Best Of: Horror Interviews

In this week’s Best Of compilation, the boys bring you a heaping pile of prime-cut selections from some of our favorite horror interviews of the past few years. From icons in the making and slasher legends to the creative minds who bring these nightmares to life, featuring Robert Englund, Stephen King and Joe Hill, Ryan Coogler, Zach Cregger, Kane Parsons, the Philippou brothers, David Howard Thornton, GWAR, and one extremely good boy.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Last Podcast in the Left is all about the facts. So when Southern New Hampshire University came on as a sponsor, it was time to do some research. Turns out they offer more than 200 online degree programs. And get this, criminal justice and psychology are some of the most popular. Classes have no set meeting times and tuition rates are some of the lowest in the US. Want to learn even more about SNHU? Visit SNHU.edu/last. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on the things you love, like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day.

• 0:45Speaker 00

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• 1:02Speaker 01

  There's no place to escape to. This is the last. On the left.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  That's when the cannibalism started.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  You guys are gonna love this one.

• 1:23Marcus Parks?

  You're gonna love it.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  I don't fucking care what you think, okay? This is a big deal for us. We talked to a lot of fucking people this year. A lot of people this year.

• 1:32Marcus Parks?

  Last couple of years.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  We've been doing it more.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, well officially, we're finally actual horror interviews.

• 1:38Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, welcome to Last Podcast in the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks, I'm here with the interview boys, Henry Zebrowski and Ed Lawson.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  How you doing?

• 1:46Speaker 00

  When I look at this, I can't even, I can't even believe who we got to talk to this year. We got to talk to the Filippo brothers, Ryan Coogler, Zach Cregger, Kane Parsons, Stephen King, Joe Hill, Robert Englund, and you're about to hear selections from all of them.

• 1:59Marcus Parks?

  Yeah, that's right. Thank you very much, everybody, for supporting us over the last, like, we're on break right now and, you know, we're, we're taking like a little bit of a, you know, snooze.

• 2:07Speaker 00

  We're getting a little bit of a siesta going on, but we're gonna be back talking about horrible things for the rest of your fucking lives.

• 2:11Marcus Parks?

  Don't worry, next week it's gonna come back big and it's gonna come back hard.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Hard. Are we gonna put back in the Robert Englund interview that he actually changed his name from Robert France?

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know. He said the lawyers were still kind of fighting with the lawyers and the publicist people, so I don't know.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, all right, all right, well, it's a fact.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  You know, hopefully he doesn't sue us for defamation, but here and listen to some of these incredible clips, make sure you tell Robert France, Last Podcast in the Left loves him.

• 2:42Marcus Parks?

  That's right.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  This is the kind of juice we need. Welcome to Last Podcast in the Left. We have a very special episode here. We have two of one of my newest, truly favorite movie creators. What you guys are doing is fucking out of this world. The new movie Bring Her Back is coming out, it's now, it's out now, right?

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  By the time you hear this.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  It's out right now.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  It's out now, Bring Her Back. The directors of Talk To Me as well, Danny Filippo and Michael Filippo, welcome.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Hello. So honored. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Yes, live studio audience here, we have two people in the back here, three.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  We, oh yeah, the Rob is our producer, we got the gals, making sure that you don't say anything too horrible. Our goal is to make you say horrible things.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  We're in a constant battle.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  So before we get started, I just want to say, I've, I love horror movies, horror movies are probably my favorite genre of movies. I have been terrified to watch Talk To Me, and I haven't watched it. I specifically did not watch this movie because I'm like, this scares the shit out of me, I want nothing to do with this. I watched it last night with my wife and fuck you.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  My wife!

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Had to sit there and see that.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  What is wrong with you?

• 4:03Speaker 04

  I'm sorry to your wife.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  What are you doing here?

• 4:05Speaker 00

  I don't know what's wrong with me.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know, you know, you just, you gotta get the doctors out somehow, you know?

• 4:12Speaker 03

  And then this morning, I woke up, 7:00 AM, bright and early, to see Bring Her Back.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Perfect breakfast film. I've been trying to sell people, honestly, see the matinee.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Like, get in at 3 o'clock in the goddamn afternoon and just experience it sober.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  I, I had to, I was watching this movie, I had to pause it halfway through, I'm losing my fucking mind, all right? I'm going nuts, I can't deal with this goddamn fucking movie, it's too early in the morning, all right? I got a beautiful dog, I'm like, I love you, please kiss me, all right? And then so I'm like, all right, I pause it.

• 4:43Marcus Parks?

  He's a mouth kisser to the dogs.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  I go make, oh yes, you guys know.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  He gives me that vibe, I hope.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, you guys love it.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  And so I get, so I go, and I go make my breakfast and I start like cutting my strawberries and I got scared of the knife in my hand.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Yes!

• 4:59Speaker 03

  Because of the movie that you made.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Yes!

• 5:01Speaker 03

  I was like, I was scared of myself because of what you guys did.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  I thought it would have been breakfast. I'm actually just jealous, and why haven't you brought your dog in? I miss my dog and I haven't patted a dog in quite a while, so you gotta bring your dog next time. What's your dog's name?

• 5:14Speaker 03

  My dog, I got a new dog named Harley.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  I'm gonna kill it.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  She had a 20 pound.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  She's 13, you don't have to wait long. We actually already got the funeral planned.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Can I ask, can I ask, how do you guys, because you guys made like stunt vids, right? Like you guys were doing, how does it get, like, was it just a natural progression of filmmaking from there?

• 5:32Speaker 04

  Well, it was always, that was always, the YouTube stuff was just practicing to become filmmakers, that was always the goal, always the aim. And, you know, speaking of stunts, Michael couldn't be listed as one of the directors at the start of insurance for Bring Her Back because he was in Detroit having death matches.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  What does that mean?

• 5:49Speaker 04

  It's like an extreme form of professional wrestling where they use like light tubes and barbed wire and real weapons and they cut each other up for real. It's like an extreme performance art blood sport. We're doing a documentary on it and I was like, I wanna be in it.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  You look okay.

• 6:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I look good, doesn't he?

• 6:04Marcus Parks?

  They're Australian, so they're like naturally immune to certain types of damage.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, luckily we brought a barbed wire back.

• 6:15Marcus Parks?

  Listen, before we plug any more of these films, I need you to eat a light bulb.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  You gotta see it, it's visceral, it's bloody, it's good, it's nice.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  What was the, like, so just like, you do that just for the thrill of it or is it one of those that you just love physical action?

• 6:31Speaker 04

  Uh, both. I think we've been obsessed with death match wrestling since little kids. So we used to do it with our friends, unfortunately, but we had a big group of friends. There were parents that would literally not let their kids hang out with us.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  No way!

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, because we were so, we were delinquents, we were actual delinquents.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  You just threatened to kill my dog.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  I was jealous, it was out of envy. It was out of envy.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  You guys had fun charges, though. I looked at your Wikipedia pages, your charges are fun.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, we've had a few fun charges.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, they're not, nothing bad, like, really, like, nothing, just the stuff that honestly just excited me about you.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, underwater cars we got, Michael got arrested for, so did I. Which wasn't even my idea. I know, but you should have. Danny had an underwater car made and he didn't want to drive it. Well, because I was filming and Michael was terrible at recording. That's his excuse for everything. Michael was so bad at recording. Oh, Michael, you're so bad at recording. He were like, we were like, do a scene and I tried to be in the videos, I tried to be in something and his footage is like out of focus, he's like plunged it in a weird way, it's like, dude, just point it at me and film it.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Yes, but you were correct to be scared to get in an underwater car.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  Well, no, I got in the underwater car, I was filming in there.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Yes, I was in there. No, you weren't, you weren't in there. I don't know why this lie has been thrown around.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  And then the cops came and found you while you were in the middle of shooting, right? Is that the idea?

• 7:45Speaker 04

  No, no, it was, so the video came out and then suddenly, like a year later, I would, Danny got arrested. It wasn't a year later, it was like a couple of months.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  Anything but, getting arrested over making art is one of my favorite things on the face of the planet.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  It was so good, but I actually got arrested for pretending to be Michael.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  But then they arrested him. And then Michael got arrested for the art. Yeah, they said I was like a wanted felon, like I had fled the country. I was like, I haven't been hiding or anything and then...

• 8:10Speaker 03

  I put the evidence on YouTube.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's on the video. But it's like a year long lawsuit, it was pretty.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  What was the charge?

• 8:18Speaker 04

  Driving recklessly, driving dangerously, driving without a license, driving without a seatbelt, driving a car that stops hitting the road.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Are you not American?

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I said!

• 8:31Speaker 04

  No, but what, what happened was...

• 8:32Speaker 03

  How about littering?

• 8:33Speaker 04

  We were, no, no, not littering.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Not littering!

• 8:35Speaker 04

  No, that would have been a bad one. They're pretty easy on littering, actually. No, but it was a big thing in the end that I got off scot-free because I didn't, I wasn't actually driving dangerously or recklessly. No, we actually, it was a stunt performed, practice car, it was a stunt, it was a stunt. The police said that they were gonna have to recreate the underwater car to prove it was dangerous.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  And you're like, yeah, we're gonna do your awesome shit.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're gonna, yeah, we're gonna make it right. Why don't we go for a race, boys?

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Let me do this, these guys don't know, everybody knows, this is the man who made Black Panther, this is the man that made Creed that made me audibly weep in a theater. I cried masculine, big fat masculine tears.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  You got Sylvester Stallone nominated for a second Oscar?

