This week Bryan and Dave are joined by author and queer horror historian, Sean Abley for a look at a stone-cold classic of 80's horror, Poltergeist. It's out second Tobe Hooper movie in October, alone, and our third overall for 2024. Bryan talks about how this movie was a pivotal moment in his horror movie adolescence. Dave maps the paranormal investigators in the movie to their real-life paranormal investigator counterparts, and Sean has a bone to pick with the ending. We'd also be remiss if we failed to mention the so-called Curse of Poltergeist. We'd also be derelict in our duties if we didn't bring up the elephant in the room: How much of this movie did Steven Spielberg direct? For years rumors and nasty innuendo have swirled that Hooper may have been picking up an easy paycheck on this one in order to allow Spielberg to sidestep some studio deals he made that prevented him from working on it while he made ET. Is there any truth to it? The answer, as usual, is complicated.

This week Bryan and Dave get real weird with it as they take a deep dive into a movie that defined not only Wes Craven's career but Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund's. Just when everyone thought that the slasher movie was dead on arrival, along comes Freddy Krueger to give it a powerful shot in the arm. Where slashers of the past felt like hangovers of the 1970's, pretenders to the Michael Myers legacy, A Nightmare on Elm Street is the first slasher movie that feels properly 80's. It lands at a crucial moment in American pop culture and just as Last House on the Left gave direction to the flagging horror movies of 70's and Scream gave direction to the flagging horror movies of the 90's, Nightmare and Freddy come to define the shape of horror movies to come in the 1980's. It's a hat trick of horrifying proportions and we can't wait to tell you all about uit.

This week Bryan and Dave kick off their Spooky Season '24 series with a look at one of the all-time greatest horror movie heavy hitters, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from director Tobe Hooper. Dave counts the human cost of making movies on a tiny budget, going over the notoriously rancid production history of a movie made in the dog days of a Texas summer on a set using real food and animal carcasses. You do the math on that one. Meanwhile, Bryan presents a wobbly thesis that, more than other horror movies, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a fairy tale in the style of The Brothers Grimm. They'll also answer the question: Is Leatherface the cutest franchise killer of them all?