.

[Alex Ross Perry]

What was great is conversations kind of took place in February and March, and I was finished the script by April. Like, you're not fine tuning.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

You're just kind of like, yeah, it'd be fun. You know, this location is appealing to me. Oh, we get to do practical gore effects. Well, let's, like, remove some faces. That feels within reach.

[Sean Fennessey]

Sure.

[Alex Ross Perry]

You know, I'm wearing a Hellraiser hoodie. Or not hoodie, just a crew neck, they're called today. And, you know, just like, just have some fun. It's A very. It's unfortunate now that the, the kid print is considered so grotesque and repellent by people because it reflects poorly on me when I say, like, my intention is just to make something fun and gross.

[Chris Ryan]

I thought it was fun. My wife turned to me midway through Kid Print and went, oh, holy shit. You know, like in a really impressed way. So I, I definitely enjoyed it. But it is, it is definitely like we're putting you, we're opening a file on you.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, you know. Yeah, I think so. And I think that that's.

[Sean Fennessey]

By the way, there is a place for you in the Vance Grabber administration. Maybe Treasury Secretary of War of Homeland Security or Health and Human Services perhaps.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I mean, you're, you're just a stone's throw away from like, you know, like the, the meme or, you know, whatever pre meme of like it be, you know, Scarface and Corleone sitting and playing poker. You know, like, you're just a stone throw away from like the guy in the movie, the character's called Bruce, you know, with the kid's mask on. Sitting there with the grabber in Vance and whoever knows who else.

[Sean Fennessey]

But horror needs great villains, Alex.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, but it, it was just really, to me, like, as a fan, just an opportunity to have fun and just mess around with something. And again, we'll talk about the very restrictive format of an anthology, the time allotment and all the rest is like, okay, you could say if Kid Print, there's seven characters in the first five minutes. It's not a surprise where this is going. My answer is like, no, it shouldn't be a surprise where it's going. It should be a surprise how awful it is. It's obvious where this is going because this is a 20 minute segment in anthology where 4 out of 5 of these, every single character is dead by the end of the segment. But what you should be surprised by is like, oh, that went exactly where I was going. But it also went further than I would have thought because these things don't tend to go that far.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, the mixed company on Saturday night felt, just based on my description, that you went too far. I think you can go farther in Kid Print too.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I mean, keeping in mind I'm having these conversations with people at playgrounds who I barely know and they're like striking up a conversation. My kids teacher, I was wearing my shutter sweatpants that they gave me the other day and I dropped her off and she was like, oh, I love shudder. I was like, I wonder if she'll just like, watch this and not know.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I was at the doctor recently, had a shutter hat on. And she said the same thing. She's like, I just watched this great movie on Shudder, and it's like, you know, these people are out there.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah. But every day, like, you just. Well, you might pass them in the grocery store and that person is like.

[Sean Fennessey]

You know, actually, they could grab you at any moment.

[Chris Ryan]

Alex, did you know how much insight are you given when you're making these about what the other segments are about, like, what the batting order is going to be necessarily?

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah. I was fascinated by this, and I'm happy to talk about it because as fans, you've probably watched all of these and the answer is, like, nothing.

[Chris Ryan]

Okay.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It's all kind of done in a vacuum and kind of for the producer's sake. I worry for them. It's all done concurrently, essentially. Just the limited window of when the movie is operational into when everything has to be wrapped is like six weeks. Wow. We shot here. We shot partially upstate and partially in Brooklyn, and then the others were shot in California and Paco Plazas was shot in Spain, obviously. And the wraparound diet Phantasma was shot in Scotland, but the three California ones were kind of blocked together. And at some point, Sam Zimmerman, again, who lives near me, and we're at the playground again, like, picture me and Sam Zimmerman from Shudder at the playground while our kids are doing whatever. And we're just, like, talking about kid print, you know, for, like, the last seven months.

[Sean Fennessey]

This is a great country.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, yeah. That's just what we're. We're just, you know, no one knows that's what we're talking about.

[Chris Ryan]

This is what Grabber and Vance are trying to save for us.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Just like a safe space for all people is, I think, what the Grabber administration. That's right.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah. For creative souls.

[Alex Ross Perry]

But, yeah, at some point, he listed the names of everybody, and other than Paco, none of them connected for me, I think, other than Anna Zakovic, who made a one feature, I think maybe, you know, I don't think the others have made features, unless I'm forgetting something. So, you know. But he's like, oh, Casper Kelly, who did Too Many Cooks? I'm like, okay, well, I know what that is.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I have no idea what he's doing in this space, but I'm sure it will be strange.

[Sean Fennessey]

It sounds like you did not see his Yule Log films.

[Alex Ross Perry]

No, I never did, no.

