The 10 Best Horror Movies of the Year … So Far. Plus: The New Scary Movie Royalty, and ‘Obsession,’ With Curry Barker!

24:23Sean Fennessey:Yeah, I mean, he was the EP and, you know, I'm sure had plenty to say about The Conjuring Last Rites, which was like a$500 million movie last year. So in terms of just like pure industry clout and power, he's incredible. But when he deigns to direct a horror movie, they're usually really good. That's what I'm saying. So, yeah, I look, I don't know. I guess there's been a long time rumor that he's making a creature from the Black Lagoon movie. I don't know if that's actually going to happen. I hope it does. Be interested to see. But yeah, he's got his name on a bunch of movies. There's a new Insidious movie this year.

24:56Sean Fennessey:Other Mommy comes from Atomic Monster and Plumhouse. The Revenge of La Llorona. Like there's a whole bunch of movies. Did you ever hear anything about what happened to Soulmate? Which was supposed to be the spinoff of Megan. But after Megan 2.0 flailed at the box office, they basically shut it down. Were they shooting it? I think it's done. Oh, wow. We saw a preview of it at CinemaCon in 2025. And it was supposed to come out in January of this year. So I saw like two minutes of footage. How did it iterate on Megan? Well, it was very similar to the film Companion. Oh. where it was about a robot companion girl, but it had an even more, I would say, violent bent, and it seemed less comic than companion was.

25:41Sean Fennessey:But that movie is now off the schedule. I'm waiting for the announcement that it's just been sold to Netflix or something, but I'm quite curious. Yeah, I had a couple of other people here. Watkins, we mentioned James Watkins, who did some really decent B-movies leading up to the Speak No Evil remake but Eden Lake and Black Coat's Daughter and then is directing Clayface and it seems like they let him make a horror movie so I'm excited about that. I think he's a really good not Black Coat's Daughter the woman in black Black Coat's Daughter was Oz. Oh sorry yeah. I think he's a really good craftsperson.

26:21Sean Fennessey:You've got Julia Ducarno here should also mention Coralie Farge the twin French Baddies. Queens. Body horror baddies. Yeah. I was not as high on Alpha. I don't know if you saw Julia Ducarno's new film. Which is not so much horror as it is. It's kind of a body psychosis drama that is also a parable about AIDS. Okay. Which, you know, you don't see a lot of stories about AIDS in the 2020s. And there was something interesting about trying to explore that. But the movie was not nearly as successful. It has like a very dour tone. and didn't have like the mania that I think was so exciting about Raw and Titan.

27:02Sean Fennessey:But I really look forward to seeing what she does next. Brandon Cronenberg? He's got a space horror movie that he's apparently working on called Dragons. No kidding. Which is about like alien DNA becoming like a drug of like a recreational drug for people and some people are out hunting aliens in space to like keep snorting that stuff. which is a good idea for a movie honestly just like horror movies are going to live forever there's so much stuff out there what if you smoked space dragons that'd be fucking good right why has anybody done that yet I do think it's notable that Brandon and Kreger are doing space horror and my my event horizon homies are sticking their head up above the parapet with no eyes this conversation is not about Mortal Kombat but But James Wan is a producer on the Mortal Kombat movies.

28:00Sean Fennessey:And Paul W. Sanderson directed the original Mortal Kombat film. And Mortal Kombat is kind of loosely related to horror. I bring up Paul W. Sanderson because of Event Horizon. Well, this is the funny thing. So, like, you know, when we were talking about Star Wars the other day, I was very conscious of the fact that we're obviously speaking from a certain, like, generational, like, spot. Like we're like, okay, it's the first three, then the prequels, like I had a harder time with than you did because you're a little bit younger. And I think that those were like a big deal. And now you're introducing all these, these movies to your, to your child.

28:36But like, I wonder whether we're going to feel a similar generational shift in what is quote unquote cool and what is being influenced or referenced in horror. so when we were doing alien predator stuff when badlands came out uh if you go online there's a lot of alien versus predator defenders i mean they may be uh in insane asylums but they are out there like they may have access to the internet logged into a public library console but it's funny how

29:07Sean Fennessey:like different so that actually explains the existence of cr heads you just you just figured it out well done we're in insane insolence yeah they've logged on in an internet cafe the only site they have access to is reddit yeah they have an interpol red alert on them uh no i wonder what horror movies and what like micro genres of horror like space horror will become a little bit more in vogue as as curry barker and kane parsons become like the kind of alphas of the genre, you know what I mean? I mean, what was the wave in the 2000s? I mean, it's notable to me. Bro, it's Marcus Nispelcore. It's like - Yeah, well, I mean, one thing that I think is helpful here is, we'll talk about Undertone shortly, but Ian Tuison, who directed Undertone, was hired to direct the reboot of the Paranormal Activity franchise.

29:58Sean Fennessey:And that is an era of movies, not just found footage, but that kind of run-and-gun, low-budget style that, you know, Jason Blum, I think, really kind of built his business on. that all the people who saw those movies are all 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, thinking about their first horror features. And I'm sure they're feeling the influence of those movies, the same way that we felt the influence of Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street. Sure, Pulser Guys. Yeah. What other names do you want to mention? I would just mention for people who are looking further down the rung, like there's a family of people in the Catskills, the Addams family, I guess, to not put too fine a point on it, who make a bunch of like indie, like kind of almost Duplass style.

30:46Like it's just us making it, like me and my family members and our friends making these movies. And there's a couple of really cool titles, Hellbender and Where the Devil Roams. So you can look around for those. Did you watch The Mother of Flies yet? That's their new film. No, it's good.

31:00Sean Fennessey:Very disgusting. Disgusting? Yes, very effective. Okay. It's amazing how extreme this family, mother, daughter, and father, are willing to go in their movies. I would recommend it. It's on Shudder right now. And another person who I think is up and coming that's worth mentioning, Brandon Christensen, has two movies that technically came out in 2025, although I consider Bodycam more of a 26 movie. And the other one was Night of the Reaper. He's really good. He's pretty prolific. Superhost came out in like 2021, but I could see him graduating to an even bigger budget project soon. Yeah, Bodycam was interesting.

31:40Sean Fennessey:It was only 75 minutes and it felt like it was stretched a little bit longer. It was basically like a really good episode of Tales from the Crypt or something. You know what? Yes. I wanted to say Tales from the Crypt, which is also extremely formative, I assume for you and definitely for me, is now available on Shudder, the first season of that show, which aired on HBO when we were growing up, which I watched religiously. and lied to my parents and said I wasn't watching it. It's basically our Twilight Zone. Yes, exactly. And it was the closest we got, and it was kind of a horror spin on Twilight Zone, inspired by EC Comics and spooky stuff produced by Robert Zemeckis.

32:14Sean Fennessey:And it's just a blast. The show's a really fun time. You can feel the... One thing I'll say about a lot of the YouTube creators is you can sometimes feel the uncertainty about, like, runtime and about like how much story do I have here and where do I want to take it? I wouldn't necessarily say that about Obsession, but I could see a 50-minute version of Obsession. Yeah. If there's a flaw to Obsession, and to me there are not many. I really, really liked it. It is a touch long and there is something really interesting about these young filmmakers who are used to working in brief expanding. And you mentioned Milk and Cereal was an hour.

32:56Sean Fennessey:An hour and a minute. Yeah, it's like one-on-one. and this movie is more of a movie movie right it's like i feel like it's like 100 minutes 105 minutes yeah but there is we'll talk about obsession in a second but there is a very clear point where i'm like there needs to be like a a third thing happening in this movie like um instead of just like this three-hander or four-hander that it basically is uh other than that i think that's pretty much it for my like power rankings i mean i want to see a lee janiak movie she hasn't done something since the Fear Street trilogy and then she executive produced Fear Street Prom Night.

33:31But I'm sure we're missing people. I mean, you know, maybe one of these days we should do a horror mailbag, you know, or maybe we could do that with Halloween and if people have recommendations or people that they love.

33:43Sean Fennessey:Sierra, that's a great idea. A horror mailbag in October? I love it. Especially if we don't get a lot of big releases in October. Yeah, you know, I'm just going to look at my October really quickly. just consult my board here well Digger yeah I mean it could have elements of horror if it turns out to be bad it will be horrifying Other Mommy is a big one obviously and Clayface and I think those are the only two wide release horror movies that are on the calendar for October which is quite strange Resident Evil of course comes out in late September okay let's talk about some movies a bunch of stuff has come out we've talked about some of it here on the show over the last few months but not everything.

34:21Sean Fennessey:Obsession is the headliner. I'm so interested to see if this movie takes off because it seems like anybody who's gotten a chance to see it has really clicked with it. As I said, it's from Curry Barker and directed. It stars Michael Johnston, Indy Navarette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless. A little cameo from Andy Richter. Yeah, fun cameo. The story is as follows. After breaking the mysterious quote, one wish willow to win his crush's heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark and sinister price. What do you think?

34:55Really, really effective. How much spoilery stuff do you want to do here?

35:00Sean Fennessey:Let's try to give some, but not too much. There's a lot in the trailer. Okay. If you haven't seen the trailer for this film. But it is... It goes to much deeper extremes in terms of its style than I expected. And I was impressed with its willingness to be very, very dark. I think I was expecting a little bit more comedy in this movie. and it's not very funny. It creates like a real sense of discomfort. It has a little bit of that barbarian feeling of not just in terms of how the story wrongfoots you a little bit, but more specifically like, this is so nuts that I'm laughing very hard. Yeah. But I might've been the only person in the theater doing that.

35:39I think that there were a couple of chuckles. I mean, first and foremost, I'll just say Indy Navarrete kind of like, I don't think she makes the movie, but she is clearly the person who jumps out, not as a final girl, although kind of. She's just responsible for essentially the terror of the movie and the heart of the movie, which is rare in a horror movie that the sort of villain, quote unquote, is also the tragic hero. So her performance, you know, like we've had a couple of really great performances by actresses over the last couple of years. I was thinking about Naomi Scott in Smile 2. but she's incredibly physical like the face acting the terror in her eyes as she is doing a lot of these scenes while she is also all of her body is compliant her eyes are like this is terrible it's just like a really fantastic performance I thought

36:33Sean Fennessey:she's really amazing I think Barker does a couple of really smart things with the performance first of all in the first 20 minutes of the movie she's kind of your classic manic pixie dream girl where she's like young guy has a best friend who's a hot girl and they've got great chemistry but she probably views him as in the friend zone and you know she's like she can hang and she can drink and she's a good time and they work together and there's something very common relatable cliche about the way that the movie sets up and Navarrete's performance through that stuff just feels very in line with what you've come to expect you know who she reminded me of is Mia Sara in Ferris Bueller's Day Off great and then as soon as the One Wish Willow snaps and the movie goes into high gear.

