Chelsea Stardust:
Oh, say can you see by last summer’s light, what so proudly we watched at the TV’s gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous devil’s flight, or the deaths we watched, were so gallantly streaming? And the rocket’s red glare, the blood bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our Liberty Bell was still there. Oh, say does that hook hand yet wave, or the land of the teens and the home of the good scream.

I’m Chelsea Stardust, and I’m joined by my handsome co-hosts, De Palma Pete, Roller Coaster Tommy, and Fisherman Kynan. And you’re listening to Sitting in the Dark.

Pete Wright:
Kynan would be the one in the slicker. I could see that. I could totally picture it.

Chelsea Stardust:
The hat, the hat, sort of.

Tommy Metz III:
Is it a sad thing that that was more patriotic than anything for the 250th birthday that America just did? That was more American.

Chelsea Stardust:
I’m so excited to talk about these movies. Obviously, I’m using a very loose theme of patriotism and fireworks in horror.

Tommy Metz III:
I’m going to use the very custom theme of human and firework in horror.

Chelsea Stardust:
Very loose. I know there are many movies we could talk about, but today we’re going to talk about Blow Out, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and the fantastic Final Destination III.

So going in chronological order, we’re going to start with 1981’s Blow Out, which is written and directed by Brian De Palma. It has a fantastic cast: John Travolta, Nancy Allen, who I met and really geeked out about when I met her, John Lithgow, Dennis Franz, and many others, with a score by the incredible Pino Donaggio.

For anyone who hasn’t seen this movie, it is about a movie sound recordist who accidentally records the evidence that proves a car accident was actually murder and consequently finds himself in danger, per IMDb’s movie summary.

Tommy Metz III:
And it’s a remake of Blow-Up, right?

Chelsea Stardust:
Yes, yes.

Tommy Metz III:
Which was based on photographs, not sound.

Chelsea Stardust:
Photographs. I believe so, yes. So first off, I want to know if there were any axes to grind. And had anyone not seen this movie?

Pete Wright:
I love this movie.

Tommy Metz III:
I love this movie, and whenever I watch it, I want to see Coppola’s The Conversation. And whenever I watch Coppola’s The Conversation, I want to see this. Because they both go back and forth and are very particular in not speeding through here’s how sound works. It’s very deliberate, and there’s something very calming and sort of old-timey-movie about that. I know this isn’t old-timey, but you know what I mean. Very patient.

I have one axe to grind, but it’s a weird one — maybe it can’t be an axe, because it is largely what makes it a horror movie versus a thriller. It spends a lot of time with Burke’s character killing women, the cover-up, going around and killing. And it’s kind of an unnecessarily very De Palma lurid subplot. It takes whole sequences and set pieces, him strangling with his cool watch garrote. I get it — you’d kind of need that for the movie to have the kind of pulse that it does. But it really relishes that. And none of those women are real characters. None of those women really exist. So that just feels a little icky. But I don’t know what it would be without that.

Pete Wright:
And the point of that is that they all look kind of like Nancy Allen, right? I’m not missing anything more subversive than that.

Kynan Dias:
He’s hiding her eventual murder by killing these other women, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
But those murders could happen off screen, because it’s not like we learn anything about these women. The cops could just find the bodies. You don’t need to spend a ten-minute sequence in a bathroom stalking someone we’ve never met, nor will.

Pete Wright:
Okay, can I just say something that Kynan just unlocked for me — something I think is really important in my viewing of this movie. That he’s intentionally killing women that look like Nancy Allen before he kills Nancy Allen. This whole time I thought he was just bad at his job as an assassin, and he’s killing the wrong women, and he’s like, oh, doy, I did it again.

Kynan Dias:
Well, no. The first one, he kills the first woman, and then he looks up at the billboard and is like, Liberty — there’s a Liberty killer out there.

Tommy Metz III:
The first one he does by mistake.

Kynan Dias:
And so he concocts this plan to kill her so it just looks like she’s randomly killed, rather than that she’s the target.