[Chris Ryan]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

I mean, they're pretty cool experiments. They're very, very similar to the Segment that he directed for the film.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, but you know, that's a name that I was like, oh, okay, I know who that is. But they don't know the sequencing until they get the edits. I learned there is no master plan. And even throughout talking to the producers or seeing Sam at the playground, it was like, yeah, we're kind of figuring out where yours might go. But then I learned, and you guys might not even notice this. It's kind of subconscious when you're watching the film. Leave the wraparound aside because that's obviously the wrapper was made as the wraparound is that segments 1, 3 and 5 all involve trick or treating and then Pacos and mine don't. So they were like. We kind of immediately realized that Coochie Coochie Coup and Fun Size and Home Haunt could not be next to each other. And in that all three of the LA movies, coincidentally, we give filmmakers the prompt of a Halloween horror short. All three of them went to like, so we're on the street and they're trick or treating and then this thing happens and yours and Paco's don't. So it was very easy to just think like, so is Kid Prince second or is it fourth? And I thought this was fascinating and also ultimately quite correct. And yeah, it's like, I don't know, like, what accounts for the fact that you give people the prompt of make a 20 minute Halloween thing? And in my mind it was like, so we're not going to do trick or treating because we don't have the money to do it. And I don't want to do a bad version of it because what you want, I mean, I could go shoot this right now and it would look like half a million dollars worth of production design, but you do it in May and it would look terrible. And I was just like, I don't want to bother with that. So there has to be some narrative justification why there is no trick or treating. Which is great because that's consistent with the story I'm telling you, which is just a micro version of overthinking. How do you calibrate a story in 20 minutes that has its own prehistory? The story's been going on since before the movie began. The story also then justifies why we're not gonna have 90 extras, we're not gonna have five houses lined up trick or treating. And I sort of lightly joked with the other filmmakers who do show exterior trick or treating scenes. I was like, I'm glad that you guys did it, but I'm glad you didn't do it that well, because it would have made me really jealous if you'd figured out how to make this look great in May for no money.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Like in home haunt, R.H. and Michelin, they, you know, put it all into one house. And I'm like, we could do one house, but one house doesn't look like trick or treating. And, you know, we all love Halloween. The classic. Like, it looks like nothing. It was shot in, like, the middle of some other season, and there's like, six people out. And that's great, but I just was like, we just need a reason that that doesn't happen. Fortunately, if child killings have been happening for a month in this town anyway, we'll just like, yeah, we don't have the money to do it, but also, the story shouldn't have it happening. And it was fascinating to kind of get the insight of how these things are made, because I think these guys are great at what they do. Like, I think that the producers have created an annual event in the streaming space. And I'm just seeing, like, in three weeks, the amount of logs VHS Halloween has on letterboxd. You know, it's like, already way more than Pavements. And that movie is, like, a year and a half old. And it's just like, you know, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people are just clicking on this every single day for the rest of the month. And it's a really reassuring business model to be making something knowing, like, well, I'm not going to be subjected to any notes or scrutiny of this. They're just going to make this as good as it can be and then release it and hope it doesn't cause people to turn off the movie before it's over, which I'm sure has happened. Or maybe you just skip ahead. But it's a pretty casual process. And again, just shooting with a release date because they were like, October 3rd is when this comes out.

[Chris Ryan]

I mean, I have such an uncomplicated relationship to this series, to this franchise. It's exactly what Alex is describing. There is no, like, I wonder if this one's gonna be up to snuff this year. It's like, I hit play. I get excited when the. The theme clicks. I was. I was curious, Alex, whether or not. Did you get any inside info or would this ever appeal to you to do the wraparound? Because that. The idea of making a coherent story that also gets interrupted five times is, like, really fascinating to me.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, I mean, it didn't come up, I think I would probably be bad at it. It's hard enough to make for my brain. Like, 20 minutes is. I mean, Brian Ferguson, like, all credit to him. Like, what he did with it, I think is super fun. But that was the one creative thing I asked at some point because we had this whole opening sequence that we cut entirely out. And it was a news report which is now just shown on the TV like, five minutes later. And it had a lot of table setting and this and that. And we were like, how do we start? Did we start with this or that? And they said, oh, so the wraparound, every segment of it ends with a super gory kill. And we were like, oh, okay. So, like, we. We should not start with, like, a lot of violent information. We should start with the kid print montage rather than starting with, like, ever since his head was found, you know, 10ft from his body, I was like, just give people 60 seconds to reset. And that was all they. The only question I ever asked was what happens in the wraparound? Because some of them just build slowly to one big conclusion. Whereas Brian's notion of doing a repetitive series of failed experiments, I thought, very funny. But no, that never came up. I guess they just assigned him. Or again, that's a mystery of the VHS world that we'll never know.

[Sean Fennessey]

This is the kind of logical problem solving that we can expect from Vance Grabber. I feel like the way that you explained how you arrived at your decisions.

[Chris Ryan]

That'S why he's the Secretary of Transportation.

[Sean Fennessey]

It's really exciting.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It was very linear in a really refreshing way, but also just fixating on my obvious core obsessions of, like, media infrastructure and distribution during my lifetime. But grounding it in again, like, this is just me in my head is like, again, I say, Anna has made one other feature which I think is on Hulu. This is just me in my head as like, a producer, where I'm like, we're getting this amount of money and I want to build this electronics store. As many pages as possible should take place in this store because we're not going to build it for four pages. We only have four or five days to shoot this thing and that's the best we're going to get. So we should make this our key location and as much as possible should take place here.

[Sean Fennessey]

Let's talk about horror anthologies. I have always been really fascinated by these structures and I. I also echo your feelings about vhs. It is just genuinely comforting to have this coming every year. And, you know, they're Born out of the original film and the sequel, which then also spawned, you know, Southbound came out around this time. XX came out in the aftermath of this. There was this kind of like rebirth of the horror anthology. But it has become a streaming gambit for the most part. But there's a long history of theatrically released horror anthologies going back to really the 1940s. And some are good, some are not so good. Alex, from your perspective, what do you think are the things that define a good horror anthology?

[Alex Ross Perry]

Well, it's interesting. I was looking at your list, which combined with a little bit of help from my old colleague Michael Ferrari from Kim's Video, has grown to well over 100 films.