37:19Sean Fennessey:The way that Barker shoots her is fascinating. This is going to seem like a bit of a stretch, but I just watched this morning. Tony Zhu and Taylor Ramos, who do every frame of painting, put up a new video analyzing Yasujiro Ozu's use of color in movies. Hang with me for a second here. And Tony in the video talks about how, how as Ozu moved from black and white to color, it took him a little while to figure out how to choose the tone of the colors that he was using. And he shifts to using a different cinematographer after a couple of color features. And the use of shadow becomes really, really important to him, even more so than when he's making black and white films.

38:03Sean Fennessey:And in several of those films, those Ozu films, you can see the characters' faces covered in shadow. So you can see maybe their eyes, but barely even that. And Barker does this over and over again with Navarrete, who is a very pretty young girl who has like a real, like a brightness to her. Yes. And when you, as soon as you cloud that and the movie keeps clouding it, it keeps hiding her. And when it hides her, it makes her very, very scary. There's a couple of moments in the movie where you feel like anything can happen, that she could do anything violent and intense and crazy because there's a couple of times where she does something either in the frame or out of the frame and we don't see it and we return to a home where she's done something.

38:39Sean Fennessey:And there's something very gross about a lot of the things that she's doing. like she has no control over her orifices over her bodily function yeah and she's trapped yeah she is trapped inside of her own body and is not in control of her own movements and yeah and the actress is really really game for doing all this disgusting behavior in a way that you just don't often see a figure like that in a movie like this and so I was really really impressed by her and impressed by the energy that the movie has because she's willing to put herself in those situations and then the other thing is just like it's just a smart movie about a certain kind of in-celly guy.

39:12Sean Fennessey:You know, a certain kind of guy who's like, I deserve to have love with a hot girl and I'll do what I have to do to make it so. Yes. And then as soon as you do that, you realize like, at what cost. I liked the fact that this movie was relatively free of explanation and or origin story and or original wound for any of the characters. So these are essentially like four 20-somethings working in a music store. It seems like maybe not you know like far a little further away from like portland but like somewhere like they're they're just like banging around this town where the highlight of their week is going to a trivia night at a bar and going to karaoke afterwards when they're wasted and they all have designs on getting out of town but that's really it as far as their like character biographies and i thought even in the places where i was i think what that allows you to do is watch this movie and read it from a bunch of different angles so you could see it as a um rebuke of the incels kind of film you could see it as a guy who um makes an impulsive decision and now has to deal with the consequences and you could also see it as a little bit of a there is a thread in there that if you wanted to pull at it is like the creepy pasta deep dive like what is this trinket that he breaks and what are the rules of it and who made it and who else has experienced disaster from breaking the same thing.

40:44Sean Fennessey:The other thing that it does that is really smart that I think modernizes it as a monkey's paw story is everything in the world is very Gen Z laconic. When he calls the helpline to figure out what is going on with the one which will up. It's a great moment. The guy who picks up the phone and has the conversation with him is different than you would have found in a super intense James Wan movie. And to me, it felt like that was a shift. Like there was something kind of changing about the genre, watching someone tell one of these stories. And even, you know, I haven't even talked to Curry yet, but just knowing that he got inspired by watching an episode of The Simpsons where their monkey's paw was featured and not reading the 1902 short story is the way that the culture bleeds out.

41:30Sean Fennessey:Where I was like, what is the next level of, what's the next wave of influence that's going to hit people. And it's not going to be, I was watching black and white Bela Lugosi movies or I was watching Argento movies. It's going to be, I watched an episode of The Simpsons that referenced this thing. That moment that you're talking about where he calls the customer service line for the Willow trinket is both the funniest and the scariest moment in the movie because it actually gives you a little bit of a peek into what happens to the Indian Averick character. And it's terrifying. But you're like, it's just enough.

42:13And I wonder whether or not the previous budgetary restrictions that Barker's worked under, like the$800 milk and cereal kind of world, where he's like, I can't now go to a call center in hell wherever this guy is working from. I can't do like a road movie where this guy's trying to find the answers. Yes. And so you kind of come up with these creative solutions. To your point earlier about like the Sundance crime wave from the 90s when we were growing up. That's it, man. Man, this is real invention to do that stuff.

42:43Sean Fennessey:It's laws of gravity. It's amongst friends. It's Reservoir Dogs. It's like we got five locations. We got five actors. Make the absolute most out of it. And it can help movies like this a lot. It really can because it pulls you down to make it feel more grounded, even though the premise is so fantastical and magical. I think this movie is really cool. And I'm really, I don't know what I was expecting when I was seeing it. And expectations play such a big part for me personally with horror movies. And if I hear something's going to be hot, I tend to get disappointed. And if I hear something is not that great, I tend to overrate it a little bit in my mind.

43:15Sean Fennessey:But this was one where it was just right. I felt like I heard just enough about it. I saw one trailer and I went in being blown away by a performance and really excited about where a director is going next. And Barker, you know, is taking on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like this is pretty crazy. It's also like, I want to talk about that, but he's really good at durational horror. So like basically scenes will go on for a bit longer than you would expect them to. A lot of the script or the dialogue is people repeating phrases back and forth to one another with increasing levels of desperation or terror.

43:50And that's so, that's so YouTube social media.

43:52Sean Fennessey:That's so like Tik TOK gag, like a lot of that stuff. If you look at, is it, that's a bad idea. Yeah. is the name of his kind of comedy viral video YouTube channel with Cooper. A lot of the gags are oriented around that kind of repeating style. But that repeating style is David Mamet. That repeating style is Preston Sturgis. Like it's a skill. It's a tool to use. But it's like, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? But then you get into like the third minute of the conversation and you're like, this is now just becoming these two people chanting at each other as they're losing their minds.

44:23I actually like, I really enjoyed it. I have no idea what he is going to do with Leatherface. And it's interesting because one person we didn't mention as a real person to watch is JT Molnar, who did Strange Darling and then wrote The Long Walk and has also got a, I don't know if it's competing or complimentary TV project on Texas Chainsaw with Glenn Powell. So I don't know if both things will come to fruition or if we're going to get to Texas Chainsaw. IP things soon, but Curry doing it is, is interesting because there's a couple of set pieces in Obsession, maybe like three, you know, like action-y scenes.

45:07I associate Leatherface with a lot of running and a lot of chasing. Yes. So it'll be a little bit of a different flavor from him.

45:15Sean Fennessey:Before he does Texas Chancellor Massacre though, he has another movie coming out next year from Focus called Anything But Ghosts. And the thing that distinguishes that movie, which is about two paranormal investigators, who find actual ghosts, is he's starring in it. Yeah. And he's the star of all of his YouTube films, including Milk and Cereal. And he's not the star of Obsession, which is interesting. And you noted this after you saw it. It was one of the first things that popped in my head when I saw Obsession. I think it would give the movie a different flavor. Yes. And I don't know if it would have been better or worse.

45:44It would have been just different. And Curry has like a kind of desperation and perhaps, forgive me for saying, like there is a malevolence to his performances. He can be a little unnerving. And I think it would be different to watch him interacting with the woman rather than this guy who's like kind of like this basically like Garden State type dude. Yeah. Who's just like, yeah. Michael Johnson, real beta. I'm wearing like a sweater and like, yeah, right.

46:10Sean Fennessey:Yeah, I agree. The new movie, Anything But Ghosts, also features Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard. So it'll be interesting. Okay, let's talk about Hocum because I feel like it's actually on the other end of the spectrum, which feels like it is completely informed and influenced by the classics. It's not as influenced by the sense of YouTube change. And so when I was thinking about this episode specifically and this, you know, the diaspora and the ways in which they part to Shudder and to YouTube, Damian McCarthy is like the classical Shudder filmmaker. Irish director, a real formalist. Squeezing everything he can out of atmosphere.

46:47Yes. of like really, really, really dialed in on set design, production design, eerie feelings, back of the frame thing moving in the shadows kind of stuff, but very, very precise and patient and sometimes too patient with his scares.

47:06Sean Fennessey:I agree. I have liked his movies and not loved them and that is also how I feel about Hocum. His two previous movies, Caveat and Oddity, are definitely worth checking out. Oddity has one of the great scares. of whatever year that was 2024 yeah um always very accomplished also visually very precise symmetrical really has an incredible sense of the frame yeah creating like putting an image in front of you that you can't get out of your mind that is a skill like i really acknowledge it i often feel like his stories are just a little bit samey and a little bit that there's like an ancient power that may or may not be spooking someone but actually it's human fallacy yeah The finality of the characters is actually scarier than the whatever is waiting in the basement.

47:52It's worth noting that in Hocum, Adam Scott is the star. He plays a dickhead author. I thought of like George R. Martin type stuff.

48:00Sean Fennessey:Think of fantasy style writer. Yeah. And it's a cool performance from him because he has not played an asshole in a really... He's a great asshole actor. Yeah. I mean, shout out to Eastbound and Down. Totally. The gold card versus black card. Yeah, it's me, your dad. Yeah. I'm your fucking dad. This gets you Jonah's brother tickets.

48:23Yeah, it was a refreshing turn from him. I felt like perhaps what I didn't need from Hokum is the thing that Obsession wonderfully lacks, which is original wound trauma story of what this guy is trying to correct in his life. Yes. And then an additional framing device, which I thought was like cool in a like, Like, oh, I see how this thing from earlier in the movie is now wound up in this is him writing the end of his trilogy that he's writing. And it's basically a fantasy adventure sequence that opens and closes the film.

48:59Sean Fennessey:Yeah, so it's about this writer who goes to this Irish hotel, which is very clearly a haunted hotel because it's a place of great importance to his family and he's spreading the ashes of his parents. So he is kind of haunted by his past and what happened when he was a young boy with his parents, but also seems to have found himself entrenched in some sort of scary plot inside of this hotel. The design of the hotel, as you said, the production design is really, really cool. He gets these really good performances out of an array of Irish actors, including Peter Coonan and David Wilmot. And it's one of those things where I kept waiting.