• 9:21Speaker 05

  I mean, I think he got, he got, he got himself nominated.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. We know how it is. We know how it goes.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  You're nice. We know.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  But the reason why you're here, those movies are too important and good for us to talk about. This is something that we're talking about that is extremely amazing. This film, Sinners, that you have made, it's coming out April 18th. You have come down to the horror world. You're making an extremely big, thick ass horror movie that are people gonna love and say, "Thank you so much for talking to us." People like, Sinners ruled.

• 9:52Speaker 05

  I appreciate that, you guys, man. That, that, that means the world. I, I, I love the, the genre. Um, you guys saying, I'm coming down to it. I feel like I was, I was coming up to it. You know what I'm saying? Like, like, um, cause, cause when I was in, you know, before I even went to film school, my first, my first short films I would make would have, um, would have, would have horror elements to them. Uh, but I didn't feel like I was, I didn't feel like I was good enough to make that, to make that step yet, man. And, and, um, uh, I kinda got away from it.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  What do you mean by like not, what do you mean by not good enough? We actually watched your movie, Lox. It's beautiful film. Like,

• 10:28Speaker 05

  I'm talking, I'm talking before Lox, bro. Like, like, like I was making stuff before that, you know? Like Lox, I think was like my second year of graduate, no, my second semester of graduate school. But I, I was making shorts when I was in undergrad, when I first learned, learned that I wanted to make movies in. And, and, and, and then I made a couple of things at, at C, you know, um, that, that, you know, one of them, one of them actually was the thing that, that got me recommended for, for Fruitville. Um, but nobody, nobody will ever see those movies. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't legal for us to submit those movies to festivals or anything like that. And they weren't good enough. But, um, but I've been, you know, I've been in love with the, with the genre, man. And, and wanted, wanted to make something, uh, you know, in that zone since I, since I learned I wanted to make movies.

• 11:12Speaker 05

  You know, that was my first, that was my first, my first instinct. Uh, but then, you know, uh, you know, I made Lox. Lox was the first thing I could submit to festivals, you know, based on the rules of the school and, and, um, ended up making things more in that, you know, you know, more in that tonality. Um, you know, but this was kind of a homecoming for me, uh, that, that folks who really know me who are around, you know, you know, know I have, uh, I have this, this type of, um, this type of passion for horror cinema.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Man, what are, what are your favorite horror movies?

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. We need to, and not just what inspired Sinners, but what, what inspires you in general, kind of?

• 11:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, man. My, my favorite horror movies, man. Um,

• 11:50Speaker 05

  I would say number one is The Thing.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:52Speaker 05

  Um.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  Now, you consider that horror over sci-fi?

• 11:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure, bro.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I, I, I consider The Thing cosmic horror. Um, you know, it, it, it definitely has, has science fiction, uh, elements as well. I, I must, I must tell you, bro, even though I love genre cinema, I, I don't like the concept of genre.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  Like, it, it annoys me. Like having a, having a, having a classified thing, and especially like after, after, um, making this movie. You know, cause I can research and, um, you know, the movie deals with, uh, a lot of things, but,

• 12:28Speaker 03

  It's drama, action, horror. It's everything.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  But you're unlocking something. It was like Hereditary was the first time I remember seeing as an adult, seeing a movie. And I was like, horror is drama set on fire. Right? Like,

• 12:39Speaker 05

  Hundred percent.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  I saw her.

• 12:40Speaker 05

  Hereditary is a big one for me. I love that movie.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so when I watched Sinners, the first thing I thought of it was, was truly refreshing about it is because, yes, what you're saying, I see what you're saying. Yeah, it's a horror movie because of the elements that are within it. But all of the stuff feeds what the movie's about.

• 12:57Speaker 05

  Yes. Yes. No, one, no, one hundred percent. Like, like, like the, the thing is, is I always, I always work from the, the standpoint of knowing what my worst fear is as an artist. And I'm, and I'm always kind of dealing with that in my movies. You know what I'm saying?

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  And, and, and in this, in this movie, I dealt with all of them. Like all of my, all of my, all of my worst fears are, are, are in this. I just dumped them all in there. You know what I'm saying?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  And, and, and, but, but, but what I was saying about genre was like, you know, um, in, in, in, in studying for this, for this movie, I, I was studying Delta Blues music. And I discovered like, I discovered that, that for a long time, when, when, when the, when the, the music business was like first commodified in this country, you know, genre itself was a, was a, was a tool of racism, you know? Like, if a, if a black person sang a song and then a white person sang the same song, you know, they would put those two songs into two different genres. You know what I'm saying? Like the, the black song would be called a race record. And in the, and in the, and in the white person singing the song, that might be called bluegrass.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  Or like pop, pop, or like it changed to a thing.

• 14:06Speaker 05

  Exactly. Exactly. And, and you know, the music industry, it, it, you know, came before the film industry. You know, you know what I'm saying? Like it, it had, it's a, it's a older industry. So, so, so a lot of the, the, the film business, it, it follows the whims of music because it's an older industry. You know what I'm saying?

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:24Speaker 05

  And, and that, that tradition is what causes like certain genres to be kind of like ghettoized. You know what I'm, you know what I'm saying?

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  Like this, this genre is beneath this genre. The horror movie is beneath the, the, the costume drama. You know, you know what I'm saying? Like this, this, this thing. So, so whenever, whenever I hear it with this one and I'm trying to define it, or when I'm trying to like classify a movie like Rosemary's Baby, you know, you know what I'm saying?

• 14:49Speaker 00

  What is, I was thinking about that. What exactly would you call it? Yes, it has horror elements, but it's like a, it's mostly a drama.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Like, like, right. So, so is it, is it, so, so you realize, you realize it becomes, you know, like they had this ridiculous rule that the movie interrogates, like called the one drop rule. Like, uh, for, for, for, for human beings, right? And in, in, in this country at a time when, when they were trying to, trying to put the, the, uh, you know, when they're trying to, when they're trying to stick apartheid on type, on top of humanity. They said, oh, if you got one drop of black blood, now that makes you black. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Which is, which is, which is, which is so absurd when you, when you, when you, when you, when you hear this. But it's also, you know, you think about that with movies. It's like, hey, you got, you got one, you got a couple of horror scenes. No, that's a horror film. You know, you know?

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  And it's like, well, it's Rosemary's Baby. Like, like, how are we gonna talk about this movie? Cause, cause, cause the vast majority of it, you know, is a husband, a husband and a wife talking to their neighbors. You know, you know, you know what I mean?

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 05

  You know, you know, and, and, and so, so, so, so for me, you know, um, my, my favorite horror movies, that they all are gonna have a, a, a, a element of like a question mark. Like, like, yo, is that a horror movie? Cause, cause, cause, cause look, I'll tell you straight up. Like, I think Steven Spielberg has created some of the most horrific images known to man. Like, like, you know, uh, uh, with Jaws.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Raiders of the Lost Ark, when everyone else.

• 16:11Speaker 05

  That, that, that ending, bro. Like what happens to the dude when he pops the thing. But, but also, man, a movie like Jurassic Park. Like, like, like the, like some of those velociraptor sequences, um, the opening velociraptor sequence, when a, when a guy gets eaten.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:24Speaker 05

  Uh, uh, and, and buy, buy something in a box that you can't see, you know, um, uh, or, or the T-Rex sequence. When he, when he is, is ran in the night and the cup is rippling and, and, you know, he's coming, fucking eyes coming by the, coming by the, uh, you know, coming by the car and just breathing on the glass. The, the velociraptor opening the door.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 05

  And the claws on the, on the kitchen, on the kitchen tile. You know what I'm saying? Like, like, you know,

• 16:47Speaker 03

  That movie is so scary. It literally scares dogs. Like, there's so much footage of it, like scaring dogs. So like, that's how scary.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Dogs know it's scary.

• 16:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, dog, yeah, dog's not fucking with it. Yeah, like, man, get that thing off.

• 17:02Speaker 00

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• 21:23Speaker 00

  I am more impressed with you the more I look at your stuff. Now, I'm talking, I'm not talking about your body. I'm talking about your work. Because I've looked at this and the stuff is very interesting. And it's also, you know, the kids like it. Yeah, but also I like it.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  I dived in pretty hard last night. It's wild.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  This is very interesting. I'm so excited to have you here. The filmmaker, Paul Axalos for the internet and soon to be for the silver screen. We have Kane Pixels of the Backrooms.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  AKA Kane Parsons.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:59Speaker 06

  Hey, guys. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, Kane. I'm just a guy. I don't, I don't have a name.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Hell, yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  I like this. I look at you, you're in fluorescent light. You look like you're in the backrooms.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Right now.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  And you're frightening me.

• 22:17Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  This is all.

• 22:19Speaker 06

  That's what I tried to do.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  I'm really afraid it's gonna be one of those where I'm gonna blink. I'm gonna be in front of one of those weird grates. Very frightening. It's really, honestly, extremely frightening. I, but you created, well, you worked with the idea, which I guess was sort of a collective idea, right? What they, they say in internet urban legend, but more so, it was kind of like a series of kind of spooky images.

• 22:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  The OG backrooms.

