Tommy Metz III:
Giovanni Bragolin’s painting The Crying Boy. The fourth-century gold Ring of Silvianus. The Basano Vase. The Busby Stoop Chair. All of these objects have something in common. They are, or were at one time, widely believed to be cursed or haunted, and the people that owned them paid the price.

When we talk about haunts, we usually talk about haunted places: the Amityville house on Long Island, the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, the Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville. But as that old sourpuss Emily Dickinson once wrote, one need not be a chamber to be haunted. So instead of places, what about stuff? The things and objects out in the world that are waiting to be found in dusty closets or uncovered in forgotten flea markets and reawakened.

As someone once said, an antique is just a ghost with a price tag. What?

For this harrowing episode of Sitting in the Dark, I, Tommy Metz III, the King of Diminishing Returns, present — thunder strike — Articles of Loathing. And yes, Pete, I demand that you put in a thunder strike right there. I’m going to make as much work for you as possible.

Joining me, as always, on this episode is the Pod Father himself, Pete Wright. Say hi, Pete.

Pete Wright:
Hi, Pete.

Tommy Metz III:
The director extraordinaire, Chelsea Stardust. Say hello, Chels.

Chelsea Stardust:
Hello, Chels.

Tommy Metz III:
And the professor of pain, Kynan Dias. Okay.

We are all here today, and the three films for Articles of Loathing we will be discussing are The Ring, directed by Gore Verbinski, Oculus, directed by Mike Flanagan, and Undertone, directed by Ian Tuason.

Before we begin, I would like to point out what I think are, in addition to the haunted objects in each of these movies, other big themes that all three of them share, and I’m interested in maybe why.

Number one: the breakdown of the illusion of safety associated with the traditional family structure — neglectful parents or children, and the ramifications for those involved.

Number two: mystery. In all three movies, you learn more and more about the backstories of the haunted objects and who made them, but at some point you just hit a dead end as a viewer, and we’re just left with ambiguity. For instance, where did Samara actually come from? When did the mirror become evil? And who sent the audio files? These questions are never fully answered. It’s up to us.

And then number three: dread. Each of these stories has a timeline built into it, which seems somewhat arbitrary, except that the entity or object wants you to know that death is coming, and to drag it out. It feels like the power invested is so strong it could kill you or cause you to kill yourself outright, but instead it wants you to wait seven days, or listen to all ten files, or revisit all of the haunts of your family’s past before pouncing on you, like a cat playing with its prey.

Hi, guys. Welcome to Articles of Loathing. I’m done talking at you. Now we’ll have a podcast. Okay.

Kynan Dias:
Hey.

Pete Wright:
Hello, podcast.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Very excited about this.

Tommy Metz III:
I thought we would do them in order, and so we will start with 2002’s The Ring, directed by Gore Verbinski. This is the horror of VHS tapes and landlines. A terrible mother with a son comes upon a haunted VHS tape. It’s cursed, and if you watch it you will die in seven days unless you figure out the puzzle. And that’s it.

So, had everyone seen this? This was the one that was sort of right up Main Street. Had everyone seen this before?

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Kynan Dias:
Yes.

Tommy Metz III:
Okay.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
Yep.

Tommy Metz III:
Let’s start with axes to grind. Anything that you guys want to get off your chest? Nothing.

Kynan Dias:
No.

Tommy Metz III:
Cool. What do you guys think?

Kynan Dias:
Ring good. Ring good.

Chelsea Stardust:
I mean—

Tommy Metz III:
What do you guys think about this movie? Ring good. This is one of my favorite horror movies, personally. And I think it does a better job — for me, and it’s probably just because of the cultural difference — than Ringu does. It’s more effective for me, because I can’t get into some of the themes and stuff of Ringu.

One thing that I wanted to say: have you guys ever seen it on DVD?

Chelsea Stardust:
That’s what I have.

Kynan Dias:
That’s all I’ve seen it on.

Tommy Metz III:
You do? So you know about the Easter egg on the DVD.

Pete Wright:
Oh, how fun. Wait, what’s the Easter egg?

Tommy Metz III:
If you haven’t seen it — if you go to the DVD menu screen and you put your cursor up, the cursor disappears.

Pete Wright:
I don’t have it.

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Tommy Metz III:
And then if you press play, it shows you the full haunted video from The Ring.

Pete Wright:
Oh.

Tommy Metz III:
And then it goes back to the title screen. And after a couple of seconds, it plays the sound of a phone ringing.

Pete Wright:
Outstanding.

Tommy Metz III:
As if you’re being called.

Chelsea Stardust:
So good.

Tommy Metz III:
None of that is stuff that works now, but it’s still really, really cool.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Kynan Dias:
It’s what DVD was made for, yes.

Pete Wright:
So both—

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. Yes, I miss physical media.

Pete Wright:
So both of you guys are dead, because you’re just appearing in seven days.

Kynan Dias:
In seven days, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Correct.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
I just watch it every six days, so it just sort of keeps pushing, pushing, pushing.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Tommy Metz III:
The first thing that I wanted to talk about is, what do you guys think about the title? I feel like there’s a bunch of different—

Pete Wright:
Oh, it’s terrible. That’s my axe.

Chelsea Stardust:
Oh.

Pete Wright:
That is one hundred percent my axe. You guys, there’s no ring in this movie.

Kynan Dias:
What? There are so many rings.

Pete Wright:
It’s just the phone rings. And there’s kind of a visual circle, but I want a haunted damn ring, and I did not get it.

Kynan Dias:
What—

Tommy Metz III:
There’s no — the ring is not the haunt, it’s the VHS tape, you weirdo.

Pete Wright:
Right?

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, it’s the image from the bottom of the well.

Pete Wright:
That’s what I mean. Why isn’t it called The Tape?

Tommy Metz III:
The telephone, because—

Kynan Dias:
Okay, but you mentioned two reasons why it’s called The Ring.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
There’s the visual ring that you find out in the climax is—

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
—from the bottom of the well, which is a fantastic reveal.

Tommy Metz III:
The bottom of the well.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Tommy Metz III:
Right.

Kynan Dias:
I love that.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
The title of it. And then yeah, it’s The Ring because the way out of it is to continue on the ring by giving it to the next person.

Tommy Metz III:
Right. The cycle of copy, repeat. Copy, repeat.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Right.

Pete Wright:
I love that you’re defending this, Kynan.

Kynan Dias:
Pete shakes his head.

Chelsea Stardust:
Pete is not buying it.

Kynan Dias:
Pete’s shaking his head.

Pete Wright:
But if anyone knows anything about me, it’s that I’m a notoriously dickish literalist, and I wanted a haunted ring.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh man, I can’t wait till we get to Oculus. Okay.

You talked about the revelation that the circle of light is from the bottom of the well. One of the things that I think makes this movie so incredibly captivating for me, and work so well, is that it is a horror movie, but it’s also a detective story. She is a really good investigative journalist.

Pete Wright:
You guys have a lot of people.

Tommy Metz III:
I forgot how she got to Moesko Island — the bending of the image and the lighthouse, and you have to go to a library. I forgot how many steps she has to go through. I think that’s really effective, instead of just being locked in a cabin or something like that.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
It takes place in a lot of different places.

Chelsea Stardust:
And I will say, for anyone who’s read the book — which I read very recently, and the author just passed away, I think this year—

Tommy Metz III:
I didn’t know it was a book. My apologies. Please.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, so it’s three books, a series of books. And when my book club read it, none of us had read it before, and the core of the story is someone solving this mystery of Sadako — that’s her name in the book. And he works for a newspaper.

I will say it’s a great read, but it is very different. So if someone had an axe to grind who loves the book watching this movie — the movie is dark, but the book also involves a second protagonist who says he’s a rapist, and the main protagonist is like, “Yeah, but we’re still friends.” And then the things that happened to Sadako — it’s wild, y’all.

Tommy Metz III:
What?

Chelsea Stardust:
We had a really good discussion.

What happened to Sadako is really, really sad, and a trigger warning. And there’s a reveal about her which I don’t want to say if you haven’t read the book. Ooh, I highly recommend — just go read the book, because there will be things where you’ll go, “Oh my God, what?”

Tommy Metz III:
Wow, okay.

Chelsea Stardust:
There are some crazy turns. But most of the book is a mystery, solving this mystery and how these people who are affected by the tape at the beginning of the book are all kind of connected in a weird way.

Highly recommend reading the book. But I do think The Ring is perfect and a great way to adapt the book from Ringu, like what Gore Verbinski did. And it’s PG-13, which I think is amazing.

Tommy Metz III:
Sure.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.