Pete Wright:
Okay, all right. Then I guess we just found my axe. This is a real kind of Sarah Connor problem that I think the movie has. And I think the other one is, I think De Palma really loves his own work. The 360-degree spin in the editing room — it’s bravura filmmaking. And it also can kind of feel like “I am Brian De Palma, I was here.” It’s very cool, but there’s a lot going on there.

I think the principal question is whether this is really a horror movie, because it is a movie about making a horror movie. It opens and closes inside a horror movie. And that may be more interesting than pretending it deserves to be a slasher of its own ilk.

Kynan Dias:
Well, I’m glad that we rewatched this movie. I’m not a big De Palma guy — De Palma is probably my least favorite of the major filmmakers. Like, really, really, really do not like De Palma.

Pete Wright:
It’s still not a bad list to be on. He’s on the list.

Chelsea Stardust:
He’s on the list, but there’s a bottom.

Kynan Dias:
He’s not McG, I mean, you know.

Tommy Metz III:
He’s no Uwe Boll, yeah.

Pete Wright:
He’s still beautiful.

Kynan Dias:
People tell me I should like De Palma. I’ve just never liked him. He rubs me the wrong way for all the reasons Pete was mentioning. But rewatching this in this context is really interesting — to think about this movie as being about a lot of things, including being about horror films themselves, when it’s all a red herring for that kind of 1970s political-assassination conspiracy thriller. I had never thought about it in those terms, and that was really enlightening — all of that as a silkscreen for what’s really going on: a political assassination.

Chelsea Stardust:
I think it’s one of his best movies. And to piggyback on what Tommy and Pete were saying: with the death of Nancy, De Palma is showing that he’s a pervert. He’s such a pervert. When you look at Body Double, and even Carrie, and Dressed to Kill — he likes it. And later in his work, Dario Argento is also a pervert. So you can kind of see that.

I’m a proud pervert, so I get it. But I think the question is, is it servicing the story as much as you want it to, or is it just, “he’s De Palma, so he’s going to put his fetishes in it”? I sort of think he’s playing to that.

Kynan Dias:
This time watching it, because when I had seen it before I didn’t realize that he was married to Nancy Allen as he’s making this movie — for me there’s this question: is he really contemptuous of this character? It feels a little bit like that, like she’s dumb, and I don’t know if he really likes this person. And then I was like, oh wait, this is his wife. I guess he must like her to some extent.

But then to shift it and make us watch this terrible Lithgow character have that contempt for her and kill her, and the sympathy the movie wants you to have at the end — yeah, it was very different for me watching it the second time.

Chelsea Stardust:
If there’s an axe to grind with this, it does have to do with Sally as a character, because it’s very much writing that line of, oh, we’re going to have her be kind of ditzy, but we also have to make sure she’s smart. And when you look at it, there are basically no other women in the movie. I shouldn’t expect more — this is the ’80s and it’s De Palma — but I sort of want more for us, especially for women as viewers, with that character. I’m all about characters being flawed, but I think sometimes it gets a little broad in terms of how she’s directed. Especially when you think about her in movies like Carrie and some of her other collaborations with him.

And it’s like, girl, your gut’s not telling you anything about Burke? Come on now. That drives me crazy.

Tommy Metz III:
She has no stranger danger.

Chelsea Stardust:
No stranger danger at all. I was going to ask — whether you’re thinking back to the first time you saw it — did you think she was involved in this, that she was part of the conspiracy? Not that you expected him to die, but did you guess that going into it, or is it a surprise that she was in on the plan?

Tommy Metz III:
I don’t remember, because I’ve also rewatched the movie The Contender recently — with Diane Lane and Jeff Bridges — and there’s a real big subplot carryover from one to the other. So I can’t remember. Other than the fact of the outstanding — what a treat to see Dennis Franz Franz-ing it up all over the place. In a tank top that gets dirtier during a scene when he’s just standing there. Somehow it’s staining itself.

Seeing them together and being like, hey, doll face — I think, if I remember correctly, being like, oh no, this is deeper, the fix is in more than just what was going on. I think that sounds familiar to me.