• 22:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, I can break it down if you like. I don't know. Okay, so just like the, and stop me if you've heard this before, or maybe this is good for the audience. It originated in a very unconventional way, this idea of the backrooms, where it initially started as basically somebody took a photo of really just what looked like. I mean, many of you have probably seen the original backrooms photo. It's just kind of that off-yellow, dingy, unrenovated backspace with like 50 different wallpapers all clashing against each other, like horrible, ugly fluorescents with like stained ceiling tiles. And someone took that. It ended up on 4chan. No one knows where it came from, just given the nature of the site. It's all anonymous.

• 23:32Speaker 06

  And that ended up getting reposted to another board along with a caption that again, another anonymous user added, which basically outlined this premise, which is like the one that most people know, like the one that you typically were originally accompanied that image, which is, I don't, I somehow don't have it memorized verbatim, but it's essentially saying like, if you no-clip out of reality in the wrong areas, which for those who don't know is like a gaming/3D design term, where if you just like move through like a phase through a physical object, if you no-clip out of reality in the wrong areas, you will end up in the backrooms, where it's just this infinite, never-ending, basically just what you see in that image. It's like you're stuck in the backrooms of an empty Sears forever.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it reminds me, I was on a show you called Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, and it is sort of similar in the aspect of the, I, almost commercial hellscape that you go to, where it's a series of almost cubicles, looks almost like liminal spaces.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, liminal spaces.

• 24:32Speaker 06

  That's the term that's popped up. Yep.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  Yes. It looks like society at one point was thriving, and now it's dying, and we're stuck fending through what's left. Is what I kind of felt.

• 24:43Speaker 06

  This thing.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 24:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  It's all fucked up and super scary. Lots of dark imagery. I fucking love what you're doing. I think it's great.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Your, your, the original short film blew my mind.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  Just in terms of realizing how that was all.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Found footage horror.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Well, I do, but I also was really impressed with the digital build.

• 25:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, I appreciate that. That's really where a lot of my background is. I've been picking away at, it initially started with just After Effects. I would use some like Element 3D for those who dabble, know what that is. But around the time during the pandemic is when I, I had a bunch of free time. I was still in high school. I mean, the pandemic hit when I was in my freshman year of high school.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  God.

• 25:31Speaker 06

  In that time, which I mean, for me, just given my age, that feels so long ago now, because just time goes so slowly right now. It's starting to pick up. It's definitely going very fast right now, the past two years.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  So much of life is just like, oh, that was like six high schools, you know?

• 25:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  I've been alive for like eight presidents. That's what I realized.

• 25:51Speaker 06

  That's, that's something I'm seeing more and more, and it's something I've had like a fixation on for a long time to the, this accelerating passage of time. But with that, I initially got my start on YouTube, like, I don't want to say my start, because I've been around for a while. I started my channel in 2015 doing like Minecraft Let's Plays and like whatever like eight-year-old kids do on the internet.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  But this is like, you were already being like, I'm gonna make stuff. I'm gonna make.

• 26:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, I've had that instinct for a while. It just kind of, it wasn't as defined until I would say around middle school and high school, when I started really pushing out CGI-driven, like, science fiction horror films. And that led to, I did this little mini web series, I guess I would call it a series. It's more like a, I don't know, an extended art piece of little vignettes from the Attack on Titan series, if you.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, very cool stuff. I watched those last night. I loved them, dude. You fucking rock that shit.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  And he never, he has no.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  I have no idea what the hell Attack on Titan is, but I was very captivated by what you created.

• 26:52Speaker 06

  I appreciate, yeah, that was like the, that was like the first.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Dude, you were talking, I just wish that you could even understand what a breakthrough it is for this ham hock of a man.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  To embrace Attack on Titan fan-made content. Well, that's how good, that's, that's what you did. You broke, you made this man on, think about anime.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, it's usually just ham and, you know.

• 27:14Speaker 06

  I'm so sorry.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  Dogs, yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, just like tits and dogs. That's all he watches.

• 27:20Speaker 06

  Well, that's an honor, truly. Yeah, with that, it's it's it was really my attempt to like, take, I was more of a reader than a watcher of the anime. I I read the manga and like, I tried to take the feeling that I got from that body of work that I felt like was kind of lost in the anime and lost in like, the the broader community where it it when reading it, it feels a lot more gloomy and and really quite. The anime injects sort of like an epicness to it almost, which I never really personally connected with. So I just tried to like, come back from that and just make my own little thing that had that feeling to it, and it really took off. That's what like, took my channel from, I think it was like, twenty thousands, which is not insignificant.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  No, it's great.

• 28:03Speaker 06

  It took it from twenty thousand to two hundred thousand, so it that's what really made me realize like YouTube could be a viable way forward, and that was the beginning of twenty twenty one. And then the later that year on Thanksgiving, I decided to, because I had been I was familiar with the backrooms as a meme like since twenty nineteen, since it first surfaced. And it wasn't huge back then, but it definitely, over the years into the pandemic, sort of permeated, made its way around everyone.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  The liminal space thing took over in twenty twenty, yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, it did, and it sort of, although reviewing trends, not as much as it did in twenty twenty two. But it sort of bled around everywhere. Everyone was kind of vaguely aware of it. They probably saw some things on, I'm not on TikTok, but but TikTok is where a lot of this stuff kind of melded together.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  Were you just interested or did, what was it about it that struck a chord with you?

• 28:57Speaker 06

  I think I would, okay, so on a few fronts, I was never the biggest like, diehard liminal space fan in quotes, whatever that means. I I would definitely.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  That is such a funny concept of like, uh, I'm a huge liminal space fan.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  I just like empty room.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  You're a liminal space fan? Name four liminal spaces that you're favorite.

• 29:20Speaker 06

  Believe me, that's a thing. That's a thing. I I have been very online for the past couple of years, and I've seen a lot of people in this space, and believe me, some people know like, the exact hex codes of every pixel of every image of.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Have you ever even been to a train station?

• 29:37Speaker 06

  Wait until you find about the about the mall.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah, but continue, I'm sorry.

• 29:44Speaker 06

  So those videos, like videos of like, liminal spaces with eerie music or like Minecraft music playing over them, like nostalgic slash creepy slash whatever. I would get those on my YouTube page every now and then, now and again, over the course of like, twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, that period, which is

• 30:02Speaker 06

  really not a ton of time, but those soaked into my psyche, they were alluring for reasons that were hard to explain, and I think that's what most people felt, like the whole idea is that it kind of connects with you on a very unconscious, or at least like, it resonates, but you can't quite explain why, and that's why people find it so interesting.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Dude, that's my shit. I fucking hate when horror movie over explains, like, don't explain it. It's better a mystery. And that's why your shit freaks me out, because I'm watching it and I'm like, there's no rhyme or reason to any of this. It's just like, I mean, maybe there is, and I'm an idiot, which is, happens to me all the time.

• 30:38Speaker 06

  There is, but it's intended to be buried.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's buried. When you do that, when, because we were remarking upon your ability to create dread in a very, because that's what liminal spaces do, right? That's the whole thing, is that it's a unfinished, it's the valley, it's uncanny, it's a weird place, it's where things drift in between. Obviously, we're all kind of, but what you did, like, can you actually talk to me about the filmmaking process of working in a fully digital world like that? Because I'll tell you, Skinner Marink wishes it was the backroom.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, the whole time I was watching it, I mean, this is our, this is our opinion, not yours.

• 31:15Speaker 06

  I wish I could commentate. I haven't seen Skinner Marink.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Ah, don't, don't let it in. Keep doing what you're doing.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Watch it. You don't need to be inspired by it.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Why are you even talking to us? Get back to work.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  It's horse shit.

• 31:28Speaker 06

  I kind of want to watch it now.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 06

  I mean, that reaction is pretty intense.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  It is, that's why people like it, but what do you, what do you think is like, what what's your little trick? What's the trick?

• 31:39Speaker 06

  So Blender, I use Blender. It's a free software. I use that for all my three D visuals. I work on just this one laptop. I mean, if you see my workspace, it's a standing desk with this one laptop.

• 31:53Speaker 06

  That's, that's it. I mean, I have some cameras as well, but only in recent years have I sort of picked those up from like, the money that YouTube stuff has made. Average budget for the stuff I make is like, maybe ten dollars to zero dollars beyond like, the starting cost of the laptop itself, and more recently, I've been using like, overseas render farms, because it's been getting pretty intense, turning stuff out in a timely manner, but if, let let me think, like, what the, I would say creatively, like, the way I did that first Backrooms short, it was more funny enough, considering how it's like, the thing I'm most known for now. It was originally just kind of like a palate cleanser exercise I did for myself.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  That's where all that shit is. It's always.

• 32:34Speaker 06

  It always, it always seems to happen that way, yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 06

  I was tired from doing the Attack on Titan videos, felt like I had exhausted that. I was looking at some liminal space images. Just thought to myself, because I've always had a very strong personal relationship with just like, locations and buildings, and I mean, it's not like a hugely stated thing, but you know, like, I guess maybe it's being sentimental, or maybe it's just having an appreciation for the way design can affect emotion and like, the flow of human traffic and and things like that, but those things have always just been like underlying themes in my life, and so I think that's probably why liminal spaces and whatever you want to call that, connect with me so much. It's sort of like, you appreciate a living room, you appreciate a kitchen, you appreciate a bedroom, but you don't usually appreciate like, the hallway.

• 33:17Speaker 06

  Going there, it feels like it's almost like, if you're thinking of these as people, they're like, the people who don't get any credit for upholding the whole infrastructure of human civilization in a way, which is like, such a weird way to humanize it, but that's kind of the, the feeling that I got, and I mean, you can take that for like, abandoned places too, like places that it feels like that place wants to be maintained and remembered, but instead it's just rotting, so it's kind of the same feeling.

