Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Vampires and Bloodsucking Leeches with Sammy Smart

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

In an audacious move, Wes decides to tell the grossest set of stories that Tooth & Claw has covered yet as the guys are joined by first-time guest Sammy Smart of the podcast Too Scary; Didn't Watch. If you think you might not have the stomach for the worst of it, feel free to skip as much as you want, it's totally understandable. Timestamp for the content warning: skip from 33:18 to 44:41 ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome everyone to Tooth and Claw podcast. We have our wildlife biologist and my older brother, Wes Larson, with us. Wes, give us a howl. How. Wait, a howl? A howl or a howl? We got Mike Smith, our producer. Is that what we're calling you now, Mike?

Yeah, slash co-host. I mean, he's my... Slash friend. I'd say Jeff's ex-rumate, Mike Smith. Perfect. And then we got me, Jeff Larson, Mike's Smith's ex-roomate and West, do you want to introduce our guest today? Yes, I'd love to.

We have Sammy Smart, my friend, and one of the hosts of one of my favorite podcasts, Too Scary Didn't Watch. Hello. Hey, Sammy. Very good, man. That's great. Sammy, we're so happy you're here in joining us. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. I've guessed it a couple times. now on Too Scary Didn't Watch. And I've kind of been, you know, trying to figure out a good opportunity to have at least one of you ladies onto the podcast. And we had been doing spooky themed stories all month. And so it just seemed like a good time to have you on. Tis the season.

Yeah, I'm going to. Let's recap. What have we done? We did a, what type of spider was it? Brazilian wandering spider. Spider. Fat bear week. Yeah, not that spooky.

And. now this one. So really not that many. But we've been trying our best. And I don't know. I know you're a big fan of scary movies so much so that you started a podcast. And the podcast is kind of for all those out of you out there that aren't big scary movie people, it's the perfect podcast for you. Because the idea is that Sammy really likes them, but your co-hosts don't.

Yep. So you'll kind of recap the movie for them. Yes. It's really fun. They were big on reading the Wikipedia synopsis of horror movies. I feel like a lot of people out there I've heard that's a common thing that people do. So this is just a little more detailed version of that where we get all the horrifying details for you. And Wes, your episodes that you've guest on are some of my favorite episodes.

We did Anaconda and Cocaine Bear. So great place to start. Nice. Some classics. Just high cinema. Yeah. If you do, what's it called, Hurricane Sharks? Oh, Shark Nado.

If you do Shark Nato, I'll come on that. Great. If I'm invited. Yes, of course. Just the Shark Nado expert. Hell yeah. I got to be honest, like the topic today, it would be like if you had me on to talk about human centipede or something like that.

I feel really bad. We're going to jump in the deep end here. Yeah. I do think. this is maybe the grossest episode that we're going to produce so far. Well, then I'm the perfect guest. I can't wait. It's horrific. So I'm happy you're here because I know you like horror. I do, yeah.

Before we get into it, though, how's your October been? It's been good. I've been watching a lot of horror movies. I have noticed that I do this thing where I will put off watching a horror movie because I think we're going to do it on the podcast eventually and so I think well I better save watching it for when the time comes and I've freed myself of that for this month and it is it's really wonderful to just be able to watch whatever horror movie I feel like watching what a concept that's great whenever us three are together I feel like whenever like we make a suggestion for a horror movie west will either say I watched that a month ago or like a week ago.

Or like, I need to watch that with someone else. Yeah. It's true. So we end up watching very haunted mansion. Haunted mansion. Well, we have a very interesting way of picking movies when we're together. And I'm not sure if you've ever done this. But we queue up Super Smash Brothers, the game, the Nintendo game.

Okay. And we assign all the characters just like a computer player, so we're not controlling them. And then each character is assigned a movie. and whichever character wins the Super Smash Bros. Fight is the movie that we have to watch. And sometimes we pick a movie that none of us want to watch and we assign it to one of the characters. And unfortunately, I feel like recently we've been on a real hot streak of watching movies that none of us want to watch, including Haunted Mansion. The recent one, yeah?

Yeah, it was bad. Yeah, heard that was pretty bad. They keep putting Jared Leto in movies, huh? Yeah, we don't need him. We're on the same page there. He needs to be out of all movies. Wait a minute. Who was he in Haunted Mansion? I didn't even notice. He was a bad guy.

He was like, he was a voice. Oh, was he like just in his face? Yeah. What the heck? Yeah. Oh, he keeps finding ways to getting in. Wow. Perfect role for him.

That's like, what's his name in Prometheus? Guy Pearce. Guy Pearce. Just plays an old dude. Yeah, it's just like, you didn't need to hire this person for that role. Yeah. I also watched Totally Killer, which I, hated. I don't know if you saw that one, but I did see it. Yes. I wouldn't say I hated it,

but I certainly didn't love it. I guess I know you work in movies, so I should be a little more careful. No, no, no. Say you've got to be true to yourself. You don't, you don't have to be afraid. All right. But yeah, pretty mid movie, I'd say. Yeah. Yeah. You know, my girlfriend liked it all right. I wasn't a big fan. Okay. So, you know, we can talk movies all day. We can catch up all day, but we got, we got stuff to talk about. And I'm going to run you guys through my thought process in putting this episode together. So initially, I wanted to do something that just really leaned into October, leaned into Halloween. And I thought, we should do a cryptid. Like, we should do another, we did a Bigfoot episode last year. I thought, we'll do a cryptid episode.

And then I was like, let's do vampires. You know, vampires are going to be a fun cryptid to talk about. I've always been obsessed with vampires. And then I thought, oh, you know what to be cool. to do vampires and then talk about some animals that also suck blood. And so I did a quick Google search of animals that suck blood. And leeches were the first one that came up. And that was one I wanted to talk about. And so I was like, oh, I'll look into leeches a little. And immediately this kind of just turned into an episode about leeches.

So we are going to, we're going to talk about vampires a little bit. And then we're going to get into leeches. And there is going to be a point where I do a little, a little, disclaimer that there's probably like five minutes in this episode that if you have a fear of worms or a fear of parasites or of things being in your body you're you're not going to want to listen to that part you're going to want to skip ahead and i'm not joking it was hard for me and from some of our listener questions it seems like maybe some of our listeners are worms yeah we do have some more than listeners no i'm going to be as generous as i possibly can

to our worm listeners. So, yeah. Because we love them. We love all our listeners and we love the worm. I don't love, I don't love them. You don't love the worms. Okay. I love the worms.

Maybe after this, you will. All right. So we're going to talk about vampires first. The origin of this vampire myth is kind of tricky to trace. I looked into it quite a bit. It sounds like ancient cultures all the way back to Mesopotamia, to ancient Greece. They all had demons and spirits that somewhat resembled vampires. But the root of more modern vampires can be traced back to Eastern Europe about a thousand years ago.

And it's Slavic people in like Bulgaria and whatnot. They believed in a ghost monster that pretty much acted like a poltergeist and would spread disease and general trouble in their villages. It was like non-corporial. It didn't have a body. It didn't drink blood. But it had some similar kind of things that our vampires today have. But still very different.

And then the Holy Roman Empire took control of these areas in the 1600s, and their soldiers heard about these different myths, and they took this myth of the vampire into bigger cities like Vienna and Paris, later even the Americas. And when they made it to those urban centers, there started to be more and more mythology piled on top. And the new characteristics were things like, you know, they didn't want to go out at night, they fed on blood, things that are much more typical. During the day, you mean. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. I didn't want to go out during the day. Thank you.

But a lot of these characteristics that they came up with may have had origins and just misunderstanding about like body decomposition or even diseases like rabies or this other disease called porphyria, which I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right or not. But essentially like they would see someone that they would dig up a body and they would see that like the gums were receding and the hair was still growing and they'd be like, oh my God, this thing's still alive, you know, and that, like, kind of built on that, that mythology. Or they would see someone rabid that was, like, biting people and acting like a crazed animal, and they would think, oh, wow, this is a monster, this is a vampire.

