Stuff You Should Know - Josh and Chuck's List of Horror Movies that Changed the Genre

Episode Date: July 6, 2017

Once in a while a movie comes along that's so forward-thinking it changes the way that horror is done. A new subgenre is spawned, new tropes are established, and audiences are more terrified than ever.... Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.
Starting point is 00:00:17 We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass
Starting point is 00:00:37 and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.
Starting point is 00:00:57 Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's us, Josh and Chuck, and we want you to know we are coming somewhere near you. We're sure if you live in North America this year. That's right, we're going on tour, and why don't we just rattle through these dates?
Starting point is 00:01:17 Okay. Toronto, August 8th at the Danforth Music Hall. Chicago, August 9th, the next day at Harris Theater. Then we are taking some time off to recover after that two-day grind. We're hitting Vancouver, the Vogue Theater, September 26th, followed by Minneapolis. We're gonna be at the Pantages Theater again
Starting point is 00:01:36 on September 27th. That is correct. Yep, and then Austin, Chuck on October 10th at the Paramount Theater. Yes, and very special show in Lawrence, Kansas, at Liberty Hall on October 11th. Yep, and then we're gonna do a three-night stand October 22nd, 23rd, and 24th at the Bell House
Starting point is 00:01:55 in Brooklyn, New York, and then Chuck, take it home. Well, take it home, literally, because we are finishing up November 4th right here in Atlanta at the Buckhead Theater, and this is a very special benefit show. And all the proceeds will be going to Lifeline Animal Project of Atlanta and the National Down Syndrome Society.
Starting point is 00:02:14 Yep, and for more information and to buy tickets, just go to sysklive.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from housestuffworks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Howdy.
Starting point is 00:02:36 His middle name's Wayne. My middle name's Malcolm. There we have it. I always forget about that. Malcolm. Yeah, Wayne. Named after Wayne Coyne, right? Uh, no, John Wayne.
Starting point is 00:02:50 And you were named after Malcolm in the middle. That's right. Frankie Munis is my namesake. I hope he's okay. Early Brian Cranston, too. I used to love that show. Oh, it's a great show. I watched it, like, within the last couple of months,
Starting point is 00:03:09 I was cleaning the house and put it on Netflix, and it's still great. Yeah? Yeah, it is really, it is a good show. So you clean your house, you put on your VR goggles, and just queue up Malcolm in the middle? Yeah. No, I just-
Starting point is 00:03:23 You walk around and bump into things and- Right, exactly. But I put on, like, a huge feather duster suit. Yeah, so you're just cleaning and bumping into things. That's right. That's how I do it. Wow. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:35 It works kind of well. Someone's gonna take that idea. Yeah, like the Sharknado? Yeah, but they should just, they should sell that suit with a purple drink. I think you'd just get one spot on the floor really, really clean. What are you gonna title this one, by the way,
Starting point is 00:03:57 because this is your pick, and we title our own shows, episodes. Some horror films that change the genre. All right, and you should add this, AKA, how could you guys forget blank? Yeah, yeah, we should say, like, this, first of all, this is a Grabster article,
Starting point is 00:04:15 so it's Grabster's list. Sure. And he knows what he's talking about. If you look at some of the entries, some don't even have source tags. Whoa. He's just like, I just know. He should just sort of tag it, Grabster.
Starting point is 00:04:27 But we even took his list and carved some out and put some in. Sure. So this is, how about this? This is Josh and Chuck's idea of some horror films that change the genre, featuring the mind of the Grabster. Yes, in other words,
Starting point is 00:04:45 it is not a complete list of every horror film that changed the genre. Yes. Because I would argue that, well, and actually, I see Grabster put Texas Chainsaw Massacre in there. He said that if this were a top 15 list, that would be in there, so would Alien.
Starting point is 00:05:01 Yeah, he has that, Alien, Ringu, and the US remake, Ring. And I would lobby for, well, Psycho didn't make it onto his list, but we're going to put that in. And there was one more. Oh, even though I didn't really think it was that great, the movie Saw, I think kind of changed horror films.
Starting point is 00:05:23 And that's what this list is, not best horror films, but things that kind of changed the game. Yeah. It seems like Saw kind of kicked off that, that the... Torture porn? Yeah, didn't it? I can't remember if it was that or Hostel, one of the two.
Starting point is 00:05:39 It was definitely one of the two for a subgenre. Well, it's pretty accurate, actually. It is, but most of these are movies that either were the first of its kind and maybe did start a subgenre or movies that were so popular that they just, you know, kind of rewrote how people view horror movies, some of them because of marketing,
Starting point is 00:06:04 some because they were really good movies, some because of box office. But all of these, I don't think anyone could argue, did not change the genre. How about that? Sure, yeah, I think that's well put, dude. And before we get started, speaking of horror, I wanna give a plug to my friend Toby's movie
Starting point is 00:06:23 that's coming out. He's a producer on a movie coming out called The Ghost Story. Yeah, Toby, when we met Toby, well, you knew Toby before me, of course, because he's your friend. And I know him through you, me, so really excuse me. But he was small time doing short films and stuff. And since that time, and this has been within the last,
Starting point is 00:06:46 like since we've been doing this podcast, he's now big time. Yeah, they did Pete's Dragon. Yeah. And then, yeah, they did Aint Them Body Saints, was I think the one that they kind of broke out with. Which I love that movie. And then this one definitely kind of falls
Starting point is 00:07:02 into that same look and mood and feel. It's called The Ghost Story. And I think it comes out in July. And I think it's labeled a drama rather than horror or even supernatural or thriller. But the reason I tie it into horror is because A24 is releasing it. And A24 is killing it with horror movies lately.
Starting point is 00:07:26 Yeah, that's a good outfit. They did The Witch. They did The Black Coat's Daughter, have you seen that? No. It's on Amazon Prime. It's on Amazon Prime right now. No, I didn't give a thumbs up. Dude, it's one of the best horror movies
Starting point is 00:07:42 I've seen in a while. I think The Witch is probably my favorite right now. Black Coat's Daughter is a close second. And then last night, I saw It Comes At Night in the theater. And It Comes At Night actually upset my stomach. The ending did. It was that rough.