• 33:43Speaker 06

  But I I looked at that original Backrooms image, thought, can I evoke the same emotion in a video form? Because I haven't seen any videos really of like, all, these are all stationary images. What if I tried to remake, capture this feeling in Blender? Did that, posted a little teaser to Instagram, because it was just going to be like, a fifteen second shot initially. People liked it, and then from there, I decided to just make a whole short around that one shot. It's it's the shot of, if if you remember it, the chair flying and and hitting the wall. That was the first ever one I did, and I never like, redid it or anything. I just left that in and built the rest of the short in both ends around it.

• 34:19Speaker 06

  And and then it did very well. I did not expect it at all. I expected it to majorly underperform. And from there, I I I can get more into the technical stuff, like, sorry, I have a tendency to go a little off rails with this, but.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  No, that's why we, that's the purpose of this. Please treat us like total morons.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  We're morons.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  And and like, and we, I want to learn everything about what you're doing, because not only is it incredibly successful, but it fucking shook me to my core last night.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, he got really deep in.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  And so I think it's amazing. I love, I kind of, if I'm catching what what I'm, what what you're saying here is, you liked the liminal thing and you saw it, and you're like, I could fucking do that. And then you did, and you nailed it, and it were kind of like, I'm, you know, it reminds me of like, it it's not necessarily what you are want to do with the rest of your life, I'm guessing here, I'm guessing here, you know, but you fucking, you're better at it than anyone else. And it reminds me a lot, and this is a crazy comparison, but how fucking Bob Dylan started. He wasn't a protester, but he's like, he was listening to the protest music, he's like, I can write better protest music than that.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  And then became one.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  You know, and then became the best at it, you know, and it's like, and so that's what I'm kind of sensing from you. And what you're doing right now is terrifying, but I'm curious, does it scare you, your art, or do you just find it cool? You know, it's it's kind of like, where what makes, I kept thinking of the whole time I'm watching, like, are you just sitting behind a computer, like, freaking out, or are you just enjoying it?

• 35:50Speaker 06

  That's happened before. It's it's more the, and also that Bob Dylan comparison is is quite high praise. But but

• 35:59Speaker 06

  the making of it has kind of recently become more technical, I would say, as it becomes more of a job. That's something I've been thinking about. And every now and then, there'll be a project where it does feel more fluid and more alive in a way, where it's kind of like, I'm interacting with a thing outside myself. That can be said very heavily for the series I did after Backroom. Well, I'm still doing Backrooms, but it's kind of the movie deal has caused the YouTube end of it to kind of pause, but I'm I'm all of that started to pick up like, right now in my own life. I don't know when this podcast will go out, but like, this is it's coming back to my life now and hopefully back to YouTube in the nearish future. But the series I did after that was called The Oldest View. I would consider that my best work to date. Probably more than Backrooms.

• 36:44Speaker 06

  But it's it's, that's the mall one that I made a tiny hint at earlier, which I can talk about in a moment, because it's the one I'm the production of that is probably the most interesting to talk about and kind of.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  We just talked about, it was, yeah, we just watched it. It's fucking awesome.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  They don't need any introduction. They are the scum dogs of the universe, Guar.

• 37:07Marcus Parks?

  We don't need any, but we want a better one than that.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Yes. Guar, international rock and roll sensation

• 37:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  from the other galaxies of the universe.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  That's right. We're cum dogs for the scum dogs, baby.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Sucking dick, feeding clit, man, yeah. The only way.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, keep us dirty, dude. Fucking, I want to see.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Have you guys thought about Botox? Like, have you guys thought about like?

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Great. What are you talking about? They come there in L A for five minutes. You're selling a botox?

• 37:42Speaker 00

  You're thinking about like, do you ever want to keep up with the Joneses? Like, does Instagram make you jealous? No, I just need a dentist. This shit really hurts. I'm looking for a dentist. I don't need any. Ever thought about a zipping?

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. They keep saying it. They keep saying it, but honestly, you won't take.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  You like like, you've got type three.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  I still got my feet. I still got my feet. I just didn't know whether or not there's any pressure for the unrealistic beauty standards for you guys now, because you guys are obviously.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  I'm happy with, I'm happy with myself. I'm content in my own skin.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  But there's a lot of pressure, you know? You're absolutely right, though. There is an unfair standard of beauty that as as.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  Woman in the business. I have to ask, you know, nobody asks, asks, asks Jiz back how old he is.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  No.

• 38:31Speaker 04

  But that's the first question they ask of me.

• 38:32Speaker 05

  Look at me and then look at him.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Well, you're the lead singer. You're the Gwen Stefani.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then pigs like you asking me if I've had Botox.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. I just want our audience to understand that not everything is as appear as it does on social media. And then when they see you and they look up to you and they think that that like, that's what I want to strive for and be. I want them to understand there's a whole process to that.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  You can't get this. You can't get this. This is not an Instagram filter.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  No, there's a lot of, I use a lot of filler.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  So welcome to Last Podcast on the Left and we have a very special person on this guy. Honestly, what's funny about this man is that not only is he on his way to becoming an extremely powerful man in Hollywood. And is he becoming a legitimate and crazy director. This man started from the humble, humble beginnings of sketch comedy. Oh, don't say it. Just like us, just like our shit filled lives. He pulled, he pulled himself up from the swamp and he made it to the big time. Why, you think you're better than me? Yeah. You think you're fucking tough? He fucking does. You think you're no nice with your fancy clear glasses?

• 39:46Speaker 00

  This is the director of the new hit Weapons and the former hit, current hit Barbarian. And one of the Lord creatrices of whitest kids you know, Zach Cracker. Thank you for being here.

• 40:00Speaker 05

  I, I'm so thrilled to be here. I love the show and it's, it's a treat. Thank you so much. Henry, have you talked about how you came in to help me with Barbarian?

• 40:10Speaker 00

  I've only, only little, little pieces is that I came in and I, cause I didn't even know what the full extent of my voice was used.

• 40:19Speaker 05

  Well, sadly it, it wasn't used.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  God, it's fine. Okay, okay. It's fine, it's fine though, but yeah.

• 40:23Speaker 05

  But I was, it was very kind of you to help though, because what was going on is I was trying to get the scream down for the mother and I just could not get the scream. And I was listening to your podcast and you were doing some fucking character and you, just like very casually went like, and then they go like, whoa. And you did this like amazing blood curdling shriek. And I was like, that's, that's what I want.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  That's the shriek.

• 40:45Speaker 05

  Like, he did it. And so I got ahold of you and you were so kind to come in and, and I made you scream for 20 minutes.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  It was awesome.

• 40:53Speaker 05

  And it was fun. It was fun to hang.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Yes, it was my pleasure. No, it was so much fun. Uh, I actually, it's a good bring up. So like, we know each other from way back in the day. Whitest Kids was always held as like this wonderful esteem. Cause when we. The goal.

• 41:09Speaker 05

  The goal. I'm sure you hated us, just like every other sketch group hated us.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  You know what, dude? What's nice is that you guys were awesome. Each one of you was extremely sweet to us. You never made us feel stupid. We were told, because we were the only other independent sketch comedy group, but when we arrived, we were like a part of a pastiche of independent sketch comedy groups. And like, you were like kind of the bastion. You guys were the light on the hill that like, oh, if you just, if you're just funny and you're right place, right time, they give you a television show. And then you sealed up the door behind you.

• 41:43Speaker 05

  You really did. Well, that was part of our deal. We're like, close the door.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  But the part of sketch comedy, I feel like now we're seeing.

• 41:51Speaker 05

  We even had Peterman trying to help us for a hot second. He couldn't do shit. Yeah, he couldn't do shit with us either. We were a fucking disaster though. We were hammered.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  We were disgusted.

• 42:00Speaker 05

  That was the problem. You think we weren't hammered? Are you kidding?

• 42:02Speaker 00

  God damn it.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  But a lot of people now, like now Jordan Peele, a lot of people are, they're seeing this connection between horror and comedy. And I think it's getting kind of like, well, everybody's saying sort of the same thing, right? Where that comedy hinges on timing and visceral response, which is very similar to humor, but I think it's deeper than that.

• 42:26Speaker 05

  Oh, tell me, tell me.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Well, no, I, I wanted to ask you if you felt that exercising dark ideas through sketch comedy actually creates a darker vision for like the world in general?

• 42:44Speaker 05

  What a, what an amazing question that I have never really considered. And, and I think you could be right. And here's, here's where I'm going to go with you on this journey here is because all the brainstorming that we would do to sit down and just start like, okay, sketch ideas. Sketch ideas, you know, cause we've all been there. Like, what would be crazy? You just start pushing your brain to think of like, what's an extreme situation? And I did that all day, every day for, I don't know how many fucking years I, I committed all of myself to whitest kids, basically a decade. Honestly, you know?

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Same.

• 43:19Speaker 05

  So I think like, if, if there's a gym, you know, like a mental gym, I was working out the muscle group that was like, how far can I go? You know, how can I, how can I go left when I should go right? You know, so maybe that's, maybe that's in there, maybe so. I feel like movies are almost like a series of sketches, like getting you from scene to scene in a weird way.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Do you think that horror movies like comedies hinge on pivotal scenes or versus entire arcs?

