QAA Podcast - City of the Dead Movie Night (Premium E309) Sample

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

In this special Halloween edition of movie night, Jake and Travis discuss the 1960 British “B-movie” The City of the Dead. The film, the directorial debut of John Llewellyn Moxey and released under the title Horror Hotel in the United States, tells the story of a coven of witches in New England who lure women for a diabolical yearly sacrifice to Lucifer. The British actors, including a very young Christopher Lee, put on their best American accents to make a film so spooky that distributors chose to cut some references to Satan worship for the U.S. distribution. Best of all? You can watch it for free in 4K right now on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl3cQ5Lo9HI Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Thank you. If you're hearing this, well done, you found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, Premium Episode 309, movie night, the city of the dead. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky. And Travis Vue. In my house growing up, there was a phrase my dad said often that never failed to elicit a groan from me and my brother. A black and white classic. Now, he would often use this in trying to sell us on a beloved film,

series from his childhood, at a time when all we were interested in was Ghostbusters, Ninja Turtles, and usually a third revolving property like mask or Starcom or some like piece of crap from the claw machine at Benigans that had become like a favorite toy, you know, in that moment. Now in the spirit of Halloween and coincidentally, the only dad on the podcast, Travis has brought us a very special movie night. Today we are discussing the City of the Dead 1960, a true BWC, as we used to call him.

Yeah, this is a good one. I wanted to bring this. This is a great film for Halloween because first of all, you could see it just about anywhere. It's free on YouTube. It's on Amazon Prime. It's on like Fubo or whatever,

though. Yeah, the commercial-driven platforms are. You can see it anywhere. It's nice and tight. It's like not a wasted scene. Very propulsive and it's short. So it's like, it's a great Halloween season movie you can watch,

very quickly for free anywhere. And it's really good. I found it because I was trying to research, I was looking for movies that involved people doing historical research, historical primary research, and preferably with like, it involves occultism. And this like fit the bill.

And I watched it. I was like, oh, wow, this is actually a really good old movie. So I'm, I dived into it. I'm really excited to share this. Yeah, I'm glad you can relate to the, the ingenue, the lead of the film, who is, you know, just,

just doing research on some occultish things. I hope you don't find yourself in the same situation that she does. No, no. That'd make for a good live episode, though, like one of our sort of out in the field episodes, like me and Julian, and Liv, Brad and Annie, having to rescue you from the clutches of some cult that you got too deep into. Yeah, yeah, like, that's the real horror, is that, like, you're just following your curiosity, following your, like, you know, academic sort of, like, inclinations, and it winds up

you biting off way more than you can chew. Well, and it's funny because the characters of this, film in a lot of ways seem to go against your primary sensibility. As the movie kind of treats skeptics as like buffoons and like soon to be murdered fools. No, no, I, that's the thing that's the thing I got loved about it. It's like, yeah, the skeptics are just getting BTFO's left and right. Like the occultists and the hyper-religious are the people who like have things figured out in this world. Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, it's it's pretty amazing. I had never heard of this movie. It stars a young Christopher Lee, which is really, which is really, which is

really interesting. He's just one of those actors that you're used to always being old. Yes, exactly. But both he's, yeah, he is, uh, he was young, but still kind of like very menacing, very commanding performance. Yes, he's got a sort of like lurch quality to him. Yeah, but it was, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's a good to see him. So as customary, I did a reasonable amount of research on the film and there's some interesting stuff. So it was the directorial debut of a guy by the name of John Llewellyn Moxie. Sometimes he would go by John Moxie, sometimes John L. Moxie. He was born in Argentina in 1925, and before entering the world of filmmaking, he served in the second world of war for the British Army doing reconnaissance. And I don't have Liv or Julian

here to make fun of me for that pun. Pretty crazy. It's always crazy to me to think of like people who serve in like intense sort of like combat situations, but then want to come back and make movies. It's like you've been to the best movie. You've already, you've played the best game for real. Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, I think it's like good, you know, especially, especially when it's involved, like, you know, understanding war. But, yeah, it was always interesting career choice. So, Moxie would go on to direct a lot of classic TV episodes like Mission Impossible. He directed the pilot episode of Charlie's Angels. He directed episodes of Miami Vice and Kung Fu. I mean, These are like, you know, huge, huge shows, huge, network shows.

But this is his first thing, which is really cool. The screenplay was originally written by George Baxe as a series intended for actor Boris Karlov, but one of the film's producers adapted his original script for this film. And one thing I found out through my research that's pretty interesting is George Baxed, the guy who wrote this, is actually a legendary Jew and, as it turns out, a pioneer in queer literature. Oh, is that legendary? Is that harder to find than a rare Jew, the legendary Jew? Yeah, one higher tier.

He's like, I mean, he was a kid of Russian and Polish immigrants. He was born in 1922, I think. I mean, this is right around both of my grandfathers, also Russian, Polish immigrants, also born in the early 1920s. So he is of my grandfathers, both of them, both of their peers. So he's the creator of one of the first open. gay detectives, Pharaoh Love, which was first introduced in back's 1966 novel, A Queer Kind of Death, which I'd never heard of, but that was six years after this film, and he went on to do

many novels with that character. So the reason he was in London in the first place, where the City of Dead was produced, is because he fled the United States in the 50s, after a couple of his screenwriter buddies were blacklisted and labeled as communists. He stayed in London for the next five years, writing payroll in 1961, and Night of the Eagle in 1962, which I got to watch now because people online who I was reading their comments about him, apparently these are his more famous films. So I guess I got to check those out. And although the film's producers Max Rosenberg and Milton Sabotsky were American, the movie began filming at Sheparton Studios in England on October 12, 1959, almost exactly to the day, 66 years

ago. Wow. Yeah. Premium episode 309, 9 minus 3.5. and you have our third six. Holy shit. Happy Halloween, folks, it begins. Proton packs coming out. As we discussed, the movie stars a very young Christopher Lee, who still manages to look old somehow, and I quite enjoyed myself watching this.

It was made for roughly 45,000 pounds, so this was, like, I guess, at the time, a micro-budget. It was often compared to Psycho, and we looked the budget of that up, which apparently was also supposed to be, low budget film and that that had a price tag of about eight hundred thousand dollars yeah this was i mean i was considered kind of a what they call a british b movie it was it was made cheaply i think they did they did a lot with what they had had like a handful of sets some cheap but well done like you know

sort of like fog effects and driving effects but no i think i this is a this is a very crafty film because of like how little the budget was i loved reading this so the funding came from two separate parties. One was British television producer by the name of Hannah Weinstein. And the other financier was the Nottingham Forest Football Club, which I thought was great. Yes, I thought that they, I thought they knocked it out of the park. There's some really kind of ahead of its time stuff here. It's especially what it does with point of view. I also really liked how they got away with reusing sets. Like, for example,

when the brother comes back to the witch town to look for his sister and he goes through the same sort of like circle around town that she does and experiences things the same way that she did

and it has this eerie sort of repetitive feeling but on a technical level they've bought themselves like 10 minutes of footage and a good scare by essentially using the exact same scene, the exact same actors

and extras like over and over again with the exact same blocking. I mean, so it's, There's really some brilliant stuff going on here, I thought. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal?

Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes. plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.

Travis, for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all. of our listeners. Yes, we do.

And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying, not me being grateful. I'm very grateful. great.