Kynan Dias:
That’s right, I always forget that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete Wright:
One of the highest-grossing horror remakes ever, and they let teenagers in. I think those things are connected.

Tommy Metz III:
I’m surprised that that jump scare with her in the closet isn’t enough to push it to R.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, I know.

Tommy Metz III:
But maybe it’s just because I urinate a little bit more each time I see it. I’m never quite ready for it. And I’ve seen this movie so many times — I am never quite ready for it.

Pete Wright:
Structurally I think it works really, really well, because it’s a procedural.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Fundamentally it’s a procedural. It keeps indicting other characters as they are absorbed into the process of the ring. For example, Martin Henderson ends up being — he’s kind of a utility player until he ends up having to carry the emotional weight of the end of the film.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Even though he’s kind of written as a deadbeat with a loft, we end up with a character with a lot more going on, and he’s not even in the movie until, what, halfway through? I think structurally it’s just really smart, and it shows that the mechanic of the procedural is very effective for this kind of a thing.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah, I think the procedural structure helps a lot, because some of the imagery is so strange and striking — obviously from the haunted videotape itself, but then them encountering some of that stuff in real life. And because Naomi Watts is trying to solve this, it makes you believe, probably more than it has any right to, that the imagery means something.

Horses drowning themselves is just so catching, and it’s like, oh God, that must be connected to this, and I find this over here and I find that over there. And I think if you were to really look at it, it’s the equivalent of what we have in, say, Oculus, of episodic images. But in The Ring it makes it, oh my God, this is some mystery we’re solving all together. But none of it’s really about horses or weeping willows or whatever.

Pete Wright:
And the ladder in the alley is a coincidence.

Tommy Metz III:
But it’s all the images that are—

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm. You’re right.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
There’s just a lot of visual coincidences that we are meant to believe are of great import.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
I think that’s funny.

Tommy Metz III:
Well, yeah, because then you do end up finding the ladder.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
The ladder, in effect, in the barn.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
The real ladder, which is not a coincidence.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
You find her walking along and that old guy’s like, “Be careful, you don’t want to walk under that.”

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Come on. Go eat a cigar.

Tommy Metz III:
What do you guys think, because I brought up the idea of neglectful or terrible parenting? Throughout this movie, Samara’s family is obviously a little problematic. Rachel kind of sucks. The first time we ever see her, she’s swearing in front of the teacher and she’s late for her kid.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Their dad is too busy to be in their lives. Rachel goes outside at one point, when I think Aiden is watching the tape, and she sees a tired mom out on that balcony sneaking a smoke while the kid is inside watching TV.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
There’s a lot of TV as emotional babysitter. And then Noah — I had completely forgotten about this — Noah describes how disappointed he was in his father.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
And then the last thing is when she goes to the island doctor, and the island doctor says parenting, quote, “takes work.”

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Some people have limits. And we’re watching an entire cinematic world of people who found their limits off-screen. Before we got to them, they reached their limit, pretty much.

Why do you think that is so important to the story, other than maybe the basic idea, if we’re talking about the ring, of the cycle of generational trauma? It could maybe just be that. I just thought of that, but—

Pete Wright:
Well, it could be, but there’s also this — I look at this movie and I look at all of the parenting structures and realize that the video is literally indicting, to me as a parent, the poison of the child’s brain that is the generational neglect that comes from being a parent, and from being a kid who was a latchkey kid. That’s sort of how we grew up: we came home and nobody was around, and we went in and we watched TV. And it was He-Man and Thundercats, and they might as well have been the ring.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
So I think so much of this movie is reminding me of the power and the import of engagement, direct engagement with our kids, because it does become a sort of generational poison in the eyes of the film. To me, that kind of jumps out.

Tommy Metz III:
Wow, sure. That makes a lot of sense, especially because Aiden is — yeah, he’s just taking care of himself.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
He’s just taking care of himself, right?

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. “I can’t tie a tie.” And he ties a tie right before the funeral. I’m like, oh my God, this kid has got it going on.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah. And a lot of parental trauma—

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
—in all three of these movies, all three of these picks. And that also harkens back to the book and the movie: Sadako’s — Samara’s — mom commits suicide.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
And so that character dealing with that, and problematic parents.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Again, why these three movies work so well together.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
I think with the videotape, which is interesting — videotapes could be illicit in the nineties in a way that I don’t know if young people today have that kind of thing. Where we’re talking about haunted objects, you could have terrible files or something, or texts you don’t want your parent to see, but it’s a little bit different.

This is closer to the idea of some demon in a fetish statue, some ancient religion, some artifact. These little teenage girls at the beginning, they’ve passed this tape along to each other, and it’s something they could hide from their parents and keep hidden in a way that you can’t quite do anymore. It just works differently.

Pete Wright:
God, you’re so — yeah, here it’s in the cloud.

Kynan Dias:
It’s in the cloud.

Pete Wright:
You’re right. It’s so interesting. When I was a kid, the ring for us, in my social group, that we were literally duplicating—

Chelsea Stardust:
There’s search history.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
—was the first Faces of Death movie.

Kynan Dias:
Oh, goodness, yes.

Pete Wright:
That was our ring, right? It’s just a horrible thing that poisons your brain, and we are worse humans as a result of it.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
That’s what this movie’s about.

Kynan Dias:
Right.

Pete Wright:
Congratulations.

Kynan Dias:
Well, for me, for my friends, it was Showgirls, which was not as—

Pete Wright:
Level down.

Kynan Dias:
—sexy or whatever as it should have been. And then when they grew up, apparently it’s a masterpiece according to French critics.

Tommy Metz III:
Right.

Pete Wright:
Oh my God, Kynan, that says everything.

Tommy Metz III:
The Renaissance of “put ice on your nipples.” Yeah, great.

Kynan Dias:
Right, exactly.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yes.

Tommy Metz III:
Chelsea, you brought up Samara’s mysterious origin.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
How are you? This is the Kyle Olson segment. Kyle, famously, before he had to leave the podcast — he and I would butt heads sometimes about ambiguity. He felt that it was a cheat and that the author was just not doing the author’s job. Whereas I — and that’s why The Mothman Prophecies went down in history as one of the most divisive films. We’ll see how Undertone does.

But yeah, so I love ambiguity. And I like that throughout this movie, this mysterious origin — at one point Noah says, “A videotape without a time code? That’s like being born without a belly button.”

We know that she was adopted, but we don’t really know from where or from whom. And when the doctor is asking Samara where the pictures she projects come from, she says, “They just are.” It’s almost like Samara is such a force of nature that she just appeared, because we never find out. There is a birth certificate. There’s a really quick—

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
—shot of a birth certificate, but we’re not given the information that we desperately want. It’s just her name, right?

Chelsea Stardust:
And it’s an interesting choice in the movie, because in the book they tell you where she comes from, and her mother, and — yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Really? Oh wow, okay.

Chelsea Stardust:
So in the book, she’s basically the result of an affair that her mother had with a doctor, and was sort of hidden away. And then her mother eventually jumps into a volcano and kills herself.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, classic.

Chelsea Stardust:
It’s sort of this classic, classic—

Pete Wright:
Classic.

Chelsea Stardust:
But there’s a lot of shame around it, and hiding the affair. So the book does tell you.

And then with the video, it’s sort of like her — which they do in the movie, but yeah, “they just are.” She’s able to project what’s in her mind and in her trauma onto film, because it just happened to be—

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Now, I may be mixing the book with the movie, but the well just happened to be below the cabin where the kids had the movie, and it got—

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
—taped over a sports event. It’s real wild. Again, they tell you in the book, and you’re like, huh?

But having such maybe rage, feminine rage and power, and you’re able to just do this and then make everyone suffer — “You get a taste of this, because I don’t want to live with the pain alone. I want to project it onto all of you.”

Pete Wright:
Well, that’s such an interesting thing, because — especially when you talk about ambiguity — the degree to which you are interested in knowing—

Tommy Metz III:
Right.

Chelsea Stardust:
So—

Tommy Metz III:
Silent Hill, sorry.

Pete Wright:
—where the tape came from is an interesting one. And I never found myself asking how the tape started.

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Pete Wright:
Which I think is sleight of hand, because I should. I should care about that. And I never did, not once. I was just totally into the fact that it’s perpetuated and it’s infinite and timeless.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, too.

Chelsea Stardust:
I love that, though.

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.

Chelsea Stardust:
I didn’t either at first. I didn’t think about it until I actually read the book and they kind of explained it more. But I love that it just sort of exists.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, for—

Chelsea Stardust:
The haunted — where did it come from? Maybe I don’t want to know.