49:36Sean Fennessey:you mentioned the third missing piece in Obsession, the sort of like the third act elevation. This movie has like the right structure, but it never feels like it goes to the next level. Yeah. You know what I mean? That's a really good way of putting it. I mean, in some ways, I feel almost like tortured by this because in Obsession, there was a part of me that wanted there to be more lore. And then Hocum is exactly that, where it's like, there's a lady in the basement. and I don't know why I did Robert Shaw from Jaws there. And everything is explained to you in Hokum. The only ambiguity comes with the idea that basically all of it could have been a psilocybin trip, but obviously not.

50:19Sean Fennessey:I think if it had, you know, you mentioned here that there is a psychedelic quality to it, that it is a folk horror riff in a way and that there's some wicker man going on in here. I think it probably, for me, it might have been more appealing. I don't know if general audiences would have found it is appealing if we had kind of like upended our created more doubt about what had transpired i i felt like it was a little too tidy by the conclusion of it um but i did really enjoy adam scott and i do want folks like damian mccarthy to get to make movies that come out in movie theaters when i was watching it i was like this is a pretty good story like i like the whodunit aspects of it as much as i liked the horror aspects of it and in fact i thought the whodunit was maybe even better realized than the horror stuff, you know?

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51:38Sean Fennessey:All right, Sierra, let me tell you about a few that I've seen in the last few months or so. I already mentioned Lee Cronin's The Mummy, which I wrote about in the newsletter a couple weeks ago, which I think is... Lee Cronin's projections? And Lee Cronin's projections, yeah. He's taking it over, thankfully. It's been only three weeks, and I need some help. And I think it was not a bad horror film, but not a good mummy movie. He did the previous Evil Dead. He did, which I really liked. That was Rise. Evil Dead Rise, which was that sort of all-in-one apartment, kind of zombified family movie. And it's the same energy.

52:16Sean Fennessey:It's incredibly gross. It feels very high stakes, high tension. He gets a lot out of a little. Mm-hmm. It felt a little bit like it was made in the 80s in terms of the way that it portrayed sort of like the Egyptian culture and its relationship to Western culture. I was kind of surprised. And I haven't really seen that too much in the criticism. And that can be a little bit of a hackney criticism. I get it. But I was like, how many times can we just do like Egyptian family puts the zap on a Western family and then they go home and they got to deal with this curse. Yeah. All right. It's a girl who disappeared.

52:47And then they're like, we found your daughter. She's a mummy. And they're like, great. Bring her back. That's it. That's the movie. Okay. And they bring her back. And guess what? She's a mummy.

52:54Sean Fennessey:she's a mummy. Bad shit. Bad shit's going to happen. And in that way, it really is ultimately more of an exorcist movie because she is a demonically possessed little girl who is saying disgusting things and creating a vomitorium in her grandmother's home and a lot of nasty stuff happens. I wanted to like it more. The biggest sin is it's two hours and 17 minutes long, which is just completely unnecessary. It's just unforgivable. But Cronin is talented. You can tell he's got a real knack for super disgusting stuff happening in movies like that, which I enjoy. And he is not doing Evil Dead Rise. Evil Dead Rise is Sebastian Vanacek, who did the French spider horror movie Infested, which is pretty sick.

53:36Not a fan of the experience, but I thought the movie was pretty good. He has some juice,

53:41Sean Fennessey:is what I'll say. And what I saw at CinemaCon of Evil Dead Burn was exciting. The trailer is awesome. When does that come out? Like this summer? July 24th. I'll see you there. the birthday movie that's how we'll celebrate you and I sharing old fashions watching demons kill people doing fucking bash brothers almost but let me tell you a little bit about Exit 8 yeah which I think is yet another film from Neon Neon released Hocum they're releasing the Oz Perkins movie later this year Exit 8 is I think a pickup for them it's a Japanese movie by Genki Kawamura and it is an adaptation of a video game and it is evidently an adaptation of a video game when you watch the movie.

54:24Sean Fennessey:It's about a man who has just gotten off the subway and he's gotten some personal news. His wife is pregnant and he receives this news and he starts walking through the subway and he finds that he's not able to escape. And he also keeps experiencing these recurring images. He keeps walking past the same businessman over and over again. This happened to me on Mushrooms in 1995 in Philadelphia. Well, it is a feeling in the first act of the movie of just being lost somewhere. Somewhere anonymous, an anonymous public place that feels labyrinthine and you can't get out. We were just at the opening of the Geffen Galleries at LACMA on Sunday.

55:01Sean Fennessey:I don't know if you're aware of this new extension of LACMA, which is really a beautiful new museum space. I am aware, yeah. But it is extremely large and confusing inside. Very easy to lose a five-year-old. It's a brutalist design, right? It is very brutalist design and is very kind of shadowed and darkened. And so the way that you're observing the art is maybe the more the way that it was created when in the 1500s or 1800s. Really cool museum, but it kind of reminded me of the experience of watching X-8. Having a young child also brings getting lost into a new light. Museums are complicated.

55:32Sean Fennessey:Don't touch that. It's something that comes up a lot. You know, you don't want to touch the fourth century sculpture. But this movie creates that similar vibe of just kind of being trapped somewhere that is cavernous and large and repeating. And the movie is mostly successful, but it does have me thinking about the other strain of the future of these kinds of movies because, like, Craig is making a video game horror movie. Yeah. This is a video game horror movie. It was interesting to see people's response to the Resident Evil trailer. did you get into that with Amanda? did you guys talk about that at all?

56:10I haven't spoken about it, no because I saw plenty of people responding to you're not paying enough deference to the mythology and lore of Resident Evil which is something I actually am pretty a fan of in the game it's kind of an interesting running storyline but I thought Kreger's maybe not response to the response but statement about like the movie is supposed to like feel like how I feel when I play the video game not like what the video game is yes and you know obviously taking liberties with people's beloved video games is a complicated thing in in the 21st century but I wonder whether or not directors will start to indulge and they I think they already have in a lot of ways indulge in that first person, what does it feel like to play these iconic games rather than like, I'm very deferential towards how like the cut scenes in, uh, God, I'm just forgetting the name of the zombie show that's on HBO.

57:17Last of us. Um, and you know, I know Noah Hawley's doing far cry. I think, you know, there's, there's a bunch of these coming out.

57:23Sean Fennessey:It's a really, really good question. I think it's all about whether or not the filmmaker who's in charge of the movie has a vision or not. And a lot of the time a vision can work in opposition to what fans of a game want from a movie. Resident Evil, there have already been eight movies. To me, that should be open terrain. Reinvent it. Try something new. The Legend of Zelda, there have been zero movies. If the Legend of Zelda film that is coming out next year doesn't feel like playing The Legend of Zelda in some way. If it's like, Link isn't in this, by the way. That's going to be a huge disappointment to a lot of people and probably is a mistake.

57:56Sean Fennessey:And I don't in the case of Mortal Kombat was interesting. The first Mortal Kombat movie, one of my gripes with it is I was like, this doesn't feel like playing Mortal Kombat at all. Mortal Kombat is not a movie with a fascinating external and internal world. It's a movie about a fighting tournament. It should be all fighting. The first one is all about getting to the tournament. And it's like Scorpion's origin story. I'm like, that's not, no. I want Scorpion and Sub-Zero to be ripping each other's heads off. And the new film is more what the game is. The trailer for the Street Fighter movie is the same thing.

58:29Sean Fennessey:In the Street Fighter trailer, I'm like, fucking yeah. 50 Cent is Balrog. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. Is Centineo in the Street Fighter movie? He is. Yeah. He's playing Ken. Yeah. Which is great. I'm very excited about that. So much stunt casting in that movie, but I'm into it. Cody Rhodes is playing Guile. Yeah. So, I think the same is true for horror stuff where if you're able to reinvent, I haven't played the game Exit 8, so I can't pretend to be an expert on what it's like to play it, but experiencing the movie feels like getting stuck in an RPG. Yeah. Where you're like, oh shit, I don't, I thought I was already here.

59:01Sean Fennessey:Like I already saw this. I already experienced this. I already inquired with this wizened old man who's holding a staff that's supposed to tell me where to go. Even that experience of playing Zelda in the 1980s. That's the thing is it's like, I remember playing Perfect Dark. It wasn't that Perfect Dark is such like a cool story. This is like basically like an espionage action first-person shooter that you could play on N64. It was the fact that you would black out and it'd be like seven hours later. You know what I mean? Right. And when I was in my early 20s and me and my boys would just stay up until like three in the morning playing.

59:37Who were among those boys? It was Greenwald. Yeah. Sean Howe. Yeah, sure. A legend. Sean had a triangular apartment on Flatbush Avenue before Barclays was there above a taco place. And we would listen to Wu-Tang Clan and play Perfect Dark. It sounds like a wonderful night. Yeah.

59:55Sean Fennessey:I wish I could go there right now being 24. I would recommend, I think you would enjoy it. I think it runs into a similar problem that so much modern horror does, which is like, let's explain the emotional arc of this character with trauma. But for the first 75 minutes, I felt like I was in somebody's extremely brutal nightmare that got increasingly worse over time, blood dripping from the ceilings. there's one moment where there's a giant wall of lockers and he hears the sound of a screaming baby and it turns out that there are many many babies in those lockers that that that that one that one got me that one got me really do you find that uh there's you're scared of different stuff now yeah it's i don't mean it's such a cliche with the kid stuff yeah the kid stuff is bad but you know what in the mummy i wasn't like oh my god don't take that eight-year-old girl because i was like we're in a movie called the mummy so with exit eight um it's different because you don't it just seems like an ordinary man riding the subway on his way to work and then terrible things start happening to him so it's about i think it's about the presentation what about you i uh i don't know i i haven't been like fucked up scared in a while since like speak no evil but i I found that Speak No Evil spoke to a kind of middle-aged malaise and anxiety about money and travel and friendship.

1:01:26And the way that it exploited a lot of the stuff that I think is probably the way our lives are now is a little bit more on the nose than camp counselors. Yeah.

1:01:39Sean Fennessey:Promiscuous camp counselors. I didn't think that weapons had many scares, classical scares. I think it had about three real scares. And I really liked those scares. But its idea of people, of parents being way too preoccupied with their own bullshit and letting something like this happen in a community, which is really outsized. And if you took a very little approach to understanding the movie, you might be like, this is unrealistic. But this does happen where people, you know, grown people, especially people I find that are in my position where you waited a long time to have kids and you got really used to your own freedom.