[Sean Fennessey]

I will share that list after this episode publishes.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It's quite long, it's thorough. And what you mentioned, the initial two VHS films and then that sort of mini boom of Southbound and XX and others, I think those were all released by Magnet or Magnolia back in the earliest days of kind of what was then just called Day and Date, where it would maybe play in a few theaters. And obviously we love this franchise and gave me this opportunity to tell a pretty grotesque story on a. For lots of people. But I think that the theatrical version of this, much like many theatrical things, just seems gone. There just can't. And why would you not make it a streaming thing when you can just drop it on the first weekend of October and have your entire audience watch it for a month? What's the benefit of trying to get people into theaters? It's not going to be an event, I wonder.

[Sean Fennessey]

Chris and I were just talking about how the Odyssey is going to have a trailer in December, I think. And Chris has been saying for years that he wants Nolan to make a horror movie. It would be interesting to try to make a theatrical event out of three real heavyweight filmmakers take their crack at a 30 minute horror movie. But that's the. That's the rare instance where you might catch an anthology in theaters now.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It makes the most sense of anything, right? Like, wouldn't it just make sense to kind of have these things getting made? The risk is low. I think most people like to work. I just feel like TV and other factors have kind of teamed up to decimate that as even a realistic possibility. And for whatever reason, like historically, a lot of them were always European. Anyway, I don't want to get into it here, but there are union questions. Which is a great thing about VHS really, is that the whole franchise may be interested, all non sag. So you watch these films, you see performers, you certainly Never seen before because it's a lot of fresh faces or people who have not worked in a high profile way, which I think is cool.

[Sean Fennessey]

It lends itself to the films, obviously, because then it feels like you are watching found footage.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Absolutely. Which is always what I liked about them. I didn't realize, like, oh, that's just. They're just non seg. You just cast them non seg because. Yeah, I don't know, I guess it's just hard to say. Like, yeah, we're releasing a movie, it has 75 characters in it, nine writers, nine directors. Like, who knows?

[Chris Ryan]

That's a reality.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I don't, I don't envy the people who untangle that. But yeah, the horror omnibus thing, like, I think like we were watching. I forget what we watched recently. Kind of embarrassing. I should probably at least vaguely remember which one of these we fired up in the last couple of weeks. But I think it was a night where we were kind of tired and I was like, well, the thing about this is like your brain doesn't really lean away from the film because every 15, 20, 30 minutes you're kind of pulled back into a different visual narrative. Like this keeps your brain awake.

[Chris Ryan]

Very much so.

[Sean Fennessey]

Do you, do you have a preference if it's one filmmaker or multiple filmmakers for these?

[Alex Ross Perry]

Well, this is something I brought up after, after consulting your list. I think this really is the biggest. I think this is the biggest dividing line. And I can't tell you, as we sit here promoting a new omnibus listing, I can't. What, what is the last one? That was one filmmaker. I mean, VHS1. So it was Trick or Treat.

[Sean Fennessey]

I think Trick or Treat is maybe the Mike Daugherty one. Right. Is like the last big one I can think of.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Is that not an easy answer for the greatest. Like, at least post creep. You know, obviously you have your creep.

[Sean Fennessey]

Shows and yeah, it's definitely one of the best. And anybody would say that.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I mean, that movie is now iconic. Yeah, I think if it gets re.

[Chris Ryan]

Released once season, like once every Halloween, I pretty much watch that.

[Sean Fennessey]

Put that on.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

This is a great Halloween vibe movie.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, yeah, it is. And it looks great and it's cohesive because it's one person making it and it has what I think and I hope VHS Halloween does. And certainly the producers and other filmmakers can imagine is like you just rewatch it because it has the vibes and you know, you can count on it. But yeah, maybe Trick or treat, which I guess is an easy answer for if not the number One for most people, certainly. Top five Ahar Omnibuses.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, there's a few. I mean there's a few that are single filmmaker. Tales from the Hood is one that I think is really beloved and you know, has.

[Alex Ross Perry]

The Dark side is not right.

[Sean Fennessey]

I think that's omnibus. Yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Tales from the Dark side and creepshow.

[Sean Fennessey]

Obviously and creepshow 2 are both single filmmakers.

[Alex Ross Perry]

So on your list. Hell's from the Dark side is just directed by John Harrison.

[Sean Fennessey]

Oh, okay. That's.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Well, could that be true?

[Sean Fennessey]

I think it's possible. You know, like Cat's Eye. Louis Teague did all of Cat's Eye. The Stephen King films, there are definitely plenty of examples. But for whatever reason in the last 20 years it has shifted entirely to this multi filmmaker style. And I don't know, I mean, I like Creepshow more than most movies ever released. I don't know if it's like one of the best movies ever, but it's just a movie. Actually. I feel like you and I and Phoebe and Eileen watched it like five or six years ago together, just hanging out one October.

[Chris Ryan]

It's just, it's.

[Sean Fennessey]

It.

[Chris Ryan]

It allows you to kind of have to Alex's point, like you can tap out, but kind of keep an eye on a segment if you're not interested in it, you know, something new is coming. It's a great. Generally all of these share and the VHS movies really do I think like a pretty decent job sticking to a thematic vibe for each one of the. Of the films. And yeah, I think that these are like great. Kind of like if you're even throwing a Halloween party, you could have one of these on in the background and somebody could be like, oh, I love this one. Hold on.

[Alex Ross Perry]

You know. Yeah, I was, I was confused. There was some either review or something of VHS Halloween that was like Kid Print destroys this movie's party vibes. I wanted to have this on with my friends and this. I was like, is that what these are for? Like to me, like I, I didn't like, I thought like we're not 13 years old and it's not 1997.