Chelsea Stardust:
I remember it being a surprise for me when I saw it. A lot of the movie makes me think about — maybe this is an incorrect interpretation, but it made me think of the Kennedys.

Tommy Metz III:
Well, Chappaquiddick, sure.

Pete Wright:
It’s all Chappaquiddick, yeah.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, so that’s what it was making me think of. In terms of showing this profession, I’m curious how people — I haven’t talked to anyone who’s not a general cinema lover, but in terms of this movie showing behind the curtain of true filmmaking and sound design, I wonder if people find that interesting or boring. You rarely get an insight into what a sound designer does.

And the fact that at the beginning we’re shown killer POV — De Palma has clearly seen Halloween and Peeping Tom and Black Christmas — he’s clearly parroting that. We’re all film lovers, so it’s hard for us to say, but do you think a general audience finds it interesting or boring, seeing that he’s hung up on a scream, and how important something as little as that is? Showing that the actors aren’t always doing the screams, that it’s ADR and things like that. And then Nancy Allen’s scream lives on forever in cinema in this meta world. What do you guys think?

Pete Wright:
Boy, if you’re not into the behind-the-scenes stuff, this movie doesn’t have a lot for you. It starts with recording audio, and it’s all about audio and sync issues. I don’t know how not to be into this behind-the-scenes stuff. And I think Travolta, as weird as he is, kind of nails it. He seems like this guy. I could see him being fascinated by ADR in real life.

Tommy Metz III:
I love John Travolta in this movie. This is one of my favorite performances of his by far — the most lived-in. The part in the beginning, the POV shot — trying to put my mind in someone else’s, a non-film-lover — is because it is so deliberate and patient. It’s not like he goes “take everything out but the scream”; they take things out one by one, so you start to realize how much it’s all been built, how much you took for granted. When he’s like, “take out the heartbeat,” you’re like, oh, I don’t even know if I noticed there was a heartbeat, because that’s such a staple of that type of scene that it’s just baked in. You don’t notice that that’s another thing put on.

I would think it maybe runs the risk of, oh, I do like how the sausage is made — but also, like when you learn how a magic trick is done and you’re like, oh, that’s not magic. It’s both interesting and disappointing. Like a poorly done gender reveal. But I think he takes the time to really take you through it, and then it does an animation sequence, in effect, to show it. It’s so well done. I would hope people would really find an attraction to it.

Kynan Dias:
When he has to go back to basics because things aren’t working and no one’s believing him — he doesn’t have access to Dennis Franz’s film — you’re seeing what the nature of film is. Even on a rewatch, I was like, oh, he’s cutting these things out, he’s kind of just crazy. And then you see him making a simple film, and it’s like, oh wow, that’s really where his mind can go. His mind can see things in a different way because he understands film so well. He can go backwards, to the beginning, doing a little flip book, making a little zoetrope, even. That’s really fascinating.

And it’s because he has this obsession, right? We see him when he’s recording the sound on the bridge, when he gets the car accident. He is a Peeping Tom. He is observing people. We get these weird close-ups of Travolta, who at this point — I don’t think we’ve ever seen any kind of villainous nature of him, because the villains come later. And then we see him recording women without their permission and kind of getting off on that, and we’re like, okay, he’s an obsessive. And then we see him using his obsessiveness for good. Even if we don’t know film, we’re like, oh gosh, this guy’s good at his job. And that’s always fascinating.

Chelsea Stardust:
And do you think he should have gotten involved? Do you agree with that storyline — that he becomes so obsessed with this case, which suits him: obsessed with one thing, obsessed with another? Everyone’s telling him, don’t get involved, don’t get involved. Obviously, without that you don’t have a movie. But the most painful part of this movie — aside from Nancy Allen, RIP — is when all the tapes have been erased. I don’t think I ever thought about that when I was younger, but I saw it when I was rewatching it in the last couple of years.

Pete Wright:
That is gutting.