• 43:45Speaker 05

  Well, that's a great question too. I think, look, a horror movie must have scenes that scare you, right? If, if you watch a horror movie and you're never actually scared, but it's telling a great story, it doesn't mean it's a bad movie. It just means it's probably not really a horror movie.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  It's a drama.

• 43:58Speaker 05

  So, yeah, or, or it's a mystery. It's a thrill, whatever it is, you know, I don't know.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  But I mean, the best horror movies will have those, but they'll still like, you could take the scares out and it would still tell a compelling story. Like The Shining is still a fascinating story, even if it wasn't, you know, as viscerally terrifying as it is. Because I want to know, I want to track this guy's decline and I want to watch how his family has to, has to react. I think that's, that's a really engaging story. So I'm trying to think of like a terrifying horror movie where if you took all the scares out, it would be like, let's, let's examine Terrifier 2.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Terrifier 2, which is like, for me, I view that even closer to like a comedy in terms of you have set pieces. Like Terrifier 2 has set pieces that the movie is sort of moving towards that.

• 44:44Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  Allow these things to collide where like you did that so well in Weapons with the, the kind of way you told the story where you set four lines out at each other and then they all collide together.

• 44:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  But Terrifier 2 is a much more deeply simplified version of what you did. You know, like it's a much more simplified, it's much more direct. It obviously is like, we gotta kill a bunch of people like, you know, like Terrifier 2, you know? The, the idea is to get just piles of guts.

• 45:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is, it's just kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, you know? By the way, I, I really liked Terrifier 2. No, they're unbelievable. When I went to Fright Fest in 2022, the only movie I was like, I gotta clear my schedule to go see Terrifier 2. Cause I had been, I loved Terrifier 1 and I was like, I can't believe I had to wait like this many years to see this fucking thing. I am, I am ready.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  I was really happy with them.

• 45:42Speaker 05

  I'm into it. I sidelined all of them at once, just because I was literally scared to see them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause I just like, I'm like, I don't know if I could handle all this gore. And then, so I was just like, then we, we interviewed David Howard Thornton. So I just watched all three like right in a row and that was fucking, that's the way to do it.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  And he's the simplest little cowpoke, southern boy. Have you ever talked to him?

• 46:04Speaker 05

  No.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  Art the Clown?

• 46:05Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  He's all like, well, gee golly, I don't even know how all this happened. I'm just a theater boy and I just, I love musicals and I, and it was, it's amazing, honestly.

• 46:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  In, I, last night I had the pleasure of seeing Weapons in a packed theater, Wednesday night, packed theater.

• 46:24Speaker 05

  Tuesday night I saw it in a packed theater and not just that, it was playing in multiple theaters at once. And it was like, everyone was going to see Weapons. It was fucking awesome. That's wild.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  But the reaction, there was a part in this that I wondered, people were talking in the lobby. Oh yes, everybody was hanging out in the lobby. You have such a great, like when you were making, when you were making this movie, you ever see Exorcist 3? Did you put Exorcist 3 in this?

• 46:47Speaker 05

  Of course I've seen Exorcist 3. I think it's amazing.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Did you, did you, were you inspired at all by Exorcist 3? Cause I think you have one of the best jump scares that I've seen in a fucking minute, dead, dead in the right.

• 46:56Speaker 05

  I'm guessing you're talking about the ceiling.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 46:59Speaker 05

  I mean, that's gotta come from Exorcist 3, but that's kind of a combination of three jump scares. Obviously the Exorcist 3 ceiling gag is not a jump scare. It's just deeply off putting.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:08Speaker 05

  You know, it's, it's, and it's great. It's mesmerizing and I love it. The Exorcist 3 jump scare, which is to my, for my money in the top five of all time, is the hallway crash zoom on that fucking lady with the cle, with the scissors. That to me, I, I'm getting the hair on my neck is standing up right now. Just thinking about that scare, it's so good. I don't know how, it freaked me out so much the first time I saw it. And it's one of those scares where I could still put it on right now and it would still kind of get me, you know? I love it so much. The other one, and this is a little less like hypocrite here, but The Conjuring dude, the best. Sheba on top of the armoire, when it tilted up and she jumps, I was not ready for that dude. That annihilated me in the theater.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Dude, the first Conjuring fucked me up. It was the best.

• 47:52Speaker 05

  Dude, the clapping sequence, it's ruthless.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  I always think of Insidious 2 though, which is my other big commercial one where I, I almost killed my mother. Cause I knew it was coming. I knew they, we saw it with my mom and I, I knew the devil, the fire devil scene was coming. And so I crawled.

• 48:09Speaker 05

  Over the shoulder?

• 48:10Speaker 00

  Yes, I crawled behind the chair that she was sitting in. I pretended to go to the bathroom and I crawled behind the chair. And as it popped up, I almost fucking killed her straight. Man, it was so worth it.

• 48:22Speaker 05

  But I do believe that's an insidious one, if I'm not mistaken.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, insidious. That's my, that's my other favorite jump scare. But like, when you're thinking about the movie, when you're writing it, like, do you think about it in that way? Like for those jump scares, for stuff like that, like, cause it, in, in weapons, it came at a very specific moment. Obviously, it felt like it, you were like, it almost felt like the movie kicks in. Hard, like, like you were watching and all of a sudden it was like, the movie changed. Is that, is that on purpose?

• 48:52Speaker 05

  To a degree, yeah. So my writing process is usually very stream of consciousness. I don't outline, I don't know where I'm gonna go. So like, I remember the first pass I did at that point in Justine's chapter, I actually didn't really know where the kids went. I didn't know what was behind them running away. So I was kind of like, just like improvising and, and so I don't think I put that ceiling scene nightmare in because I didn't know that Gladys existed. And so.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  When did Gladys show up for you?

• 49:20Speaker 05

  I think in the, in the cop stuff, when I was getting into Paul and the cop and the junkies, when I kind of figured it out. Like, I think by the time I wrote James's chapter, I had that idea. I was like, the kids are in the basement. Why though? Like, why would the kids be in Alex's basement? It's just, it just felt like that's where they had to be. And then I, and then I, I just kind of had this idea of like, it's, this is gonna sound really woo woo and I really don't like to talk about the meaning of the movie, but I have said this before, so I, I guess I can, I can let this much out of the bag because it's already out. But like, the Gladys and Alex chapter to me is a, is just about living with an alcoholic parent. I grew up in an alcoholic household. My dad died of cirrhosis, you know? And, and it's a terrible thing that comes into a family dynamic and it changes everything. And, and so, you know, I had a happy

• 50:05Speaker 05

  house and then something came into my house and it turned my dad into a scary person. And I'd go to school and, and everything's cool and I'd go home and I'd have a scary house with a scary dad, you know? And so, like, that to me felt so interesting. And, and this is such a personal movie, so it's like, it.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:23Speaker 05

  There's no overarching like lesson in this movie. This is not like, I have nothing to say with this movie. I'm not, I have no pretense of like, this is a, a treatise or anything like that. It's just a diary entry for me. And it just felt good to kind of have this dynamic at the core of it. That is something that I feel really a personal connection to, that had a ripple effect out into this town. And so, that's all that is.

• 50:50Speaker 00

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• 51:34Speaker 00

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• 52:13Speaker 00

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• 52:38Speaker 03

  Oh no, it's my favorite thing in the world. It's Quince. Oh, I look good. I mean, I feel good. You know, it's been a while since I wanted to look at myself in the mirror and Quince really helps me with that. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I see myself in that beautiful cashmere Quince sweater and I think, dang, everybody's gonna want this. I better take it off because I love my wife. You gotta get that versatile jacket. You gotta get the perfect t-shirt. And you know who's got it?

• 53:17Speaker 03

  Oh, it's Quince. Quince has got it. If you come to one of the shows, you'll probably see me wearing Quince. If you can't guess which part of my clothes are Quince, I'll give you a pinch. That's right. Quince for a pinch here over at Last Podcast on the Left. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. I like the cashmere. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Last Podcast on the Left. It's the best way to support the show.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  Quince, it makes you look like a prince.

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• 54:47Speaker 00

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• 55:35Speaker 00

  Now, many people would say, many people, my manager, my family.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  30 people.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  A lot of people might say that when a broadcaster has found himself interviewing a dog, that that would be the low point of their career.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  But, why is it my high point?

• 55:57Speaker 03

  I gotta say, I'm thrilled today to be joined with the wonderful, absolutely

• 56:06Speaker 03

  good boy, Dr. Henry Indiana Jones.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  So good to have you here. How have you been? How are you enjoying LA?

• 56:17Speaker 03

  Have you gone out to, have you tried the vegan food yet?

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Have you been to the chateau?

• 56:24Speaker 03

  Oh, you would do great at the chateau.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  Have you gone to the chateau? Because honestly, I feel like that's like one of those things where the scene at the chateau.

• 56:34Speaker 03

  Would really, yeah, it really, you would look good there. You would be good there. And if you wanted to, you can go to the bathroom and call it the chateau. Nothing, huh?

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Well, so.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Nothing on that.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  So.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  I do puns.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Your father, Ben Leonberger, directed this film. Uh, do you feel that he in many way? Sort of, I don't know, because your dog might have skirted around some of the child labor laws?

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Do you know that Ben? Um, is actually, I hate to do this.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  What?

• 57:07Speaker 03

  Not your father?