So over time those- I would go zombie, but sure. Yeah. Fair enough. I don't know if they had zombies yet, but this other disease also had some weird attributes. Like, people were afraid of the sunlight when they had this disease. garlic was like an irritant to them. A few other things.

During those times, people would do things to corpses to prevent them from becoming vampires. They'd cut off their heads. They'd bury them with religious artifacts. Or they would do the thing that we know kills any vampires. Sammy, what's that? Stab it in the heart? There you go. Stake in the heart.

Or whatever. But that would work on anybody, though, right? Yeah, that does tend to work on most things. We stabbed them in a heart. with a wooden steak. He died. Hence, he must be a vampire. Yeah, that's true. It does work on just about everything. Anyway, in the 1700s and 1800s, this vampire hysteria started really growing in Europe. It was reflected in the literature in the theater of the times. And because Gothic literature was so popular during those eras, vampires started taking on much more sinister and sometimes

much more romantic characteristics. So those characters went from being walking corpses and like non-corporeal ghosts to being seductive aristocrats. Hoties. Yeah, hoties, exactly. Cates. Yeah, capes. Hot people wear capes. Have you guys ever seen that Key and Peel sketch where there's like the sexy vampires

and there's the new vampire that like doesn't want to be sexy? And he's just kind of like, why is everyone acting so sexy? I have not. But Key and Peel, they don't miss. They don't. It's a great sketch. One of my favorites. So in 1897, a struggling Irish actor named Brueh and

Ram Stoker published a book that would introduce the world to what would become the most famous vampire of all time, who is, of course, Dracula. It was thought to be loosely inspired by the story of Vlad the Impaler, who was a bloodthirsty ruler of Wallachia in the 1400s. He would kill people and put their heads on stakes and impale people and leave them to die, picked apart by crows. But Dracula in the book was a really powerful vampire that could control minds, could turn into bats, could turn into wolves or mist and his evil was rooted in a really deep romanticism and a long-lossed love so again and like we're really leaning into this romantic side of vampires and and kind of you know this is like the the seedlings of like hold on tight spider monkey or whatever are more romantic vampires are saying

in twilight and whatnot. Jeff your background photo there's a gremlin whose ears just like perfectly match your head so it looks like that Ben Laniers. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, hell yeah. I didn't even notice that. We're almost through our vampire preamble here. But in 1922, Nosferatu was a film that was based on Dracula that started the idea that vampires cannot exist in sunlight. Vampires continued to permeate Western media in lots of different ways, but they really

weren't thought of sympathetic, thought of as sympathetic monsters until Anne Rice wrote interview with a vampire in 1976. And then she continued on with all. whole series of books called The Vampire Chronicles. The vampires in these books were powerful, fast, immortal, almost impossible to kill, but they were also really emotional and they longed for meaningful connections. So I think it was the first time that people really saw themselves in vampires and really thought of vampires as like complicated emotional beings. And that kind of vampire really made them a lot more popular and led to shows like Twilight or movies in shows like

Twilight, True Blood, my personal favorite, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and just led to like... Vampire Diaries. Yeah, I've never seen that one. I'm sure it's good. Me neither. I used to get, I looked like someone from it. Oh, okay. A vampire?

Yeah. Nice, dude. Sammy, do you have a favorite vampire show? I also started with Buffy. I was trying to think of like when I first got into vampires. It was definitely Buffy. I was in love with Spike. Yeah.

Hell yeah. Maybe it's... We all were. But I actually took a class in college called the vampire tradition. They like offered a vampire class. You should be teaching this. No, no, no, I've forgotten everything. This was a while ago.

But I was at San Francisco State. And I just found out. I was going to guess Transylvania. Yeah, yes, yes, yes. Transylvania, you. But I just found out that Anne Rice went to San Francisco State, which is kind of fun. Oh, wow, cool. That's awesome.

How was the class? Was it like one of the, Those classes that you think will be really fun and then they make it way harder than it deserves to be? No, I think it stayed pretty fun. It was, I think we even watched Twilight in it, which is the, you know, what could be more fun than that. For sure. I do you feel like the old Bella Lagosie, Dracula? Yeah.

It seems like maybe he was a little bit of a prototype for what eventually Anne Rice would be doing, right? A little more layered and complicated maybe. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I agree with that. I think, like, Dracula, even, like, in the book in Bram Stoker's Dracula, like, there is some emotion there, like, he's avenging or trying to, like, reconnect with this long-lost love. But I think, like, interview with the vampire made them, like, modern, you know,

they're like people living among us. It's not this ancient count that, you know. It's Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Yeah, exactly. Because Nosferatu kind of look like a dying Jeff Bezos or something. Not quite sexy. That's very true, actually. That's a great.

Yeah. Now I, you know, now I feel all sheepish. I didn't know we had a true vampire expert. Oh, no, I'm not. I'm not actually. But true blood was also a big one for me. I love true blood. I love true blood. Until they got into like fairies and stuff. Yeah, I went a little off the rails as many shows do. But, you know, those first couple seasons. They're great. And my favorite opening title sequence, I think, maybe of all time, great opening titles. It is. Oh, wow. That's a good. We should add that in. categories at the end. Favorite opening to a show. Okay. Put it in there. Okay. It's in there. Really wreck my brain.

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But we're going to talk about a little tiny animal vampire. And I already spoiled it for you guys. You guys know which one it is. We're going to talk about mosquitoes. It's not mosquitoes. Sammy actually hates mosquitoes. It's a good thing we're not talking about. Oh, no way.

What a crazy. take. Wes is the only person I've ever known that has had one nice thing to say about mosquitoes because I post a lot about how I want them all gone and wiped from the face of the earth and Wes. Yeah, I'm on. A more sensible person. I agree with that.

I mean, I'm on your side. Like the animals that eat mosquitoes will find something else, you know. Okay. I'm not getting it. That's exactly what I said to her though. She said something about it. I'm like, lots of stuff sure loves eating them or something. Les, don't even do this.

Don't do this to me. They don't even taste that good. That's my opinion, though. As long as we're sharing hot takes. They get stuck in your throat. Speaking of stuck in your throat, we're going to talk about leeches. So we're going to start with the story. This is a story I found online.

It was on S.F. Gate. It was written by a guy named John Flynn in 2003. John was in a group hiking during the end of the monsoon season in tropical Nepal. And the prolonged wet weather led to perfect. condition for leech proliferation. So leeches in the tropics, what they do is they crawl out on leaves or like branches or whatever, even on the ground. And they have a sucker on each end.

And the sucker that's on their butt, they plant on the ground and they latch themselves to the ground and then they stick their other sucker out in the air. And they wait for something, a mammal to walk by or get close enough and they latch on to it. Oh, really? So like when you're walking through brush and whatnot in these wet tropical places, you're just picking up leeches. They're just like... This is in Nepal?

Like the Himalayas? Nepal? Yeah, Nepal, though, also has tropical forest, like in the lowlands in Nepal. I didn't know that. Yeah. So these leeches can also pick up on our body heat, on carbon dioxide. So they're just like ready to go. They just want to attach to mammals.

Does it hurt or is it like you don't know that it's happening? We'll get to that. Okay, good. We'll get to that. Pretty much every plant and brush they pass or bush they passed was full of leeches. And they're battling them the entire. trip. John says that they would crawl in through the eyelids of their boots, and each night in camp, when they would take off their boots, they would literally pour out blood that had pooled

in the bottom of their boots from leach bites. It's like Romeo and Michelle's high school reunion, please excuse me, I've cut myself earlier and now my shoes are filling up with blood. Yeah, exactly. Yep. We'll take your word on that one. Yeah. Anyway, like when a leech does bite you, and we'll talk more about this, but they have an anticoagulant in their saliva, and that's how they get so much blood out of you. But then when they detach, that anticoagulant's still working, and so you do bleed quite a bit from leech bites often. So that's what's happening here.

Even though these leeches have probably detached and gotten back out of their boots, they're still bleeding and there's going to be a lot of blood in the bottom of their boots. Can they still fit out the little eye holes of their boots? They're probably all punched up after the blood, right? Yeah, it's a good question. Like Winnie the poo stuck in his hole. Yeah, they try to squeeze through. Someone, another little leech behind him pushing him.