[Chris Ryan]

Throw a party where show Kid Print on a different.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, you guys, like maybe you guys, it sounds like, have like parties where your friends come over and you watch a Halloween movie. But apparently we ruined someone's party and I guess that's cool. It's more. It's like. But that is, you know, I, I guess I just don't relate to that way of viewing. But the, the. I didn't Think until I looked at your huge list. What is the difference between the multiple filmmakers or one filmmaker? And it does seem to be kind of an interesting division.

[Sean Fennessey]

Well, if you sort it by highest average ranking on letterboxd, the top five is as follows. Quaidon, the Masaaki Kobayashi movie. Dead of Night, the original British film, which is Omnibus, has five different filmmakers.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Did Tracy Lett say you could watch Kwaidon in multiple sittings or did he?

[Chris Ryan]

He said multiple sittings.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah. Okay, good, that's confirmed.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah. But Berlin Alexander Plots you need to watch in full confirmed place. Tales from the Hood, Mario Baba's Black Sabbath, which is one filmmaker, and Creepshow. And then after that it's Three Extremes and Trick or Treat and Tales from the Crypt and a handful of others.

[Alex Ross Perry]

So quite a few individual filmmakers up front.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes. And I would welcome, I mean, I would certainly welcome Alex Ross Perry's full fledged anthology movie. I do think that could still be theatrical to me. I don't know. If you said from the mind of Jordan Peele, three short, short films collected together so he can get out of the doldrums of whatever script he's writing and just get something out into the world. I would dig that.

[Chris Ryan]

You know, can I just give away a billion dollar idea? I'm sure that maybe. But I mean, to Alex's point, like, this is getting routinely like thousands of logs on letterbox. Just like casual physicians and teachers who are wearing shutter sweatpants and are just like, I'm out here.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, hang on, those are my sweatpants.

[Chris Ryan]

Those are your sweatpants, but they were compliments your community.

[Alex Ross Perry]

They were complimented by my daughter's teacher.

[Chris Ryan]

A couple weeks ago, my wife was up in Portland, Oregon and went to go see the nun at a drive in. And the aspect of this that's unique is that they had, you know, people dressed up as characters from the movie, but also just other monsters like run up to your car and scare you at various points in the. So it's kind of like haunted. Hey, ride meets a, meets a. Driving.

[Sean Fennessey]

Did you enjoy that?

[Chris Ryan]

Would I enjoy that? I'm just like, why is Shudder not making their own drive ins and having like vhs?

[Alex Ross Perry]

They did, I think Clown in a Cornfield was widely distributed at drive in throughout the summer. Okay.

[Sean Fennessey]

Were there clowns approaching the cars during.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I think there might have been some. I didn't go to one, but I think there was some maybe interactive outdoor element. But like, I, I mean, I can say like, from a production standpoint, it's not efficient to say, like, we're making four movies worth of sets. Four casts, four. You know, like that. That is not an efficient way to make anything. Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

They're usually single setting pieces every time. Like, I just watched Creepshow 2, and all three of the segments were all single setting stories because of what you're describing where it's like, we need a house. We need a raft. You know, we need, like, one place to go to shoot for 20 minutes of.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Is Creepshow 2 only three? Because I feel like Creepshow 1 is six segments.

[Sean Fennessey]

I think Creep Show 2 is only three with. And the Rapper is honestly not even very good because it's animated.

[Chris Ryan]

Okay, which is the one? Yeah, Dancing is.

[Sean Fennessey]

Which one?

[Alex Ross Perry]

That's one dance is in the first one where his head ends up in the.

[Sean Fennessey]

That's a great one. I love that.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Tanker head ends up underwater.

[Sean Fennessey]

And Leslie Nielsen. Yeah, that's an incredible.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It's.

[Sean Fennessey]

It's.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It's an interesting thing that I'm glad you're giving an opportunity to kind of shine a light on. But, like, the weird thing is, I love these movies, and I would watch. I'd watch them all the time. Nobody would be like, I'm going to a marathon of three omnibuses.

[Sean Fennessey]

That's true.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Like, that would be. That would be too much information for the brain to handle in 6 hours. Unless it was maybe creepshow and creepshow 2. But I feel like it would just get exhausting. And I will say I did the same thing here. I ranked your list. I've weirdly seen quite a few from the bottom of this list and very. And beyond the ones you listed, there's, like, a big range in the top of your list of movies I've not seen, like, you know, beyond the top, like, 10.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah. I mean, part of it is because of your. The help that your friend provided. I mean, I think there are some kind of 80s standbys that are outside of Creepshow that like Waxwork and Nightmares and movies that will crop up when you're pillaging, you know, trying to get into the depths. And then there's also a bunch of, like, Corman made one of these.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Nightmares is all one director.

[Sean Fennessey]

It is.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It's a fine film. But even within that is, like, wildly uneven in its attempt to sort of swallow up various 80s tones.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes. I mean, you've also got a handful of movies that it felt like the filmmakers didn't have an idea strong enough for one movie, so they teamed up with a close friend like Body Bags, which is Carpenter, and Tobe Hooper from 96.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I also didn't know that two counted as an omnibus until I looked at your list.

[Sean Fennessey]

Well, I guess you could debate whether or not that's true. Two Evil Eyes is like that too.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I think it's correct. I just. I never thought about what the limit was. If it's because there's not very many movies that are like, this is two movies.

[Sean Fennessey]

I mean, both Body Bags and Two Evil Eyes are made by four of the greatest horror filmmakers ever. Carpenter, Hooper, Argento and Romero. And none of them are even close to the best work of any of those.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I know it's strange. Those do just kind of feel like somebody was offered a chance to, like, work and make a few bucks.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

And they were like, yeah, sure.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

It's interesting.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Did you. Looking at your. Again, this is imperfect science of letterboxd user ratings. Couple things that jump out here. I incredibly surprised that Trick or treat is number 10. I really would think that would be.