1:02:14Sean Fennessey:Sure. And then you're in your late 30s and you're like, yeah, let's have kids. But I only know how to be myself at 38 instead of myself at 28 when you're confronted by new responsibility and you have to change your life. But when you get really ingrained in your behaviors, that terrible things can happen if you don't keep your eye on the ball. Yeah. I thought that was such a novel idea, but it didn't haunt me the way that watching The Exorcist at 14 haunted me where I was like, is this really happening? Is the devil real? Because the movie made you feel like that. Yeah, I mean, it's the question of like, what's scarier or what's the scary thing about the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

1:02:47Is it Leatherface? It is. Or is it being with your friends somewhere where you're not supposed to be where you've never been before and watching the friendships dissolve and break down and get destroyed in that moment? And like, I think it's the, it's when you have two things working, that's when the movie works. It's like, that's why, like, in some ways the weapons gimmick with Alden Ehrenreich getting stabbed by Austin Abrams's needle is like the scariest thing that happens in the movie. Because, you know, it's like, it's a very real, real piece of horror. I'm excited for Resident Evil, though.

1:03:25I am, I'm, I'm pretty pumped.

1:03:27Sean Fennessey:I am as well. What are we going to do? How are we going to celebrate? When does that come out? September? September 18th. I don't know. I mean like we'll probably pod about back rooms right I sure hope so yeah and then we'll I mean I definitely want to pod about about Resident Evil should we do any Resident Evil like like Twitch stream stuff should we play No, I've been promising. I have two on my PS4. I downloaded it. You still have your PS4? Yeah. You want to get a 4K camera in your house? Do I want to get a 4K camera in my house? Yeah, we'll shoot an episode. Me and you playing. Just shooting the breeze.

1:04:04Sean Fennessey:Jack, what do you think? We should do this in the movie theater. No, we should do it in somebody's fucking living room. You want to do it in your living room? No, you should play Cuban Links. Okay, here's what we'll do. We'll have Bill buy a house. Bill will buy us a house. You're going to smoke a menthol cigarette. Yep. I'll smoke. I'll work some heaters. We'll take it back. We'll take it back to 2002. Yeah. And we'll do it the way that we used to do it. We're going to get a case of PBR. No, we'll do Edward Fortyhands first. And then we'll play Resident Evil for six hours. And we'll listen to the entire Wu-Tang Clan discography.

1:04:34Sean Fennessey:And we'll smoke a fat blunt right in the middle of it. After the completion of the first game. No, we'll play a roulette where one of the blunts are dusted. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Spring is here, so celebrate it with fresh, juicy, seasonal produce and some very tasty limited time flavors. New Whole Foods Market Peach Apricot Rose Italian Soda. Perfect for a picnic or brunch, as is their trending mango yuzu chantilly cake. But if you're on the go, new 365 strawberry pretzels make a great sweet snack. That sounds delicious. Get savings with yellow sales signs storewide and everyday low prices on 365 brand items.

1:05:18Enjoy the fresh flavors of spring. Save at Whole Foods Market. This episode is brought to you by Paramount+. Beth and Rip are back in a new series, Dutton Ranch. Kelly Riley and Cole Hauser returned, and this time they're taking on Texas. As Beth and Rip build a future together, peace will have to wait as they face corruption, danger in a ruthless rival ranch willing to protect its secrets at all costs. Legacy is a beautiful thing, but only if it survives. Dunton Ranch starring Cole Hauser, Kelly Riley, Annette Bening, and Ed Harris now streaming on Paramount+.

1:05:54Sean Fennessey:Let me tell you about a couple more movies. Have you considered centering women in horror? Have you thought about this? Yeah. I advocated for several female directors and you blanked me. That's not true. You said take them straight to the vomitorium. I saw two movies this week, both of which I really liked and I really want to strongly recommend to people. One is called Maruyama, which is directed by Toa Stafford, which is about a young Maori woman who travels to Victorian England in 1860 to go look for her sister. and she's gotten a letter from a kindly man who knows her sister and says, you have to come and visit her.

1:06:39Sean Fennessey:And she travels. And because it's 1859, it takes 90 days to get there from New Zealand. And she shows up and shit is not so sweet. Is this guy not so kindly? No. Well, the guy who wrote her the letter is not there. And there's another fellow who owns the house. And it turns out the guy who wrote her the letter worked for the guy who owns the house. and this fellow who owns the house, no bueno. He's up to no good. And he is really interested in this young woman's culture. The actress's name is Ariana Osborne and he speaks Maori and he understands the history and some of the cultural traditions, but also has a very nefarious, it's very clear in the first 20 minutes where you're like, this isn't gonna be okay.

1:07:23Sean Fennessey:But Osborne's performance is amazing. the movie has extraordinary style for such a small budget it's a real chamber piece that takes place primarily in this house lots of shadow most sequences taking place at night but beautifully lit that sort of like darkened blue light that you get in nighttime scenarios I think this is XYZ the company that you mentioned earlier who is putting this out and I I had not heard of Toa Stafford and was really really impressed by this movie awesome let's check it out the other one is sort of sort of horror sort of just like pure revenge exploitation thriller with a little bit of a social bent.

1:08:00Sean Fennessey:It's called Is God It Is. It's based on the Obie winning play by a woman named Alicia Harris. Have you seen the trailer for this movie? I haven't. Okay, it comes out today, May 15th, in movie theaters. It's from Amazon, which is so fascinating that they put their money behind it. Streeting or are they putting it in theaters? They're putting it in theaters. I don't know how many theaters. It stars two young actresses, Carrie Young and Mallory Johnson, as twin sisters from the Deep South who as young kids, along with their mother, were burned alive by their father. All three of them survived, but they are left with brutal scars.

1:08:34Sean Fennessey:And these two sisters have this kind of psychic connection where they are finishing each other's sentences and are always referring to each other as twin. And the dialogue that Harris writes and the tone and the pacing, like the speed that she writes the dialogue reminds me a lot similarly of some of those 90s movies that we're talking about where sort of like fast-talking characters who are really in sync with each other, actors who clearly had a lot of time to figure out their tone. And then the twin sisters are summoned to see their mother, who they call God, and she tells them on her deathbed, you must find your father who did this to you and track him down.

1:09:10Sean Fennessey:And their father's played by Sterling K. Brown. Oh, shit. The mother's played by Vivica A. Fox. And it becomes a kind of Kill Bill Revenge road movie where they go find different pieces of the puzzle. Dude, it's fucking good. Extremely violent. very much like from a, it's a very singular voice. Like even though the movie is inspired by a lot of 70s stuff and 90s stuff that you and I both really like, clearly only this writer could have written this movie this way. And for a first time feature, I was pretty darn impressed. Yeah. I can't, I can't wait to check that out. And it has like some violence and some gore that I think is very much in keeping with a lot of the movies that we're talking about here.

1:09:46Sean Fennessey:And also this idea of like, what is beauty? You know, like what is desire? Especially when, you know, one of the actresses faces, I think it's Mallory Johnson's face is really, really severely scarred for the entire film. So I encourage people to check that one out. Okay. So you watched Undertone. I watched Undertone. I watched Dolly, which is another one you got here. Let's talk about Dolly and Undertone. Okay. Two sides of the same coin. One movie that is extremely violent, shows everything, makes you sit in the agony and the pain. That's Dolly, which comes from Rod Blackhurst. And then Undertone, which shows nothing, gives you nothing, is largely without incident, but does have atmosphere.

1:10:31Yeah, and also I would say Undertone comes from the sensibility that we were discussing earlier with some of the YouTube deep dive, wait, there's more podcasting style of horror, where this one, we can talk about whichever one you want first.

1:10:48Sean Fennessey:Well, I mean, they're both interesting to me in that they both don't totally work. but they both have things to recommend about them. Let's talk about Undertone. Okay. I saw Undertone, I think, the right way. And it was the same way that I saw Skin and Meringk years ago. Just knowing nothing. Knowing nothing at home on a laptop. Okay. And a link got passed to me because it had been making the rounds at the horror festivals. And a film like that scene with AirPods in, in a darkened room, which is exactly how I watched Skin and Meringk some years ago. And I was like, this is pretty effective. You know, it's kind of dumb.

1:11:20Sean Fennessey:like I wish more happened but that sense of dread that the movie is trying to stoke I think actually works better independent like I think there's lots of different ways to watch this stuff I don't think that only in a movie theater with a bunch of other people in fact sometimes those situations can be ruined if people aren't taking the movie in the right spirit you know but even Undertone if there were a lot of people in the room like screaming and throwing their popcorn everywhere like when something was scary I actually don't know that it was that exact kind there's a different kind of scare that the movie is in pursuit of that is intimate and odd.

1:11:54Sean Fennessey:Whereas Dolly is a little bit more of a ripper. It reminded me a little bit more of an in a violent nature in some ways. It's got a really, really great central, malevolent, villainous figure. And Fabian Therese is a really good horror actress. She was in Southbound a bunch of years ago, I think. Yeah, she's very good. I just felt like both movies are like 80 minutes and feel like two hours. And that's, you know, that's an issue. I just watched another movie last night that had an interesting premise in a really good Jessica Roth performance called Affection that goes to some really wild places where a woman wakes up in the middle of the road.

1:12:34Sean Fennessey:And she's clearly been in some sort of accident. And she can't remember who she is. And she can't remember why she's there. And she's picked up on the side of the road by a man who says that he's her husband and that they have a daughter. they go back to the house and something is not right and she can't really it reminded me a little bit of Seconds the John Frankenheimer movie with Rock Hudson and she's trying to figure out why she doesn't feel like she's in the right place and she feels very angry and she's having kind of like these like physical convulsions that she can't control and the first 40 minutes of the movie are excellent and you really really want to know where it's going and then at the 50 minute mark it tells you where it's going it tells you what it is tells you what the story is and you're like oh that's it I don't love that and then you gotta watch the movie for another 45 minutes so it's one of those things where when you take a chance on a smaller movie like this you gotta try to get your head around it the last one that I you know I think Faces of Death is kind of fascinating yeah Faces of I mean that's probably the best horror movie I've seen this year so tell me what you thought of it I just thought it was an exploration of our own fascination with this stuff in some ways it's like very much a meta commentary on like guys like you and me chasing a feeling that we have to go to more and more extreme measures to get.

1:13:52Sean Fennessey:But I will say I don't ever go to snuff. Like that's not something that I'm interested in. I want produced, you know. Yeah, you want production value and story. Yeah, yeah. If I'm going to see a vomitorium, I want it to be beautifully rendered. But the idea of somebody out there moderating that content that we get in some ways and urban legends and whether or not things are spoofs or viral or deepfakes or whatever. And I just thought, I mean, I'm such a huge fan of that director. So it's like, I thought it was awesome. And in some ways, not unlike the way that Craig has talked about Resident Evil as this is supposed to make you feel like I felt playing the game.