Just pushing on this side. They, on this trip, they would find leeches everywhere on their bodies. And they would go from like tiny little inchworm leeches to the size of their finger when they were engorged with blood. At one point, one woman in his group went to go to the bathroom in the woods. And she came back with four leeches attached to her butt after just like squatting down for a second. What the heck? And real quick, we'd like to stop and announce our next Trova trip to Tropic Nepal. We're going to go look at leeches.

All right. The worst happened one night when they were camping. In the middle of the night, John heard muffled screams coming from a tent that was occupied by a woman from Minnesota. And she was screaming, Arach imarraf. Oh, no. When he got closer, he realized she was saying, I've got a leech in my mouth. A leech had crawled inside her mouth while she was sleeping And it had fixed itself to her tongue

And they tried pulling on this leech to get it to release And the pain was too much for this woman Like when they were pulling on it was really hurting And so finally she's like stop pulling on it And they just left it So she waited 15 minutes for this leech To fully engorge itself on blood from her tongue And then it detached and she spit it out

And she was like She had to have stomped on that one just like out of air. They're really hard to kill, though. And she was gagging and dry heaving the whole time, but just like had to sit there and let it feed. He said he woke up, yeah, he woke up hours later and could hear her still like spitting

because she was still so disgusted by this leech. Oh, I'm sure. That's crazy. This story, unfortunately, led to a really deep dive for me. But before we get into it, I want to talk a little bit about leach biology. Yeah, I want to hear how hard to kill they are. Like Stephen Seagal level.

Like in one of these stories, someone said they lit one on fire. Like they put their lighter on it and like held the fire on the leech and thought they had killed it. And when they like rolled into a ball and then when they pulled it away, it just squiggled off. So what? So they're hard to kill. They're thought to be over 600 species of leeches in the world. Some are aquatic while others are terrestrial. About three fourths of the species are sangivorous or sangivorous, which means they feed,

exclusively on blood. They're segmented parasitic or predatory worms that are closely related to earthworms. So some of them are parasitic and feed on blood. Others are like true predators and will eat other small invertebrates. A difference between them and earthworms is they have suckers on both ends and they're much more muscular than earthworms with smaller internal body cavities. So earthworms, because they're kind of loose, they have like a body cavity that's like, like has a decent amount of air in it. These are real beefy little worms. They're ripped.

They just have like a pretty narrow body cap. Doing sit-ups. So I would be the earthworm of the three of the two thin cloth hosts. You two would be leeches because you're beefier than I am. We're beefy. All right. They can be teeny tiny or as large as 17 inches, the giant Amazon leech, which is nightmarish. It just don't need to be that big.

That one has like a hyper, like a hyper. epidermic needle that it puts into things to get blood too. Yeah, which is gnarly. They're hemaphroditic, meaning they have both male and female functioning reproductive organs, but they don't self-fertilize. And you guys know that I had to dig into leach reproduction a little bit. So when these little freaks have sex, they line up next to each other so that the female parts of each leech is matching the male part. Oh, they run, train?

No, it's more of like a 69 thing where, but the female, the female, the female, part of one leech will be matching the male part of the other leech and vice versa because they both have both parts and they both pass sperm packets to the female gonapur of the other leech. You scratch my back. I'll scratch yours. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So both leeches are getting a sperm packet and both are receiving or sorry, both are passing

a sperm packet and both are receiving a sperm packet too. It makes it sound like they stuff it in a little envelope and a half. hand it off. Here is your sperm back here. It makes it sound to me like they shouldn't like have a gender. They're hermaphroditic. They don't. Oh, okay.

Yeah. You said male and female size. No, I said they have both male and female functioning reproductive bodies. Oh, I got you. So some jawless leeches use hypodermic injection to pass sperm into their partner. So they actually like inject it through like a thing that penetrates the skin of the other leech. but all the jawed leeches have like a penis and a gonoport. So it's like somewhat, you know, something we can conceptualize.

They generally lay between one to ten eggs depending on the species. A crazy fact about leeches that I found is in dry places where there's places where there's like a wet season and a dry season. After the wet season's over, leeches will bury underground and they'll dry out completely. Like they become hard and brittle. And then when it rains again after like five minutes, minutes of rain, they're up and moving again. And they're like wet little weird.

That's so weird. Yeah. It's like the three body problem aliens. Exactly. That's exactly what I was thinking about. There's no way those guys have souls. Yeah. You know, if you dry up, if you dry up, like, you don't have a soul anymore.

That's true. I think that's fair. That's how it works. Is that how it works? Okay. Yeah, you're our expert on souls, so I'm going to agree with you. Yeah. All right.

So the leeches that typically. latch on to people. They have a Y-shaped jaw, and those jaws are lined with a razor-sharp teeth that kind of look like little shark teeth under a microscope. When they bite, they secrete Huradin, which sounds like a Lord of the Rings people or something. But it looks, it's like a natural, it's a natural, it's a natural anticoagulant that keeps blood flowing as long as they're feeding, and sometimes even for hours after they're done feeding. There's also speculation, Sammy, this is what you were asking about earlier, that they secrete some kind of, kind of anesthetic because most people that are bitten by leeches never feel the bite.

Yeah. There's no really good scientific evidence for that, though. And it's more likely that those teeth are just like really sharp and that the leech is so good at picking the right spots and only biting as deep as it needs to that we just don't feel it. And there's like vampire bats are the same way. We talked about vampire bats last year. When they bite something, they do it just the right way to where that thing isn't going

to react. And evolutionarily, that makes a lot of sense because these are animals that are much smaller than their prey. And so if like when they bite, we have a pain response to that bite, then what we're going to do is rip them off and kill them. Or if it's a vampire bat and you feel the vampire bat bite you, you're going to like smash it or throw it or do something. Anyway, that's, we don't really feel them bite usually, but they can be painful. When you're trying to pull them off, I guess, maybe your tongue specifically. Yeah. It's on your tongue. It's on your tongue. Oh, just wait. You guys are going to long for the days when we are just talking about tongues. Oh, come on, I mean. So predatory leeches often have a spear-like proboscis that they'll fire into little invertebrates that they hunt. And then they suck it in and swallow it whole. And then there's other ones that actually like fire that proboscis in and then just suck out the soft tissue of whatever they're killing. Which really makes you think like it's such a nightmare world for little invertebrates. Like if you're,

There's a little aunt, like mine in your own business, and all of a sudden there's this thing that just sucks you in whole and swallows you. Like they should have had this thing in honey I shrunk the kids. Or just your inside. I feel like somehow, yeah. Yeah, we need an R-rated honey. We shrunk the kids for sure. Just sucks soft tissue out of them. Well, and ants have souls, too.

So that's extra scary. I feel like for some reason sucking out just the insides is worse than. I know, right? It's so much worse. Yeah. Yeah. Unless you're alive inside of them. That's the worst.

Your soul is still, it's trapped inside of them forever. Like if they ate it alive. Yeah. Well, it's funny you say that because they have extremely slow digestive systems. Oh, like the sarlac. Just like the sarlac pit. That's what I was about to say to. Oh, that's so cool.

They're real. So a mature, yep, sarlac pits are real. So a mature leech will only feed once or twice a year, which makes sense seeing that they're really just like waiting on leaves for something to pass by. So, like, they're not often going to get lucky enough to latch on to something. And that's what makes them so determined when they do. Like, they finally got a meal, so they really want to get it.

So they eat once or twice a year, is what you said. And then is that kind of why they can just get all the way dehydrated until it's time to eat something again? Or, like, what's, I don't know what the, I don't. They don't all do that. Okay. No. The dehydration thing is, like, so far beyond what I can even.

conceptualize. I have no idea how that's possible. And I'm sure I could do a five or six hours of research into figuring out how that works. But I just, there's too much on this episode for me to do that. But yeah, I think part two. You're invited back for that, Sammy. Great. Yeah. All our leech, you're a leech correspondent. I love it. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. It was this one. I didn't mean to. So they'll like eat little insects and human blood. The same leeches. No, no, no, no. So Some are predatory and some are parasitic. And parasitics are the ones that attach to us. The drink blood.