[Chris Ryan]

Especially since it tends to overweight. I think more recent stuff like that.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I'm incredibly surprised that Trilogy of Terror. This isn't numerically ranked, but it's right in the middle. I feel like that is most people's answer for like, easily top tier of all time.

[Sean Fennessey]

That famously, though, was a TV movie and not a theatrically released film.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I just feel like in the last 20 years, that reputation has just. I don't know. Again, maybe that's just me. And then I'm quite surprised I've not seen All Hallows Eve, the Origin of Art, the Clown, who really could be on the Vance Grabber ticket. I feel like he's kind of a shoe in it. But I've not seen that. But then the bottom three, vhs Viral, which is openly despised. And I have seen it. I don't remember it being like that bad.

[Sean Fennessey]

I don't remember it being that bad either. Actually. I was really surprised to see it so far down the line.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I guess there's a segment or two in it. People like Creepshow 3, which I've never seen.

[Sean Fennessey]

I haven't seen it either.

[Alex Ross Perry]

And Glenn Danzig's Verotica, which I have seen.

[Sean Fennessey]

How is that? I haven't seen that.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I don't know if I would say it's the bottom of all of these. It's. You know, I think your mileage might vary. I really respect and admire the work of Glenn Danzig.

[Sean Fennessey]

I was gonna say you're a Danzig guy, and I know that Glenn Danzig.

[Chris Ryan]

Gotten to direct multiple films.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, he does, right?

[Alex Ross Perry]

He has two or three.

[Sean Fennessey]

Okay.

[Alex Ross Perry]

One of them is like. One of them is. So Veronica is an omnibus of stories, I think adapted from his comic. One of them is a western that is called Here Death Rider in the House of Vampires. That could also be good. It does, yeah. Has a 2.3 on letterbox. Sean, is that good or not good?

[Sean Fennessey]

That is not good.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Okay.

[Sean Fennessey]

I'm not familiar with this film, which. It takes a lot to get a movie like this past me. In the Wild west, the mysterious Death Rider enters a dangerous vampire sanctuary where the price of admission is one female virgin. This film stars Devon Sawa, Julian Sands, Danny Trejo. Really? And Eli Roth.

[Chris Ryan]

No shit.

[Sean Fennessey]

Not. Not familiar with this film. Alex, you haven't seen it?

[Alex Ross Perry]

I haven't, no. But I mean for no reason. I watched Veronica and again, consistent with the Glenn Danzig project, I. It's probably not. Not at the level of a Rob Zombie making his movies, but I don't. I wouldn't look at 100 films and say Veronica is the bottom. But I don't know, maybe these other ones are all great. It feels like Rob Zombie would have made one of these.

[Chris Ryan]

It really does.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Like he could have at some point just thrown together, but. Sorry, go, go ahead.

[Chris Ryan]

Oh, no, I was just going to ask, like, do you find that most of your at home watching, especially around this time of year, is dedicated to this stuff? And if so, how long does it take you to like decelerate and be ready to like watch Caught by the Tides or whatever?

[Alex Ross Perry]

It's a great question. I don't know what that film you.

[Sean Fennessey]

Referenced is, but it's Zha Jean. Cause new film.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, that one's probably not going to get around to that one.

[Sean Fennessey]

That is also kind of an omnibus movie because it's about lots of footage captured over the years from various Xia Jean Cau films anyway.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Well, that sounds a little highfalutin for a guy like me. I will say this is very specific, Chris, and a very regimented is basically by September 15th, we're watching horror movies.

[Chris Ryan]

Me too.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Every one a night. I don't know about you guys. Sean seems to have more time than most people. I watch one movie a day. We watch it when our daughter goes to bed. Starts around the 15th. It ramps up through Halloween. But we have, I think, what's called in the horror community, Horror Hangover. Which starts after Halloween.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes.

[Alex Ross Perry]

So the, the ramp down is actually a very important part of the programming. But Horror Hangover, for us anyway, we tend to put off a lot of things that we want to Watch. But we know now that we're like, in October 20th, like, we're not going to watch a supernatural thriller now, but on November 3rd, a supernatural thriller that's not really a horror movie might be just the ticket.

[Chris Ryan]

It's a great step.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah. We always watch a lot of Universal monster movies in that time. Like, things that are in the spooky mood, but, like, they might not satisfy you on the 26th, 27th. And we watch a lot of like, that's when we watched Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein a few years ago. Okay. That's when we watch things that are like. Yeah. I mean, that's like a spooky movie. But you get to the point in October where you're not going to watch it.

[Sean Fennessey]

You know, Chris and I were talking about this earlier. There's something very weird happening. It feels like a post Nosferatu success thing. But this year after Halloween, we're getting Keeper, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, and Five Nights at Freddy's 2 after Halloween. Yeah, that doesn't seem. Well, that's not very helpful for Halloween Hangover. First of all, I don't know what you're going to do about that.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, I'll look and see. At other. In years past, we've definitely really planned. I feel like this has been happening and it's always confusing to me. But there's nothing more confusing than the, like, November horror release.

[Sean Fennessey]

Well, I get it. Because for studios, these are very reliable movies. Right. They know they can continue to get people to show up to these movies. So I understand it from that programming perspective, but just from a vibes perspective, Keeper is one of the most October 7th movies I've ever seen.

[Chris Ryan]

Do you think they were clearing out for Black Phone 2?

[Sean Fennessey]

I guess so. Anyhow. That's neither.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I don't have a theory on this. This is much more your wheelhouse. It just is another, I guess, is there too much good product to release? Like, this doesn't exist. And it's not like, well, we'll release these. These Christmas movies in January. But I guess the. I guess, like last year was it Heretic that came out like, November 5th.

