Episode 113 - 2025 Wrap Up
Discover the Horror Podcast
Another year in the books, which means it is time for our annual Wrap Up, where we not only go through our personal favorites of the year, but also some other standout films, as well as some others that came out in the last 12 months. For the second year in a row, it is astounding at some of the high quality pictures that have been getting released. From ones going straight to streaming services, to other wide release pictures, there have been plenty of fantastic titles out there. It really is a great time to be a horror fan. It's a long episode, so make sure you have a pad and pen, because we...
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Episode 112 - Twice Told Tales: Maniac
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Every now and again, the horror genre produces a film that becomes a bona fide classic. In 1980, director William Lustig and co-writer and star Joe Spinell teamed up to make what may be the defining film of the 42nd Street grindhouse era: Maniac. The film has it all, a serial-killing protagonist who scalps women while sobbing about his mother, buckets of gore from an early-career Tom Savini, and all the usual suspects of late-’70s Times Square: hookers, drugs, and utter despair. A remake, directed by Franck Khalfoun, written by Alexandre Aja, and starring Elijah Wood, arrived in 2012. This...
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Episode 111 - Paul Naschy
Discover the Horror Podcast
Count Dracula's Great Love (1973), Horror Rises from the Tomb (1973), Panic Beats (1983) We're finally back to discuss the wonderful cinematic world of Paul Naschy! Back in episode 21, we covered three different entries in Naschy's werewolf films. So this time out, we are covering three of his NON-werewolf titles. It's important to remind fans that while he was known for his Waldemar Daninsky werewolf films, he made plenty of other films, incorporating a bunch of different kind of monsters. And if you are familiar with more of his work, then what better time to revisit some of them,...
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Episode 110 - Turkey Day 2025
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Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Terrorvision (1986), and Uninvited (1988). That's right, folks! It's Turkey Time again, and we are celebrating our 5th episode dedicated to those wonderous missteps in cinematic history. They aimed for the stars, but dropped like frozen turkey chucked off a building! But as we always say, the only bad movie is a boring one. And these films are definitely not boring. Because once the credits roll, if you've been entertained, then how could it be considered bad??? So sit back and enjoy this episode, where we discuss giant telepathic crabs, a ravenous space...
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Episode 109 - Hammer Frankenstein Films with Peter Cushing Part 2
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Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) Continuing our quest to get through the rest of Hammer's Frankenstein films which starred Peter Cushing, we cover the last three titles that Hammer made. Cushing loved to play this character, and he's done it like no one ever had, or ever has. Along with the screenwriters, Cushing made this character his own, and really made him the real monster in this series. While these films might be well covered by others, sometimes we forget just how good some of these are, as well as...
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Episode 108- Hammer Frankenstein's with Peter Cushing pt 1
Discover the Horror Podcast
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), and The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) What can you say about the Hammer Frankenstein films that hasn’t been said before? Well, a lot, actually! In 1957, a relatively small, mostly unknown studio made a film that would forever change horror and kick off a cycle of sensual, bloody, and atmospheric fright flicks that would dominate the genre for around twenty years. To say that The Curse of Frankenstein is a classic is almost like saying that water is wet, but it is also a film that lives up to it's reputation. It and its...
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Episode 107 - Making Monsters with Howard Berger and Marshall Julius
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No matter what kind of horror fan you are, there's a good chance that you love the monsters. Whether it’s from the Universal Classics, Hammer’s colorful reinterpretations, the amazing creatures from Ray Harryhausen, to the no-classic aliens in Star Wars, monsters are a backbone of cinema, and arguably, are the backbone of horror. It’s one of the things that we horror fans rally around, and love to discuss: from our favorites, to how some are designed, how they move, and everything in between. Oscar winning special makeup effects artist Howard Berger and author Marshall Julius have a new...
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Episode 106 - Hammer's Quatermass Films
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The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Quatermass 2 (1957), Quatermass and the Pit (1967) Everyone knows the name Hammer Films (at least, we hope they do!) but most people associate it with gothic horror, particularly their reimagining of the Universal classic Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). Yet Hammer had been around long before Peter Cushing breathed life into that first stitched-together corpse. Founded in the 1930s as a distribution company, the studio gradually moved into producing films, often adapted from popular TV and radio series. In 1953, the BBC aired a six-part serial,...
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Episode 105 - Andy Milligan
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The Ghastly Ones (1968), The Man with Two Heads (1972), and Carnage (1984) There are not many filmmakers like Andy Milligan. Sure, there were a lot of no-budget independents during Milligan’s era that somehow got their finished pictures to play theaters and released on home video. But there weren’t many whose real life was almost as terrifying as the films they made. But Andy Milligan would fit neatly into that category. Making over 30 pictures in almost 25 years, with some of the most outrageous and memorable titles, he still remains very close to obscurity. But...
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Episode 104 - Fantasy Horror
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A Company of Wolves (1984), Nightbreed (1990), Errementari (2017) As horror fans, we might not really think about the amount of horror elements that are in other sub-genres, such as fantasy. Sure, we all know titles like Conan the Barbarian (1982) that has a guy who turns into a giant snake, or Legend (1985) where one of the main characters is some sort of demon or devil, do those elements make it a horror film? We all know that horror is used in many different genres of films, even some where the filmmakers themselves go out of their way to make sure to define it NOT as horror. But we know....
info_outlineThere have been many horror writers that have been important to the genre, but few have had the outsized impact of the one and only Chas. Balun. Whether it was his work in Fangoria, Gorezone, or his own magazine Deep Red, even if you didn’t see his name at the head of the article, you knew it was him within a few sentences, by either by the tone of the writing, or maybe the films he was covering. Chas’ style was humorous and more than a little confrontational, but he was always waving the flag in support of movies that he felt were important and hadn’t received enough attention. Sure, they tended to be on the gory side, but for Chas. it wasn't just about the gore.
Not entirely, anyway.
While the three of us knew his work and the impact it had on us personally, for this very special episode, we felt we needed to talk with other folks who were just as impacted by him, and also knew him personally. In the second half of the show, you'll hear from John Szpunar, author of Xeroxferox: The Wild World of the Horror Film Fanzine and Blood Sucking Freak: The Life and Films of the Incredible Joel M. Reed; Art Ettinger, editor at Ultra Violent magazine; and finally Shawn Lewis, creator of Rotten Cotten and Eibon Press. They all share their own stories of Chas, and we all discuss the profound the impact Chas. had on us and on the horror genre in general. Don’t miss this one!
Films mentioned in this episode:
Abomination (1988), Bad Taste (1987), The Beyond (1981), Beyond the Darkness (1979), Blood Sucking Freaks (1976), Blue Velvet (1986), Braindead (1992), Bug (1975), Cannibal Holocaust (1980), City of the Walking Dead (1980), Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), The Exorcist (1973), Friday the 13th (1980), Guinea Pig 2: The Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985), Hell of the Living Dead (1980), Last House on Dead End Street (1973), Last House on the Left (1972), Mad Ron’s Prevues from Hell (1987), The Nest (1987), Night of the Demon (1980), The Omen (1976), Pieces (1982), Splatterfest Exhumed (2024), Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972), Zoltan: Hound of Dracula (1977), Zombie (1979)