Yes. I wanted Sammyon because of the vampire thing, not because of the leech thing. I'm into it. This is fascinating. I'm learning a lot. I can tell. She's just like smiled over there when you're talking about it. I'm sick and twisted.

Perfect. This is all up my alley. All right. Aquatic leeches seem to be a little bit more adept at finding prey. rather than just waiting for it. They have little tiny hairs on their body that detect disturbances in the water, and then they also have primitive eyes

that can pick up on like shadows in the water. So if a shadow's moving around, they know there's something in the water, and they also pick up on those disturbances. So rather than just wait for something, they actually swim after it and attach to it. Marine leeches aren't nearly as prevalent, but some species do exist,

and they actually don't always fall off after they finish feeding. Sometimes they'll just stay latched. on and then they just continue to feed whenever they want. And so if enough marine leeches attached to an animal, they can actually kill it. Like there's fish and marine mammals that have died because they have too many leeches on them. So they could potentially kill a human from drinking too much of our blood? They could.

And they almost have. And we're going to get to that. Wow. Yeah. So they've been used like leeches. We have a really interesting history with leeches because they were used for a lot of different medical treatments up through the 1800s. Name one.

Bloodletting is the main one. And so it's pretty much been shown that all these traditional uses. They just used it for everything. Headaches, calm and colds. Oh, yeah, exactly. Stubbed toe. Just put a leech on it. Everything from like, yeah, they would truly put leeches on people's temples for headaches.

And the idea there was that some of these people's believed that we had like a balance of fluids in our body and that sometimes. that balance would be upset. And if there was too much blood in your body, they would stick leeches on you to remove some of that blood because it was like a pretty painless way to get blood out of your body. It still is. And so people used them for everything. And it's an interesting thing is the red stripes on a barber pole are actually to symbolize bloodletting because barbers used to be people that were like professional bloodletters. Whoa. Really? Yeah, which is really cool. So they continued to be used for a lot of medical treatments up through the 1800s, so much so

that some leeches were at risk of extinction. And people would even get addicted to leach treatments. Like you would have people that just liked it and they would go into like leach pools and like overdo it, which I think I could see that being you, Jeff, right? Just getting really into leach treatments. It's like that billionaire who's like taking his son's blood. Oh, yeah, the vampire guy. Got some leech stuff going too. Probably. He probably has a leach pool in his house.

All right. So medical advancements have really shown that bloodletting isn't practical. It doesn't really work. And use of leech has stopped in most places. But then it started to become popular again in the 80s. And doctors started to use leeches to help with extreme inflammation, to help with circulation after reattaching body parts and doing microsports. surgeries. So we've actually talked about leeches before on the podcast. I think there was someone that

had a nose that got grafted on their arm that had to be put back on his face. From the bear. Yeah, Lee Brooke was his name. And they had leeches helping with the circulation with that nose that was on his arm or something. I can't remember what it was. Real horror show. Anyway, but it worked and he's got a nose now. Okay. On his arm. I think it's on his face now. I don't know. Sorry, You think he ever got bloody nose on his arm? Or if he was like sniffing things with it? He's got in. Okay.

It's time to talk about something gross. Again, this is a quick warning. And Mike, maybe after we're done recording, I'll have you put the timestamp in of when they can pop back in. But it's pretty gross. We're going to get in some gross stuff here. It is going to haunt my nightmares a little bit. Oh, God.

And you guys didn't have to see all the photos. So it might not be as bad for you, but I had to see the photos. So it's bad. Hate just popping in for one final content warning. Like Wes said, this does get pretty gross. So if you're sensitive to leeches getting into the human body through really all kinds of different, we'll call them pathways and avenues, skip ahead to a couple of minutes. I'll put the time codes down in the description.

But yeah, okay, let's get back to it. Leeches are generally pretty harmless. It's rare that they carry diseases. You really don't need to worry about a leech if one's attack. to you to suck blood. If you're like this guy in the story where you're hiking in the forest and you are peeling leeches off of you, it's not a big worry. It's just kind of an annoyance more than anything.

However, and this is a big however, there are potentially dangerous situations with leeches. And that's when they crawl in and attach themselves to somewhere within your body cavity, kind of like the leech on the tongue story. Oh, my God. Okay. They shouldn't be allowed to do that. Leaches have unfortunately found their way into people's eyes, ears, noses, throats, stomachs, bladders, rectums, vaginas, and urethras.

And for all of those... That about covers it, covers the holes. Yeah, they're good at finding into... Yeah, all the holes. They're there. I knew I was going to have to dig into this. I found some pretty fascinating stuff. We're going to start with the throat. I'm using an article here from the Ethiopian Journal of Health Science.

It was written by Domech and Maconan. It's titled Leach Infestation, the unusual case of upper airway obstruction. So in 2012, a seven-year-old boy in Dedo, Ethiopia, was starting to see blood in his saliva, which he thought was a bit strange. He showed his parents, they were also a little concerned. He had no underlying health problems.

they just figured it would clear up. About 10 days later, he started having some breathing problems. The breathing problems got worse, so a couple days later, when the bleeding also intensified, they took their son to the Jima University specialized hospital. The doctors ran tests on him. It was clear that he was in respiratory distress. They couldn't find anything that might be causing it.

Aside from the blood in his throat, they were really perplexed. They took x-rays of his lower neck, and it looked like the soft tissue was influx. and his windpipe was obstructed from the inflammation, there's no hints as to why that might be. So they finally were like, we're going to give him some anesthesia, we're going to put a Larix camera into his throat

and see what's in there. So when they did, they saw what looked to be a blood clot at the top of his trachea, and then it started moving. So they grabbed the leech with some forceps and pulled it out. It measured six centimeters long. It had been almost completely blocking his windpipe.

And they discharged him not long after. Oh, my God. Jeez. I can't tell you how many papers there are like this of throat blocking leeches. Ew. They're mostly in places where people are living in really rural conditions and where they don't have sanitary drinking water. So they'll be getting water from like a nearby spring or waterhole or something that's shared with other, with like, livestock.

And because of the livestock, the leeches are like, they know it's a realtying water. really good spot for feeding opportunities. And then when people drink the water, they drink either adult leeches or little baby juvenile larval leeches. And they grow within their body cavity and then start feeding. Dude. That's what had happened with this boy. They drink in water from a nearby spring that had leeches in it. Okay, that's the appetizer. It's going to get a little worse. That's the appetizer. Oh. Yep. Okay, okay. I'm ready. There's a medical study done in Bangladesh over five years between 1998 and 2003. The article was leech and urinary bladder

causing hematuria by Shadryl Alam at all. This study was over a period of five years, 1998 and 2003. They had 43 different boys who would come in with different problems. All of them had blood in their urine. So they all shared that same characteristic. And every single one of these boys had a leach crawling through their urethra up into their bladder.

And that was why they were peeing blood. Man. So each of them had a catheter inserted. If you don't know what a catheter is, it's essentially like a tube that goes into your erythra. It goes all the way up into your bladder. I tried inserting one once just... Pretty easy to use, right? They're not. I had a friend who was paraplegic.

He said, hey, Wes, you just need to know how this is. and I said, sure, I'll try it. And I almost passed out because it's terrible. And I didn't get to my bladder. These things go in like 15 inches to get to your bladder. It's not fun. That's like the size of a leech. Yeah, those Amazon ones.

Yeah. So each of them had a catheter inserted. They had 50 milliliters of saline squirted into their bladders. And then the catheter was clamped for three hours. Once the catheter was removed, all 43 of the, those boys, peed out either a dead leech or a live leech. So that works, apparently. If you got a leech in your bladder, put a catheter up there, squirt some saline in, pee it out. All right. Okay. All right. Don't keep that in mind. I guess though. Maybe I'll just, I'll just do it just in case I

have one. You just want to be extra careful. Yeah. Right. Of all the things that could cause blood in the urine, though, I just feel like maybe you pee blood and you're like, oh, no, something. You're things. Of course, something seriously wrong with you. But I probably am going to be sitting there now that I know hoping it's a leach and not like cancer or something. I will say like the nice thing about every one of these ones that we're going to talk about is once the leeches are out, the people are okay. Like it's a very easy fix.