[Sean Fennessey]

It was.

[Alex Ross Perry]

And you were like, not you. But one was like, that's weird. And you watch it and you're like, well, this isn't really, like, this isn't a horror movie. This wouldn't have. This wouldn't have played any differently a month ago than it plays now. This is fine.

[Sean Fennessey]

It's kind of perfect for what you were describing. The hangover, the hang of The Comedown.

[Alex Ross Perry]

This was great for that. I feel like that's allowable, albeit slightly confusing. But these are. These are the vulgarities of the industry that you can nitpick better than most. I'm much more suited towards scrolling through this insane list of omnibuses and just wondering, like, I wonder what this is.

[Sean Fennessey]

Well, there's a couple of other things that I think contribute to this. When I was a kid. One, I was obsessed with books that did this. Scary Stories To Tell. In the Dark was a huge book for me when I was like nine and was a major glide path to getting obsessed with horror. But at the same time, the Goosebumps books, and then Those are all R.L.

[Chris Ryan]

Stine.

[Sean Fennessey]

That's the R.L. stine book. Scary Stories to Tell. In the Dark was a different author. But then what was the name of that show? Are youe Afraid of the Dark? Which was a television show on Nickelodeon that gliding into Tales from the Crypt, the TV show on hbo, and then getting comfortable with. And then getting interested in the Twilight Zone and the Twilight Zone movie, also omnibus, being like comfortable with 28 minute installments of horror storytelling at that age. And I don't know, maybe we're not as comfortable with that as we are now. Like, what's the best horror TV show?

[Chris Ryan]

Channel Zero.

[Sean Fennessey]

But what that's on right now?

[Chris Ryan]

Oh, no, but like Channel Zero is probably like the best one.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I mean, I don't know what that is.

[Chris Ryan]

It's. It was on. I think it was on Sci Fi and it was an anthology series. So each season would be a story. And they were definitely. The first two are really good. Whatever. No End House, whatever season that was. But they were like, those are pretty, pretty effective.

[Sean Fennessey]

The third season, Butcher's Block, is directed entirely by Akasha Stevenson, who made the first Omen.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Interesting. I don't know about this at all. It feels like this is again like a production thing where what you're describing, this boom that we grew up with, this was almost like the easiest thing to do.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Because you didn't need to have standing sets or a cast who you paid for 15 episodes. And now it's like the hardest thing to do.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Because you'd have to renegotiate the. The actor deals for 15 different cats. Like, it just seems like this could not have been easier at the time it was like, I don't know, just put on a different Goosebumps every week for children. And then the parents can watch Tales from the Crypt or the Outer Limits reboot or something that just kind of scratches that itch. And every time they try to do this now, it fails. And it doesn't just fail, it fails spectacularly.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah. Jordan Peele did reboot Twilight Zone and it didn't. It didn't take off.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah. And there's like Black Mirror obviously is basically this, but seems to have like some nebulous source of BBC Netflix money that allows it to exist in this way. And you know, really talking about omnibus, it runs the gamut from like one of the best things you've ever seen to something that is so unwatchable you have to turn it off.

[Sean Fennessey]

They're also. Those are basically all bordering into feature length films at this point. Yeah. For the other problem, every Black mirror is like 78 minutes now.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yes, that absolutely catastrophe of decision making. But truly some of them are things I've rewatched and some of them I cannot get through. And that's, I guess, I guess what you want from an omnibus. But a lot of the horror books behind me that you're upset aren't 4Ks. I read a lot of short stories, especially this time of year. And on your list here is Clive Barker's Books of Blood film, which I've never seen, also inspired by his work, which he had nothing to do with. And I loved those books. But it's funny, I don't remember short stories, except for if I read a collection that has 10 to 20 stories, I might remember two of them, but I remember the sum total of what that book felt like. And I think a film omnibus is kind of similar, except there's obviously fewer of them. There's very few that have more than five or six.

[Sean Fennessey]

I remember reading the King collections and feeling like Skeleton Crew, like, made a real impression on me.

[Chris Ryan]

Which one's the body in?

[Sean Fennessey]

I think that's in.

[Alex Ross Perry]

That's in Four Seasons. That's in the Seasons one. Because that's like. It's not like the Summer of Summer. Different seasons.

[Sean Fennessey]

But you're right that usually you're finding these, like, longer collections of stories. I mean, you know, there's some of these are Poe, right? Like Corman did a Poe movie. There's a handful of Poe adaptations here. Hammer, I think, did a Poe adaptation.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It's right there. And I will say I'm pretty far down this list, although I saw it recently, screened a print of it basically by myself at the Eastman Museum in Rochester, where, as I said, you have a standing invitation to go and select some films.

[Sean Fennessey]

As soon as I get to Rochester, I'll be there.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Present yourself But a Night Train to Terror. Quite fun. Series of different shorts that I guess maybe debatably were abandoned. Features that were then retrofitted into an omnibus.

[Sean Fennessey]

You know, I've never seen this.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It's great. Highly, highly enjoyable. But again, I think, if you believe what I read online, that this is like three or four movies that got abandoned. Financing ran out and like, I think some of These segments are 15 minutes and one of them is like 45 minutes. Like, it really feels very uneven.

[Sean Fennessey]

Sporting a 2.6 on letterbox. Just so you know, I, I would.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Debate that if I. If I was ranking on a scale of one to five, I'd give it a four.