Kynan Dias:
And there’s so much explanation in The Ring Two, too, which is—

Chelsea Stardust:
Ambiguity is awesome.

Pete Wright:
Where will it go next?

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Kynan Dias:
—very frustratingly spelled out T-W-O instead of just a number.

Pete Wright:
Oh no.

Kynan Dias:
Uh, yeah, yeah.

Pete Wright:
I’m out.

Kynan Dias:
All they do is explain everything, and people explaining—

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
—scientific concepts that they shouldn’t have any access to. And they’re just like, “Oh, it’s from this,” but you’re just a priest in this small town. Yeah, there’s no reason for you knowing this. So yeah, if Kyle writes in and he wants to know those answers, send him The Ring Two.

Tommy Metz III:
Anyone, we’ll just send him that way.

Speaking of the origin of the tape — Pete, if you don’t mind going to Ring 2. Not the movie, the picture. This is the still, again, taken horribly of just my television. My apologies.

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Tommy Metz III:
But I just wanted to point out one of the things that I love the most about this movie: there’s so much ring imagery and ideas, it’s almost like it’s always there.

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Tommy Metz III:
Look at what some of the other movies are. We have The Looking Glass War.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
Looking glass is a mirror, mirror is important. Open Water Experience. Garden Pond Basics. And then my favorite, Family Plot. What is The Ring other than just a family plot that goes from family to family to family?

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
And as far as we’re doing other imagery — Pete, if you can go to Ring 3.

Pete Wright:
Sodom and Gomorrah.

Tommy Metz III:
Sodom and Gomorrah’s up there too.

Pete Wright:
I’m sorry, can we just — I know.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Spontaneous Combustion. Let’s give that some love.

Pete Wright:
All right, what did you want?

Tommy Metz III:
Ring 3 — it’s just funny, of course, that that’s the card that she pretends is a seven.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Everything is constantly moving in these kinds of circles.

My favorite ring — there’s a lot of ring imagery throughout. Some Gore Verbinski doesn’t take as much advantage of as I wish he would, but maybe it’d be too heavy-handed.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
But there’s the kid that just repeats, the kid that’s on the island with the doctor, and he’s just pushing himself around in that circle, whatever those things are called. There’s a lot of stuff like that.

My two favorites are not hard to find. These are just my favorites. Ring 1, of course, before the movie even begins.

Chelsea Stardust:
Oh yeah, right.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
That’s the poor DreamWorks kid sitting on the ring moon.

Chelsea Stardust:
I love that shit.

Pete Wright:
The poor DreamWorks kid.

Tommy Metz III:
And then Ring 2 — this is the ECU of the horse.

Pete Wright:
You mean Ring 4?

Tommy Metz III:
Ring 4, thank you very much. Oh, I have mine out of order too. Yeah, that’s before the horse biffs off of the side of the boat.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
And then did you guys — I assume you saw it — did you see the subliminal ring in between, at the end of the boat, going to the next thing?

Pete Wright:
Yep.

Chelsea Stardust:
So good.

Pete Wright:
Yes, yep.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, that’s cool. I love how everything is just constantly connected. There’s that ghostly thing that people see, that wavy thing that goes by a little bit. I’m not a huge fan of that, but I understand it, because if we’re talking about her being able to invisibly project — almost like electricity — and burn images onto things, something like that would exist.

Another thing that I embarrassingly just put together this last time watching it, and it’s probably very obvious, was the effect of how once you have seen it, you’re always blurry in all photos and representations.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
We do see that actually in the movie when you see the flashback of Samara being thrown down the well. There is a POV from her falling into the water. If you just go to Ring 5, Pete. This is the last thing you see.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
So the waviness is what would be distorted in a reflection of water, or if you were underwater. I think that’s what Samara is trying to get across by messing you up in photos, which is just really cool.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Five minutes.

Tommy Metz III:
I mean, it’s deeper. It’s even deeper than I thought, than I’ve caught before.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s made for rewatching and rewatching.

Pete Wright:
It’s like a well.

Tommy Metz III:
Some would say it’s like — oh well.

And then, of course, the twist.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
This movie plays — there are two things. One of my favorite things is that he starts it and puts you in such a safe, familiar trope of two teenage girls alone in a dark, weird house, and then subverts the heck out of it. And then he goes as far as — the music is cheesy, she’s got the rough blanket, she’s probably got some sort of cup of water or coffee. I mean, this movie is over.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
And then what does Aiden say? “You helped her? Why did you do that?” I mean, oh my God.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
The movie is just still going. That’s incredible.

And then the question that he asks, how this movie ends — she says, “You’re gonna be okay.” “What about the person we show it to? What happens to them?”

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
And she doesn’t answer. I think she turns to the camera and goes, “Directed by Gore Verbinski.” And then just like — duck that. It’s a really devastating ending. It’s a real bummer.

Pete Wright:
I imagine you love it, right?

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
For ambiguity’s sake. Does anybody have problems with it? Is the fact that the movie doesn’t even endeavor to answer that question — or is the fact that the movie doesn’t try to answer that question the point for you guys?

Tommy Metz III:
Which part—

Kynan Dias:
I think it’s a definite answer that the next person will be haunted by this, and that she doesn’t want to think about that. All she can think about is saving her child.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
And she has been through this arc of being a pretty terrible mother. She reverts in The Ring Two and leaves him in the bathtub to drown and all sorts of nonsense. But in this one, she is a pretty terrible mother. She’s not paying attention to her son. She’s letting him get into this trouble.

And then she sees what Samara’s parents have done, which makes them also terrible parents. And then she learns that it was okay, because Samara is an evil, evil demon person. And she gets rid of all of her guilt. She washes that out, because it turns out that sometimes parents make mistakes. And she’s like, “Okay, well, I’m just gonna go ahead and do this.”

This time watching it, I was thinking of It Follows, where we are told the rules of what will happen in this ring, this chain-letter thing.

Tommy Metz III:
Mm-hmm.

Kynan Dias:
And this doesn’t have that at all, because they’re not concerned with it, I think. There should be no sequel to this movie.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
We save the son and that’s it. Screw everybody else.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think that’s the—

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, well, she is stepping up and becoming fiercely maternal, finally, at the end.

Pete Wright:
Listen.

Kynan Dias:
Right, mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
She’s sticking up for hers, and the cancer will spread. Just like what’s his name — the doctor, the dad — says. What does he say about reporters? “You take one person’s tragedy and force the world to experience it. Spread it like sickness.”

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Sorry, Pete.

Pete Wright:
Well, that’s what I — in reading up on the film, some of the criticism of the film is that the movie presents this huge moral, ethical conundrum at the end and hasn’t made—

Kynan Dias:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
—any sort of an effort to answer that question of what happens next. But I think the fact — I think Kynan’s where I land. The fact that they didn’t answer the question is the answer to the question.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
The next people, the same thing is going to happen to the next people that happened to us.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
And we dodged a bullet, and I hope they can figure out how to dodge a bullet too.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm. But not trying too hard, not looking over our shoulders too hard about it.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah, right, right.

Chelsea Stardust:
And I think there’s no question what you would do to save your kid. Of course, you wouldn’t think twice about it. But someone should just put a little note on that tape saying, “Hey, here’s what to do.”

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Just a little help. A little Post-it note, something.

Pete Wright:
Copy first. Yeah, right.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, yeah. Help people along.

Tommy Metz III:
That’s a good point.

Pete Wright:
Have a second VCR ready.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
The ambiguity I do like is whether they really understand the rules correctly, because the ending is this series of, “Oh gosh, I didn’t understand the rules, I didn’t understand the rules.” She’s made a copy for Noah, her ex. And then she needs Aiden to make a copy. She’s convinced that he needs to do it, that she can’t just make another copy for him or something like that. So it’s guiding him through that process of the two VCRs, etc.

Tommy Metz III:
Right.

Kynan Dias:
And it is kind of like hoping, fingers crossed, because there’s no manual, right?

Tommy Metz III:
The discounts, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Right. Or does he have to do it himself? Does he have to know what he’s doing? Does he have to willingly pass this along and curse somebody else? But yeah, can you do it innocently?

Tommy Metz III:
She did it innocently. She just made a copy for Noah just to take a look at.

Kynan Dias:
That’s true. Right.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
That’s true.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. So that’s a good sign for young Aiden.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah. And then he’s in The Ring Two, and none of that matters.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, fingers crossed. Perfect.

Pete Wright:
That’s what I was gonna ask. Do any of these questions get answered?