It's not like all these crazy complications afterwards. Like once your leeches are gone, you're all right, which is nice. It's very. With like my mindset of just not wanting to go to hospitals, if I like, had cancer and was peeing blood, I'd be like, oh, it's probably just a leak or something. I'm, I can take care of this. DIY. Yeah.

All right. A 33-year-old man had been swimming in a dirty swimming pool in southeastern Turkey, and not long after he started having rectal bleeding. He went to the hospital after four days of bleeding, oh, sorry, after four days of bleeding and when the bleeding intensified, and he was having some discomfort as well in his rectum, and he felt like he had to poop. He just, like, had the nonstop urge to poop. So he goes to the hospital, and they couldn't find anything wrong with him.

They sent him to a specialist in an emergency hospital. And when he got there, he was starting to show signs of blood loss. He was having a really elevated heartbeat. He was breathing fast. He was pale. He had anemia. They were like, wow, this guy's losing some blood. So they couldn't find anything wrong.

So they said, hey, hop on this table. get on your elbows and your knees, and we're going to put anoscope, you know, an anal scope into your rectum and see what's going on. When they did it, they found a really, like a hemroid, and hiding behind that hemorrhoid, they saw a smooth, dark mass. And when they looked at it a little closer, it moved as well. No. So they realized that they had found a leech, and when they tried pulling it out, they couldn't. They grabbed it with forceps and pulled on it and pulled on it. And the forceps kept slipping off of this leech.

So what they then tried to do was squirt it with lidocane, which also didn't work. So then they reached the forceps in, clamped its mouth close, and that was enough to make the leech release its grip, and they were able to pull it out of this guy's rectum. The mouth is like on the... I think they just like put where it was attached... The other end? No, where it was attached to his rectum,

they just like pinch the forceps on it right above that and just held him there for a little bit. And that made it so it couldn't feed anymore and it released. That's terrible. They got it though. So he was just like, you know when you have the, you feel like you have to sneeze, but you can't? It was like that for him, but with poo, that'd be terrible.

Yeah. It's like when you get a UTI and you feel like you got to pee all the time and you don't have to pee. So similar to that. Awful. It's not fun. Do we know how big that one was? Because if he's like having signs of blood loss, is that because it's a bigger one or just because it's just like feeding?

It doesn't necessarily mean that it's bigger. It just means that like. Just a hungry little guy. Yep. It's like engorges itself. And then maybe for whatever reason it doesn't feel safe detaching or it like is worried about falling further into his body or something. Yeah. He's like, I don't know where I am.

I'm scared. These ones. Yeah. Can you imagine being on that table on your on your knees and your hands and their hands and they're like trying different stuff back there. And you're like awake the whole time. They're like, well, that didn't work. Let's try something else.

And you're like, what is going on back there? Or like the feeling of like them pulling on forceps on something that's attached to the inside of your rectum and then like slipping off and it releasing. I don't know. Yeah, maybe it's cool. Well, I don't know. Think about it this way, though. You haven't eaten anything in six months and you finally find this place that's super delicious. Warm and nice.

And then all of a sudden, someone just shits on you. Yeah. That's true. We got to look at it from their perspective. Yeah, you're right. It's a good point. Good job, Jeff. Always thinking about the worms perspective.

Okay. This one was the hardest one for me, even though it doesn't really apply to me. Oh, boy. It had some pictures that were really hard. A seven-year-old woman checked into Gimby Adventist Hospital in Ethiopia. She'd had three weeks of vaginal bleeding. It was bright red, excessive. and there was no clots.

She had been feeling lightheaded and weak, and she also said that she could feel something moving inside of her vagina. When the doctors did an examination, they couldn't find anything wrong, but she definitely looked like she was losing a lot of blood. She had a high pulse rate, a high respiratory rate, and a high temperature.

So they did a pelvic examination where they found her upper thighs soaked in blood and a large leech attached to her cervix. They pumped some stomachs. saline in there, the leech detached, and the woman received three units of blood before she was released from the hospital. Oh, my God. It's a bad one.

And honestly, like, I know there aren't as many details in that one, but if you're really interested and you want to look at medical papers, I'm sure you can find this paper. There's photos. They're not pleasant. I wonder why the blood was bright red. Is that, like, some byproduct of what the leech was getting up to? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's because it's, like, highly oxygen.

blood that like is coming out and just immediately like going away yeah it's super fresh exactly fresh all right that leach eating good yeah so it's the worst of it take a deep breath you guys made it through we did it i found other medical papers that had stories of people getting bit by hundreds of leeches uh that caused massive blood loss a few of them were like people that were trying to undergo treatments with leeches and they just like overdid it and one person that actually died from a leach in their throat that obstructed their airway. So I'm sure this episode has unlocked a new nightmare for a lot of people. For that, I'm truly sorry.

I don't want people. I don't know. I don't fully understand how important leeches are in their ecosystems. I'm sure they are. Whenever you have- Oh, you can't tell us not to hate leeches. I'm going to right now. I think like every-

on, dude. Every animal, especially one that's as prevalent as this, like leeches are very prevalent, often feeds a lot of other animals. So aquatic leeches, for example, I know feed a lot of fish, so much so that fishermen often use tackle that looks like leeches because fish just really go crazy for them. And then terrestrial leeches, reptiles, amphibians, birds, all sorts of other animals feed on them. And I have to imagine they have other purposes as well. I think this is a really easy animal to be afraid of, a really easy animal to be disgusted by. I will say there are some beautiful leeches out there. And I know that's hard to believe. There are. There are brightly colored, absolutely gorgeous leeches in places like Thailand, Southeast Asia.

They do exist. So if you need an animal to be visually appealing to have a connection to it, there you go. I'll give you leeches, Wes, but they've killed what, you said one guy. How many people do mosquitoes kill? Yeah. They're the number one killer. That's right. That's right. I know.

We're going to do mosquitoes at some point. That's like why mosquitoes are best for the environment, killing humans. You know, honestly, there's an argument to be made for that. There is. The bad part of that argument, though, is they're killing people in places where those people are like, you know, coexisting. with nature in a much more healthy way than we are. Yeah. All right. I'm back on team wiping out mosquito. Yeah, fair enough. You know what's scary that's going on with mosquitoes?

And if we ever do a mosquito episode, we'll probably talk about this. And Bill Gates is one of the main people doing this. He is like genetically engineering mosquitoes. Crispering. Get out of here. Stop. Using CRISPR. Trying to make them so they can't reproduce. I know all about this. I hate mosquitoes so much that I'm like, always Googling. What are they doing? What are they doing to solve this problem? Daily updates. He's like making these mutant mosquitoes that will go out and mate with other mosquitoes and make them infertile. And there's all sorts of weird ecological things that happen when we play God like that.

So it scares me. I don't like it. That's not a new thing though. They do that with like invasive insects. So like create other insects for them to mate with that will like kill them off or something. This one's just scary because. they're an animal that interacts with us at such high levels that it does make me a little nervous. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft.

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we're in our stories. I think there's a lot of people in these stories. So let's Let's do the woman with the leech on her tongue. And let's do the, you know, let's do the rectum guy. Let's do those two ouchies. I'm going to say tongue lady, three ouchies. Three out of ten? Yeah, but like ten is like being eaten alive by a bear while it sits on you. Yeah.

We should let Sammy go first because she doesn't match. No, I would have, I need to get a handle on the scale. Yeah, let's just hear yours without our warped scale. I mean, yeah, they're going to be much. higher than that. That's why that's good. I like that. Um, the tongue one, I would have said eight. And like even I feel like I would rank it higher than the rectum one, which seems wrong, but like something being in your mouth that you can see and it's, and you just have to let it sit there and fill up. Oh, you're going to like one of the questions I have for you.