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Don't do this.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  No, I mean, but he's not, I mean, obviously you're a dog and he's a man. And you're not his son.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  Ben is the father that stepped up.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  So how do you feel about your stepfather?

• 57:24Speaker 00

  So tell me, when you first got this script, how did you choose it? Was it one of those where? Like, you know, you've been auditioning for years and you're like, finally, like this is me. I'm in this film, right? Or is it just because you needed the money?

• 57:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. And were you not willing to put on the, the weight for Beethoven?

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Fucking nothing. Jesus Christ. Nothing, huh? You know, I, I don't know whether or not you're being paid by big government to be silenced.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  But you gotta understand that part of your job as an actor is to do promo. Okay?

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. You gotta hit the road. You gotta get out there and talk to people about your movie.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  Or no one's gonna go fucking see it. Nobody's gonna see it unless you press it.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  You know, this is like when we try to have Billy Bob Thornton.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  We had Billy Bob Thornton in one time and he literally showed up dressed as a French mime and he didn't speak on, and you wouldn't even know it was Billy Bob Thornton.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  He also ate his own shit.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  Yes. Which was like, to me, he said something was about like, he said human composting.

• 58:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  He said that was his new diet or whatever. Have you ever met Billy Bob?

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  I'm just.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  I just wonder if the silence has anything to do with some of those recent.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  Are you in the Pupstein files?

• 58:44Speaker 00

  Are you in the Pupstein files?

• 58:45Speaker 03

  Are you in the Pupstein files? Answer us. Where is it?

• 58:48Speaker 00

  Did you take Pupstein's plane?

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Were you on Dog Lolita one?

• 58:56Speaker 00

  Because it's legal for you. There's no, there is no age of consent. Dogs get pregnant before they're one.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  So it's not even that big of a deal.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Now, now that you're like, you're an actor, do you still believe in money over bitches?

• 59:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. Now that you can get anything you want, any kind of treat that you want, any kind of, you know, you can get heart guard. Sent to the house.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  You know what I mean? Like, what was your first expenditure?

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I get being shy.

• 59:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  He wants to appear, like, you know what it is I get in a way that he wants to appear like he's still one of us.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  I'm sure. I'm sure. Did, now, are you in SAG or WAG?

• 59:40Speaker 00

  Well, non-union.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Non.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  We're gonna talk about that with Ben.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  Non-union.

• 59:45Speaker 00

  That's a, ooh, that is not a good look.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  In this town, dude.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  Not a good look.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  A big no-no in this town.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  Watch out for that.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Boast.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  Oh, actually, no, they shot in Montana.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  So they don't care.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  Montana doesn't care. They just hoard water there.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  They do hoard water.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  Well. You're not gonna answer our hardcore questions. I don't know what you're gonna do when you go on Access Hollywood af- after us.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. I can't believe that good boy is a bad dog.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  You're a bad dog.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  Bad dog.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Bad boy.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Bad dog.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  Bad boy.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  I don't like being around you. You're ugly.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  No, don't, don't do that. No, it's not true. You know it's not true.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  He's very attractive.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  He's the handsomest person in this room.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  God, I bet you get all the bitches.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  All right, let's try to talk to his fucking father.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  It's not his father. He's not your father.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  Now, your lead actor was a bit difficult at the top of the interview.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, what, what up with that?

• 1:00:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he refused to read a script for the entire duration of the shoot. He really doesn't understand that he's in a movie. I cannot say that enough.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  It's, it's like him, Gary Busey. When did the second chances start? You know, and like, when did, like, how often are we gonna do this? These guys that don't understand. You can't pee in front of everybody.

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  You, the trick is figuring out how to make a movie around them.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  Genuinely, that's what it takes is that, you know, Indy doesn't understand he's in a movie, so you have to.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  Talking about Gary Busey.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, but yeah.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, that might be how it works. Uh, yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  You're like, here, Gary.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  I will say.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  Here's tennis ball, Gary. Over here. Aim the chompers over here.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Oh, man. I love just how it's spooky even talking to you over Zoom.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  We can't even really, just to even bring the audience in, we had a little bit of a technical kerfluffle, but it's still frightening. Because we're watching, it's like, it seems like, I don't know why, I don't know what it is, but your energy that they're, the, the tubes are afraid of. But we have a, the, one of our new horror icons.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  Uh, we're very excited to have the actor who portrays Art the Clown, nay, is Art the Clown. David Howard Thornton, thank you for being here.

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Are there any clowns that you would like study to get mannerisms or is this all just like you?

• 1:02:11Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, definitely so. I mean, I, I grew up watching a lot of the great silent comedians and clowns. I mean, I was watching like, you know, Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin and all, even like Emma Kelly Jr. and Emma Kelly and. Um, gosh, Mr. Bean was a huge influence on me as well. Uh, Marcel Marceau, Peter Sellers, you know, Don Knotts. I could just go on and on, list all these. Jim Carrey, just on and on and on. Ashley Steffen, who I understood for Grinch, he was professionally trained in clowning in mime work. So I took a lot of what I learned from Steffen and put it into art. You can actually watch videos of Robbie Rotten and compare them to Art the Clown and you'll see probably a lot of similarities with the mannerisms.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  That's really interesting.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  Now, is there any music that like you would listen to to kind of like get in the mood, you know, and just like, do you like play circus music or something before you get out there or?

• 1:03:05Speaker 05

  No, not, not really. I mean, not for myself, but like I, a lot of the times in the chair when Damian, especially in parts one and two, when Damian was doing my makeup. He was used, listening to a lot of yacht rock.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Speaker 05

  That, that's what I think is so funny. People probably think Damian's like this hardcore badass listening to heavy metal all the time. No, man, he grooves to yacht rock. He loves yacht rock and eighties music. We will drive like when we're going to set something like a two hour, three hour drive sometimes upstate. We would just be sitting there listening to like yacht rock and eighties music the whole entire time, just grooving out. But that's, that's just how we are. But like. For myself though, I, I will sometimes just for shits and giggles, put on something. I, I sometimes would like to put on like the, uh, the song, Danny Elfman's song from, uh, the first Batman movie with the, the Joker's like, um, Waltz to the Death.

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:57Speaker 05

  That's just always, that always just puts me that little wacky little mischievous. Evil clown type of mode. So sometimes I will just think that in my head if I have to go a little bit, little bit nuts, I guess you could say.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Do you feel like now that the movie got, like Terrifier three probably got the biggest like budget, the most legit budget? How is it going from being driven by the director to set who would do the makeup? And then you'd shoot, obviously probably like five, how such, the most shoestring crew possible to like an actual like movie set? Like how, like, is there anything you miss or is there anything, what's better?

• 1:04:41Speaker 05

  Oh, we, we still had a lot of the old school feel to it all because we weren't a full on like traditional movie set where we, we didn't have the honey wagons or anything like that. So it, it wasn't a big. Huge leap, but it was, um, we did have, you know, a makeup team that came in this time. And so that was definitely a nice thing to have there because it allowed Damian more freedom too, because he wasn't having to stop my making. And go on to set and do stuff and come back and do my makeup more and so, it, that was nicer in that way. But yeah, we're, we're still not like what you traditionally see here in Hollywood on a set. So we were still had that, that, you know, independent feel to a lot of things.

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  Cause they changed the makeup too, right? Didn't they do a thing? Cause it used to be sort of despair, different separate pieces and then they just made it a whole mask for you essentially?

• 1:05:29Speaker 05

  No, it, it was always a, a one whole mask, but the original mask wasn't even molded to my face. It was Mike Gennelli's original mold.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 05

  And so it didn't fully fit my face. Damian always had a manipulated suit would fit my face. But this time, uh, Christian Tinsley, who, his team that did, uh, our makeup for this one on part three, they actually did a new sculpt and mold of my face. So it's a little bit more gaunt. Than the last one was because Damian wanted Art to be more gaunt in this one. And then I also, oh, I love, I love the look. And, and they also gave me a skull, uh, skull lenses for, for my eyes this time. So I, I, my eyes were different and like part two, I had my natural green eyes and. Part one, I had contacts for a little bit and then like we had one night where I had a rip in my lenses. And so I couldn't wear them for that night and we had to film. So we decided from that point on, I would just be wearing my, my.

• 1:06:23Speaker 05

  Regular eyes and if anybody knows what the hell, you know?

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, why? You're not paying attention to the right thing.

• 1:06:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And I, I kind of just say in my head, like, the eye color changed after he got knocked out by the exterminator. So I was like, oh yeah, the eye, the contacts popped out. And so now that's why.

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, definitely.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, but in this one, he's, you know, he's rebirthed. So now he's, he's become more demonic in part three. So he has different eyes going forward.

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  This is a question that we were talking about before. Is he a human in the first one?

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  Okay. And when does he like, when does it become supernatural?

• 1:07:00Speaker 05

  Um, at the very end of part one, where he's brought back from the dead.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  Yes. And then like, so he was just a man.

• 1:07:07Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  And so the face underneath the makeup, you would assume would have just been like Arthur Clown. So what's Arthur Clown? What was his day like? Yeah. What did he do during the day? What did he, what's he had a job? Did he, what, what was that? Oh, you can't say yet?

• 1:07:22Speaker 05

  Can't say yet.

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  Wow. All right. I'm glad there is an answer. Yes. That's one of those things too, where God, that'll be great. Everyone will be very excited to see that jump in.