Starting point is 00:08:01 Yeah, I think we're at a place with horror movies that we haven't been in a long time. Like a really genuine- Good spot. Yeah, like the whole torture porn sort of era is over. And the found footage thing is so played. Oh, man. But I think with movies like The Witch,
Starting point is 00:08:20 I think we've really, like there are some really creative, it follows, did you see that one? Yeah. It's in just really creative ways of bringing scares that I haven't seen before. Get out? That was amazing. Did you see Get Out?
Starting point is 00:08:33 No, man, I still haven't seen it. You're gonna love it. I know. I'm envious of you. It's really, it's great movie. Chuck, you're gonna love it. Well, I don't get to the movies much anymore. And the only time I could was a couple of weeks ago
Starting point is 00:08:43 when I elected to see Wonder Woman. Yeah, not a bad choice. So, long way of saying congratulations to Toby and his new film. Well, that's funny. We also need to congratulate Toby too, because Toby just got married. Toby and Annelle are now married.
Starting point is 00:08:58 So congratulations to them as well. So is this new movie with his directing partner, David Lowry? Yeah, yeah, and Rooney Mara. Man, they've got a good thing going. Yeah, they definitely do. So it's gonna be good. I'm looking forward to it.
Starting point is 00:09:13 Awesome. Okay, so let's get started. Thanks for indulging that. Thank you, everybody. So the first movie on our list is what's widely considered the first horror movie. And it's a 1920 movie out of Germany that basically was the first film
Starting point is 00:09:33 that undertook what's the artistic movement known as German Expressionism. Yeah. It's called The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Yeah, I mean, some say, like you said, it was the first horror movie. Some say it was the first cult film. Well, you may not be able to get through the whole thing
Starting point is 00:09:54 if you're not into silent movies, but you should queue up a little bit of it and watch a little bit of it because it's hugely impactful and still, to this day, very disconcerting to look at because of how ominous and weird it looked, just physically looked. Yeah, like the sets that they built
Starting point is 00:10:18 are obviously constructed, manufactured. They were not in any way shape or form going for realism. They were going for surrealism, for sure. And so like the staircases are at crazy weird curves and angles and like everything from the house, the house's rooftops to the blades of grass are super pointy and sharp. And the shadows that they employed are just perfect.
Starting point is 00:10:44 You've never seen a better use of shadows than this. They didn't get in the way, they just created this mood and it was the first movie to really kind of do that, to just take, to use the camera for something other than capturing realism. And for that reason, it's considered the first horror movie because that's such a standard part of horror, whether large, like in large part,
Starting point is 00:11:09 like in a Tim Burton movie or in small part, you know, where you're using small spaces to create claustrophobia, the idea of using the set to mess with the viewer's mind, I think, is born in Dr. Caligari's cabinet. Yeah, it's almost like they took a child and gave them construction paper and said, cut out scary things.
Starting point is 00:11:32 Right. And then like that movie, The Babadook, I think the actual book within The Babadook was hugely inspired by this. The actual movie itself, the plot is about a sideshow operator, a hypnotist who has a patient that he takes around to these sideshows with a sleep disorder.
Starting point is 00:11:52 Supposedly he's been asleep his entire life and he uses this patient to commit murder. Right, he's like a sleepwalker. Yeah. Somnambulist. So that in itself is a pretty frightening plot and to think about that being cooked up in 1920 when there weren't really not such things
Starting point is 00:12:10 that you think of as horror movies is pretty impressive. And then some of the deeper critiques I've seen of it was like the explanation for why the filmmakers chose like these weird odd angles to kind of depict insanity or that kind of thing was rooted in World War I. The horrors of World War I had just been seen and revealed and recently taken place and it upended Europe in general.
Starting point is 00:12:38 And especially Germany as well. And the idea is that they might not have had this idea. They might not have had this desire, this drive to create this weird set and in fact this weird movie had World War I not happened. Yeah, there's this writer, Jeff Saperito who kind of put it this way about German expressionism because I wasn't exactly sure how to define it.
Starting point is 00:13:05 But you're kind of right on the money. He said Germany was largely isolated from the rest of the world following World War I. So expressionism therefore became confined to the country, refers to a number of creative movements from World War I through the 1920s. Expressionist works examine the current and future state of the culture through bold and artistic creations
Starting point is 00:13:24 of creativity and often explored topics of madness, betrayal and other intellectual concepts. And nothing encapsulates these ideas more than the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. That's basically what I said. Yeah, did you read that or were you just that? I don't know if I read that one or not. It sounded kind of familiar.
Starting point is 00:13:45 Yeah, no, just say you came up with it. So the idea of the set just creating a creepy tone and texture to everything, that was Dr. Caligari. That's how it changed the genre. Yeah, yeah. Tim Burton, say thank you. Yeah, have you seen Coraline? No, but I know it.
Starting point is 00:14:08 They did that to very good effect. You know, I think Hodgman does a voice in that, doesn't he? He does. He does the dad. He did a spectacular job because you actually forget it's Hodgman while you're watching it. That's impossible. All right, Chuck, moving on.
Starting point is 00:14:20 That was 1920. We're going to fast forward all the way to what, 1960? 1963, if you're talking about blood feast. Well, I wasn't, but let's. Simon Abrams of RogerEbert.com says this, blood feast is a terrible film and a historically important one, too. Yep.
Starting point is 00:14:42 And I think that's sort of the deal with blood feast. It is not good by any accounts. Did you watch any of it? Yeah, sure. It's not good. No, it's not good. It's terrible. It was written on a 14-page outline, didn't even have a script.
Starting point is 00:14:57 It's got the same cloying technicolor of like an early Hawaii 5.0 episode. Yeah, for sure. Directed by Herschel Gordon-Lewis and producer David F. Friedman. And basically, the idea was this. These guys did not see films as art. They saw them as a business and thought you were foolish if you thought it was anything else. So they sat around.
Starting point is 00:15:20 They brainstormed movies that they thought no one else would make. Yeah, because they started out making like porkies-esque type movies. Yeah. And they were doing fine with that. But apparently, they were successful enough with it that they started to be imitators and the market was crowded. So they said, where can we go make movies that no one else is going to make? Yeah, because we want to shock people, essentially.