Uh, and then I mean rectum, don't get me wrong is close behind. No pun intended. I'll give it a seven. Okay. Nice. I like it. Now you guys tell me all your low numbers. I'll finish mine then. I did three for the tongue. I'm going to do four for the rectum.

So I'm doing three and four though. rectum's worse for me. For our scale, I'm going one for the tongue. Wow. Okay. Okay. And then I'd go three for the rectum and also three for the boy's throat just because like that's a lot of being uncomfortable.

It was weak. It sucks to have to poop. and not be able to poop. And then, like, I'll raise them to four because, like, not being able to breathe right. Like, that sucks, too, you know. Yeah. He was worse. But, like, there's no recovery.

There's no, like, once it's out, it's out. Yeah, we should have done him instead of the right. That's fine. All right. Mike, what are your numbers? I think I'm going to go two for the tongue. And I might even go one for rectum. That, like, I guess, like,

can't really know until I've walked a mile in those shoes. But like, needing to poo is like an incand, it's like uncomfortable. It's not even really painful. That wasn't it, though. That wasn't the only thing. Like, there's plenty more. I don't know. You guys are really stuck on that.

Let's do three and two. Three tongue two poo. Okay. All right. I'm not going to argue. Okay. We are going to get into our categories. So we're going to do some categories and then we're going to have a little mini interview

with Sammy. We're going to start. because we talked about vampires, we're going to start with vampires. I want everyone to say your favorite vampire movie and then also your scariest vampire from any media. We're just going to combine those two. I'll lead us off because mine are one and the same.

My favorite vampire movie is Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece, in my opinion. We've talked about it recently already, so I won't get too into it. And then I think when he's like the, old man vampire that you first meet in the castle with Keanu Reeves and stuff. I think that's the scariest vampire ever. I just think when he's like creeping along on the wall and he just grabbed babies and he's like throwing him to his vampire vixens and stuff,

I don't know, he's powerful, he's scary, he's intimidating, checks all the boxes for me. So it's my favorite vampire movie and I think he's the scariest vampire. Great performance, old men. Would you say you think that's Francis Ford Coppola's best movie? In my opinion, it is. I know that a lot of people would not agree with me on that. It's like become a favorite movie for me. I absolutely love it. Would you say it's Keanu Reeves' finest performance? I would not say that. No, I think it's far from his finest performance, but it is a very lovable performance. I've always said I want a GPS voice of his accent. in that movie.

I want him to be guiding me around my life. Turn left, here. Incredible. Sammy, you can go next. Okay. My favorite vampire movie is a little controversial maybe, but it's a movie called Vampire's Kiss, and it's a lesser known one.

Everyone should watch it. It's starring Nicholas Cage. The one? Oh, no way. The only. Yes. I've seen it probably 25 times. I used to make every new person I met that hadn't seen it watch it with me.

And I like to watch people experience it for the first time. It's a really, really silly performance, but also, you know, it has a lot of heartbreaking elements to it, the same kind of tragic vampire figure themes a bit. But like, oh my God, but there's some parts that are so funny. and Nicholas Cage. It's probably my favorite Nicholas Cage performance. Oh, that's tough.

I can't even follow you. You're opening up a whole can of worms here. He does the ABC's thing. You guys have probably seen that. It's in like every compilation. All right, I'm adding it to my list. I need to watch it. Yeah, I haven't seen it.

I tried to watch his other Dracula one, Renfield or better, but didn't love that. No, that one is not good. And the only time that I've enjoyed one scene, of Renfield was when I could see Nicholas Cage doing Vampires Kiss acting. Yeah, I can't have. I was like, I love them.

And then, yeah, my scariest one, I'm going to go with Danny Houston's Marlowe in 30 Days of Night. It's a good pick. Kind of very unsexy vampires in that movie. They're just like straight monsters. Danny Houston is incredible in it, him saying, God, no, God. God. It's like one of the best lines ever, so. I love that movie.

Good picks. Jeff? Yeah, you want me to go? I might take yours. I don't care. That's fine. All right. For a favorite, I'm going the first Twilight movie.

Oh, that was totally mine, dude. Not really. It's probably not my favorite, but I do really enjoy the first one. It's a fun watch. It's really, like, every time I watch it, I have a really good time. Baseball seems so fun. When he like walks in the classroom and she or like he like sees her and pretty much his orgasm. It's just like the craziest thing I've ever seen in a movie.

And then she doesn't know how to use ketchup. That was all funny. I forgot about that. But then for scariest, I'm going to go Fright Night Colin Farrell. Okay. Just like super hot vampire. that's like, isn't he into the kid's mom? Yeah.

Yeah. That's, like, what's scarier than that? Who's that actress? I'm forgetting it from hereditary and stuff. It's Tony Colette. Yeah, it's Tony Collette. I always kind of want him to, like, get away with it at the end. I love Colin Farrell.

Me too. Yeah, I kind of want him to win, you know? That's why he's the scariest to me is like, he's so hot I would fall for him. Yeah. True. The original of that movie is really good, too. The 80s one is like, I definitely recommend it too. But, yeah, I thought it was a great.

boot. Mike? Okay, so my favorite vampire movie, it's George Romero's Martin. Have you heard of it? I have heard of it, but I haven't seen it. So George Romero, it's great. It's like a really sad and somber movie, but like all of George Romero's best works, it's like very heavy on social commentary. And this is about like identity and like the isolation of modern day urbanization. It like, it goes all kinds of weird, sad, depressing places. But yeah, I love it. All right. Well, watch it, Mike. Yeah, I want to watch it. Scariest vampire movie.

I'm just going to go daybreakers. I think that's an underrated movie. The Ethan Hawk, Sam Neal, Willem DeFoe's in it. That's the one where people are like food, right? We're like cattle to them. Yeah. Yeah. They're like cannibal.

Like they turn you kind of cannibalistic before you like fully lose yourself. So it's got a really interesting energy to it. All right. Okay. My next question is one that we've kind of already answered actually. And I didn't mean to do that. but it was a would you rather question and it was would you rather have a leech in your throat

or a leech in your butt and I think you know my answer I'm picking the butt yeah but yeah all picking butt yeah all right we're all picking butt that was a little unexpected but I think we're all butt people butts are throats is the question

yeah T or a throats are butts okay something now a quick a quick question for you guys, and this is one I thought of because we were talking about vampires, I'm going to tell you a tiny little story. I don't think I've told this on the podcast yet, but you guys remember that book, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, yes? There was one in one of those volumes about a girl who had a vampire that would like scratch on her window,

and it was terrifying, and finally this vampire succeeds in coming through her window, I think it turns into mist and comes in and gets her. And for me, that reading that as a kid just terrified me. And I remember one night, especially just not being able to sleep, tossing and turning, looking at my window, fully convincing myself there's a vampire out there and just being absolutely terrified. I would get really vivid nightmares as a child. And so I tiptoed upstairs and I went into my parents' room, like knocked on the door, went in, told them what was happening and they did what parents are supposed to do and like calm me down. And then as I was leaving, my dad was like, don't worry, Wes, I killed all the vampires around here.

And then he goes, or at least I think I got all of them. And then just sent me to bed. And I was just like beyond terrified for like multiple nights after that because they had acknowledged that vampires exist. So I wanted to ask each of you just something that scared you really bad as a kid. because for me, vampires were one of those things. I feel like this answer is unexpected, but similarly traumatizing for me was seeing the movie Titanic when I was eight years old in theaters.

Interesting. Oh, nice. Specifically the scene where there's a little boy, probably around eight years old, my age at the time, and they're trying to save him and his dad comes and runs the wrong way, and they're trying to be like, no, you have to come this way, that way is going down, and the kid and his dad get washed away.

And I think this was the moment that I realized that children could die. And like I think I understood death as a concept, but that children could die was new to me. That's great. And I freaked out in the theater. I was like scream crying. My mom was like, oh, should we go? And I for some reason was like, no, I want to stay. My poor mom.