1:14:36I felt like this was almost the filmmakers talking about how they felt coming across faces of death as kids or as teens or whatever.

1:14:44Sean Fennessey:I think that's right on and I really responded to that too. Goldhaber, he's got some juice. I hope he gets a chance to do something bigger after this. I almost wonder whether or not with the marketing of this movie, they should have pushed the movie nobody wants you to see. They're scared to show you this. It got a limited release. It was weird to hear a lot of theaters were only playing it at 10 p.m. And I don't know. I know. I know. It felt like it could have just played as a straight up traditional slasher despite the media commentary that is a component of the movie. I think you would enjoy it just as Barbie Ferrer trying to survive in this deranged environment.

1:15:27Sean Fennessey:But I really liked it. And I think also once it hits Shudder, a lot of people are going to watch it. We already talked about 20 years later, The Bone Temple, which I think is probably my favorite of these movies. Yeah, I guess 28 years later, Bone Temple would be, it might be my favorite movie of the year so far. So it kind of, I guess I consider it horror. It's terrifying. Yeah. I had a ball with Primate. Yeah. I had a ball with Duba, with Send Help. But I wanted to tell you quickly about Duba Duba. Do you know about this? I have heard about this. Is this kind of Skinner-Marinke? Very. Yeah. It's like just CCTV.

1:16:00It's like security cam footage, right?

1:16:02Sean Fennessey:Correct. Right. It's about a young woman who takes what appears to be a normal babysitting job. and she learns that the girl who's in her care has a lot of emotional struggles and also that she can't leave the house. And another movie that is like 75 minutes feels a little bit long, but when it's scary, it's fucking scary. And then it gets really silly at times too. So it's kind of trying to strike this tonal balance that we're talking about throughout this episode of like there's a comedy component, there's a discomfort. There's a little bit of, we didn't mention kind of life after too many cooks and the Christmas Yule log movies, those Casper Kelly movies, those movies too, I feel like are kind of a soft influence on what's been happening in the last five years.

1:16:46Sean Fennessey:Casper Kelly had a movie at Sundance this year called buddy that I haven't seen yet that I'm looking forward to. But dooba dooba was kind of interesting. You had a few others here that you might. I just thought I would mention cold storage. It's like a kind of a, almost like an 80s feeling sci-fi, mildly horror, but more gross out creature features. Joe Currie's in that. That's, it was really fun. I enjoyed that movie. It reminded me a little of the remake of The Blob. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll, you know, we talked about body cam. And, you know, just because we mentioned Marcus Nisple and Platinum Dunes, like I thought Do Not Enter was like.

1:17:26What is that? I haven't seen that. It's about a group of like, social media like um stunt adventurers like people who try to break into you know abandoned buildings uh taking on a abandoned casino um in atlantic city where there was like bugsy malone hit a bunch of money so they're like looking for treasure uh and it's haunted and it has mole people running around it wow so uh mole people yeah but they're really getting a lot of mileage right now out of influencers and YouTube vloggers going into places that they shouldn't. Like horror movies in general. Do you want to start getting into that?

1:18:05Like want to be invited to spaces? I don't think I should do that, no.

1:18:10Sean Fennessey:Because one thing that I'm enjoying doing on this show is like, I went to this thing and I want to tell you about it. Oh, like an event? Yeah. But do you want to go to an abandoned casino and do battle with mole people? I think it may be for a good episode. What do you think? Me and Amanda together? I'm trying to imagine Amanda being like, we went to this casino. It was amazing. The groanies were great. Could be good. The social content would be good, right, Jack? Yeah. It would be amazing. Anything coming out this year that you want to tell me about? Get the pump primed. Is there anything we haven't mentioned yet?

1:18:44Sean Fennessey:Sadly, I'm going to miss the first screening that was made available to me of Leviticus, which was a queer conversion therapy horror movie that played at Sundance that apparently is quite good, and they showed the trailer to that at CinemaCon. It might even be available widely that trailer. I'm really looking forward to that. Aussie film. So yeah, Backrooms, Evil Dead Burn, Resident Evil, Other Mommy, Clayface, the young people. We've talked about all these. Teenage Sex and Death of Camp Miasma. Great trailer. Jane Schoenbrunn's new movie. Yeah, I really like the trailer and that is playing at Cannes and I'm very excited to see it at Cannes.

1:19:19Sean Fennessey:I think it's in uncertain regard. It might even, I don't think it's in competition. made the bank competition but I'm very pumped about that you know I don't know if whale fall is horror is that Austin Austin Abrams is in that he is that's if a guy gets swallowed by a whale that's it you got it that's it we saw five minutes of it in Vegas absolutely riveting is he in the whale the whole five minutes or is he thinking about other stuff and like here's what happens spoiler alert for one minutes long sequence of whale fall there's a guy who's deep sea scuba diving and he spots a giant squid. The squid swims by him and he's terrified.

1:19:58Sean Fennessey:He's like, holy shit, I do not want to be zapped by that squid. And then right behind the squid is a giant whale. He eats him. And the whale eats the squid. Oh, and the guy? Or just the squid? Well, the guy in the moment where the squid is sucked up, there's that kind of like wave that pulls toward... The vortex, yeah. Yes, pulls toward the whale and he's being drawn into it. And it's this incredible moment of survival where he's inching closer and closer to the gullet of the whale. And then it cut it off. And I was like, show me this movie immediately. It's based on a novel by a guy who just won the Pulitzer Prize yesterday, but not for whale fall.

1:20:35Sean Fennessey:He won it for something. Daniel Krause. Okay. Just sharing that news with you. Do you think I should buy a giant house in Hancock Park with all my Austin Abrams stock money? Yeah, that's where we're going to play Resident Evil. He's going to come over and play with us. Right next to Bill. Sony, if you're listening, buy us a house. Invite Austin Abrams to the house. Yeah. We're going to play at Resident Evil with him. I will have RZA come over and play the W on an old CD-R. Yes. Chris has several copies of Ghostface's Fish Scale on CD that he wants. He's burned several for you. And will you be offering weed?

1:21:12Sean Fennessey:No. You would never. I don't have to. I mean, it's legal in California. You can pick it up anywhere you want. You could have some in the space. Have some next to home state, you know? Wow. I don't know. You want to cater it with Homestate? Oh, yeah. That'd be good. That'd be nice. Yeah. How do you feel about Homestate being the number one choice for toddler birthday parties for parents to eat? I'm good with it. I guess. What would the alternative be? Like, hot wings? Like, you know. That sounds bad. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Any other thoughts about horror? You feeling good about the genre? Yeah, I am.

1:21:45I am. I'm feeling really good. I think it's like a pretty exciting time. And I think that the opening conversation that we had really speaks to like some interesting places it could go.

1:21:54Sean Fennessey:CR, thanks as always. Let's go now to my conversation with Curry Barker.

1:22:02Sean Fennessey:Very happy to have Curry Barker here for the first time. You're such a young man. You make me feel very old. Are people telling you that on this tour? Yeah, kind of. Okay. Yeah. How does that make you feel? Like I am excited that I used to. I mean, even when I was like 21, I was like, oh, I'm getting older. I got to, you know, there's always that clock ticking, right? Where you just want to accomplish things like as fast as, like, like Timothee Chalamet. Like, like I was, I remember being jealous of that kid when he was a little younger and just being like, oh, he's acting, he's already getting Oscars.

1:22:37Sean Fennessey:You have that same pursuit of greatness that he talked about. That's, that's inside you. I hope so. Tell me a little bit about where you come from. There's not a lot of filmmakers that come out of Alabama. I'm curious, like what it was like growing up for you? I mean, I grew up in a small town where if you want to act in film, you pretty much have to make it yourself. That's the only really opportunity that you have. And then there's local plays. I did a lot of local theater and stuff like that. But like I kind of learned pretty early on that if I wanted to act in film, I had to create it. And it was actually just means to an end.

1:23:15because I've been wanting to be an actor since I was like four years old. That's what my mom tells me. What spurred that? Do you remember? Did you see something? Did you watch a movie or go to a performance? Harry Potter probably. Really? Yeah. I was so obsessed with Harry Potter growing up and it's kind of like being transported to another world that couldn't possibly exist and wanting so bad. I became such a big pretender. I was such a big pretender as a kid. sword fights, you know, with my brother outside in the woods. We had huge imaginations and we would just let them, action figures were a big thing, right?

1:23:52Like, um, Lego sets, building those and like playing and, and, and it felt really real when you're a kid, you know, you really play the scenes out.

1:24:01Sean Fennessey:Yeah. Did you, how did you get a camera in your hand? Was it phones? Was it a video camera? Like what happened? First camera was like this little red, like, I guess it was It's called a DSLR where it's got like the electric lens that comes out. How did you get that in your hands? Okay. Yeah. And did he say you should try to make something? Yes. My dad was so encouraging. Like there was a really, as a matter of fact, I give a lot of credit to my parents because I feel like if in a world where they were discouraging, I might've listened to them. You know, I might have been like, all right, I guess they're right.

1:24:43Like, this is silly. But they were always being like, do it again, do it again. And like, wow, this is so good. And like, even if it sucked, like they really were encouraging, you know. How old were you when they put the DSLR in your hands?

1:24:55Sean Fennessey:It's probably like 10. And so was the idea that since you wanted to be an actor and that you knew you'd have to make things for yourself, was it sort of like this will vault you out of Alabama? Was there any kind of mentality around that, or was it just expressing yourself in a way that you felt happy about? I mean, in a small town, there's always that, we got to get out of this town mentality. That a lot of people, like people will DM me and say, you did it, you got out of here. Like it's some sort of jail or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah um but no i mean i loved mobile but uh yeah i was i i aspired to be um what i had seen on the big screen and what i wanted to but i never it wasn't until later that i realized i've been directing for a while you know like i you learn about what is a director what do they even do what does that mean like are they in charge of like the camera angles you know what i mean these are the questions you have as a little kid uh but you don't but i didn't realize that like i was doing that and like being in charge of this production and kind of telling people what to do do you remember the first time you saw a movie where you could kind of feel the director making choices or that there had been like something different about one movie from other movies that's a good question um yeah i'm sure like like that bug of like this is good versus this is bad had to start hitting me at some age.