Kynan Dias:
God, is there a—

Pete Wright:
Should we just pretend there is no—

Tommy Metz III:
The bags under his eyes just get bigger and bigger and bigger. He becomes the most haunted, tired child in history. It’s not good.

Pete Wright:
It’s so weird, because I picked that movie as part of my next themed episode, which is Haunted Tired Boys in Horror Movies.

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Okay, anything else that you guys would like to bring up about The Ring before we move on?

Chelsea Stardust:
I just want to take a moment to talk about Daveigh Chase, who played Samara, who died this year at 35, which is really sad.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, good. Please.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, I didn’t know that.

Chelsea Stardust:
She was also Samantha Darko in Donnie Darko, if you watched that.

Tommy Metz III:
Sparkle Motion.

Chelsea Stardust:
So really kind of a tragic death. Sparkle Motion.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh no.

Chelsea Stardust:
So she passed away in June of this year.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, that’s terrible.

Chelsea Stardust:
So very recently.

Kynan Dias:
Yes. Very, very sadly, yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Super sad.

Kynan Dias:
She’s Lilo, just to bum Tommy out more.

Chelsea Stardust:
Oh yes.

Kynan Dias:
She’s Lilo in Lilo & Stitch.

Tommy Metz III:
Ugh, come on, guys. What kind of podcast is this? You guys are gonna make me bust out the Cryptkeeper.

Kynan Dias:
And I just wanted to point out, before we leave, just how great it looks. Just a fantastic look. Kind of unconventional—

Chelsea Stardust:
Oh yeah.

Kynan Dias:
—horror. It’s relatively bright, you’re outside a whole lot, but it just looks fantastic.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Kynan Dias:
Which, again, they just abandon in The Ring Two. It just looks like anything else.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s all-the-time Pacific Northwest overcast, which makes that tree just pop.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
That tree is insane.

Chelsea Stardust:
Love it.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s like the only color in the entire movie. It’s incredible.

Pete Wright:
What’s interesting, though, is that that keying, that bright environmental backlight, is very akin to Japanese horror too. When they go outside, this has a look that feels cribbed from Ringu — from the entire style of eighties horror in Japan, which I find really interesting. I think that keeps it sort of in the family.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, and I think with the look you’re saying, that’s something I feel like after this movie — the 2000s, early 2000s, later 2000s — people are really leaning into this look on stuff.

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
But it works best in this movie.

Tommy Metz III:
Agreed. All right, then we are moving on to number two of our Articles of Loathing. Thunder strike again, Pete.

This is Oculus, by Mike Flanagan. In 2013, this is the multi-generational tale of the cursed Lasser Glass and its effect on the Russell family. Spoiler alert: it goes great.

Was this the first time that any of you had seen this movie? This is probably my favorite Mike Flanagan non-series, actual movie. What did you guys think?

Kynan Dias:
Oh, okay.

Tommy Metz III:
I mean, listen — axes to grind and overall thoughts. Pete, would you start? Do you mind?

Pete Wright:
Well, I loved it. I think the craft in this movie is outstanding. There are parts of me that don’t even remember what happened, because I was so busy trying to track the editing job—

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
—that Flanagan pulled off in this movie. It’s just wonderful. It is a nightmare of cuts to keep things moving and flowing in the right direction. And I love it.

My axe is the mirror itself, because the mirror can do anything it wants. And I think unlimited threats start to diminish tension, right?

It plays with perception and it plays with memory and physical sensation. We’re chewing light bulbs and stuff. And as those mirror powers accumulate, I think the stakes start to thin out.

But it didn’t really matter, because the fabric of the movie is in how these characters are moving around together in the house. And by the end, it’s such an orchestra of movement that I’m still all in, and the mirror is like a secondary threat.

Tommy Metz III:
First I would like to point out, for those that aren’t watching the video, when you said people are chewing light bulbs, Chelsea did the happiest little wiggle, like she just found a Christmas present under a tree. We know what Chelsea likes.

This is Flanagan doing one of the things he does best: telling a story nonlinearly, flashing back and forth between time periods—

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
—and then having them physically overlap. He does that so much in The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher — someone will run out of a room past their adult self who’s sort of reliving it.

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s stuff like that. It costs zero money. And it’s better than so many things — shooting them from above, moving the two cameras—

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
—next to each other while rehashing the argument that you just heard. That costs nothing.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
And it’s so profoundly scary for me, because the idea of reality, of not being able to trust what is real and what is not—

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
—has always been a through line for pretty much every movie I’ve ever picked for this thing. That’s what really grew me on Smile when we did the Smile trilogy of sorts — because you just can’t trust anything.

Pete Wright:
Oh yeah, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
My favorite part of the movie: there’s no gore, there’s no effects. It’s when they’re outside, after she kills her fiancé — or does she — and they see themselves inside the room. And he says it’s a trick to get us back inside. And she says, “What if this is a trick to keep us standing here?” I could just end the movie there and be like, well—

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
I’m just gonna go have blood come out of my nose like Rachel when she picks the fly off the screen. There’s no winning. It’s outstanding. I love it.

Chelsea?

Chelsea Stardust:
I was at Blumhouse when we acquired this movie.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah, I don’t know.

Chelsea Stardust:
And so I was there at the—

Tommy Metz III:
Cool.

Chelsea Stardust:
Then Flanagan went on and did the Ouija sequel, which is so good.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Yep, which we’ve done. Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
No, no — I mean, I worked on the first one. It’s so much better than the first one.

And I want to say, when I first saw this—

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
—full transparency, I was like, eh. I didn’t — I was like, what?

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Tell me. I want to know. Is this real? Is this — I was really annoyed. My axe was, I was so fucking annoyed that—

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Chelsea Stardust:
—just fucking commit. Tell me. Are we in a — what’s real? What’s not?

And now — and this is, to be honest, the first time I’ve rewatched this movie since I worked there, since 2012, 2013.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
And I’m a big Mike Flanagan fan. And I gotta say, I was wrong when I first watched it. And I love when I revisit something I was lukewarm on. And now, this movie’s a fucking banger. This movie is great.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Give him all the — let him direct more things. He hasn’t directed enough, I don’t think. So give him more movies.

Tommy Metz III:
And he’s incredibly prolific. Yeah, sure.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah. And I think, like what we were saying before — don’t tell me. Let me as the viewer decide. I wanted that. And also, I’m a savvier viewer now. I’ve made movies, more than when I first saw this. So yeah, axes have been put to bed. And I do not — I just think it’s really great writing.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
On Mike and Jeff’s part, and really expertly crafted. So I don’t really — I mean, it could get tiring, how many “is it real, is it not real, is it real, is it not real,” if I have to get down to it. But I really like the ambiguity. I love the choice now as a viewer. And it’s so expertly done. Anyways.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah, I have things — they’re not quite axes, but I guess this is the section where we should go over this. So, two things.

I’m kind of maybe where Chelsea was a little bit when she first saw it. There’s a part in the movie where the movie wants you, just for five minutes or so, to consider whether Kaylie — Karen Gillan’s character — is making this all up, and it’s all in her head, and she’s constructed this elaborate super ghost story history to protect her psyche, because it really was that her father killed her mother and forced her brother to kill him.

And for me, right now, initially, that is more interesting to me than “there’s a haunted mirror out there.” So that’s not quite an axe. It’s just that that’s a different movie. So I was watching that like, that’s very interesting. And the fact that the mirror really was haunted didn’t quite reach some new level for me. It’s like, oh, okay, that’s even better.

And that kind of goes with the second thing, which is, I think if he were redoing this movie, he would do some of the stuff that he’s learned doing The Haunting of Hill House, which is where every single thing that we see in the present-day story will reveal how it was planted in the past. And so it’s just kind of like, mmm, I’m craving that — which isn’t fair, which is totally auteurist nonsense. But I was like, okay, this crack in the mirror, we’re gonna see how that happened. And then in the present, we’re gonna reveal something, and that’s gonna be the key to something. And it’s just not there.

And that’s just seeing what he does in Hill House — like, oh, this is some ghost. And then it turns out it’s not just some ghost, it’s the ghost. All that stuff that just elevates that.

Tommy Metz III:
Mm-hmm.

Kynan Dias:
So yeah, totally unfair stuff. But those are the things that are kind of niggling at me. Not quite axes, though.

Pete Wright:
Do you know, it’s so funny, Kynan, though — I think I agree with you.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
I think part of the reason I like this movie so much is that there is a generous reading that says there’s no mirror at all.

Kynan Dias:
Uh-huh. Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
This is two kids trying to relitigate a domestic abuse parentage kind of a story.

Tommy Metz III:
Right.