Just has to, like, sit there with me screaming, crying as a kid. And, yeah, and then I feel like that's stayed with me. That's a good answer. That's not in a million years what I would have guessed. No. Very unexpected. Yeah, you were right. Jeff, what about you?

What scared you as a kid? I mean, aside from the Boy Meets World Halloween episode. Yeah. Maybe there's like a movie about rattlesnakes that all came into a town, and there's just like $5,000. rattlesnakes and they were like going in people's houses and stuff. Yeah, I remember that. I remember watching that.

Yeah. Okay. And at the very end, there's just like this like 20 foot rattlesnake blocking this guy from his exit. And that last snake scared me so bad. Well, it worked. It was effective then. Mike?

Just to preface this real quick, my dad is the best. He's the best person. He did an amazing job raising us. But when we were really little, he used to have this burlap. bag that he called the gunny sack. And every day he would come home from work and he would do room inspection. And anything that was out of place or like laying on the floor, he would confiscate it and put it in the gunny sack.

And he would say, you'll never see this again. And it would just vanish from existence. And I was so diligent to make sure every tiny thing was in place because the thought of like something of mine disappearing, just being gone forever just horrified me. It's probably a little bit tapping into that same thing. Like, things can actually just be gone and I can't do anything about it. Yeah. It's like, it's arbitrary.

I don't know what criteria he's judging it on. Like, if my little stuffed animals, like, turned a little wrong, is that out of place? Is he going to take that? I don't know. Did he ever threaten to throw you in the gunny sack? I'm sure you did. Dude, I was a bad little kid sometimes. All right.

Well, we're going to, from now on, whenever you're bad, I'm going to threaten to put you in the gunny sack. The gunny sack. The gunny sack. Dude, that thing. All right. Our last category for all of us, before we do, we'll do claws at the very end. But for all four of us, what is your favorite animal that drinks blood? I can tell you what my least favorite is.

I think we're all going to pick the same thing. Least favorite, I think we know. What's your favorite, Sammy? I mean, I feel like maybe a basic answer, but it's got to be bad, right? They're so cute. Yeah. I couldn't really even think of anything else. Like a lamprey?

There's others. lampreys, leeches, mosquitoes. There's a few others. But it's got to be, yeah, lions kind of lap up. For me, a lion. Okay, yeah, we'll count that, sure. I'm going to go with vampire bats too. And if anyone wants to hear about vampire bats, we got an old episode.

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Just head to mood.com. That's M-O-O-O-D.com to get started. Okay. We're going to go into our interview with Sammy. Oh, I had a spooky animal fact. Oh, yeah, yeah. Let's hear your spooky animal fact. So last time I did starfish stomachs come out to eat something, their eyeballs are on the ends of their

like five arms starfish yeah the stocks what yeah like they have five eyeballs yeah I think they have more than five right uh I looked at a picture of one and it just had one on the end of each arm okay interesting but I I'm not that's not the maybe that'll be next week how many eyeballs they have as far as I know uh in a couple years we'll know everything about starfish and also let's do real quick the best opening to a show ever because I thought that Oh, yeah, yeah. I forgot about that. That's a hard one just for me to think of off the cuff.

I could say another one, one of my other favorites, just to get help. I think The Simpsons is another real. Yeah, that was the first one that came to my. Especially, like, because you're always waiting for what happens on the couch. Yeah. Or what Bart writes. That's a great one just because of, yeah, exactly. Like, they change it up.

Honestly, for me, I'm probably going to say Buffy. Yeah. Like the Nerf, the Nerf Herder song that they play and just. I just loved it. Yeah, so I think it would probably be buffy for me. I'll go Ducktails. Oh, Ducktails is a great pick. Yeah, super catchy.

I'd probably go Netflix Daredevil series. Oh, that was good. Or I also really like Game of Thrones engines. Yeah. With like the puzzle and all that stuff. That's a great answer. I was so happy when for House of the Dragon, they just brought back the same song. Like they knew they had a winner and they're just like, no, we're using it.

All right. Sammy, I got some questions for you. Great. What has been the hardest watch for you as you've made Too Scary You Didn't Watch? Because I know you've had to watch a lot of movies that you didn't necessarily want to watch. Yeah. You had to review on the podcast.

Yep. So what's been the worst one for you? Probably Terrify or Two. I think I hated it more than like any other movie. It's here's the thing. I like Gore. I like violence. I like scary.

these are movies that like Terrifier 2 I think is a bad movie and it makes me feel like scared about the person that made it like there are certain horror movies that it's more I'm thinking about the writer and director and just like why are these people doing this um the sadness was also kind of like that and the Pekipsy tapes was another one that I was just like ooh why are why are we doing that yeah the sadness I remember seeing you guys talking about it and thinking like okay I'm absolutely not going to watch this one yeah have you have you had to watch human centipede two yet no I haven't but I love the original human centipede so that bodes well for me I heard the second one is just like vile but I haven't seen the first one either I don't know I'm not I'm not quite as hardcore as you are but I mean people always think it's a very crazy thing to say but I think the first human centipy is very funny I mean I guess you can see how it could be funny, right? Yeah, sure.

Some people really can't even see how it could be funny. So is it like their faces? Yeah. Their faces like tied to the next person's butt, right? And they are all eating each other's shit. Yeah. And they're in a circle? In the first one, it's just three of them in a line.

But maybe in future ones. So like the guy at this front is the best off. Of course. Yeah, you want to be in the front. Well, okay. Depends. And how long is the movie? I don't think it's that long.

It's like a four-hour epic. You know it's one that I just thought of recently that I'm really glad you liked that we talked about already was the Evil Dead remake. I loved it. The 2013 one, not the Not Evil Dead Rise. Yeah. I liked Evil Dead Rise okay, but 2013 Evil Dead rules. Yeah, the Feddy Elver is like. It's just, I remember, so we have a cabin in Utah that my great grandparents built that we go to sometimes.

And I had some friends up there and we'd watch kind of like a couple movies that were a little scary. And one of my buddies was like, let's put on something kind of fun. And I was like, oh, Evil Dead, 2013. It's like pretty hardcore and they were not happy with it. It's only fun for me and you. Yeah, it's a roller coaster. It's a fun one. Is that your favorite Evil Dead?

movie? It's mine. Yeah. It's hard to say that. I love the first one. It's tough. Oh, yeah. It's tough.

No, I think I'm thinking it too. Where the guy's like arm takes control or like is attacking him. Yeah. It's so hard to. They're like such drastically different movies. It's really weird to try to pick. Because yeah, Evil Dead too and the 2013 Evil Dead would be my favorite. It's like I don't know how to, I don't quite know how to compare them.

They're so different. But if you, if I'm on an island and I can only have. one evil dead movie. I'm picking the 2013 one. I probably will too. I probably will too. I hate me for that. Yeah,

sorry. That's fine. You're uninvited from Leach part two. You're invited to the centipede episode. Yeah, exactly. All right. Do you have a current top three horror movies? Like of all time or recent ones?

Yeah, of all time. I just, I know that's hard because tops are hard, but we're big into favorites on this on this podcast. So your favorite three horror movies? I would say my favorite three are the dissent, the Texas Chainsaw Masker, and Mandy. Oh my gosh. Wow. Fellow Nick Cage fan. I'm so excited right now. Yeah. The dissent is one of my favorites too. Like Neil Marshall. So good. I went into it. I took a horror film class in college. I'm making my college sound so fun. I guess it was fun. But we put, I had not heard of the dissent and they put it on. This was in a class, like a big class of 700 students, didn't know what it was, I thought it was just going

to be claustrophobia. Those are the best. What a great movie to go into blind. Yeah, it was awesome. Sure. Cool. And then the OG Texas chainsaw, I imagine. Yeah, yeah. Mandy's crazy. It's crazy movie. It's crazy. It's like two movies in one. The first half the second half are like, but they need each other to work. Oh, I love it. All right. Top three Halloween movies, movies that you just want to watch around Halloween. Um, Halloween. I just watched it the other night. It's amazing. That's a good one. That'd be in my top three. Um, and actually, Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of mine. I feel like that's a good Halloween. I don't like a Halloween movie feels like you want like something kind of. Atmospheric. Yeah, yeah. Totally. And then,

Then I'll go with Beetlejuice. Okay. Oh, nice. Mike and Jeff, why don't you give me your top Halloween movie real quick to watch around Halloween? Hughie Halloween. Okay. No, it'd be Sleepy Hollow, Halloween, and I don't know.