1:26:25Right, right. Because I think your opinion is the most important thing as a director. What do you mean by that? Well, like, it's not about I have this strong vision for something, me, me, me. Like, it's more about, like, I know what I like and I know what I think is really good. I know what I want this movie to be. And then that kind of opens you up to other people, by the way, right? Like, anyone could have an idea. The sound guy could have an idea. It's not about that idea came from the sound guy, so no. It's about, is it a good idea or is it a bad idea? Some ideas are good and some ideas are bad.

1:27:07But what is a good idea? And like learning what your taste is.

1:27:11Sean Fennessey:When you were making things at a young age, were you making it with friends? Were you doing it by yourself? Friends, yeah, yeah. And did you have that mentality back then too? Like, were you guys collaborating or did you feel like, I'm in charge of this thing? I mean, I felt like I was running it, but only because I was the one who cared the most. I was the one that was going to edit it. I was the one that was coming up with most of the ideas. So it was almost like it felt like mine in that way, but it was still a collaboration. Sure. Yeah. How much of this was about trying to actually materialize an acting career and how much of it became what I actually want to do is be a filmmaker?

1:27:54Sean Fennessey:So I'm curious about that as you stand right now too. Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, it's a good question. And if it means anything, I moved out here into a college that was a filmmaking school, but I was in the acting program. So I was really focused on the acting. But I'd already done a couple films and little short films that I really enjoyed. And I was already so into editing. So it was something that I knew I enjoyed quite a bit. But it was kind of all means to an end. I moved out here to be an actor. But then I kept making films. And I don't know, man. It took off. Like as in like in my head, like it took what my passion for it took off, you know.

1:28:44Sean Fennessey:So at the top of this episode, my colleague Chris and I talked about this undeniable YouTube transitional moment, especially for horror. But like something has been happening for the last five or six years. You are a signal example of that happening. Can you just talk to me a little bit about when you first started posting to YouTube, like what your intention was when you first started doing it? Was it a strategy that you had? Yeah, it's interesting to be like a face of this thing, right? When I first started, I was actually in Alabama still. So we had a channel called Popcorn Culture. It was me, Cameron, Noah, Riley, my little brother Riley.

1:29:26and just we would make these funny videos and it got to the point where like in drama class in high school we would like our teacher would like show the videos for the class sometimes like as part of the class which was really yeah interesting so I mean the YouTube thing was kind of go I never like wanted to be a YouTuber because I just was so obsessed with film but I wanted I already knew the platform and the potential of like spreading the awareness and then when I moved out here I met Cooper and then we started That's a Bad Idea which fun fact is popcorn culture like we totally just like took the subscribers from that and changed the name

1:30:10Sean Fennessey:happens in podcasting too for the record oh wow I'm sure but so we took we made That's a Bad Idea and we just it wasn't like oh we're eventually we're gonna trick everybody and we're gonna make movies you know it wasn't it was just um let's do a funny channel where we just do sketches and uh eventually we'll do like um a web series that has a little bit more story to it um and um every now and then we'll make a horror short film or we'll make a a short film that that's a drama or something that will be that will have the platform to throw on there was no i mean i was still auditioning i had an an agent and i was like out here and i was trying so hard to break in and we were doing film festivals and stuff so i was still like i had it felt very separate for me it was the youtube world where i started to get friends that were like in this world too right um and then there was like the world where I have my little agent and I'm trying to do these auditions.

1:31:19And so it did feel like separate worlds and they like design it that way.

1:31:23Sean Fennessey:Well, did you, so I'm interested in how you design the actual work for YouTube, because are you thinking about kind of what is successful, what tends to work historically, the length of pieces, the tone that you're pursuing versus, hey, here's like kind of a reel for what a film might be if I were ever to pursue it. because I look back at some of the That's a Bad Idea stuff, which is really just good YouTube sketch comedy. And you can see a little bit of obsession in it, but it's like a pretty far leap to, especially some of the most intense moments of the film. So I'm curious how you thought about making the YouTube videos.

1:31:56I mean, I'm not like a YouTube strategist. As a matter of fact, some people kind of treat me like I am. They'll be like, oh, what's your expertise? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm not the guy. Like I, I, um, I just made like successful stuff that people like to watch.

1:32:15Sean Fennessey:So then they immediately think that you are that, right? Yeah. But I didn't like check out the algorithm. Like Cooper got into that a little bit more. And of course, like there's a point in the YouTube world or which really started off as TikTok, by the way, like we really took off on TikTok and in that world, you're chasing the views. You're like, Oh my God, this one got half a million views. That's so crazy. Then it becomes this one got a million. and like you get that rush and you're just chasing the next like, how can we get 10 million views? Can we get, and you know, you hit those milestones.

1:32:44So you, in that journey, you figure out timing, you figure out the tricks of like how to get someone's attention in the first three seconds because you learn that like the first three seconds are the most important. And if they swipe away, you've lost them, right? So you learn a little bit of that, but we always were like, no, screw that. Like I was actually so disappointed to even ever do vertical because I was like, I'll never do vertical. I'm always going to do horizontal. And the goal for us was always to make key and peel quality sketches that felt like they could be part of a movie or felt like they could be part of a TV show.

1:33:21So they had that like high quality production value. We never wanted to shoot it on our phones. Like we had rules for ourselves for the very early on. We were like that we're doing something higher quality.

1:33:32Sean Fennessey:Why? Like in an effort to eventually be doing something like in a feature film format i guess so i guess so okay but like um yeah but more we wanted people to to to be like oh this is not internet content on the internet you know i guess so yeah i guess you're onto something there well it's interesting because it is though like i watch the youtube videos which are very well made and very well edited but they are youtube sketch comedy videos and they're not they're definitely in a tradition of Key and Peele and SNL and the long history of sketch comedy on television, but they do have like a certain kind of editing vibe.

1:34:11Sean Fennessey:Totally, totally. And I don't want to say that Obsession like transcends it, but it evolves it a lot. So like maybe you can tell me a little bit about Milk and Cereal and like, because you mentioned that you were thinking about trying a horror film on those same channels. And there is some, there's obviously some creative connective tissue between that film and the sketch comic videos, but like it is also different. yeah yeah I mean it's true there's there's a certain editing that you kind of do when you're doing those like you get you get these instincts of like okay we've lost like which is really helpful in film because you're constantly thinking like you've lost me but you have to think like that all the time and so uh but but when I made milk and cereal um that's actually a funny story of how that came about I was I was going through this world of trying to get my acting reel together and so I had made a bunch of little scenes from what they from what I was trying to trick people that I've look at me I've been in all these different movies but they weren't movies there were little scenes I had written that looked like they could possibly be a part of an entire film so I had like a cowboy scene I'd like me being a bully at school high school scene and like at the bottom it said like the name of it like it was a movie with a new logo and like I made a new logo for each film.

1:35:31And I did this, I wrote this one where I play a serial killer and I'm like sitting on the chair and I'm like talking to her and it's really disturbing. It's basically this scene in the movie. But I caught, for some reason, I called it milk and cereal and I spelled cereal like that. And it just, that's all it was. It was just a scene that I'd written for my acting reel. And then I kept thinking like, whoa, what an interesting concept. a guy that's using YouTube to get famous for being a serial killer. Like, whoa, and how messed up that could be. So I just started writing it and went down, and what if it's a prank show?

1:36:09And what if the whole movie is a prank? And it just became like, oh my God, how has this not been done? So I just started writing that. And then Cooper was out of town. I was like, as soon as you get back, we're shooting this movie. We're going to get some friends together and we're going to shoot this so but yeah i mean that kind of allowed it to be that youtube choppy type of editing because it's it kind of is that style you know it makes sense yeah it makes sense for the plot it's so

1:36:36Sean Fennessey:interesting though that you then did you get the like come and do general meetings with us what is milk and cereal like did that open up doors in the way that you did you even think it would the chair did like i i hadn't released milk and cereal yet but the chair was a short film that i did that like really put me on the map as like oh this is uh a director um and that's how I found my manager Aaron like Aaron uh had been watching our internet stuff for a while and then was already interested and I was like and I sent him the chair and I was like what about this and then he was like oh shit you know and so that's when I started getting once I had a real manager when I that's when my life kind of changed honestly like I started getting uh generals with and I was just like oh my god I'm meeting with platinum dude or like whatever right like I'm meeting with uh these companies and then you kind of and this was like this is kind of my whole journey right like that was when I started getting that manager was was the start of something because he is the one that found um james harris or james harris i guess reached out to my manager aaron and was like hey i have this like program where i take like um new up-and-coming filmmakers um and give them you know a very very small budget to do something and i'd love to do a feature version of the chair and i was like oh my gosh like this is amazing but um can we do i have this idea it's called obsession can we do that instead let me pitch it to you so I pitched him obsession and he liked it enough to let me go and he's like all right go write it we'll see and so I just start working on the script and just just working and working and really like I remember the drive back then it's like oh you know like this is my one chance um so like that all happened because I got the manager and it's just like it it's so funny that you frame it that way too because it indicates that it's not always just about how creative you are, even the work that you've done up until that point.

1:38:47Sean Fennessey:It's about often meeting a person who can put you in a room. Probably. That allows you to break down a door, right? Yeah, probably. I mean, I know for sure that that was the moment for me that I started to feel like I was in the industry when you're meeting people in the industry. And my friends kind of knew it around me too. And then Cooper got a manager and then Cooper also started going on generals and you're like, whoa, we're kind of like, is this happening? Is this really breaking in? That's so exciting. Yeah. So, would you think of yourself or did you and Cooper think of yourselves as like hardcore horror fans or scholars or like was it your favorite genre?

1:39:23Sean Fennessey:It was mine. It was. Tell me about like your interest in it and your history with it. I watched, even as a little kid, I watched Goosebumps. It's like all I was allowed to watch, right? Because my mom was super, like she's the most chill mom ever but for some reason she was really strict about horror but I think it was mostly because she was nervous that I was going to get scared and have to sleep in her room or something. Which it did happen. Like I'd get nervous, scared. Do you think that stoked your interest in it though? That she was keeping it from you? Yeah. Like it's like kind of that forbidden fruit.

1:39:54Yeah. And it was like that for a while. And I would, I remember like sneaking downstairs one night and the adults were watching The Ring. And I like snuck behind the couch and watched a little bit of it and I was terrified I I was like regretting it because then I couldn't tell my mom that I snuck down so I was scared you know yeah um you couldn't tell her you were scared that you

1:40:20Sean Fennessey:saw the ring right because I wasn't supposed to be seeing the ring which is also weirdly kind of the plot of the movie interestingly oh yeah exactly yeah exactly you shouldn't watch it uh but the first movie like she allowed me to watch it was like a certain Halloween I think I was like 10 or 11 and I was like mom come on it's Halloween can I pick out one horror movie to watch and I picked out Texas Chainsaw the 2003 okay um and and that was like Nispol version is he the one who did that one it was uh I don't know I know it's uh it's Platinum Dunes right yeah yeah yeah the the it's the one where like have you seen them all I don't know have you You know, the one where this girl just gets popped in the head in the first like 10 minutes, which by the way, not okay for a 10 year old.