Kynan Dias:
Oh, really? Oh my.

Pete Wright:
And I find that really — the mirror obsession is just a way to get us into thinking about the fact that these parents were in an abusive relationship, and father killed mother.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm. Oh, I’d like to see that.

Pete Wright:
So yeah, I think that’s all buried in here.

Kynan Dias:
Okay.

Tommy Metz III:
This movie shares with Undertone, which we will get to, the idea of another reading, if psychosis is involved.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
And time is stretchy — that there’s a reading that has nothing supernatural, if you’re allowed to have hallucinations, auditory, anything like that.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s possible. It could have been they were just in this, because—

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
—if you take the mirror out, like Kynan is saying, and I might just be literally repeating what he said, but it really does work horribly as a very upsetting abusive family, abusive husband story.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
Yes, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Mother gets jealous and the father just slowly — I mean, we’ve seen that in home invasion movies. We’ve seen all of this stuff.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
This one just has an anchor and a mirror in it. But I, of course, want the mirror. I want the backstory of all of the people, the lecture of the vampire where she goes through all the different people.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, which was great. I love that bit.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, yeah.

Kynan Dias:
I just remembered, because I was gonna say, the thing that reminds me of what I was hoping this movie was—

Pete Wright:
Love that bit.

Kynan Dias:
—more like: The Turn of the Screw. And then I was like, oh wait, as you were saying it — that is the third season of The Haunting of Hill House. It’s The Turn of the Screw.

Tommy Metz III:
Mm-hmm.

Kynan Dias:
So it’s The Haunting of Bly Manor. And I haven’t seen that. So I wonder if he approaches that more explicitly in this later one.

Tommy Metz III:
Right.

One of the things that always worked for me, that helped me mitigate any frustration about what’s reality and what’s not, is how incredibly competent our protagonists are. Yes, one is a skeptic, but not a skeptic like Evie is in Undertone. He is just released from an asylum, Tim, but with really well-constructed critical thinking skills. So he’s coming at it really, really smartly. And Kaylie is incredibly competent and intelligent. She out-thinks things.

And so that’s why the mirror messing with their reality works so well and is so upsetting. It’s like, what? This isn’t fair. They got all the stuff. Look at all these lamps. The lamp budget alone.

Pete Wright:
That’s yeah, it’s really true. Every one of these movies, they’re all professionals in their field, and they are destroyed by their own stuff.

Chelsea Stardust:
Uh-huh.

Tommy Metz III:
And what if it was just a bunch of dumb-dumbs, like in later sequels of Scream? Just a bunch of knuckleheads running around.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.

Tommy Metz III:
I wouldn’t care anymore, because all they’d be doing is splitting up.

I have something, and I messed up the numbers for this, Pete, so I apologize. So we’ll do this together.

Pete Wright:
Awesome.

Tommy Metz III:
This is something that I found. At one point, young Tim — we’re in a flashback — young Tim is watching cartoons, and then there’s some visual static and it turns off.

I went frame by frame on it. Can you go to — do you see the one that’s a TV set and it’s really blurry, Pete? I don’t know.

Pete Wright:
Is there a face in it?

Tommy Metz III:
Yes, looking at us. Okay.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
That image comes up for one frame, and then it goes up like the vertical hold doesn’t work, and then it disappears.

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Do we have any thoughts about what that is? Because I do.

Chelsea Stardust:
Tell us.

Tommy Metz III:
I think — Pete, go to the next one.

Pete Wright:
Are we sure it’s the next one?

Tommy Metz III:
As if the — it’s the mirror.

Chelsea Stardust:
It looks like Karen, uh-huh.

Tommy Metz III:
I think it’s her, but go back one.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, it looks like Karen Gillan.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s from the POV of the mirror.

Pete Wright:
Of the mirror.

Chelsea Stardust:
The mirror.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm, right.

Tommy Metz III:
If the mirror — because remember, “oculus” means eye in Latin. So if this is either some sort of demonic force, or if the mirror itself is alive, this is sort of what it would look like. And this is showing way back when Tim was a child, again, as if the fix was in from the start, as if they didn’t have a chance.

Another example of this: Pete, if you go — you remember young Tim shoots his father in the chest, with the father’s help, of course. What’s the very first thing that the father sees in the mirror right when they move in? Go to Oculus 1. Remember, he spilled his juice box on himself.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
That’s before we’ve seen one ghost. And that’s it. We’ve seen — what’s her name? Marisol Chavez, who’s the one that died in 1975, that’s the one that’s sort of seducing him.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
But look at that. That’s in the very beginning.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, fascinating.

Tommy Metz III:
Nothing has even happened yet, as if the mirror has somehow planned all of this out, which I just think is really, really interesting.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
I think the one thing that is missing from this movie — but I think other people are probably glad it’s not there — is I miss my Flannel-ogues. Mike Flanagan is the king of monologues, and I guess maybe there’s more room for them in his limited series on Netflix and stuff, but I do miss those.

Kynan Dias:
Uh, uh—

Tommy Metz III:
I just want someone to look at the camera and talk for like—

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
—fifteen minutes straight, and then something comes out of their face and you’re like, why?

And I love that we go all the way back to find out why it’s called the Lasser Glass, but it just appears. It just is.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
Again, it’s a videotape, it’s a time code without a belly button.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
That’s not how that phrase works.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Tommy Metz III:
You know what I mean?

Pete Wright:
Yeah, it’s the Joker.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, exactly right.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, it just appears and is just a force of nature.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Right. Right.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah, the mirror idea is just to gaslight you in general. I think that’s what happens in mirror movies — to be gaslit and to be shown the wrong thing.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
How this movie does it is pretty incredible, because it’s not just what we’ve seen before of looking in the mirror and seeing reflections that are wrong or any of those things. It’s using cinema. It’s using close-ups, like you say, and then revealing, or through the cuts like Pete was talking about.

The really heartbreaking stuff, like when they are smashing the mirror, and then we reveal that they think that they’re doing it, but they’re not.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
That’s really, really cool stuff that I haven’t seen with the mirror before. And I don’t know why this mirror is allowed to do that. Other mirror movies have much more confined rules, right?

Tommy Metz III:
Mm-hmm.

Kynan Dias:
It’s about what you see through the mirror.

Tommy Metz III:
I haven’t seen — it’s not based on it, but he directed a short film called Oculus Chapter Three or something.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
I unfortunately haven’t been able to find it, and that’s because I forgot to look for it. It’s probably just out there. But I’d be interested in seeing how he—

Pete Wright:
Rigorous. Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
—stretched the ideas.

Apparently the one thing — because I try not to do a lot of behind-the-scenes reading of movies when I do these, but I did read one thing where—

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
—he was worried that he had done everything in the short and he didn’t have enough stuff for a full feature. And that’s when they came up with the idea of the two timelines. Originally it was just going to be — I don’t know if it was just the family or the kids — but the idea of those two timelines. It just feels so funny—

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm.

Tommy Metz III:
—to think of Mike Flanagan not thinking of that, because that’s his big thing.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
But maybe this was the genesis of it. His earlier ones, like Hush, don’t have that.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Maybe this just opened up an entire world and he’s like, oh, what’s more fascinating than the past affecting the future, affecting the past? It’s breathtakingly done.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Right, right.

Tommy Metz III:
And then to do it so much in camera is really exciting. Any last things?

Pete Wright:
I got nothing.

Tommy Metz III:
Good?

Pete Wright:
I feel good.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, by the way, the other thing that I like about Oculus is that it has the biggest bummer of an ending since Frank Darabont’s The Mist. And Mike Flanagan is remaking The Mist.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Ah, mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
So we’re going to see what he does to that.

Kynan Dias:
Right.

Pete Wright:
He is?

Tommy Metz III:
He is.

Pete Wright:
Do we need a Mike Flanagan The Mist? Darabont was so good.

Tommy Metz III:
If someone’s gonna do it, he can do it.

Kynan Dias:
No.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
I trust him as much as I trust Frank Darabont.

So, this one is very divisive. People seem to really either like it or hate it. And so I’m really interested to see what you guys think. This is 2026’s Undertone, directed by Ian Tuason, T-U-A-S-O-N.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
Two horror podcasters receive a bunch of haunted audio files, and things go great.

Okay, so what do we think? I saw this movie in the theater. How about you guys?

Kynan Dias:
You raved and told us all to see it, and we didn’t, I think.

Tommy Metz III:
Okay. I want to start with Chelsea, if that’s okay.

Pete Wright:
That’s exactly what happened. Oh my God.