Starting point is 00:15:44 So a couple of ideas they had that did not make the list was con man evangelist and Nazi torture, which were later made. Exactly. And they finally said, you know what? No one's really done yet is hardcore gore. Yeah. Like everyone always cuts away when the knife comes. And you're like, what if we showed the grossest,
Starting point is 00:16:07 goriest stuff imaginable on screen? Yeah, and even still, they didn't show. So like one of the first murder, a woman stabbed through the eye and then the murderer hacked her legs off of the machete. Right. And they didn't show the knife penetrate the eye. They didn't show the machete making contact with the skin. But what they did in Blood Feast and what made Blood Feast the first of its kind
Starting point is 00:16:31 was they would show what came after that. They would show the brains on the ground. They would show the entrails on the knife. They would show the leg that had been dismembered being put into a bag and the wound that was left by it. No one had ever done anything like that on film before. No, and it paid off. Depending on who you ask, the budget was anywhere from like 20 to 30 grand.
Starting point is 00:17:03 And it made between $7 and $30 million, like I said, depending on where you get your info. But by all accounts, it was a huge financial success compared to what they paid to make it. Yeah, and they shot it in six days or something down in Miami based on a 14-page outline. There wasn't even a script. It was an outline. And basically it was like, murderer goes and kills this girl. Next girl, murderer comes in, kills girl, cuts off leg, that kind of thing, right?
Starting point is 00:17:34 Yeah. I mean, if it matters, the movie's about a serial killer caterer. Yeah, that's it. There's your plot right there. Yep. But it was just such a revolutionary movie that the censors at the time, there wasn't such a thing as the MPAA hadn't been formed yet. And there was basically no one except for local censors overseeing movies.
Starting point is 00:17:58 Yeah. So you could be playing in one town to all audiences and then the next town over, it could be banned. But the censors had never seen anything like it and they didn't know what to do with it. So it was hugely successful commercially, too. Yeah, and another big impact it had was it inspired a generation of special effects. But basically, let's be honest, young boys who were doing this on their own Super 8 films and said, wait, I can get a job doing this? Yep.
Starting point is 00:18:31 So hats off. Including Tom Savini, I think, was inspired by it, wasn't he? Or was he inspired by... Yeah, I think he was inspired by Blood Feast. Oh, wow. And then we should also give a mention to the Grand Guignol. Is that how you think it's pronounced? Sure.
Starting point is 00:18:48 Grand Guignol. Sure. It was a theater in Paris, I believe, from the late 19th century on to, I think, 1962. So the year before Blood Feast came out, it had closed up. But it used to do this stuff on stage. It was like a gore fest. And there was lots of blood and sex and depraved themes in the plays that were put on at this theater.
Starting point is 00:19:14 And people loved it. They were crazy for it. And this was kind of like the Grand Guignol tradition put on the film for the first time. And hooray for that. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's do it. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker
Starting point is 00:19:53 necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?
Starting point is 00:20:14 Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing
Starting point is 00:20:32 on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands
Starting point is 00:20:59 give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.
Starting point is 00:21:14 Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Life in relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.
Starting point is 00:21:29 Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Charles, we're back. So 1960 or 1960, not eight? Uh, I've got 1968 in front of my face.
Starting point is 00:22:06 Okay. Uh, and that could be no other movie than Night of the Living Dead, classic George Romero film, uh, Romero was a TV director, making TV commercials, commercial director rather. He was also making short films for Mr. Rogers neighborhood at the time. Yeah. And he was, he was young. Yeah. I don't, I don't know how old he was, but he was pretty young guys still.
Starting point is 00:22:29 I think it, I think when he made shot Night of the Living Dead, he was like 26 or 27. Wow. So, uh, yeah, by any standard, that's still pretty young unless you're 23. So he, he had, um, he and his buddies were like, let's make a horror movie, but let's not make a stupid horror movie. Let's make one with like an actual plot that explores like deep themes to like a good movie. Let's, let's make the first good horror movie. Well, yeah.
Starting point is 00:22:58 So, and we'll delve into that a little more, but that, that was definitely a different thing at the time. And the other different thing was that all of the horror movies up to that point, uh, they were called the universal monsters from universal studios, you know, all the kind of the classic Frankenstein and Dracula and creature from the black lagoon and the werewolf. And, uh, that was where that was mainstream horror. And George Romero comes along and says, um, how about zombies? And everyone said, what in the world is a zombie?
Starting point is 00:23:29 And he said, well, let me define that for every future generation of movie and TV goers and lovers. Yeah. And there had been zombie movies before, but they had been things like, like Dr. Caligari's cabinet, somebody who was under the control of something, someone else or something like that. There was a hypnotist or this was like the first time what we think of as zombies were ever introduced, like flesh eating ghouls who were dead and come back to life.
Starting point is 00:24:00 Yeah. Just what you think of as a zombie. This guy started that genre, like you said. Yeah. Uh, shot it outside and in Pittsburgh, uh, on about a hundred and fifteen thousand dollar budget ended up grossing 12 million domestic. Not bad. And I think close to 20 worldwide and, um, was eventually selected by the Library of
Starting point is 00:24:23 Congress for preservation in the national film registry. It's a good movie. It's a very good movie. Uh, he shot it in black and white to save on cost, even though color was the standard by that point. And, uh, black and white is also a little more forgiving for rudimentary special effects. And, uh, one of the revolutionary things he did was, uh, cast a black actor as the lead. And for no other reason than, Hey, this guy, Dwayne Jones is really good.
Starting point is 00:24:51 Exactly. Right. Like he didn't go back and go, Oh, well, you know, our, our hero's black, so we need to make the, the whole thing of meditation on race and have them confront racism. It was just, here's the script and then the guy playing the lead just happens to be black. Right. And he was the best guy in the auditions. And you know, in 1968, this didn't really happen.
Starting point is 00:25:13 You didn't just cast a black guy as a lead actor for no, with no like ulterior motive, basically. Right. So I read this review from the, from the time from 1969, the year after it came out, a young Roger Ebert went and watched it and he wrote, um, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a pretty, pretty interesting review, which is basically it was about the reaction of the audience. And he went to a Saturday matinee that was populated almost entirely by 10, 11 year
Starting point is 00:25:42 olds. Oh, wow. And they were used to seeing the creature from the black lagoon or Frankenstein or, um, you know, just, just movies that any kid could handle and could enjoy watching and, you know, fun, scary kind of stuff. Yeah. And that's how the, the, that was how the crowd reacted for the first half of the movie. But then about the point where, and here's, here come spoilers, everybody.