1:41:11Like I was... Pretty intense. It was intense.

1:41:14Sean Fennessey:This is what makes you fall in love with this stuff though. I have the same experience with horror. I'm obsessed with the horror movies and it's because I saw them very young and they get in your bloodstream. Yeah, right. Right. Because now you're like, I need to feel that again. That like disturbance that I felt at 10. That's exactly it. How do I go back to that? Yes. That feeling, which is so rare to experience. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. But like the science of it apparently is like that there's something called being like safe scared, which is where like you're scared, but you're in the safety of your own home.

1:41:43And there's an adrenaline that you get from it, but you know that you're never going to be in actual danger. Yeah.

1:41:49Sean Fennessey:I mean, I totally buy into that. I found with Obsession that you did do this. And I'm like a pretty tough critic about horror movies. Thank you. There are, there's a lot of really impressive formal stuff. A lot of it is in the way that you, clearly how you directed Indy and how you filmed her. And I just, I think I want to hear a little bit about coming up with the story and then that character and then getting that performance out of her because the movie really lives and dies on, on, on that, I think. Yeah, yeah, totally. And I knew that from the start. It's funny because The Chair was kind of an inspiration to this movie in a way.

1:42:30I did this thing. I don't know if you've seen The Chair. I have. Well, the girl, I don't even, Julie, I think her name is. I don't even know her name or the character's name. But the girl in that does this thing where she snaps into different emotions and stuff like that. And I already kind of had this idea for a while in my notes of an obsession movie about a boy and a girl that were just both obsessed with each other. And it didn't really go anywhere because there's no conflict. like their story is rooted in some sort of conflict it's like oh they live happily after after um so but but like i was intrigued by this idea of like what if there was a movie where the scary girl from the chair that was the whole thing like what if there was a movie where i could really lean into that um and so once i got the wish fulfillment of it i was like oh my god a girl who's like trapped in her she's trapped in her own body and that's the movie like that's awesome and I can really play with that so I was trying to play to my strong suits of like what I had just done with the chair uh is what was your question no just and then how you're able to get a performance like that out of that character because you know if you overplay that it's a

1:43:51Sean Fennessey:little bit. It could seem silly. Yeah, exactly. How do you create this idea of like a person who is simultaneously tortured and torturing? Right. And you mentioned in the chair like that snap of emotions, like the way that her character elevates very quickly to a very unsafe place where you feel like something really terrible could happen to Bear that she doesn't even really understand is happening. I don't know. It was a very unique sensation watching the movie. I felt like it was a real invention on your part thanks man yeah i'm like really critical and i think that i uh like i know i was kind of saying this earlier but like i i think the most important thing you can do as a filmmaker is have an opinion and when you watch a movie um you should be very critical but not for the sake of like that was that was a bad movie you needed to be able to dissect it like why was this bad what didn't work for you what could you have done better constantly thinking about and so you know when I see those moments in horror movies that make me like roll my eyes or or make me like like oh that was cheesy or whatever I just try not to do that stuff right like so um I have easier said than done I know totally totally but like and exactly that's i i strive to do it um you can only try to to do what you set out to do but uh for me like the thing that kind of makes me roll my eyes is like the demon aspect of or like there's like not having a motive for like why like why are you doing it you know so if she you know this movie could have easily just been like she get becomes possessed and she goes on a killing spree because everyone's a threat get to take away my bear right and and that would just be like okay but why like really so instead i wanted to lean into she will do anything to keep bear and if nothing goes wrong she won't do anything right like she's she um there's a world where this worked out for bear and he just had a super clingy girlfriend right but um it didn't work out that way well Well, so I'm wondering if you think about the movie in this way, because there's an easy way to read it too, that it is not just like a judgment of Bear, but a judgment of an entire male mentality around what you think happiness is, what you think a healthy relationship is, people's inability to communicate what they really want.

1:46:15Sean Fennessey:Totally. Which is a real challenge for, I think, a lot of guys. Was it important for you, for the movie, to have that kind of social weight, or is that just the natural byproduct of a cool idea you had about a girl who's becoming possessed? I mean, it's all things I get excited about after I've had the idea. Like seeing the potential of how deep and like how many questions you can make someone ask after you have this idea. You're like, oh my God. And then you could lean into this and you could lean into that. But it's not like I, it wasn't important to me from the get. what was important to me is to be relatable in some sort of aspect of like the movies I look up to like like for example in Midsommar so relatable when when you see uh Danny I think her name is and them and the boyfriend like fighting and you're like oh my god this feels so like real you know that that to me was like I wanted that to feel real and I wanted um but yeah I mean mostly for for indie never ready it was kind of always saying to like okay so there's magic in this world fine whatever but the magic is that it is just that it worked so let's forget that it's magic and right now i just want you to play crazy jealous girlfriend i don't want you to play possessed demon so with that comes a lot of like whininess and like um desperation and like that's what I, we were always striving for instead of like this, I'm a robot, I'm going to kill you.

1:47:51I'm a demon. I'm angry. Right. Right.

1:47:53Sean Fennessey:I know, but that's such a, it's such a great insight because I'm sorry to explain to you what you're probably thinking, but you know, one of the reasons why I think a lot of men are afraid to get into relationships is because they fear having that dynamic where, all right, even if you've like convinced a person to be with you, who you want to be with, if things don't go right, then you get this like shrewish, difficult series of emotional conversations that you don't want to have to deal with. But then also the idea that her character is so vulnerable and trapped and stuck because of this guy's own insecurities is this fascinating push-pull in the dynamic.

1:48:28Sean Fennessey:The other thing too is, you know, I read that you saw the Simpsons episode and that you had the kind of monkey's paw idea for the movie in part inspired by that, which is so interesting to me as somebody who's a little older than you, because like the monkey's paw is 115 year old short story. There've been a lot of movies that have explored aspects of that story before. Yeah. I couldn't think of any, really, that had it in this relationship dynamic. Yeah, I mean, even if there was, they never tapped into, like, the potential of, like, how messed up and how far you could go with, like, forcing someone to love you.

1:49:03That's such a, like, that concept was untapped, really. I know people say, like, this feels like something that's been done before, but, like, not really.

1:49:12Sean Fennessey:I was trying to think of a movie. I mean, the idea, I think, of someone sitting in their car and wishing someone would love them is, as you said, incredibly relatable. That's something that a lot of people experience, especially, you know, when you're like in high school or college. Right. But the dark downside is really impressive. Also, I'm curious what it was like to just have more money and, you know, working with a bigger crew. And even though it was still an indie, I felt like you really leveled up stylistically in ways that I really appreciated. Yeah. I mean, like it hasn't been people don't really know or realize how cheap this movie actually was.

1:49:54Like under a million is is like an understatement, really. You know, I feel like. We had nothing, but at the same time, well, it was it was so amazing. Like, let me start by saying, holy shit, did I have more tools than I've ever had like that. And it was life-changing for me. And, I mean, even just the aspect of having a schedule, Monday through Friday, 12-hour days every day of the week, and then for 20 days. And just showing up and doing your job and everyone knows that we're making a movie. I've never had that before. So, I've got nothing to complain about as far as, for me, being life-changing, right?

1:50:46But there were some challenges because it's almost like there's some things, like every time I make a movie, I realize that you can do things, but you just have to do them the illegal way or you have to do them the wrong way. like there's so many like even just for this last movie I shot even just shooting a scene in the car going down the road now we have police escorts we're on this big trailer if it was me back in the day I would just be in the car shooting right so there's these hula hoops you have to jump through with more money so sometimes more money hurts you in aspects that I'm learning yeah maybe

1:51:29Sean Fennessey:when you come back in the future we can talk about how things have changed from when you were making movies for less than a million dollars because it seems like that's not going to be the case much longer. Oh, that'll be great. A follow-up of like... Yeah, yeah. Well, whether it's better or not. Right, right. I'm sure many... I'm sure making more money will be better, but also the constraints of working inside of systems. Like, this is... You know, this was a true indie and then it got acquired out of a festival. What was that experience like? I mean, dude, we didn't know where this movie was going to end up.

1:52:00We really... Like, we're on set. we're making this thing and there's no guarantee of anything there's and you're trying as as the director and as like the person that everyone looks at you're trying to convince everyone this is going to be huge and this is like indie this is going to be big for you like just listen to me right or michael like whatever like you gotta you know and people did like everyone showed up because of of that kind of mentality and taylor clemens my dp really helped rally uh his team right the the camera team and like this we're on to something here right uh but there was no guarantee i mean we kind of thought once once i was in the editing bay for a while i was like this movie sucks like i was like this which i do with every one of my films i i think they suck and then i go through phases where i uh but um even just getting into tiff was a huge deal for us like we we went to dinner we celebrated we're in the toronto international film this is huge and the news just kept getting better we uh we're at the we're in the midnight madness section we've got the friday slot i think it was um you know we're on the biggest screen or whatever and um it just became like this is not only is this at tiff but like they're advocating for this movie yeah it's like they're almost advertising it yeah and it was like what you know same slot that the substance had um which like won a bunch of oscars so it just became no way you know what i mean and then that night uh you know um finally made it to the night uh had my a stylus for the first time i'm getting like a very expensive watch that is not mine that i'm wearing you know um um yeah and and like felt surreal and and and you watch it but like everybody's been building up that the midnight madness uh audience is the best audience in the world and so when you were told that it's like well great so then they're just a bunch of like then what does that mean for me you know what i mean they would have liked anything yeah right right um so so yes i knew that like it performed well in the theater.

1:54:18The reactions were great. But like I just said, I was kind of like, I had no idea of like, I had no frame of reference of like, was that a good thing? Or was that just like, whatever? And so it did feel good to watch the screening, but still nothing. Then the next morning I wake up and I have like missed calls from my agent, my manager, text messages. I'm like, what's going on? And I finally get on the phone with somebody and they're like bidding war neon a24 focus i'm like no like i i mean my life was changing before my eyes it was one of those things you read about and you're like like the flippo brothers and you're like and you're like i can't believe this is happening you know uh and it just it was and then you go to like the this just happened i know like this like it's like four or five months ago Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:55:12Sean Fennessey:Just happened. And I've shot a movie since then. Right. I was going to ask you about that next, actually. Before I ask you about that, you're starring in the next movie. Yeah. And I was wondering if there was a moment when you were thinking about starring in Obsession or if that ever came up. Because Chris and I were talking about your acting style and the presence that you have and if Obsession might have been, how would it have been different? Yeah, totally. If you had thought about doing that. They would have let me. It was a conversation where James Harris, who was the producer, he said if I wanted to play Bear, I could.