• 1:07:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, I, I will say this, that, um, I know for one thing, for the, his origin, we don't want to make him a sympathetic character.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:07:41Speaker 05

  We, we don't want him to have one of those tragic backstories where he was abused and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We, we basically how I view him in my head is he came out of his mother's womb and strangled her with his own umbilical cord. He's just evil incarnate. He is just, that's why hell latched onto this guy. He's like, this is our avatar on earth.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  We love this guy.

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

  Pure evil. Yeah.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. We love this guy. Yeah. It's like, it's the same variant of he's from the seed of a thousand maniacs.

• 1:08:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. He was just born evil. And I, that's the thing is like, I do generally believe there are some people that are that way. They, they just came out of the womb and they are just fucked up in the head. I, I knew a kid like that growing up where I, he was this kid that lived across the street from one of my best friends and I saw him flat out just take glee in killing, you know, squirrels.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:08:34Speaker 05

  Where he would like shoot them with his BB gun and watch them bleed out, or he would just strangle them himself. And I was like, this kid's just evil. And my mom was like, do not play with that kid ever again. He's evil. Like, so that's how I view art. He is just born that way. He just had that tendency from the very get go where he just loved to kill things. It brought him joy.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  I also find that people that have the happiest existence play, uh, unrepentant maniacs really well. And I can tell from the Lego on your, the shelf behind you, that you are, you seem like a very happy go lucky man.

• 1:09:11Speaker 05

  I, that comes from, you know, years of struggling.

• 1:09:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:09:15Speaker 05

  I'm happy with, yeah, that's, you know, I, I, I was bullied relentlessly growing up, but it's like, I, I always, how I escaped all that was finding the things that brought me joy and brought me happiness. And so it's like, I, I am a child of heart in a lot of ways. I guess some people would say, I, I, you know, I'm like a, um, have a, um, what is it? Um, arrested development in some ways.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  People have said that about me too. And it's like, whatever, whatever you idiot, whatever you fucking butt head, fuck you. Your stupid face. Shut up. Shut up. Oh, I'm a child? Well, you're fucking, you got big ass and stupid feet.

• 1:09:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Speaker 00

  Save that in your pocket if you ever need.

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I, I, I think it's just all that bullying I went through. It's like, I, I think I've been able to channel a lot of that on, on set. I mean, there are even times on set where like, you know, I'm just not fully giving them what they need for a, an attack or something like that. And they'll just go, hey, Dave, just pretend it's this, um, certain person and go. And I'm like, ah.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 05

  Like, oh shit, Dave, where'd that come from? Like repressed rage.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  Okay. We interviewed Joe Hill, uh, author, Joe Hill, few months ago. Yeah. Fantastic man. It went so well. And we never, we didn't really even say anything about his dad. Yeah, we didn't say, we said nothing about his dad. We were so cool during that interview. But it went so well that he came back and he brought his father, Stephen King with him.

• 1:10:47Marcus Parks?

  That's right. He was like, I got my dad. You guys are talking about me and I got my dad here now.

• 1:10:54Speaker 00

  But then he did a whole thing. You'll see in the interview where he's like, my dad will beat you all up. And Stephen King stood up and he was like, come here, you little F words. And he yelled that five or six times. You'll see, you'll see, it's all there. It's all.

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  You know, one thing, it, speaking of grotesque gifts, you know, disturbing gifts, John Wayne Gacy sent my dad some art back in the day from prison. And actually I found that so disturbing. That's in the first paragraph of Heart Shaped Box.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:11:27Speaker 04

  You know, that kind of hung in my mind. Cause the other thing is, is Gacy wasn't terrible. I mean, he was obviously terrible. I can't, I can't underline enough how terrible he was.

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  Well, he was a funny guy. Yeah. He was a funny guy. We've already singled it out. You're screwed.

• 1:11:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. That's gotta be the clip to sell this episode. John Wayne Gacy was pretty good. You know, but, but he did. A real mushroom. He was a fun guy.

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  He could, he could do a passable, he could do passable like Disney characters and stuff.

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

  Well, he used to do paint by numbers. He used to go and get the like, he would have a whole system of other serial killers, including one of the, uh, the guys from the Chicago Rippers. And he also had the guy that killed everybody to avoid the earthquake in Southern California. Yeah. The Herbert Mullen. Herbert Mullen. He had other serial killers working for him on an assembly line, painting these paintings for him.

• 1:12:27Speaker 04

  That's not true.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  Yes. It is.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  Is that true?

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  Yes. Cause he's, he literally was a job creator. He was a executive manager. He was a project runner. That's what he did. He was a project manager.

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  So they had an art club in prison?

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  It was a kind of like a chain gang. Like literally you need to kind of force them to do stuff and then they would bring in, there's a whole story about how John Wayne Gacy was sort of gamed by this young man that called him and pretended to be really into him. And so this young man started arriving to visit with John Wayne Gacy. And then the two of them would talk to the other serial killers like they were his little like crew. Like it was like, like his little brothers. So don't feel that honored about the art. Is it like that?

• 1:13:07Speaker 04

  It was like hair club for men, but with art.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes. Do you find that in speaking of terms of collaboration? Cause you guys worked together because like John Wayne Gacy can really run that type of collaboration. I'm sure you guys really, you guys put some really good stuff together. Like, cause in the tall grass was a great thing. Like, how do you guys feel like when you're together working?

• 1:13:28Speaker 04

  Uh, we've only done it twice. We've only done it twice. We, we, we wrote in the tall grass and we wrote throttle and, you know, I mean, I feel like when I, the times I've written with dad, you ever seen like the, the Warner Brothers cartoons? When Wile E. Coyote climbs on an Acme rocket and lights the fuse and then suddenly it takes off under him?

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Speaker 04

  That's what it's like writing with my dad. I feel like I'm just kind of hanging on for dear life, you know? I, I'd sort of like sweat and pull my hair out over like three pages or something. And then I, I'd email it to him and like 45 minutes later, he'd be like, it was great. Here's five more pages.

• 1:14:13Speaker 04

  I wrote five, I wrote five and keep it up. Well, you know, there was, there was, uh, a time when I was chemically assisted by some of those things in the, the books with Peter Strab in the early days, but, uh, those days are behind me now.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. Now it's just what Cialis, lot of, lot of Snapple. That's what I do. I crush up my Cialis right into the, right into, and I, I just do it. I do it line by line each day just to get me going to do podcasts. Yeah. And under the lid of those Snapples, they got funny little things. You can just slide right into the book. You know, if you wanted to.

• 1:14:54Speaker 04

  Say so, man. If you say so.

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  How do you write books? How, how write books?

• 1:15:04Speaker 04

  One of the things that, you know, you talk about character.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  That died. A little boy died at the end of Cujo, you know, in the novel, in the movie.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  Jesus spoilers.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Joe, the book is fucking fifty years old or almost.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  Go read Cujo.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Anyway, the little boy dies at the end of the book, but in the movie, he lives, but he got licked by the rabid dog. So I think he died horribly of rabies after the fade out. But, you know, the thing is, when, when children die or adults die in books, that's one thing. Don't let a dog die, you know? I have heard more about that. I mean, Greg Stilson kicks a dog to death at the beginning of The Dead Zone. I, I've never heard the end of it.

• 1:16:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Speaker 04

  That's, that's an automatic one star off your Goodreads rating. You kill, I, I, I killed a cat in a story called Jackknife and I, I have eaten so much shit about it online. You know?

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  My, my mother's dog, who I took in, Tootsie, she actually passed away yesterday out of complete, you know, randomness. She was only nineteen years old. So, you know, why?

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, she could almost buy a beer.

• 1:16:32Speaker 03

  Why do they go so young? But, uh, I, so we, we did a wonderful thing with her. We, we took her up and we, we, we put her up. We, we brought her body up a hill and then, you know, we, we, we put her in the ground and there was a beautiful rock structure on the ground. It was like some kind, it was just gorgeous. And then we were putting her in the ground and it was, it was thin soil. It was sour. And, and so I'm hoping when I get home, uh, she'll be there waiting for me.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  Pet cemetery, yes.

• 1:17:07Speaker 00

  Go and go down that road.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  See, I don't think that's better.

• 1:17:14Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, was that your Judd Crandall?

• 1:17:15Speaker 00

  Sometimes that's better.

• 1:17:18Speaker 04

  I hope that your routine doesn't depend on the quality of your impersonation.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  No, he was good.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  He was great.

• 1:17:27Marcus Parks?

  But I have to ask about Pet Sematary because like you, I am a, a massive Ramones fan, massive, massive Ramones fan. And, you know, and the story goes, uh, that's been told that, you know, you invited them over to your house when, you know, before Pet Sematary was being made. And Dee Dee Ramone took a copy of Pet Sematary, disappeared for an hour and came back with the song fully written. Did that, did it actually happen that way?

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:17:55Marcus Parks?

  Okay. How did it actually happen?

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  I love getting past a musician's stories.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  I said, would they, would they write, you know, I, my idea was that they would do the soundtrack for Pet Sematary. And that didn't fly, but they did do that song. I, I don't want to be buried in a pet cemetery. And that was, what, you talk about a great line, burying.

• 1:18:23Speaker 04

  I don't want to live my life again. That's such a sad little, sad little, you know?

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  But every lanky nerd boy knows that feeling. They're all just like, I don't want to go through junior high again. That's what it's about.

• 1:18:36Speaker 04

  You just get a whole album out of ACDC.

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:40Speaker 04

  You know, they did, they did the whole soundtrack to Maximum Overdrive.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  I just saw that movie to prep for this. Do you remember directing any of that, Mr. King?