Starting point is 00:26:11 If you haven't seen Night of the Living Dead, just hit yourself in the knee with a hammer. Um, you, the, the, the, the teenage couple go to get gas. And when their car blows up and is engulfed in flames, they die, they're burned to death. They said, right about that time, the tone, the mood of the theater changed and there was no like gleeful screaming anymore. Kids were starting to like not move and were afraid to like move in their seats and some were quietly crying to themselves. And from that, the whole, the whole point on, it just got worse and worse for these little
Starting point is 00:26:45 kids watching this movie. So it was a huge, uh, impact on horror movies, a, it, uh, like you said earlier, it was kind of the first one to really sort of delve into other issues. Like if, if you look up like significance of Night of the Living Dead or, um, meaning of Night of the Living Dead or something like that, there are scores of articles that have been written over the years of how it was a metaphor for the Vietnam war or an allegory about distrust of authority or the collapse of traditional family. And I think Romero said like, I didn't necessarily mean all these things, but you can certainly
Starting point is 00:27:22 find it in the movie. It is art. Like one of the great revelations of my adult life is that the artist, the writer, the songwriter, the, um, the author rarely intends to imbue as much meaning into their work as people take from it, that that's part of art as interpretation in that neat, like, you know, if you're a writer, if you're a young writer right now, who's just sitting there racking your brain for how to insert metaphor and, and meaning into this, just write your story and people are going to find it for themselves.
Starting point is 00:28:00 Yeah, agreed. I wish somebody had told me that when I was younger. I had teachers that said stuff like that. Oh, I didn't. Like good college professors in English that would, when students would argue like, I think he means this. He would say like, you know, he may or she may not have meant anything. Right.
Starting point is 00:28:17 That's the revelation. I had teachers that would just go wrong. The other thing about Night of the Living Dead is it spawned, um, obviously the, the zombie genre and, uh, sequels, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, uh, the walking dead, remakes, like, Shout out, shout out, Steven, you. Yeah. Right.
Starting point is 00:28:40 Yeah. Why not? I'm still into the walking dead. You. Yeah. We talked about this. Yes. Okay.
Starting point is 00:28:48 Uh, anyway, zombies are, I think, still hot and we can. So hot. We owe that all to Mr. Romero, master of the genre. Yep. Took one more thing too that, that Night of the Living Dead did that they weren't the first, but very famously Romero did was kill off his hero senselessly and shockingly. Yeah. At the end.
Starting point is 00:29:14 Good point. Thanks, man. Okay. So let's move on. You said 1973. Yes. Day after Christmas. If you've ever been, uh, in Washington D.C. at the end of M Street, you might have noticed
Starting point is 00:29:28 very, uh, during the daytime, ordinary set of stairs at nighttime, maybe they look creepy to you because those are the Exorcist stairs. Yeah. I'm trying to conjure the music in my head, but all I'm coming up with is the Unsolved Mysteries music. It was not. It's not quite right. So close, but it's not, I'm so unsatisfied right now.
Starting point is 00:29:49 So the Exorcist was, uh, based on a book by William Peter Blatty who, uh, wrote this, uh, in 1971 and then in 73, the movie was made, uh, and there's, I think I referenced not too long ago, a great Mark Marin interview with, um, William Friedkin, where he talks about the audition process for Linda Blair. So you should go listen to that because it was pretty insightful. But, um, the Exorcist really kind of changed the game, um, in that it was, A, it spawned a bit of a subgenre of, um, demonic movies. Sure.
Starting point is 00:30:28 They were like religious based. Yeah. Even though I guess Rosemary's Baby was before that, but the Exorcist was such a mega hit and it was nominated for Best Picture, the first horror movie to be nominated, um, for that. And it was just like, it was a big deal. It was. It sold six million tickets in about two months.
Starting point is 00:30:49 Yeah. It's amazing. This was a horror movie, right? And it came out in nowhere, um, apparently the effect it had on audiences was extremely pronounced. There was a woman in Boston who had to be carried from the theater and she goes, it cost me $4 but I only lasted 20 minutes. So, like, that's the stories of that got around and people wanted to see, you know, this movie
Starting point is 00:31:15 can't be that scary and they went and they were like, oh my God, that movie is that scary. Yeah. And it holds up too. I mean, um, special effects are, they'd never quite hold up, but it's still a very creepy movie. Um, very famously, uh, Linda Blair played the little girl who was possessed by a demon and, uh, the, the, the heavy hitters were called in to exercise esteem and including, um, a Max van Seedal who was only 44 when he played this guy in his easily in his 70s.
Starting point is 00:31:50 Yeah. Was he Benjamin Button? Well, no, they, they made him up. Wow. They did a great job. Yeah. Which I don't see why they felt the need to do that. I know they, um, God, who else did they almost cast?
Starting point is 00:32:03 Oh, uh, Brando, they almost cast Brando, but that would have been a colossal mistake. Well, Friedkin said, you know, as soon as you do that, it's a Marlon Brando movie. Yeah. And I think it's a picture, a Brando picture. Sure. That's what they said. Uh, and he did want it to be a Brando picture. He wanted to be the exorcist.
Starting point is 00:32:20 Um, so the, the, you said it was based on a book from two years before by William Peter Blatty, he apparently was known as a comedy writer and he wanted to do something different. He said, Hey, wouldn't it be funny if the little girl's head spun around and she puked green bile? Wait, what do you hear what I ever do with the crucifix? Hello. So, um, he actually wrote the book because he wanted to scare America back to church. That was his aim with the book.
Starting point is 00:32:49 It may have worked. He believed that there was real evil going on in the world and that part of it was because of a, a loss of faith or a loss of religion, I guess, and that's what he wanted to do with it. Um, and when the movie came out, there was a huge pushback from religious authorities like Billy Graham said, he believed the movie itself was possessed by a demon. I'm not sure how that would happen, but that was like a huge thing at the time. Um, and a lot of, a lot of other religious establishment types were like, don't go see
Starting point is 00:33:21 that movie. It's evil. And there were some who, who were part of, part of religion, major organized religion who kind of saw through it and said, no, no, this is, it's good that we're talking about this, that they were telling people, you know, or people are seeing that there, there's such a thing as like good versus evil, literally combating on earth, you know, when people are talking about this and thinking about it. And so in that sense, the exorcist like really kind of went to bat for organized religion.