Chelsea Stardust:
I was like, oh, it’s like you’re losing your hard drive or something. All of it, gone. Fucking Burke. So painful.

Tommy Metz III:
And again, the erasing of all of that takes place off camera. But Burke’s killing women definitely takes place on camera. De Palma knows where he wants to spend his time in his movie.

Pete Wright:
And De Palma is not a pervert for demagnetizing, right? He’s a pervert for other stuff.

Chelsea Stardust:
Also, if you aren’t paying attention, you miss that — because in Burke’s trunk, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Because it’s just a magnet box in the trunk. And if you don’t know that magnets do that to sound, that’s a weird place to be cagey and to assume that people know things.

Pete Wright:
It’s deeply trusting, though, as a filmmaker, and I kind of appreciate that. You can watch it a few times before you understand that. He doesn’t pander. If it were the other way around, we might be complaining that he doesn’t trust us.

Tommy Metz III:
Why all of the American iconography? Are we saying this is America — don’t catch you slipping up? Are we saying that America is a country where people are disposable and power is corruptible, and people will do anything they need to make it happen, and welcome to us, because it’s a very paranoid thriller? Is that the reason it crosses over with the Liberty Day of it all?

Chelsea Stardust:
I would say yes, but also there’s a commentary on obsessiveness and excess. Especially that ending shot, against the fireworks. I think it’s sort of a commentary on that. And it’s a Liberty Bell celebration as opposed to Fourth of July, which is interesting. That to me is an interesting choice — like, okay, we’re not going to say anything about Independence Day, but we’re going to talk about the Liberty Bell, using Philadelphia as the backbone of it. That’s how I read into it. But it’s definitely a commentary. These killings are happening, and everyone’s just going about their lives like this is normal — sort of like today.

Kynan Dias:
Well, the Liberty Bell is the Liberty Bell because they were using it too much — using it for its sound too much, obsessed with using this, let freedom ring, and then they broke it. So I think that’s probably part of the lore. And the bicentennial, which was five years before — when you see that depicted in movies, like one of my very favorite movies, Rocky, that’s completely opposite of how it’s portrayed here. In Rocky, everyone has these crappy lives, the bicentennial is sort of in the background, and nobody really believes that unless you’re already Apollo Creed — you’re not going to get lifted up by that, and then by the end you are.

And here at the end, it’s like: Liberty, Liberty, you’ve got to love Liberty. And then we have this murder at the end that’s like, oh gosh, what are we celebrating, and why are we celebrating, and what about individual freedoms? We’re working up to the celebration, and everyone’s telling you the celebration is so great and so wonderful, and then at the end that’s where we have our murder. He feels incredibly alone and isolated, being the one person who’s not into Liberty — the Grinch of Liberty Day.

Pete Wright:
And there’s something else lingering over all three of these movies — maybe this is better saved for after, but the entire idea that it’s American celebration that is a killing floor in these movies. They look at what the superficiality of patriotism allows these people to get away with. We’re so distracted by puffed-up chests that we don’t realize there’s a watch garrote floating around in the construction sites. There’s a conscious choice here to throw fireworks in, in the spirit of “look up here, look up here,” while nastiness is happening down below.

Tommy Metz III:
That’s a cool reveal, speaking of the watch garrote, of what that noise is. Because it sounds kind of like a cricket. I thought that was really neat. I had completely forgotten about that.

Chelsea Stardust:
So good. And also, to use this situation — Burke is a serial killer, so this gives him an excuse to kill more people. I think he just loves doing this. They mention but don’t go into the details of the deaths, which feels sort of unusual. Now I feel like they tell you everything that happened to the person. But they talk about the Liberty Bell being stenciled into the bodies, with that punch tool. He just looks it over and is like, that is how I’m going to show that this is all being done by the same person — by stabbing this Liberty Bell into them. Which to me is very fucked up. Perverted De Palma.

Tommy Metz III:
You could just make an X. Why do you have to make someone a human Lite-Brite? There’s no reason for it.