Tommy Metz III:
Because I feel like I have a guess about your feelings about this movie.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Okay, so I missed this when it was in theaters. I was out of town. So I watched it with a friend who’s also a director — lights out, volume up. I followed your instructions, because you and many others have said that.

Tommy Metz III:
You did it. Thank you.

Chelsea Stardust:
And while I found things in this to be very creepy — when I was watching the movie, there was a room, there were some doors open down the hallway. And I thought, I need to close — and they were all dark.

Tommy Metz III:
No, yep.

Chelsea Stardust:
I’m like, I need to go close those doors.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, close those doors. Yep.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Because it creates this great suspense throughout it.

Oh, y’all. Okay. So, people love this movie. I know a lot of people love this movie, especially my friends who do podcasts. Love it, love it, love it.

I think it is a fantastic short film. And this is a me thing, this is not a movie thing: I’m very tired of the “let’s rotate the camera very slowly all around the room, and then do it again” and never really give you a scare. And again and again and again. Okay, let’s go back to this stairway.

And I take a lot of issue with “let’s make this protagonist pregnant” when she doesn’t need to be. Spoiler alert. I cannot stand that. And this is me being a super bitch, especially when men do it.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
So when that happened, I was like, no, no, God, no. Why have you done this to me?

Tommy Metz III:
You don’t think that’s important to the overall story, though? Because the whole story is in part about the terror of pregnancy, parenthood, all of that.

Chelsea Stardust:
I didn’t buy it. It wasn’t earned. And I think you could completely remove it and still have the movie. I didn’t think it was earned. I didn’t think it paid off. I didn’t think it mattered. And this is one of the biggest axes I feel like I’ve had. I feel like I’m getting very passionate about this.

So that’s where it lost me. I thought there was enough between what we gathered from her and her mother. There were actually pieces of stop motion that this reminded me of, too. But—

Pete Wright:
Is it—

Chelsea Stardust:
I just didn’t need it. And that’s enough. That’s enough, I think. I don’t mean to be so hard on it. This is personal me things that drive me nuts in movies.

Tommy Metz III:
Sure.

Chelsea Stardust:
The end. I will step off the soapbox.

Tommy Metz III:
Before I bring it to Pete and Kynan, though, I would like to very lightly push back on the idea that it doesn’t matter that she’s pregnant, only because that is a through line of the theme of the movie.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, yep.

Tommy Metz III:
And she’s already experiencing being a parent of sorts to her mother — the roles have reversed. And everything about this movie is about things in reverse.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Tommy Metz III:
So she’s already going through the pain of taking care of someone that can literally not take care of themselves. The one time she leaves her alone, she falls out of bed.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
And then when she knows she’s pregnant — we learn from Justin that maybe she had a drinking problem in the past, that she sort of bats away. We see her drinking, so she’s already doing something not great for the baby.

And then we don’t know what her choice is, but right before everything breaks apart, she makes an appointment at a women’s clinic.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
That could be one of two things, but we don’t know what it is.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
But she’s made her decision.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yep.

Tommy Metz III:
And so if she is suffering from psychosis or having this type of breakdown, in part because she’s terrified of becoming a parent, it’s almost like she’s punishing herself, or falling apart because she has made that decision. I think that’s what makes it really personal for her.

But that being said, everything you’re saying is completely valid. That’s just where it works for me. Because, Pete, I believe you also had thoughts about the lead.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Well, I struggled. I didn’t find myself ever able to really connect with the lead performance. I really struggled with it. I didn’t find any of the charisma that I need to care about this person. And when it’s one of two people on screen at the same — for the entire run of the film, I think that was a challenge. So I’ll stand on Chelsea’s soapbox that this is a me thing, I’m sure. I just didn’t connect with it.

I also think that I shouldn’t be a target audience for this movie, because I make a lot of podcasts, and I couldn’t with the podcasting. I don’t know a podcast that is made in five-minute chunks of two people reading Wikipedia to each other. And then, “We’ve recorded for five minutes. Let’s take a break and come back together tomorrow.”

Kynan Dias:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Have the four of us ever recorded a podcast that way? “Tom, I think we should take a break. We’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll release it another time.”

Nobody does that. I was incensed by that — that she’s got this beautiful podcast microphone and is not at all in any environment where she should be recording a podcast.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Sure.

Pete Wright:
Like that — I just could not get past it.

Kynan Dias:
You don’t like the center of the house with hallways in every direction over the wooden floor?

Pete Wright:
That, and — oh my God, the — please, Kynan.

Tommy Metz III:
I didn’t think about that.

Kynan Dias:
That’s not where you should be doing podcasts.

Pete Wright:
Preach. Yes.

So I struggled with that. Now, I want to say I didn’t have a problem with the — it has a very Skinamarink kind of nature to it.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
We were Skinamarinked all up and down, and did not care for it.

Tommy Metz III:
Which I know that Chelsea does very much not care for. So that’s why—

Pete Wright:
Right. Did not care for it.

Tommy Metz III:
I like that it called its shot with the Skinamarink in a different way, because she references audio apophenia — creating meaning from random sounds.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Apophenia, yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
That’s what happens with the negative space visually so much in this movie, which—

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Tommy Metz III:
I still am — I was terrified by Skinamarink. I’m still scared of this negative space stuff.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Well, and I watched it in the headset. It is very unsettling in a complete isolationist space. I had the headphones on and I couldn’t see anything in the environment, and it is very engrossing visually. I did not have any problems with it there. I found the practical stuff, the substance of this movie—

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
If you’re gonna make a movie about podcasting, goddammit, make a movie about podcasting. This was not that movie, and for me, I just wanted to give notes.

Tommy Metz III:
Well, the original title of the movie was Pro Tools.

Kynan Dias:
Uh—

Tommy Metz III:
Okay.

Pete Wright:
Do you know, though, the whole time I’m thinking, there are some fantastic — when we were in lockdown during the pandemic, there are some really great stories about the lengths people went to to record podcasts in their house. That included sitting on the floor in the bottom of a coat closet.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
That included sitting in the bottom bunk of their children’s bunk beds with blankets surrounding, to deaden the sound. Their environments are deeply horrifying and equally accessible in this house. And they chose to do it in a place that is stupid.

Tommy Metz III:
Kynan, have you given your overall thoughts? Not really.

Kynan Dias:
Uh, oh no, no.

Chelsea Stardust:
He hasn’t had a chance.

Kynan Dias:
But yeah, my real axe to grind is how much these podcast hosts sound like—

Pete Wright:
I gave Kynan’s — shit, it’s fine.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
—me. And having that reflected back to me was the real horror. Being like, ah, that is what I do, I suppose. Yes.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
That is how I sound when I listen back to myself. Yeah.

But no, I think it really worked on me. I think the opening made me trust the film. And then through a lot of the stuff — even though intellectually I was tracking what Chelsea’s saying, of “this is the same shot and none of it is actually meaning anything” — I went along with it.

And I mean, none of us yet have mentioned how successful I think the sound design of the movie is.

Tommy Metz III:
Mm-hmm.

Kynan Dias:
I think that’s just stellar stuff.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
That’s the shine.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Kynan Dias:
When we’re going into negative space and half the frame is not just falling off into darkness but maybe even not well designed or what have you, the sound kept bringing it back to me.

And I’m sure I’m with Pete. When my friend said, “We should go see this movie about podcasting” — that sounds terribly uncinematic, even if it’s a horror movie.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
And I still think that’s right. There are horror movies about people writing books; it’s the same thing. Writing a play, and it’s a horror movie. Same thing. It’s inherently uncinematic. And so now we know. Now they don’t have to make any more podcasting movies ever again.

Pete Wright:
I couldn’t help but think of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which for my money is the movie—

Kynan Dias:
Uh, yes.

Pete Wright:
—that makes research super sexy.

Kynan Dias:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
And I think both of them, the original and the remake, make research terrifying and sexy.

Kynan Dias:
Terrifying, yeah.

Pete Wright:
And this was—

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
—not it. This didn’t even strive to make it sexy. And I think for it to be scary, it needs to be a little sexy. We need to have some more unraveling, uncovering of the stuff. And I feel like either they were recording a podcast or she was dealing with her personal stuff, and never the twain shall meet.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
And I think the movie is less for it.

Tommy Metz III:
I like the idea of sexy investigation. That’s why I always get so aroused with All the President’s Men. Never mind. I tripped over my own words because I had too many things to say.

Kynan Dias:
But I think Pete is right.

Tommy Metz III:
Um—

Kynan Dias:
To sort of defend any movie and be like, oh, it’s impossible to make this cinematic — I mean, in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, she’s getting a cup of coffee from the vending machine and you are on the edge of your seat.