Starting point is 00:33:52 Oh, interesting. I saw another, um, criticism of it though that, that said one of the themes of the movie that the book hadn't really intended, but the movie picked up on and expounded on was intergenerational conflict that, that it was Reagan, the child represented the younger generation who was at war with the establishment and that it even goes, um, so far as to where her mother, the actress, the movie that she's working on is about a campus takeover by young radicals. Huh.
Starting point is 00:34:27 So that, that's kind of a theme that was apparently part of the subtext, but it was a major part of it in the movie at least. Interesting. Yeah, I thought so too, because apparently, I mean, you think of intergenerational conflict now, apparently in the late 60s and early 70s, it was sharper than it probably ever has been before or since. Yeah. Um, the only other thing I got is that the, uh, the green stuff that she projectiles
Starting point is 00:34:54 was, uh, Anderson's pea soup and a little bit of oatmeal for texture. Anderson's pea soup. Well, but you can't get that anymore. Chuck, let's do Jaws and then we'll take a break. I love talking about Jaws. Yeah. I mean, Jaws is on, you know, I did my top favorite movies list, uh, at one point on our website and I listed Jaws as my favorite movie.
Starting point is 00:35:16 Favorite of all time. Yeah. I mean, that list changes, but it's Jaws is always in my top five. I can watch it anytime it's on, uh, it is one of the, I've all, I've often said it's a perfect movie. Um, and what I mean by that is there's just not a misstep like the casting was perfect. The acting was great. The script was great.
Starting point is 00:35:38 It played out just perfectly throughout the film. Um, he like Spielberg was just a master storyteller. Yeah. With that movie. You were talking about how young George Romero was in Night of the Living Dead. Spielberg was 26 when he made Jaws. He was 13 years old and he was apparently scared to death when he finished filming. The schedule had been for 55 days.
Starting point is 00:36:05 It went to 159. Yeah. He had, I think been allotted $4 million. You ended up spending 12 million on it. Um, yeah, largely because a shooting on water is notoriously difficult and B, uh, the shark mechanical shark they use was, uh, legendarily, um, wonky and how it are not wonky, but wanky wonky. It didn't work.
Starting point is 00:36:32 No, it rarely worked. So they spent a lot of time and burn a lot of, uh, hours trying to get this shark to do its thing and, uh, so much so that it didn't even make that many appearances in the movie. I think they even kind of scaled it back and that ended up being better for the movie because you didn't get as much shark. I looked up the, um, the urban legend about the shark being named after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce. And apparently it's true.
Starting point is 00:36:59 Oh, really? Yeah. Bruce Rainer was the name of Spielberg's lawyer and that was the nickname for the mechanical shark on the set was Bruce. That's pretty funny. So with Jaws, right, we're, we're talking about horror movies that changed the genre. Jaws not only changed the horror genre, it changed movie making to this day and in multiple ways, multiple massive ways.
Starting point is 00:37:24 It changed the entire film industry almost single-handedly. Yeah. It was, uh, at the time there was a, uh, there was no such thing. You take it for granted now, but there was no such thing as a quote unquote summer release. No. A lot of theaters closed down because AC wasn't in every theater and people didn't want to sit around in a hot movie theater for two hours. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:37:50 A summer release or a tentpole film or a blockbuster feature, like Jaws was the first one of all those. At the time when Jaws came out, they used to, um, release a movie on maybe one, two screens and say New York or LA for a week. And then it'd make its way to, you know, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago for a few weeks and then eventually it'd make it to your small town six, eight weeks later. Yeah. That was how movies were released.
Starting point is 00:38:21 Not Jaws. The movie was released on 435 screens across the country, which is huge, which is part of the, part of the, um, summer blockbuster release playbook now. Yeah. And it was also the first movie to, to spend lots and lots of money on marketing. Um, and so I think the studios were like, wait a minute, you spend some dough on marketing, you release this thing wide, you can make a ton of money in the first month that a movie's out and you're kind of set.
Starting point is 00:38:52 Like after that, it's anything else's gravy. Yeah. And that's after the first like week or two probably. Yeah. It was, yeah. The whole, the whole point of blockbuster now is to get that opening weekend to make all your money back in the opening weekend and everything else is gravy on top of it. Right.
Starting point is 00:39:08 Jaws was, uh, it didn't make its, I don't know, maybe it did make its money back in the first weekend because it hit a hundred million dollars in like 78 days or something incredible like that because it was the first movie to hit a hundred million dollars. And it did it in just a couple months even. Yeah. It eventually went on to make, uh, to about 260 million dollars domestically, uh, which is, I mean, that's a great take now. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:39:33 You know, much less, uh, the mid 1970s. Sure. For a $12 million spend for sure. My only beef here is that I would not consider Jaws a horror movie. Yeah. I think it's an adventure film. Yeah. I guess you're right.
Starting point is 00:39:47 It's a very scary antagonist. Yeah. But, um, it's amazing how much I quote that movie in my day-to-day life. Yeah. A shush, shush, shhark! What? That's a great, that's a classic. All right.
Starting point is 00:40:01 Let's take a break. I'm going to meditate on that line and we'll talk about a few other scary movies, including one that was originally titled Scary Movie. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.
Starting point is 00:40:48 It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?
Starting point is 00:41:06 You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough
Starting point is 00:41:35 or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.
Starting point is 00:41:51 And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.
Starting point is 00:42:06 Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Starting point is 00:42:40 Okay, moving on to Halloween, Halloween, Chuck, 1978, I believe, Halloween. Yes, John Carpenter, uh, the youngest John Carpenter who originally titled this movie The Babysitter Murders. No. Little on the nose. Yeah. Pretty terrifying title. I guess.
Starting point is 00:43:02 Uh, young Jamie Lee Curtis, her very first movie. Was it really? Yeah. Well, she went on to become known as the Scream Queen for all the horror movie she was in. Totally. And this was, uh, shot in 20 days in, uh, South Pasadena as the Midwest and, um, it's credited as being, uh, birthing the slasher genre. Yeah, it did.