Pete Wright:
I do love, though, that every one of Burke’s decisions ends up being like “first thought, best thought.” Everything — he looks at a thing, he does the thing. There’s something where he’s both exceptionally good at his job and really not very clever at his job.

Kynan Dias:
Yeah, they show that this conspiracy can’t control him. The conspiracy was like, hey, I pitched you, we were going to kill the guy. And they said, don’t do that. And he’s like, well, I’m just going to.

Tommy Metz III:
I’m going to go ahead and do that.

Pete Wright:
I had to do that anyway.

Kynan Dias:
So normally in these movies, this conspiracy has everything planned out and they’re in control. Even One Battle After Another is kind of like that — like, we’re in control of all this. But now it’s like they’re not even in control of this, because there’s another force, the serial-killer murderer, who’s hijacked the conspiracy to get off on what he wants to do, as opposed to the cabal. Even the cabal doesn’t have control in the De Palma-verse.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s got a No Country for Old Men, Chigurh kind of feel, where he just goes rogue and starts killing everybody because he doesn’t care.

Pete Wright:
It does, but I think Chigurh deserves more credit than the Christmas cabal in One Battle After Another. This feels more like that. There are some Christmas-themed cabalists in the background of this movie that we never meet.

Chelsea Stardust:
Moving into 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, the OG. This is directed by Jim Gillespie, written by Kevin Williamson of Scream, and based on the book by Lois Duncan. For anyone who hasn’t seen it: four young friends bound by a tragic accident are reunited when they find themselves being stalked by a hook-wielding maniac in their small seaside town of Southport. It has a deliciously ’90s teen-filled cast — Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ryan Phillippe, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Freddie Prinze Jr. — with wonderful appearances by Anne Heche and Johnny Galecki, and a banging ’90s soundtrack, with covers of all sorts of great songs.

I’d love to hear if this is a first-time watch, and what the axes are to grind. I grew up with this movie, so these ’90s horror movies have a special place in my heart, but they are flawed. Let’s get into it.

Kynan Dias:
This is a new one for me. Because I’m scared. I’m a scaredy-cat.

Chelsea Stardust:
I bet you did great.

Kynan Dias:
It’s a very effective movie. I was surprised how good it is, because it is kind of a cheesy, weird premise, the title is crazy — but it’s very effective. My axe is that it works really well moving forward, but it doesn’t work as well moving backwards. When you think about it — if this is what he’s trying to do, why does he kill these two extra people? That doesn’t make any sense to me. And why is he sometimes getting his revenge by killing them and sometimes by embarrassing them? As the credits are rolling, you’re like, wait a minute. He was right there, he was with two of them, over their bodies, and could have killed them and didn’t. So what’s the deal? But I guess that comes with the territory of this type of movie.

Tommy Metz III:
I think it does and it doesn’t. One of the most interesting things about this movie is how much the language of horror has changed. At the end of it — because I had seen it in the theaters but had forgotten it, and one of the reasons I’d forgotten it was, oh, it wasn’t any of them? It has to be one of them. That’s the thing. The latest Scream movie, the tagline was “The killer’s on the poster.” It’s saying, we’re a movie and the killer’s on the poster. It couldn’t be more meta. And this one, he’s playing a bunch of mind games for no reason. There’s no reason to do mind games or machinations if you’re just going for straight revenge.

He also, unlike now, the Fisherman has the ability to make evidence appear and disappear in broad daylight or in a crowded theater — with that Joker-like ability to just have warehouses filled with dozens of oil barrels and no one notices. He just has an army of people able to do his oil business. So it’s interesting. It feels like it’s trying to be two movie ideas at once, because it does throw suspicion on Johnny Galecki, it throws suspicion on Freddie Prinze Jr. But then the fact that it’s none of those kind of feels like, oh, all right — the Scooby-Doo mystery, where it’s the caretaker we never got to meet.