Pete Wright:
Yes, that—

Chelsea Stardust:
And I think piggybacking off of what Pete said, I think it’s also because of who the lead character is.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
And it’s who she is, and you connect with her. I cared more about Justin than I did about Evie, and we never see that guy — we only hear his voice. That is a problem.

And again, the sound design. One of my favorite parts of that, since you brought that up, was I love the nursery rhyme stuff.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah, mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
That was great. And for me, that and her being the caretaker to her mother as the roles reverse — that was enough. I didn’t need the pregnancy stuff. I was like, oh yeah, I see it.

Tommy Metz III:
Got it.

Chelsea Stardust:
Reversing this. That’s what her role is now.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
And that was enough for me.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Then then it all got undone.

Tommy Metz III:
And with the couple on the recordings being expecting, that that would be enough.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Tommy Metz III:
Got it. Pete?

Pete Wright:
And the fact that the mother-daughter relationship stuff — I’m a huge fan of Relic, and I think that movie—

Chelsea Stardust:
Oh, yeah.

Pete Wright:
—just nailed that relationship stuff between adults, and I wanted that kind of feeling—

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
—in this movie. And I think because I had so much of that in my head, this never quite reached that place.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
It’s a huge swing. And you’re absolutely right, I don’t want to undercut the incredible production design and sound design. It is very effective, and a huge swing.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
And so this movie has some stuff seriously going for it. I feel like I’m in the way of some of it.

Tommy Metz III:
Maybe one of the reasons that I like it so much is it’s very akin to Ghostwatch, which we’ve also done—

Pete Wright:
Which I know, you’re right.

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Tommy Metz III:
—on this podcast. The idea of using modern media to break reality and bring a supernatural force into the world and unleash it.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Tommy Metz III:
And I like how this movie slowly breaks reality. With the tenth recording — is Jessa actually talking to Evie? She’s listening. “I have to warn her.” That’s broken.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
I think that the movie maybe tackles a little bit too much. It has a few too many strands, with all of the Abyzou stuff and all of the different people and then the callers and stuff. But that last twenty minutes are some of the most terrifying and thrilling moments I’ve seen in a horror movie in a really long time.

And there’s a chance I like this movie because of that, because I know it’s all gonna lead to the coolest haunted house that I’ve ever wanted to go to.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Can I show you some stuff real quick?

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
Okay, let’s go to number one.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
I read the Bible so you guys didn’t have to. Undertone number one. This is actually Mark 5:38 and 39. This is the story of Jesus going to a synagogue.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
This leader of the synagogue’s daughter has died. And the quote is: “Jesus saw a commotion with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said to them, why do you make tumult and weep? The child is not dead but asleep.” And then he raises the young girl from the dead.

Why pick that, other than the fact of children in peril going back to the beginning of stories?

If you go to Undertone 2 — I’m an enormous fan of all of the constant mirror imagery. Because what is a mirror? And of course, also with — whatchamacallit — Oculus, it’s reality in reverse. This movie is constantly toying with the idea that everything is flipped in reverse, not just mixed up.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Oh yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
But reverse. Reversed.

Let’s see. The image I can’t get out of my head — and it’s so simple, and I couldn’t figure out why it struck me so much in the theater, and it still does to this day. If you can go to Undertone 3, please. It’s when the haunted house starts, and just that: the table is gone and the chairs are on the ceiling.

Chelsea Stardust:
Oh yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
I think I have a guess of why it hit me so hard. It’s because she doesn’t acknowledge it.

Kynan Dias:
Good day.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
She walks in and goes to — if you go to Undertone 4 — she doesn’t notice all the stuff in the sink. She doesn’t notice anything but that the sink is on. She’s not hearing the screaming kettle. The only thing she’s hearing is the sink, and we know that babies are drowned in sinks.

That’s the only thing that she can hear in this world, because her entire reality has been broken down.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
I wonder what it looks like through her eyes. My guess is all the cabinets are shut, and she’s just like, oh, this dumb sink is on.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
That’s what really — and this is one of the first times in waking life, other than the hall light and the figurine moving locations, that she’s seen an anomaly, versus us in the mirror. It’s always in the background. It’s always for us. There are anomalies in front of her, and she can’t even see it, because she is broken.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah, there are several shots in the movie that you swear are—

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
—not in the mirror. I don’t know how to say it otherwise. You swear you’re in the room, the camera’s in the room with her, and then we pan over and reveal that we’ve been in the mirror the entire time.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
That happens like, I don’t know, four or five times, and I could see tells — someone saying, oh, that’s repetitive, etc. But every time that happened, that was very effective to me. Like, ooh, I didn’t—

Tommy Metz III:
It’s destabilizing.

Kynan Dias:
I was being lied to. It was destabilizing, yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, yeah.

Kynan Dias:
And there were a couple of shots like that that I wanted to return to and just see, did I understand what was happening? And one of them — there might be many, many more — is a little bit before the sequence you were talking about, where she goes upstairs and the upstairs bathroom door is open. She’s talking to her mother, the mother’s sleeping, and she turns her back, and as she shuts the door, the mother sits up in bed.

But the mother is way in the background, out of focus, and when you’re watching it just all the way through you’re like, I don’t know if I really saw what I think I saw. Right. It’s not like Michael Myers, where we’re like, oh, I definitely saw that and she definitely did not see that. We’re more in the trance of, hmm, I don’t know if I could trust myself.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s very like the movie Lights Out, in that you just get little flickers and the physics don’t work. Because you’ll see, like in that one that we showed in Undertone 2, mother is standing up, but then that whole shot continues and she hasn’t moved.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm, right.

Tommy Metz III:
For such an active lady, she’s not going anywhere.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
If we can finish real quick the nightmare sequence, and then I just want to ask you guys, what do you think really happened in this house? If we can go to number five. This is the continuation of after she shuts off the sink. Look who’s sitting on top of the refrigerator.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s the doll.

Kynan Dias:
Oh, it’s a baby doll.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s the creepy doll that sleeps and talks to you.

Kynan Dias:
We keep her in—

Tommy Metz III:
Nobody cares for that.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah, we gotta keep her wrapped in plastic so she doesn’t get ruined.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Oh my God. Yeah, for sure.

Tommy Metz III:
And then of course, wrapped in plastic — we have a lot of babies in bags. Everything falls in on itself.

Let’s see, what else do we have here? If you can go to Undertone 8, skipping to the very end. What do we think has happened in this house? Because that’s downstairs. There’s no reason for that to be downstairs.

Overshadowed by the mother in the reflection — and I didn’t get a shot of it, my apologies — her bed is neatly made. Like no one has been in that bed for a while.

There is a reading of this that none of this happened, because we never see anyone else. We hear voices, we hear the nurse, we see people talking on the phone, but it’s just her and her mother. When did this psychosis start? How, when did these things start breaking down? When was she walking around drawing dead babies on the wall? That stuff is terrifying to me — just not knowing.

And that’s very Ghostwatch-y, if you remember, when the show starts replaying a loop from something earlier, and then the live feed cuts in and all hell has broken loose.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
We just weren’t allowed to see it. What do you guys think happened? Do you guys have any guesses of who sent the files?

Pete Wright:
Wasn’t it Abyzou? Abyzou on AOL.

Tommy Metz III:
I don’t think Abyzou has an AOL account yet.

Chelsea Stardust:
I sort of saw the files as similar to The Ring, of “where did this come from?”

Kynan Dias:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Because I think they talk about trying to figure it out, but that actually, like, I don’t believe ever gets resolved. And I thought she killed her mother, and this is — she’s in maybe herself too, and she is in—

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
—a purgatory, or is dealing with the grief, or is trying to process it and doesn’t realize she is no longer on this plane, and it’s maybe her purgatory. That’s the very surface sort of thought I had. And it’s either—

Kynan Dias:
Should we complete it?

Chelsea Stardust:
—already happened at the beginning, or something within the tapes, thinking of The Ring, has unleashed — yes, has pushed her.

Tommy Metz III:
Unleashed it. Right.

Chelsea Stardust:
Because also she really wants to go to that party. She ends up leaving. She comes back. She supposedly has maybe a boyfriend, Darren, I don’t know. Never see him, doesn’t matter. And she comes back, but he’s like, “Oh, I’ll only be gone a couple hours,” and is gone. I was like, what the — you’re gone twenty-four hours when you’re the caretaker of this person? Yeah, probably shouldn’t be a mother, but whatever.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Anyways, I think when it happens is somewhere in there, and maybe she doesn’t ever leave, because we as the audience never leave.