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I, I remember too, too much of it, but, uh, you know, the thing is, I didn't know. Dino said, yes, Stephen, this is Dino DeLorenz, he said, Stephen, uh, I think, uh, what we want to do is make a movie and, uh, you're gonna direct it. Well, I'd never done anything before. I hadn't been in, uh, film school or anything. I learned as I, as I went along. I could actually do a pretty good job the, the next time, but.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  It was a blast. I have to say.

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  I also feel a lot of it because you have such a deep understanding of movies because you guys were both big media heads. You guys watch a lot of movies. When you guys are writing novels versus like, are screenplays like easier than a novel? Or is it like, like, because suppose sometimes you're retrofitting from one of your other previous works? Like, what's the hardest thing that you do? What's the thing besides getting up in the goddamn morning?

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  I mean, going to the dentist, I think.

• 1:19:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Or probably having a proctological exam, but.

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  Those are, I mean.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  No, is, is it easier to write scripts or books? Which one is?

• 1:20:05Speaker 04

  I mean, books, I'd want to write books any day of the week over writing screenplays, but I, I do write screenplays because that's how I get my healthcare. So I try to write at least one script every year, you know, but you've had a lot, you've done a lot more in that space. You've written whole TV shows, you know, like, not just like the pilot or something, but like every, literally every episode. I think you wrote every episode of Golden Years, you wrote every episode of Lisi's Story, you wrote every episode of, uh, Storm of the Century.

• 1:20:33Speaker 00

  But does it suck to go from being able to be lord and creator in your own world of writing a novel to like having to go talk to a bunch of suits in a building? And trying to tell them what your ideas are? Do you just, you just not care? Or are they just like, oh, whatever you want, Mr. King?

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  No, I mean, it, it isn't that way, really, but what I do, because I have this wonderful cushion that I don't have to write for the rent every month. And that's a big fucking deal, as you guys probably know. The thing is, I can write a script on, on spec and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I did a, a, a series of scripts, uh, for a, a show called, uh, Storm of the Century. And that's, that's my favorite one, really, you know, that really turned out well.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  And because I had a good relationship with director, you know?

• 1:21:32Speaker 00

  Well, it's also really glad, I'm glad to hear that the OnlyFans is really working out for you guys. That is really paying the bills and I just really, I think that that's really great for you guys.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  I, it's regular. I've noticed that, uh, you have the same director do your stories, you know, like your multiple movies. Is there a certain director you think that understands your, your, uh, your stories better than anyone else?

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  Mike Flanagan.

• 1:21:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  Life of Chuck was awesome.

• 1:22:00Speaker 04

  He's good, but who's the other guy? I want to say he's got like a name like Jack Holden or something, or like maybe he directed The Hitter.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  You, you, you're talking about, uh, uh, Jack, um.

• 1:22:15Speaker 00

  Jack Bender.

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  Jack Bender, it was Jack Bender. Thank you. You just saved us.

• 1:22:21Speaker 04

  A lot of your stuff's bad.

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  Jack Bender is terrific, uh, and, and he's somebody who can do things that are just wonderful on a, a, a low budget and short time. And he's fantastic at both of those things. And it doesn't look phoned in, you know, that's, that's great.

• 1:22:45Marcus Parks?

  Well, it seems like, speaking of, you know, things that you've written for the screen, like I, one of, a, a massive influence on, on me was the, the, the TV mini series for The Stand that, you know, came back in, in nineteen ninety-four like that. It blew my mind, uh, when I saw that when I was a kid. But, you know, with, you know, writing that and also, you know, writing the, the novel, which is also of course incredible. When COVID came around in twenty twenty, were you surprised by how people acted? Or were you pretty much like, okay, this is what I expected to happen when a plague hits?

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  Well, one thing that, that did happen is, this is horrible to say, but the book went through the roof again.

• 1:23:35Speaker 00

  And we have truly, this is, I, I, obviously a pillar of, of the, of our world. The ultimate man of nightmares, the star of arguably the peak of his career, Pinocchio Unstrung.

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  Is Robert Englund. Thank you so much for joining us today. Do you think that you, your persona as like the master of horror also sort of like paints how people react to you? Like, do you think that like you, you disappoint, do you feel you disappoint people by not being a child? murderer.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing. I had a fat 10 years in Hollywood before I ever did Freddy.

• 1:24:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  And in that 10 years, I did a dozen movies and starred in half of them. You know, again, you know, I starred with Jeff Bridges and Sally Field and Henry Fonda, Jeff Bridges.

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  I do want to ask quickly, what was Charles Bronson like?

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Charles had a guy, an assistant, who had a little miniature ticker tape with him. And he would be checking his stock market.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  And he also, he also would tear out dialogue, you know, and keep it real simple.

• 1:24:57Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  And parse his lines down to smaller, clean lines of dialogue. And also I watched him and he would reach, he would practice reaching for a prop. So he didn't have to look at it when he went to get it. And he'd measure it off. And in a way, he moved and rehearsed his physical stuff like a dancer. He wasn't big. He was compact, but he moved beautifully, like Lee Marvin moves beautifully. Or Kevin Bacon moves really well and interesting. They, or old John Wayne had that great strange grace in the way he moved. And, uh, and I watched him do that, like he would measure his grip for a coffee cup

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  so that he could just keep talking to you and reach out a frame and bring that coffee cup in. You know, or unscrew that bottle, you know, and switch hands. And, you know, he just, he was great that way. He really moved. If you see some of his movies, Cato's Land and things like that, and watch him move. It's, he's just beautiful to watch. We forget, you know, how big Charles Bronson was. Every culture in the world thought he was one of theirs.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  The Russians thought he was Russians. The Polish thought he was Polish. Well, it kind of was. You know, Czechoslovakians thought he was Czechoslovakian. Spaniards thought he was Spanish.

• 1:26:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, he's also, he had that idiosyncratic way about him that kind of cut through everything. Like, I feel like that's about, thing about actors we're missing a little bit now. It's like, you, anybody can impersonate Charles Bronson. Anybody can impersonate Marlon Brando. You know, the voice so indicative of it.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  Well, this is one of the things we've lost. If you think about Jimmy Stewart's hesitant delivery.

• 1:26:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  Or Henry Fonda's Midwestern accent.

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  Or Brando, or John Wayne. You, you recognized them when you heard them, let alone when you saw them. It was a signature voice. And I think that that's something that actors have to realize has, is part of the component, you know, of, of, of an actor. You know, every once in a while, there's certain actresses that have such beautiful, deep, husky voices. You just love hearing them speak. And it makes them just that much more fascinating or sexy or, or, you know, you just, you like that. Yeah. It, it, they, it's, they come with a full toolbox, you know, so to speak.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  And we've lost that a little bit, you know, you know, and I think that people probably thought they could compensate by going to the gym, you know, or something. But you, you can, as long as you're taking your shirt off, but then you also have to sound right when you speak.

• 1:27:44Speaker 00

  Well, that's what makes you so important. It's clearly you in Pinocchio Unstrung. And it was, it was great to hear you curse again, by the way.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  I mean, all I tried to do was avoid the Freddy laugh as much as I could because the Freddy laugh is an old, uh, uh, class exercise from, from, from voice class, you know, that I had. Uh, and that was my go-to thing because it's about the breathing on the diaphragm.

• 1:28:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  To sustain that laugh. And so I, my muscle memory, I fall into the Freddy laugh pretty automatically. Now I have to consciously pitch it higher and breathe less, you know, to, to, you know, get, get, you know, if I want to, if I'm doing an evil laugh when I'm doing a voiceover, you know, for animation or something now, I, I consciously have to pitch it high and bite off the air and turn it more into kind of like a demonic giggle or something. So I don't, so I don't remind everybody that they're listening to Freddy Krueger.

• 1:28:39Marcus Parks?

  And wasn't that great?

• 1:28:40Speaker 00

  That was truly one of the best things I've done. Just being here. I'm done with the intro.

• 1:28:47Marcus Parks?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, the intro. The intro was actually right on the money.

• 1:28:50Speaker 00

  That was better.

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  That was great.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  That was great. Did a lot of the interviews from my perspective. You guys are really good at interviews.

• 1:28:55Marcus Parks?

  No, thank you. You're, you're better than you think you are.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  I'm fine.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  You're doing great, buddy.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  Sometimes I just get nervous. I want to meet the, Stephen King was like one of those guys. I worked really hard on that interview.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  It's so funny because I actually cared way less about Stephen King than Robert England. Cause like Robert Englund's like my fucking childhood hero.

• 1:29:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Like, and I know it's weird to like, for Freddy Krueger to be your childhood hero.

• 1:29:15Speaker 00

  It's, it's actually kind of appropriate, but it is funny how he was so good at not answering the dumb questions.

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  Oh my God. No one has deflected my questions better than Robert France.

• 1:29:26Speaker 00

  He's a real pro. He's a real fucking pro.

• 1:29:30Marcus Parks?

  Well, we'll see y'all next week. Thanks, everybody. Go check out all our socials. Go check out our Patreon. Go check us out on Netflix. Have a good night. Have a good time. Have a good week. Have a good life. We'll talk to y'all soon.

• 1:29:40Speaker 00

  Helsit.

• 1:29:40Marcus Parks?

  Hagen.

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  Hello, Robert France.

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

  France.

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  France.

• 1:29:48Speaker 04

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