The only other thing I wanted to say is that the violence and gore in this movie, except for one big scene, is almost nothing compared to what we had and what we’re going through now. It’s almost like this movie is scared of its own gore. It shies away from it in quick cuts. The gore is in the aftermath, almost never during the actual killing. It feels like the movie is hiding its eyes. Even in the beginning, how it panned to the ocean in the opening — I assume — sex scene between Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt. There are some things we know should happen, but let’s not be gauche and actually see them. Let’s just fade to a seagull. It’s surprisingly chaste, both with sex and with gore, I thought — especially compared to Final Destination III, which is just a meat machine. We’ll get there.

Kynan Dias:
I saw that those were reshoots — that they had reshot the two murders that had any gore at all, to add more. It was a lot more chaste before that, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Yikes. It’s an interesting movie, and I want to celebrate its addition to this list, because I also have a very fond appreciation of the film. It is more than the sum of its parts, because its parts are not much, and I don’t understand why I like it as much as I do. I’m watching it and I think — you know how sometimes you sit there talking to Google or AI and you think, oh, AI is a bad writer? And then you watch this movie and you’re like, oh, I know why AI is a bad writer, because it was trained on this movie. This movie sounds like it was written by AI in the ’90s. There’s such weird, weird dialogue in this movie that I found myself thinking, why am I watching this? Because I kind of love it.

I don’t think the Fisherman is an iconic serial killer after this movie and the next one. Is the slicker enough? Probably not. But I still love it. The morality — you’ve already brought it up — is really muddled. The kids are punished as much for just being pretty and privileged as for the cover-up. The ethical math in this movie is a mess. And maybe that’s interesting, or maybe that’s just because AI wrote it. I don’t know.

Tommy Metz III:
And Johnny Galecki and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s sister are killed for no apparent reason. They’re both tapped as potentially the evil ones, and then pretty much right away killed before other people are.

Pete Wright:
There’s no time for a mystery in this thing. They just keep killing the clues.

Kynan Dias:
Can I read this thing that Love Hewitt said? This is in 2018, and it’s going to sound like a dig, but I think it’s part of the charm of this movie. She’s talking at the Television Critics Association, about the scene after they find the trunk full of crabs and then it’s not there, and then that iconic shot that’s parodied so well — “What are you waiting for?” She says: “That scene was actually directed by a kid who won a contest to come on and create a moment for the movie, and it became the biggest part of the movie. He was like, I want her to stand in the street and turn around and just scream, ‘What are you waiting for, huh?’ And I was literally like, are you kidding me right now? This is what I’m going to do.”

Tommy Metz III:
What year was this, Chelsea?

Chelsea Stardust:
’97.

Pete Wright:
Wow. What were we doing?

Tommy Metz III:
I bet he won the contest because he opened a Coke and something popped out. That’s so funny. But that is the most iconic part.

Kynan Dias:
It was all over it, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
It was all over the trailer.

Pete Wright:
That is one of the scenes that absolutely takes me out of the movie, and I didn’t expect to be taken out quite so much. The movie I wanted to see is what happens between her discovering the guy in the trunk covered in crabs and discovering the meticulously cleaned trunk. What happens between those two scenes?

Chelsea Stardust:
So clean.

Pete Wright:
I want the guy who’s trying to get live crabs corralled out of the trunk. I want that movie — and a body, right? We didn’t get it. That was disappointing.

Tommy Metz III:
Well, if he’s the Fisherman, potentially he can just go, and they all jump out of the trunk. He’s like Aquaman.

Chelsea Stardust:
Like the Deep.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, he’s like the Deep.

Chelsea Stardust:
I want to go back to what we were saying about the gore and the lack thereof. I think that speaks to the director, Jim Gillespie, versus a Wes Craven. Kevin Williamson wrote it, so I think that speaks to maybe Jim Gillespie not having the confidence to execute that. Because when you look at something like Scream — to this day, that movie still has this really great violence in it.

I rewatch this movie every Fourth of July. My husband cannot stand it. I highly recommend you do not watch I Still Know What You Did Last Summer — that does not hold up — and the remake is, no offense to anyone who worked on it, hot garbage.

Tommy Metz III:
Is it really?