Tommy Metz III:
Yep.

Chelsea Stardust:
That’s my two cents.

Tommy Metz III:
There’s also a couple of scenes where the camera really does cant all the way. And that whole idea starts in the very opening title.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
That might be a demarcation line.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, maybe.

Tommy Metz III:
Maybe that the filmmaker is giving us of, okay, we’ve gone on. Don’t look at the kitchen, it’s a real mess. But she can’t see it.

Sorry, Kynan. Go ahead.

Kynan Dias:
Oh yeah, and she does — she does in the last podcast confess directly to camera, and she says, “I killed my mother,” which at the time we’re shocked by that. We’re shocked by that, and then we figure, oh, she’s talking metaphorically, the mother hasn’t died yet, as far as we know. But then perhaps, as Chelsea says, that’s what all this is all about.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, right.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Right.

Well, because we find out from one of the callers — this is a backup of what Chelsea’s theory could be — we find out that Jessa and Mike were found at the bottom of the stairs, dead babies all over, drawn like this, and they had plastic bags on their heads.

When we are going into the bedroom for the last time, there are two one-frame flashes. If you go to Undertone 6—

Pete Wright:
Oh, I wasn’t ready.

Tommy Metz III:
That’s one, and then Undertone 7.

Pete Wright:
Uh-huh.

Tommy Metz III:
There’s a world in which that’s the mom and Evie. It’s too hard to tell. If that is just an artifact in the bag, or if that’s a mole, I don’t know. But I’m not sure who these people are, for sure.

Pete Wright:
There’s kind of a mole on the — it’s like a mirror shot.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, interesting.

Tommy Metz III:
So I live for ambiguity. I like that it ends with sound, that you hear what sounds like—

Chelsea Stardust:
Oh yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
—she’s screaming “mama,” all the babies are crying. Someone is thrown down the stairs. And then it’s just “mama” and Justin and babies crying. And then it’s like—

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
—what was the song that plays? It’s probably some horrible “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”

Pete Wright:
“London Bridge Killed Them All.”

Tommy Metz III:
So I don’t remember.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. It’s interesting that this movie — the parallels between this movie and The Ring are pretty special, not the least of which is that Roy Lee is an executive producer on both of them.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, okay.

Pete Wright:
And I think that is — he was the guy who’s credited for bringing Ringu to America. And twenty-four years later, he’s EP on this one.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, there you go.

Pete Wright:
I think this is an accidental double feature that works very, very well.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
And I think there’s an interesting — the distribution mechanism is interesting here too, that we needed the VCR and the dub for The Ring to work. And here we need a podcast feed and an email address and—

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
Right.

Pete Wright:
Now, friction. Distribution of horror. The friction is at zero. It kind of reminds me of Smile 3, right? That sort of finale. So anyway, great.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Before we leave this film, just a shameless plug for my other show, The Devil’s Details, where we have talked about Abyzou — or Lester Brian Clark, my co-host who knows these things, has talked about her as Abizuth in our Testament of Solomon episode. So just to point that out there.

Pete Wright:
Outstanding. Link in the show notes.

Kynan Dias:
Yes, link in the show notes. And she might be in the Bible, depending on how you read these things, because demons used to just have names that were also common nouns that would plague people. So depending on some people’s readings of it, when in Revelation it talks about the abyss and the abyss being where the devil comes from — Abyzou is the abyss. So that could be literally the demon where the devil comes out of.

So she’s sometimes thought of like the mother, the grandmother of the devil. Or it could just be, you know, because we often name demons after just terrible things.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Kynan Dias:
So those could be coincidence.

Tommy Metz III:
Like tornadoes.

Kynan Dias:
Like tornadoes.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, Bible.

Well, thank you guys so much.

Kynan Dias:
Right.

Tommy Metz III:
I think we got two winners and one on the fence, but that’s okay.

Pete Wright:
They’re all winners, Tom.

Tommy Metz III:
Movies-wise.

Chelsea Stardust:
It was a great, great trilogy.

Tommy Metz III:
I hope you enjoyed the ride, though. And thank you guys so much for watching my stuff. And who’s up next?

Pete Wright:
For sure. Well, it’s me, Tom.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh my God, Pete.

Pete Wright:
It’s me.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, P-Money.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh my God.

Pete Wright:
Okay. So I’m up next, and I’m doing this thing that I think I dropped in episode one of this show. In our very first conversation, I said that zombies are my favorite monster.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
Do we remember? Who cares.

Tommy Metz III:
I do.

Pete Wright:
Deep, deep in the bag. I don’t know why. I love zombies. I’m deep in the bag for zombies.

Then I went and actually looked at what we’ve talked about — and I mean what I’ve talked about on all of The Next Reel family of film podcasts — and it’s pretty much Romero and after. Because Romero, zombies.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
But you know what? Zombies are more than just appetite, it turns out. So we’re gonna go back in time. Okay? Because the appetite zombie has only been true for about the last fifty years, right? A zombie didn’t used to eat you. It used to work.

It was labor. Somebody else owned it and pointed it at heavy things and said, “Lift this, turn that,” and they would do it.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, like a golem.

Pete Wright:
Right. So the monster that we’ve been calling my favorite is a mutation of the original. And I’m excited to go back and look at the cultural history, the cinematic history of the zombie.

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Pete Wright:
So I’ve got three American movies about Haiti across fifty-six years. And we’re gonna start way, way back with White Zombie, from 1932, Victor Halperin, with Bela Lugosi as a man named Murder Legendre—

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
—who runs a sugar mill on zombie labor. And it is made while the United States was nineteen years into a military occupation of Haiti.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Kynan Dias:
Mm.

Pete Wright:
Which the film does not seem eager to bring up.

Anyway, then we’re going to move to 1943 with the film I Walked with a Zombie, Jacques Tourneur directing for Val Lewton, which is — and I promise this is not a bit — a Jane Eyre adaptation set on, yes, a sugar plantation.

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
It is only sixty-nine tight minutes, and it is a beautiful bit of history from the RKO catalog.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
And then we’re gonna jump to 1988. Yes, we’re still—

Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
—in Haiti. Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow.

Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.

Tommy Metz III:
Serpent.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
Because what is a show about zombies without a little male genital mutilation?

Tommy Metz III:
That’s right.

Pete Wright:
This movie was shot on location in Haiti, also while the Duvalier regime was coming apart.

Tommy Metz III:
“Don’t bury me, I’m not dead.” I love it.

Pete Wright:
And I think that is fascinating history too.

So all of these are movies about colonial exploitation that are also colonial fantasies. It’s very strange, and we’re going to have to reckon with that.

White Zombie is free, public domain, it’s everywhere. I’m gonna try to find a link to the best one, because some of them are pretty stupid and muddy. And the rest are cheap rentals if you don’t have it.

Now, I don’t know what to call it. I was looking at The Working Dead as a title. But Take This Job and Shovel It was in there too. So I don’t know, there’s a pun in there that I’ve been kind of brainstorming. I don’t really have it locked yet, but it’s gonna be in that neighborhood of stupidity. Thank you. I’m excited for this series.

Kynan Dias:
Excellent, excellent, Pete.

Pete Wright:
Nice. All right. And thank you, Tom, for leading today.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yes.

Tommy Metz III:
My absolute pleasure.

Pete Wright:
Well done, Thomas.

Tommy Metz III:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Pete Wright:
Very, very good job. And make sure to check the links in the show notes for all of the stuff that we’re doing on it.

Do we have any specific plugs, Chelsea? You got any new movies coming out we gotta check out? Are you still on tour?

Chelsea Stardust:
Oh yes, still. We’re about to play FrightFest. That’s coming up in the UK. So if you’re there, come check out Grind.

Pete Wright:
Nice.

Chelsea Stardust:
And we’re playing at a bunch of other places. I just have to look at when I should plug them, but that’s the next one.

Pete Wright:
Okay. All right. Great.

Kynan, if you ever are interested in going to film school, Kynan will be there teaching you film school. And definitely check out the other podcasts.

Kynan Dias:
How to film score.

Pete Wright:
There’s the Everything Everywhere, Every Minute of Everything Everywhere All at Once, and The Devil’s Details with Kynan Dias and Tommy Metz III. You can see with me on All the Feelings, and also other podcasts, I’m sure, that we do together.

Tommy Metz III:
Probably.

Pete Wright:
The Film Board, and this one. So check us out on this podcast. Thanks, everybody.

On behalf of Chelsea Stardust and Kynan Dias and Tommy Metz III, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you next month, right here, sitting in the dark.

[thunderclap]