Starting point is 00:43:27 So there were slasher films before it, the town that dreaded sundown. Good movie. It was like based on a true crime story, actually, in Texas, uh, one called Black Christmas, The Grabster Sights from 1974, haven't heard of that one. But the idea of, um, of a faceless, almost, like, non-entity entity coming at you, uh, and relentlessly stalking you, being impervious to harm as The Grabster puts it, um, and just coming at you again and again trying to kill you, that, that was, that was all established by Halloween and it was done, like, to, to great effect as well.
Starting point is 00:44:09 Yeah. And it holds up. It's still scary. Uh, Michael Myers, of course, was the killer. Um, the, the music that John Carpenter scored, I mean, he, he scores most of his movies himself, but very iconic, uh, basic thing. I think he only took a couple of days to come up with it, but like the Michael Myers character and the mask are so iconic, the music is so iconic.
Starting point is 00:44:33 You know about the mask, right? Shatner. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. I'm going to verify that it was true and it definitely is true that Michael Myers mask is actually a Captain Kirk Star Trek mask painted white. Yep.
Starting point is 00:44:49 And that is history. Yep. In the, in the script, uh, when it came to the mask, it just said, uh, pale, neutral features of a man. Yeah. Which makes the whole thing even creepier because he's an implacid or a, uh, is that the right word? No, no, no.
Starting point is 00:45:07 It's just, it's just almost like a, just an emotionless killer. Oh yeah. It made the fact that he was merciless, ruthless, pitiless, and, and all arbitrarily killing people almost, um, all the more pronounced because his expression never changes. Well, to me, the two things that were creepiest about Halloween was the expression never changed because of that mask and he did not run like he would just walk and you still got the feeling like you can't outrun this guy even though he's walking. That was another creepy part about it.
Starting point is 00:45:40 It follows with the walking aspect of it. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. In the same way that like 28 days later was freaky in that it took zombies and made them run. Yeah. Or I remember when I saw, uh, Friday the 13th, I'm sorry, uh, Nightmare on Elm Street
Starting point is 00:45:56 for the first time and Freddy Krueger was running around. I was like, that's not what scary dudes do. Yeah. Scary dudes don't trot. They walk very creepily toward you and still somehow gain speed on you even though you're running full speed. Well, Freddy scared me to death the first time I saw that movie. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:46:14 The first one was a pretty good one. But Halloween established, like you said, it established the slasher genre and everything about slasher films still today, all rooted in, in Halloween, John Carpenter's tropes. Yeah. And again, like you said, there were a couple of other slasher films before, but none of them grossed close to 50 million bucks. Wow. Is that how much Halloween made?
Starting point is 00:46:35 Yeah. 47 million domestic at about a $300,000 budget. So it, uh, you know, it's sort of like with the Exorcist. Like there were other movies that sort of did this thing before, but when you have a huge hit that does it is when it sort of redefines the genre because it makes money. Yeah. And that's all that matters. Everyone starts paying attention after that.
Starting point is 00:46:56 All right. What's next? What's next, my friend, is a movie that came out when, I don't know, were you still in college? Uh, no. You must have just been out then. I was out a few years. Okay.
Starting point is 00:47:09 Well, regardless around our college era, this movie came out because up to this point, everything's come out either when we were little or before we were born. And this one was right in our wheelhouse. It was the Blair Witch Project, which came out in 1998. Yeah. And, uh, one of the big things that, um, Blair Witch Project did, well, two things really, it established the found footage, uh, genre or subgenre that is so overplayed now, uh, in the viral marketing campaign.
Starting point is 00:47:37 And that's how I came upon it. I remember very specifically, uh, being in the apartment of Scott of Toledo, who you know, he shot our TV show, one of my oldest friends, and I was sitting in his apartment on Claremont Avenue, uh, in Decatur. And I happened upon this, and this was pre-Facebook. I don't even know how I found it, you know, before things were being shared around. Right. And that happened upon this website, the very first Blair Witch Project website.
Starting point is 00:48:04 And I was like, dude, come over here and check this out. This is the scariest thing I've ever seen. Yeah. And I remember the, the website set it up as if it was real and that this found footage thing, it's so overdone now, it's hard to go back in time and remember when it was fresh. But I remember looking at it and being like, did this happen? Did they really find this footage of this murder in the woods? Like, I got to see this.
Starting point is 00:48:29 That was the rumor that this was actually real, man. And this is, like you said, I mean, this is before the found footage genre. So people were being exposed to this concept for the first time and were kind of falling for it. I mean, first of all, you're either in college or you're just recently out of college. So you're maybe slightly more gullible than you are 10 years on. You're ready to believe it. You want to believe, right?
Starting point is 00:48:50 So yeah, the idea that this was actual found footage, it just made it all the more enjoyable and people were buying into it. And I think the other part of it too was that the filmmakers, partly because they didn't have the budget for actual effects, left a lot of the scariest parts to your imagination. Yeah, nor did they have the talent to make a good narrative film. I mean, they worked on a 64 page script, which I was surprised that it was that big. Where they shot it for eight days and originally they were going to make it like a documentary about the found footage.
Starting point is 00:49:28 Right. And then one of them had a flash of perspective and was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's just release it like it's found footage. And that was the rest was history. Yeah. And I'm poking fun. That was not very nice at all. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick or Myrick, the co-directors, they should be credited
Starting point is 00:49:48 with a truly ingenious campaign and invention that well, they weren't the first to come up with found footage. Right. There were some films before I've never known how to pronounce it, Mondo Kane or Mondo Kane. I think Kane. It's from 1962 and it was supposedly a documentary about like some like weird tribal rituals. I think there's hedge shrinking may be involved and it purported to be like real footage. Same with Cannibal Holocaust, which if you've never seen Cannibal Holocaust, go out and watch
Starting point is 00:50:24 it right now. Yeah. It's very disturbing. And it's so disturbing that the director of the movie was charged with murder because they believed that the actual murders depicted, they were so realistic. They thought that it was a snuff film basically. But it was supposed to be a documentary as well. So there was an idea of like found footage or documentary style horror movies that had
Starting point is 00:50:48 come before, but nothing like the Blair Witch, where it was just straight up. These people, we found their old camera and this is what was on it. Well, and they were smart enough to kind of dig up an old thing that never went huge, you know. They're like, hey man, like these other movies, they never really hit it big. And they, it was a timing thing. They, I mean, hats off for them, to them. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:51:14 Good for them and to them. Nice going dudes. All right Chuck. Scream. Yeah. Scream. I tease that it was originally titled Scary Movie. I'm glad it wasn't because Scary Movie is awesome.
