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?

Take a trip to Italy with Bryan and Dave this week as they put a little garlic on it and talk about Michele Soavi's ambitious, absolutely mesmerizing but ultimately frustrating, Cemetery Man (also known as Dellamorte Dellamore). Adapted from the novel by weirdo Italiano extraordinaire, Tiziano Sclavi, Cemetery Man is also a backdoor adaptation of the wildly successful comic book series, Dylan Dog. It's top to bottom unreliable narrators, naked women, and zombies, headed up by a man so handsome it'll make you angry, Rupert Everett.

Bryan and Dave take a trip back to Japan for their Toho 3-in-a-ro-ho, looking at 1977's psychedelic haunted house freakout by Nobuhiko Obayashi, House (Hausu if you're nasty). You'll see a young woman be eaten by a piano, a grown man get turned into a pile of bananas, a flying severed head biting girls on the butt. This movie has everything! It's recognizably a horror movie by a director who stradfastly refused to let it be purely horrifying, instead putting the focus on high-flying visual style and storybook production values. You've never seen so many matte paintings. It's a real challenge to talk about a movie so rich in visual aesthetic but we're going to do our best to break it all down.

Bryan and Dave are joined this week for their episode celebrating Latin American History Month by Dracula enthusiast, Michael Varrati! Long thought of as a lost movie, the fully restored version of Dracula, produced in tandem with Tod Browning's version with Spanish-speaking actors, the movie is practically the same film with some key differences which have, since its restoration in the 90's, caused many people to declare it the better version of Dracula. Is it? Well, it's complicated. We're going to give you all the facts and tell you all about it in this episodio.

It's Friday the 13th so here's a bonus episode about Friday the 13th... Part 2. In this episode Bryan struggles with his conflicted opinions on this movie and Dave turns him to the dark side with his position that Friday Part 2 just isn't a very good movie. It IS the movie that gave us Jason despite that part of the story making any sense and it also has a heaping spoonful of 80's misogyny. Great things are to come for fans of Jason and the Friday the 13th franchise but right here, right now, they're still figuring out what they're trying to do with this movie and unfortunately, it just doesn't shake out.

We close out our two part examination of the Godzilla/King Ghidorah beef with a close look at the Heisei era movie where Americans from the future presume to travel back in time and destroy Japan with a monstrous weapon and then force what's left over to conform to their political and economic interests. This time around the America/Japan relationship is bopped real hard on the nose. We also discuss the cultural and social conditions of Japan at the time which made American attitudes toward Japan so weird and more than a little racist. Don't worry though, there's plenty of chatter about Godzilla, King Ghidorah and the peerless thrill of big, loud, Japanese special effects movies.