[Sean Fennessey]

Okay.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It largely, you know, it's God and the Devil playing chess on a train that's being sort of like energized by a disco punk band and a bunch of dancing people in leotards. And then every once in a while, God and the Devil will be like, so what about this girl? And then it just goes to this story. Yeah, it's pretty insane, but I think very good. And, you know, it's just kind of right down the middle, but it gives you a lot to enjoy. I just don't really know what happened to these. I mean, I feel like the success of VHS should imply that there's more of these. And I see so many things on your list here of these, like recent ish Christmas ones. Seems to be a lot of those. Like, don't really know why there's not.

[Chris Ryan]

You know, you were mentioning the TV stuff and I, you know, I was talking. I think I mentioned Channel Zero, but there have been two Stephen King adaptations or explorations. One was Castle Rock from a couple of years ago that was on like, Hulu and now they're doing it. Colon. Welcome to Derry on hbo Max. I think the first episode is this weekend and I definitely think, like, I.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Was just goodbye to Delco, welcome to Dairy.

[Chris Ryan]

I know, exactly. But I was thinking, like, you know, he's got so many collections of short stories that would make great. And thought, like, you could just do Night Shift. I mean, Lawnmower Man, Children of the Corner and Night Shift.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yep.

[Chris Ryan]

But I always wanted a little bit more of a choppier kind of like short story version of. Rather than the let's get to the bottom of what's wrong with.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah, that's what's great about Creepshow is that it's like.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I mean, Creepshow is definitely the closest. Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah. That's why it's so special, because it's King. And King is so good at those like funny fucked up little mini stories.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, it's a really weird thing that this is so obvious. And when these are good, even, you know, good on the level of a Black Mirror, good on the level of VHS franchise like this is. People want this, they just enjoy it. And yet as we've seen with these multiple failed Twilight Zone reboot, why can't this just be gotten right? This isn't rocket science. And again, I give great credit to the VHS producers for just finding filmmakers who they like, who they say, we're going to give you this much money, no more. Do whatever you want with it. Here's your delivery date. We're going to give you a handful of notes, but really not that many. And is my opinion as a fan and now a partner in these films, like people like these, like that, that model results in many people saying, well that's one, one night of October that I will watch. And I yeah, real, real quick, XX here, maybe fifth to last on this list in terms of ranking I saw. So I was at Sundance for the premiere of Golden Exits which was at like 5:00pm, was over at, I don't know, let's say 7:30. Party was at 8. At 11:30 I was back in the theater watching the world premiere of xx. So I left. The party sounded really great to me. I wanted to see it. I was excited. And the programmer was like, I've never seen ever a filmmaker attending a movie the night of their own premiere. And that's my relationship to xx.

[Sean Fennessey]

One thing that's wonderful about that is that Golden Exits I think augured your first appearance on this show. Yes, as I recall, and it's been full circle moment many, many since and hopefully many more. I wanted to give a very quick shout out to Freddie Francis, who I think holds the title of the most horror omnibus movies. Freddie Francis, actually in one of our text chains, Alex, I've cited many times as maybe the most fascinating career of all time in the movies because he was the cinematographer, I was saying, like.

[Chris Ryan]

The Lawrence of Arabia guy.

[Sean Fennessey]

Well, he shot the Innocents, he shot Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He became David Lynch's preferred dp, who shot Dune, Elephant Man, Straight Story, he shot Glory for Ed Zwick, he shot School Ties, you know, he was one of the core kitchen sink British cinematographers. But he was a director in his own right and almost exclusively horror and hammer horror movies. And he directed in a very short period of time the original Tales from the crypt, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. He directed Torture Garden, he directed Tales that Witness Madness, Many other movies. I think he's directed at least five, maybe more omnibus horror movies when not shooting masterpieces for other filmmakers.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, it's interesting. After viewing of Creepshow a few years ago, I got very into like the Weird History of Tales from the crypt and his 70s one, which has just an amazing poster art image is really good.

[Sean Fennessey]

It is really good, really solid stuff.

[Alex Ross Perry]

And yeah, he is an intro. I have a tape of it over there. Quite an interesting filmmaker. I did remember the omnibus we watched recently that I said this will keep us awake was Cake of Blood, which I did text you, which I don't see on this list, which is in the Severin. If I can High council it for 30 seconds.

[Sean Fennessey]

Please do.

[Alex Ross Perry]

In the Severin Gothic Horror Spanish set. Not the Gothic Horror. Italian. Danzo macabre. I think volumes one through three are Italian and volume four. Four is Spanish.

[Sean Fennessey]

Hell, yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

And in my mind, the basement of Italian Gothic horror is rock bottom and the basement of Spanish Gothic horror is like mid tier. So I bought the Spanish box set because I could imagine how unwatchable some of those Italian films might be. And Cake of Blood had nothing to do with Cakes or Blood Omnibus in this box set, which was quite sufficient. One truly unwatchable segment. One that was like, awesome, and then two that were like, nah, that was fine.

[Chris Ryan]

That's all you need. This is like one homicide.

[Sean Fennessey]

Like that. Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

You'll take a strike out in two singles.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Alex Ross Perry]

The second segment in Cake of Blood is a just super literal retelling of Frankenstein in 20 minutes.

[Sean Fennessey]

And it's like, I wish Del Toro had done the same.

[Alex Ross Perry]

It's just like completely. You're like, why are. Like, why is this the choice? Why. Why is this what we're watching? Are you.

[Sean Fennessey]

Are you seeking an invitation to the next High Council session?

[Alex Ross Perry]

I'm always a little jealous.

[Chris Ryan]

Are you worried about how big can the High Council get?