Starting point is 00:51:28 I don't know if Scary Movie ever would have been called, maybe it would have never been made. Or maybe they would have called that Scream. Oh yeah, I guess so. So Scream was a very big deal when it came out. The writer Kevin Williamson, and this is still the highest growing slasher film of all time, basically. Scream.
Starting point is 00:51:45 Yeah. It was huge. I got Neve Campbell's haircut as a result of it. Like it was a big, big pop culture watermark. It was. And one of the big things about it, aside from the boatloads of money that it made, was it spawned a subgenre called Metahorror, which is, even though it had been done by no less than its own director, Wes Craven, with Wes Craven's New Nightmare, two years before Scream.
Starting point is 00:52:12 It wasn't nearly as popular, but Metahorror is this idea, and if you've ever seen Scream, you know they're constantly just referencing horror movies. Like this is where, you know, you don't go out and make out in the car because that's where you get killed, and then they would do that and get killed. Right. Although I don't think that specific thing happened. Like don't go back into the house. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:52:32 Like all the tropes of horror movies are addressed in the movie. And they're talking about them as the horror movie tropes. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Metahorror. Yeah. And there are plenty of other things that came along, Metahorror examples, like have
Starting point is 00:52:48 you seen Tucker and Dale vs. Evil? No, it's a good one. Oh, check it out, man. All right. That's a good movie. Zombieland. Yeah, I did see that. Where he's rattling off all of the things that you need to know to survive a zombie apocalypse
Starting point is 00:53:02 that he learned from zombie movies, right? And then Cabin in the Woods. Did you see that one? Oh, great movie. It was a great movie. I thought it was really good. I mean, from beginning to end, it was a great movie. Did you like Scream?
Starting point is 00:53:14 Yeah. Love Scream. I liked all the Screams. I only saw the first two. The second one, I think, might have been even better than the first, to me. And the second one shot, Emily worked on that. It was shot here at Agnes Scott College partially. Oh, is that right?
Starting point is 00:53:32 Yeah. You have to go back and watch it, knowing that now, and be like, oh, I've driven past that place. So I got a few tidbits. Like I said, initial title was Scary Movie. Number two, the Weinstein Brothers initially offered it to George Romero and Sam Raimi. What else do I have here? Drew Barrymore was originally supposed to play Sidney, the lead character.
Starting point is 00:53:55 And then she said, no, how about if I just played that girl at the beginning, which kind of was a big thing, because you see Drew Barrymore, and it was a big shock when she died in the first scene. Right. You know? You can't kill off your heroine right away. Yeah. And I remember that first scene really, really scaring me when I saw it the first time in
Starting point is 00:54:18 the theater. Yeah, it is. It's a scary, gruesome, gory heart. Yeah. Very well played. And then before he went to Nef Campbell, he went out to Alicia Witt, Brittany Murphy, and Reese Witherspoon. And then Nef Campbell was like, no, that was your first choice, right?
Starting point is 00:54:36 And then the mask, the iconic screen mask, apparently was an off-the-shelf mask. Wow. That made that company's money. Yeah. And the Weinstein's didn't like it. They were like, I hate that mask. Everything else is fine. Huh.
Starting point is 00:54:51 But Wes Craven said, no, it's got to be that mask. Don't be stupid, Bob. All right, we're going to finish up with our own edition here. Finally 1960. Yes. Psycho. I can't believe this wasn't in the list. I think Ed kept this off the list to toy with somebody he doesn't like specifically.
Starting point is 00:55:15 That's the explanation. Oh, yeah, because Psycho changed everything. Yeah, it really did. I mean, it was the, you could say that it was one of the first slasher flicks. It was an early psychological thriller. It was based on the real life story of Ed Gein. I mean, it doesn't exactly mirror Ed Gein's life, but the idea of being obsessed with your mother so much that you will commit murder is definitely rooted in Ed Gein's story.
Starting point is 00:55:48 If you're not familiar with Ed Gein, he not only, I don't even know if he was a serial killer. He only, I think he murdered one, maybe two people, but more than anything, he was a grave robber, but he'd like to dress up in people's skin, women's skin, and pretend he was his own mother, which, man, that's a lot of years on the couch working that one out. Or you can just die at the hands of cops, one of the two. And he also inspired Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yeah, and Buffalo Bill, of course.
Starting point is 00:56:23 Oh, yeah, yeah. The sound of the lamps. Yeah, one guy inspired all those guys. So I found this article, Psycho colon, the horror movie that changed the genre by Owen Gleberman, or is it Glyberman? Gleber? Gleberman? I think.
Starting point is 00:56:40 He wrote for a legendary critic, wrote for EW for years and years, and now writes for a variety. Oh, he does? Yeah, but he put it best. He said, well, you know, the iconic shower scene, first of all, is hugely important because it was, Hitchcock really kind of ripped up the script, not literally, but the horror movie script. When he kills off Janet Lee halfway through the movie, it was, you just didn't do that
Starting point is 00:57:06 at the time. No, and we came out of nowhere. And we've seen that come up later on, like at the end of Night of the Living Dead, or Drew Barrymore and Scream, Hitchcock was the first one to do that. Yeah, and Gleberman puts it this way. He said he was also slicing through years, decades, centuries even, of audience expectation that the hero or heroine of the fictional work would be shielded and protected, or would at least die, usually at the end, in a way that made some sort of moral dramatic sense.