1:55:47But at the time, I had done Milk and Cereal, Warnings, and The Chair. Two movies that I was in and one movie that I wasn't. And I felt like my best work was The Chair. And I was kind of like, man, it felt really good to relax and not try to put on so many hats. and this felt like a really big opportunity for me as a director for the first, and I wrote it. This was my baby. I wanted what was best for the project more than anybody. And so it's not like I felt like I couldn't do it. As a matter of fact, I may even admit that when I wrote Bear, I kind of wrote him in my voice of like, I could totally play this character.

1:56:30But I didn't want to. At the end of the day, I was like, no, this is my opportunity to show the world that I'm a director. I think it was a smart choice. thank you yeah

1:56:39Sean Fennessey:I think you got a good performance out of Michael obviously he's great he's so good but it kind of shifts the dynamic of what kind of was it even just to expect from you from somebody like me too where I'm not sure if there's ever been a horror auteur who casts himself in films have you thought about that? that's why I think I was thinking about my my heroes like the people I look up to and it's like all of my favorite directors and filmmakers I look up to they don't star in their movies I believe Jordan Peele could be in one of those movies so good but so then when you're making this new movie how do you think about what you've learned from making the first one but then still being able to give a good performance and make the movie make sense well the thing is like Obsession was like the Curry Barker movie right like it was it was my thing and it was my baby Anything But Ghost is a film idea that me and Cooper had for a long time that's a buddy comedy where we were always supposed to star in it so it was one of those things where it was like no no no this is the movie where we put on those, we are Cooper and Curry, like the people on YouTube.

1:57:45Like we are those two and we're ghost hunters and everything goes horribly wrong. So it was like, I have to, I have to play this character. And there was a time where when things started getting really real, I didn't tell anybody this because I knew that the moment I like put it out there, it might become bigger and bigger I was scared right but there was a time where I was like maybe Will Poulter could play my part or someone that's like awesome could play me and then Cooper can still play Cooper's part and whatever but like maybe we bring in someone like Will Poulter that's funny and but no I was like screw that I'm gonna do this and it's it's one of my favorite things as I ever did.

1:58:28He's not, he's very different than like the internet that I play. I mean, Milk and Cereal got to see me play a more kind of serious role and then on YouTube I play like really silly, right? This was like kind of in between. Okay. Kind of an awkward guy but also kind of an asshole in the way of like there's just a, there's like, it's like he doesn't compute that he's being so selfish. And it was so fun to play that because there's an innocence to his selfishness that was really fun to play with. He says these words that are so rude, but he says them in a way that he's like, right? Everyone doesn't understand that.

1:59:13Do you realize what you just said and how messed up that is? So it was really fun to play that. And I didn't want to give that away. And I don't think it hurt the movie at all. to but it was a challenge I'm not gonna say it wasn't a challenge yeah crazy challenge you think you'll keep acting in your films yeah yeah um but not not forcefully never forcefully like I'm not gonna force myself into Texas Chainsaw or write myself apart and in a right like but but but then again me and Cooper wrote that movie together as kind of um it just it feels different when you're like no I'm gonna play you know right in the voice of your partnership yeah exactly um I have

1:59:58Sean Fennessey:to ask you about Texas Chainsaw when you came in you seemed a little concerned about how you've been communicating um it's a big burden to be taking on something like this we were talking about how you this is three consecutive originals that you've made and now this is something horror has this long tradition of remakes reboots reimaginings yeah totally yeah um what can you tell me about it? I mean, um, I haven't, here's the thing. I, I guess the reason I'm kind of saying I'm going to start keeping my mouth shut is because I haven't even started writing this thing. Like I haven't even, I've got a bunch of ideas in my phone, really excited about it.

2:00:37Um, it's, here's how I know I'm excited is because anytime I have a bunch of ideas all the time, like that's just what a filmmaker does. They have a bunch of ideas, but you know, when an idea has kind of taken over. Like, oh, I might have an idea about this haunted this or might have an idea about a killer this, right? But then when you have that one idea that's like, oh my God, you keep going back to that note section and adding things. That's what's happening to me right now with Texas Chainsaw. So like, I know that I'm so excited about this.

2:01:13Sean Fennessey:It's such a challenging text to reboot though. like I've watched everyone like you said and I'm interested in them but very few non-Toby Hooper movies click for me in this strain like they're really I love 2 as well and 2 is actually weirdly very in your tone of like blending horror and comedy in a very like outsized way that is a lot of fun but this is a hard world because the first movie is it's not just that it's so iconic but that it is doing something so singular so I don't know that doesn't psych you out at all huh Well, I mean, it is now because of the world of reading the comments and like putting yourself out there and then people kind of, people will just get personal with you.

2:02:03They'll be like, you have a punchable face. That doesn't even have anything to do with the movie. you've been online for a while though I know but I'm not used to most of the time it's either look you like my stuff or you don't like my stuff and it's kind of like whatever but now I'm touching something that's very dear to someone and I'm kind of like the target there's a target on me

2:02:27Sean Fennessey:you're going to have to put a flak jacket on and try to find a way to ignore it because I don't think you can really consume all that when you're doing something like this and feel excited about it yeah and to me I watch those movies and see there's there's really only one or two of the see I can't I can't I'm like I've been scarred now but like there's there's there's a lot of material out there but only a a little bit that's like worth being explored and then the rest of it's not really canon I mean even the name Wyatt like the name Sawyer is not even like I'll see you next week. It's consistent.

2:03:08Like the 2003, they changed it to like, I think Wyatt's or something, the Wyatt family or something. I mean, I'm going to use Sawyer. That's going to be, that's easy, right? But like, but it's just, there's not really a consistent canon with Texas Chainsaw. It's kind of like an open book.

2:03:25Sean Fennessey:It's very true. We did an episode of this show, I think I want to say back in 2022 when there was a Netflix remake or reimagining of the movie. and we were kind of like trying to piece together if there's any coherent lore and one of the things that Chris and I were saying in this episode was one of the great things about Obsession is you could have spent a lot of time on lore exploring the character's trauma gone back and kind of like psychologize all this stuff and you dispense with all of that and it makes the movie so much stronger to not get hung up on that so I'll just encourage you please keep doing that well I think the key is like to live in a world where that lore feels like it exists that's the key but doesn't have to be explained no no the key is is is to um have like the one wish willis should feel like there's so much story behind it but never go into it yes and that way you feel like a world that's lived in instead of living in a world that just is very empty and like the characters don't feel lived in and so it's about it's about not over explaining oh like this friend group clearly has been together for a while one has an opinion about this person this but never being like i've got an opinion about you know like totally don't lose that yeah it's very insightful and i i think about that all the time when watching a movie and i hear a character dig into five consecutive lines of dialogue that explains the entire premise of the movie do you see me just roll my eyes i know what makes me roll my eyes and and i try i find it's that it's filmmakers or studios or whoever is working on the film that is like the audience isn't smart enough and the audience is smart enough that's the thing and that's what youtube taught me like the comments like like the chair all these things like i would always throw in these little things and be like nobody's gonna notice and they always notice and it kind of unlocks your brain of like people aren't just smart they're really smart and and um that allowed me to always treat my audience like and you know what it also allows me to like not care like oh well what if uh half of the people don't get it i don't care you know what i mean i almost don't care if half the people don't get it because the person next to them that does get it will might explain it to them and then it just becomes better right it's a very healthy mindset you have curry we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they've seen also people often say when they start making movies it's harder for them to watch movies have you found that yeah yeah i mean so well i try really hard to allow myself to sit back and watch it for a story but i'm always just uh studying the cinematography the acting the um like the coverage uh even the music so it of course it's it's harder to accept it as a story and not as like a technical piece of what becomes what becomes art right so have you seen anything recently that has taken you away and not gotten you focused on fixating on those things uh yes um i watched well i mean weapons was kind of a long time ago but um i loved that movie it's amazing yeah and aunt gladys is great and just unsettling and kind of like everything i'm fighting for like aunt glad i was like dang that's awesome you know what i mean i was kind of like um yeah and and me and Zach are friends, I wouldn't say.

2:06:46I mean, we've only ever talked on the phone. We've never met in person. But he's awesome. Like, Resident Evil looks nuts.

2:06:54Sean Fennessey:I know. We're really excited. We were talking about it in this episode, too. And you guys have something in common, right? Obviously, like, your backgrounds, the kind of tone where, like, you'd think that these movies would be a little bit funnier based on your backgrounds. And yet, there's something really funny about how severe they are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. that only like the real ones really understand. I really, I mean, I really love Zach's movies and have had him on a couple of times. But yeah, work in that tradition. That's a good one to go in. Yeah. I mean, there's this like fine line between the comedy I do online and the comedy that I allow myself to put in these types of movies.

2:07:33And the difference is, like when I'm doing comedy online, it's a three minute video. So like the stakes and the danger for these characters don't matter because maybe they are going to jail, but you're not going to see that because the video is over. Right. Right? But when you're making a movie, the consequences should feel real and the danger should feel real. And the moment that you do something that feels like that's not true anymore, you've lost me at least as an audience member, right? So be as funny as you want and have as many jokes as you want, but never at the expense of losing the consequences or the danger of the world, right?

2:08:15Or like if it's two ghost hunters that are conning people, don't be so silly that like that's, you'd have to be dumb not to see that. You know what I mean? Then you're like, oh, that's so silly. Like they would have known that that wasn't real.

2:08:29Sean Fennessey:You know what I mean? It's a great insight. Keep credibility in mind at all times when you're watching something. Curry, congrats. Thanks for doing the show. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

2:08:42Sean Fennessey:Thanks to Curry. Thanks to CR. Thanks to Jack Sanders for his production work on this episode. Thanks to Lucas Cavanaugh for his support. Next week, we'll be drafting again. CR will be there. What year are we doing? 76. 1976. We'll see you then.

2:09:14Sean Fennessey:Good energy in. Ah, good energy out.

2:09:22Sean Fennessey:Storm, zero sugar, 200 milligrams of caffeine, and immunity support. Storm, energy for life.