[Sean Fennessey]

Well, I mean, we know that he's gearing up for his work in the Federal government, so maybe this is a good way to start working on.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Much like the VHS series. When I, you know, when one of these passes me by, I think, what do you have to do to get involved with that? And, yeah, I don't know, it's been very. I'm not flying to LA with a suitcase full of. Full of stuff, but. Well, then you're not invited.

[Sean Fennessey]

I think that's the number one prerequisite, is to come with doubles to give to Chris Ryan.

[Alex Ross Perry]

The funny thing about that is that, like, obviously that's a legendary flex on the part of Mr. Letts to fly across the country with a briefcase full of 4Ks, like, presumably handcuffed to him in like a very, you know, classic noir sort of way. But then, like, I guess somehow I, like, figured out or, like, the timing realized that I was like, oh, so he was, like, in LA for the Emmys.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yes.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Where his wife is, like, multiple nominated.

[Chris Ryan]

It was up for White Lotus, but I think might as well have been up for Gilded Age, too.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah. So I'm like, okay. So, like, I guess if HBO was flying me like first class, I would bring a bunch of suitcases full of toys also.

[Sean Fennessey]

Okay, so our next act is to get you nominated for an Emmy this year. So you can come.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I just want to be the plus one of someone who's being flown first class.

[Chris Ryan]

You can be Mark Ruffalo's plus one for his task. Emmy.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah. And I'll bring. I'll bring some stuff, but were you.

[Sean Fennessey]

A Delco advisor on that show?

[Alex Ross Perry]

I wish. I wish. You know, Chris, my problem with this, and maybe you've covered this, is like, this is now the second one of these Delco crime shows where about every 16 to 25 minutes, someone shows up with a cup of Wawa coffee. Yeah. Wawa is all over this on social media. They've never set foot in a Wawa in a single frame of filming. We don't even get an establishing shot of someone leaving the parking lot carrying.

[Chris Ryan]

They reference it all the time, but they don't go. It's really.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I don't understand why. This is like, they're obviously signing off.

[Chris Ryan]

On the logo, but they gave Rita's has, like, a beautiful. Like, they could use the ritual Rita's stuff in task for like. Like, commercials for the next 20 years.

[Alex Ross Perry]

They got into Reed. I don't understand what. Why they're not filming in Wawas.

[Sean Fennessey]

I haven't seen the show.

[Alex Ross Perry]

This is, like, one of the only. Yeah, I mean, I'll just. I'll watch it. I'll watch a Del Crow crime show. But, yeah, they got to get into a Wawa at some point. It's not enough to show up with the takeout.

[Sean Fennessey]

Alex, thank you for your time on this. Thank you for Kid Print. Thanks for hitting up your friend to expand this list.

[Chris Ryan]

I want to see it. The list?

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting collection of movies that have been devastatingly rated by mean letterboxd users, but that I think are valuable and worth everyone's time. It sounds like Alex agrees. What do you got? When are you coming back? What's coming up next for you?

[Alex Ross Perry]

I don't know. I mean, it's really not productive as a parent to just waste all of your time making passion projects that pay you nothing.

[Sean Fennessey]

Okay.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessey]

What are you going to do about that?

[Alex Ross Perry]

I, you know, chain myself to my desk and do some actual WGA insurance qualifying screenwriting for the indefinite future.

[Chris Ryan]

Do you.

[Sean Fennessey]

I heard that the Fast and the Furious might need a polish the next installment.

[Alex Ross Perry]

They're in great shape. Yeah, I think the script is. I think the script's probably diamond cut.

[Chris Ryan]

Ethan Hawke has already said that he wants to do Black Phone three and he wants the Grabber to go to Hell. I think this is. This is tailor made for Alex.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I mean, I have my. Sean knows this is a favorite of his as well. I have my Jason Goes to Hell button here.

[Sean Fennessey]

Jason Goes to Hell is atrocious.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I. I don't know when I'll get around to Black Phone too, but I would skip straight to Grabber Goes to Hell.

[Sean Fennessey]

Grabber Goes to Hell. I. I feel like. Makes more sense.

[Chris Ryan]

It does. No offense, but leave the kids in the terrestrial land and go to hell with Ethan Hawke.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Or just, you know, go. As long as Hawk is involved. Go. Like the Grabber. Election year. The Grabber. The Grabber. Anarchy.

[Chris Ryan]

That's right.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Purge, Grabber crossover. Anything's possible.

[Sean Fennessey]

Wow. Now we're talking. Okay.

[Alex Ross Perry]

You know, I think the Black Phone was a short story, like a Stephen, maybe his son's story.

[Sean Fennessey]

Yeah.

[Chris Ryan]

Joe Hill.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Yeah, I would have watched that in an omnibus.

[Sean Fennessey]

Oh, that might have actually improved the Black Phone, the original film.

[Chris Ryan]

If they should, they should have combined Black Phone 2 with Frankenstein. I just had, like, Guillermo del Toro's 20 Minute Frankenstein.

[Sean Fennessey]

I would welcome Guillermo del Toro's Stephen King adaptation. That would be exciting. All right, Alex, thank you so much.

[Alex Ross Perry]

Thanks, guys.

[Sean Fennessey]

We'll see you next time you get nominated for an Emmy and you're out in Los Angeles.

[Alex Ross Perry]

I'll bring a suitcase full of discs. And thanks for watching VHS Halloween.

[Sean Fennessey]

Thanks, buddy. Thank you to Alex Ross Perry. Thank you, of course, to CR for his contributions on this episode. Later this week on the show, we have another 25 for 25 candidate, it's number eight. I am quite certain that you've seen this movie. Thanks to Jack Sanders, our producer on this episode. And we will see you later this week.