Starting point is 00:57:35 Right. In Psycho, the murder made no sense at all. Right. And he really kind of hits it on the head there. It was like, if you've never seen Psycho or heard of it, the movie's just going along about this woman who like steals some money from her work, and she's kind of on the lamb and checks into this hotel, and you don't even know it's a horror movie. You're thinking it's a movie about a lady who steals money and is trying to get away
Starting point is 00:57:59 from getting caught. Right. And then just out of nowhere, she's hacked up in a shower. And at the time, audiences, and still if you haven't seen it, it's shocking, but audiences were just like, they didn't know what they'd seen. Right, exactly. So not only is the hero no longer safe, that means maybe you're not either. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:58:21 So it had a really huge unsettling effect. And then Owen Gleberman points out that Hitchcock was so smart that he even made a nod to the type of Pat-expected horror that the audience was used to in the house that he used for Psycho, the Bates house. Yeah. There was this huge rambling Victorian mansion on a hill, and there was lots of taxidermy, and it was like over-decorated and just creepy. But up to that point, like that was horror.
Starting point is 00:58:57 That was what a horror movie looked like and felt like. And this was kind of Hitchcock's homage to that. But at the same time, he was also putting the heel of his shoe on it as well. Yeah. And that house was, I mean, almost a character in itself. Like if you've ever seen the recreation of it in Los Angeles, I think it's universal. Did you see it? Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:59:19 I never did. The closest I came was, I think, when different strokes went there. That's the closest you got to it? Yeah. Yeah, man. If you've ever seen this thing in person, like, it sends a chill up your back just seeing the thing in, like, a sunny Los Angeles day still. That's awesome.
Starting point is 00:59:38 It's such an iconic house. It's like, oh, man, there it is. That's where Norman Bates lives. He's the most disturbed human of all time. Right. So in the movie, of course, there was the mother character who is sort of referenced throughout the movie. And it is not until the end that you realize that there is no mother.
Starting point is 00:59:56 Mother's dead. Right. There's just Norman Bates and all his rage and hang-ups. Yeah. All the monster movies about giant ants or the creature from the Black Lagoon, monsters, things that were in other that a normal person had to do battle with, that was gone. Now the monster had been on screen the whole time and you had noticed it. And now, what do you think about your neighbor who has seemed a little weird from time to
Starting point is 01:00:24 time before? Could he be a murderer who thinks he's his mother? Who knows? Yeah. This is what Hitchcock did to everybody back in 1960. And you almost get like, I think Owen Gliberman points it out. Yeah, he does at the beginning. He basically says like, we probably didn't see Psycho.
Starting point is 01:00:43 If you're reading this, you're probably too young to have seen Psycho in 1960. And we should all feel sad that we didn't because it's so changed everything. We can't do anything but take it for granted now. And everything that's come since then has been trying to regain that shock and horror that it instilled in audiences and thus far, no one's actually been able to do it. Yeah. And the other thing I remember when I saw it, when I was younger, I think I saw this when I was like 14-ish.
Starting point is 01:01:13 And I think it had this impact on just about everyone. I don't think I took a shower for a month. I was straight up bathtub, curtain open, doors open, windows open. Making your mom watch. She's keeping watch. No, that would have been full circle practice. You didn't even want to have anything to do with your mom. No, man.
Starting point is 01:01:35 Like, it changed the shower curtain industry for a while after that. Yeah. Very good movie. And there were a couple of Hitchcock movies in the last few years. Two different ones. One with Anthony Hopkins and one with Toby Jones. They were both really good. And one was about the years that he was making Psycho.
Starting point is 01:01:57 The other was about the years when he was making the birds. And they were both really, really good movies. And you should check those out too. You should repeat that. We just got a rare interjection from Noel. So go ahead and say it again, Josh, in case it didn't come through. So Noel just said that the director of the Black Coat's daughter is Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in Psycho's Son.
Starting point is 01:02:19 He also did another movie now that Noel says that. Thanks, Noel. It's called The Pretty Little Thing That Lives in the House, which is another horror movie, The Ghost Story. I think that was his first one, and I think that might be on Netflix. It's great. It's a really great movie, too. Man, this has got me fired up to see some horror movies.
Starting point is 01:02:39 It's a renaissance of horror. Yeah, it's tough, though, because Emily doesn't really dig it, so I have to just find a alone time to do this. Yeah, to watch it in the bathroom. All right, well, if you want to know more about horror movies, go watch horror movies. Go forth. And let us know what we missed, for God's sake. Yeah, if you want to check out Grabster's list, type in horror movies on the search
Starting point is 01:03:02 bar at HouseOfWorks.com, and it'll bring up this fine, fine list that you'll disagree with. And since I said disagree, it's time for Listener Mail. This is from Eric, and I'm going to call it what he called it, a schoolhouse rock and nostalgia theory. All right. I think it's pretty right on. This just came in, actually.
Starting point is 01:03:20 This is a hot take. Hey, guys, in schoolhouse rock, so Josh made the statement that Gen Xers are most nostalgic generation and attribute it to the success of schoolhouse rock. I'm going to offer my own theory. I propose that Gen X is nostalgic, mostly for pop culture, because of the proliferate that word, of child targeted advertisements and marketing in the 70s and 80s. Oh, maybe certainly something we've talked about this theory's got legs while our little impressionable brains were developing.
Starting point is 01:03:48 We're being taught by those who are steering pop culture to long for and find fulfillment in the toys and other products. Our cartoons were pushing on us. Now as adults, those messages are still deep in our psyche, and we can't shake the idea that we still really need those Star Wars action figures to be happy, not because the toys and the shows were so great, because we had been tricked into believing we need them. I have nothing scientific to back this up.
Starting point is 01:04:11 Just a hunch. Yeah. What? You mean there hasn't been a study from MIT on Star Wars toys? I'm kind of surprised by that as well. I thought you were being facetious at first, and then it just took a turn. Yeah. I don't know which way it's up at this point.
Starting point is 01:04:27 Nothing scientific to back this up, but I'd love to hear what you all think. See if anyone out there is any respectable and informed input, love what you guys do. I love you, Eric. That is from Eric Lewin, and Eric, I think that's super valid. Yeah, I do too, Eric. I think you've really hit upon something here. And that's all I have to say about it. If you have a great theory, fan theory, real life theory, whatever, we want to hear them.
Starting point is 01:04:52 They're, especially if it's interesting. Yeah. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K Podcast, or Josh M. Clark. You can post it on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant, or Stuff You Should Know. You can send us an email at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com, and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of
Starting point is 01:05:33 the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.
Starting point is 01:06:02 Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. Get a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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