Mike, you start, and I don't think I'm right there. I think we already said these, but we'll say him again. Trick or treat the compilation anthology is just kind of like the quintessential filming. experience for Halloween specifically. Yeah. I'll just stick with Hubey where he has his peed bed sheet and he's a ghost. That's funny. That's good.

You got to admit. That's funny. Mine's Sleepy Hollow, even though I, like, my feelings have changed about some of the actors. Sure, yeah. But I do, I just think it's a perfect movie. So Sleepy Hollow. All right. Sammy, what's your favorite animal?

I think you know this, but it's a shark, probably great white shark. I have a shark tattoo. I love sharks. I'm scared of them. I mean, healthily scared of them, I think. Yeah, you have a respect for him. Yeah, I love them. Great.

Yeah. You're in company that also really loves Great White Sharks. Jeff, what number are they for you? Great Whites? Yeah. Well, they're my second favorite shark. Yeah. I think they were around like 12 or 13.

Okay. What's your favorite shark? Well, shark. Yeah. I think that's my number one favorite animal. Ooh. Mike, Great Whites are two for you? Three.

Three overall. All, tiger, killer whale, great white. Yeah. And they're number two for me. After grizzly bears. Yeah. But probably the first tattoo I would get, to be honest. So, all right.

Where it like on your belly button? Lower. Of course. Your mouth is eating your belly button or something. Exactly. Yeah. Sammy, an animal that you'd most like to see in the wild. Whale shark's a pretty good one, but I was, I think,

I got really obsessed with this animal at one point, and it seems like it would be a fun one to see is a harpy eagle. They're just really big and sometimes kind of funny looking. You're going to see them? I'm hopefully going to see one. Take picks. Share those picks. Where?

In Ecuador, in the rainforest there. You want to make a bet? No, I don't think I will, but there's a chance. So I will make a bet. Million. Yeah. If you don't see one, you owe me a million. If you do see one, I owe you a billion.

Deal. You got a deal. Oh, yeah. You take that every day. Hell yeah. Okay. Sammy, is cake and ice cream one dessert or is it two desserts? Two.

Correct. Whoa. That seems like I did not get the reaction. You just lost your credibility. With Jeff, not with me. We have gotten quite a fight over this. It still continues to this day. But those are the correct answers.

So you are invited back for Leach's Part 2. Great. It's been a real roller coaster. Let's just see if we can feed into that real quick. Would you rather have ice powers or tree powers? Describe tree powers to me? Oh, I'm glad you asked. Tree powers, you could like shoot wood at things.

You could produce fruit if you wanted just to produce fruit to eat. You could grow real tall into a tree. And like think Groot from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, if you've seen those. You kind of just are able to do whatever a tree is able to do. Ice powers, I think you can conceptualize. You can kiss someone and make your mouth cold. It's the name of Perg. Okay.

I know Jeff's answer. I am going to go with my gut here. I think this is the wrong answer, but I'm going ice powers. There's something about it that just feels right for me. I think it would, it's more my personality. here. Yeah. Yeah. Jeff is she invited back. I'm thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Batman. Oh no. I'm

way more invested in the I like tree powers. Okay. You're more invested in the TV. She just said she's thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Batman Free though. That's a great that's a great way to think of it. Like he you could have like so many puns if you had ice powers.

Exactly. That's going to be me. That's right. That's what I'm doing it for the puns. Hey, cool down. And then you just freeze them and like kill them. All right. And one last question for you. You are considered, you know, you watch a lot of movies. I think you're a movie officiono. You work in the movie industry. Do you have a horrific animal attack scene from a movie that stands out? I thought about this and I was like, don't say the revenant. Everyone would say the revenant. I mean, but it is a horrifying one. But I'm going to go with something else just to switch it up. And it's the birds. And it's that final attack scene in the birds. And I think it's because it's very hard to watch because I know Alfred Hitchcock was so horrible to Tippy Hedron during the filming of that movie and used actual birds in that scene when he told her they would be animatronic birds.

And so you're seeing real fear on her face. And she just went through absolute hell for that movie. And so I'm going to go with that, the birds. We have a cousin that developed a healthy fear of birds. from watching the birds. So it was an effective movie. Yeah. I understandably, yeah.

Well, those are great answers. Thank you so much for answering our questions. We have one last question for you. And it's going to be our claw rating. So at the end of each episode, we assign from one to ten claws. We give the animal that we've been talking about a rating. So if you love the animal, it's your favorite, you know, it's a great white shark. That's 10 claws.

Okay. If it's a mosquito, it's, you know, probably zero. Claws. Or like a leech. Yeah. So I do think we're going to have an animal that's going to get a little roasted here. But I'll start off. I'm going to give the leech two claws.

This is a two-claw animal for me. I think they're a really good food base for a lot of animals, but I am not interested in interacting with them or seeing them. So two claws. I'm going to go three claws because I hear some of them are really pretty. Perfect. It did. One, one claw.

All right. I don't want anything to do with them. Perfect. Please stay away. Why not zero? Oh, can we go to zero? Zero. Sure.

Yeah, no claws. Yeah. Yeah, I don't care. All you leeches out there. I don't care about alienating our leech audience. I would go zero, but because of the 69 sex stuff, I think I'll give them a three. Yeah. Yeah, that gives them points about being animals.

And I mean, for animals, you just don't think animals are doing that. All right. That's fair. And then I'll put them at 2,500 even for your overall. Jeff does an overall too. So, yeah, all right. Perfect. Well, thanks so much.

I might have to. Pump them back in the future. Yeah. When someone... There's a lot of animals sat there. Thanks so much, guys. Thanks, Sammy, for joining us. It's been a lot of fun.

Do you want to do a quick plug for Too Scary Didn't Watch? Sure. Yes, you can listen to my podcast, Too Scary Didn't Watch, wherever you get podcasts. Like we said, it's me and my two co-hosts, Emily and Henley, who are very scared of scary movies, so I just tell them the plots of scary movies. Sometimes we have a good time. Sometimes I really ruin their days. Just depends.

What's your most recent episode? Reanimator. I'm looking at it right now. Reanimator. We have disturbing behavior will probably be out by the time this is out. Oh, that's a good one. We had fun on that one. Reanimator we had less fun on.

Even though it is a pretty fun movie, there's one very unfun seen. So, but yeah, and we have. a lot of great guests. Wes has been a guest. Yeah, you got to have Mike on for Nick Cage. Yes. Wait, isn't there, he's, I mean, we've done a lot of the Nick. We just did the Wicker Man.

It looks like Wicterman. I mean, he has so many, though. Yeah, we haven't done a mom and dad yet. That's still on the table. Okay. Sure. You guys just had Paula Tompkins on again, too, right? We're having him on for our live show on October 29th.

and yeah he's been on a couple episodes we did jaws with him and orphan first kill which is a fine film no it is it's really a very fun one um yeah so yeah fun fun guests fun show and i'll say like as a listener um i think all three of you have like i think all three of you are very funny like in very different ways so i genuinely really enjoy listening to the podcast so i recommend it whole hard Check it out, listeners. And thanks again, Sammy. It's been really fun. Thank you guys for having me.

This was very fun. I'm curious to see what types of nightmares I will have tonight. Yeah, sorry. I'll send you the photos after we log on. Don't you dare. Only of the pretty ones. Maybe you'll literally swallow a leech. Maybe it won't even be a nightmare.

Maybe you'll actually do. That would be a big coincidence if that happened tonight. I would be really surprised, but you never know. All right. Thanks, guys. Thank you, everyone. Love you. See ya.