Chelsea Stardust:
Unwatchable.

Pete Wright:
I did watch these back to back, and I concur.

Chelsea Stardust:
It’s unwatchable. Oh my God.

Pete Wright:
It’s rough.

Tommy Metz III:
I was shocked by the trailer of the new remake, by the complete lack of diversity.

Chelsea Stardust:
And just atrocious characters. You don’t care about anyone. They all suck. Why? Who asked for that? Nobody asked for that.

Revisiting this — sometimes this happens in the ’90s and 2000s, some of the horror movies and remakes. How do I word this? Like Anne Heche’s character. I don’t want to say “backwoods porn” characters, but the way they have her dress and act — this is such a stereotype that this time watching it kind of took me out of it. It feels like I don’t think anyone who worked on this movie knows anyone who’s from the country, because that’s just not it. Trying to make her creepy and goofy, giving her this haircut — strange.

Tommy Metz III:
The movie is really suspicious of the poorer parts of town. The fear of them being the other makes them suspects. Like the dock workers, and Anne Heche, who lives in the sticks in a giant house — which is just weird, because she has an animal hide and is cutting up fish heads in the other outfit we saw her in.

Chelsea Stardust:
She’s like Leatherface’s sister or something. It’s very classist.

Tommy Metz III:
Very.

Chelsea Stardust:
It is — especially how Ryan Phillippe’s character behaves, who’s such a dick. You’re like, oh, it’s got to be this guy, let’s just get rid of him. Pete, did you say you watched the remake?

Pete Wright:
I did, yes. It feels like an absolute cash grab. It feels like nostalgia porn to the nth degree — having the number of grown-up characters come back into that movie and be wedded into the fabric of the mystery in a way that is totally unbelievable. It feels a lot like what Scream ended up doing, but Scream did it better. It reminded me that it’s possible to do this well, and that they were just unable to conceive of how that’s even remotely possible. So just take the narrative off the table. The movie is not canon.

Chelsea Stardust:
Taking legacy characters and doing them dirty, but trying to be Scream — it’s like, y’all are behind. Why even bother? Tommy and Kynan, you don’t need to know any of that. Do not — you’ll never get that hour forty back of your life.

Tommy Metz III:
Okay. Good. Thank you for letting me off the hook.

Chelsea Stardust:
And I love that this also — when you think about another movie I love from around this time, Urban Legend, they tell the tale of the man with the hook hand. That’s very lightly mentioned in this, but we’re creating a whole new character, which I think is sort of lesser-known when you’re talking about the canon of these killers in these ’90s movies. Anytime I see someone doing cosplay of the Fisherman, I get very excited, because I think it’s very underrated. I feel like this movie still holds up today. Not everyone would agree, but I think there’s still some really great, smart stuff in it when you’re looking at these summer slashers. I’m surprised by the reaction — I felt like this would be a little more polarizing with everybody, but I’m pleased.

Kynan Dias:
One of the things that really helps it is that when they have that accident, it’s very plausible. These are four good actors. They’re really likable. I saw a lot of reviews saying they’re impossibly good-looking — these are four of the sexiest people I’ve ever seen in a movie. So you kind of like them, even though they’re acting like spoiled kids. And the argument is so convincing that you’ll follow them for another half an hour before you start to have any questions of logic. You’re like, yeah, okay, this is all making sense.

And the surprise they have when he comes back to life and now they have murdered him — you know, irrefutably murdered this guy — that was really surprising. That’s not quite in the trailer, so I hadn’t learned that before.

Chelsea Stardust:
And it’s a kind of ballsy move. You’ve just met these characters, and then you have to get back on board with them. I think it’s a nice, challenging thing the film does for the viewer, and I do think it works.

Tommy Metz III:
They are all very pretty. That’s my only problem with this movie — everyone always has their shirts on. I agree with Kynan that they make a really good case for why the kids hide the body. The movie does slow down, and it’s all an argument. Ryan Phillippe, who I really like, has the problem of starting it at a 10 in the opening scene and has nowhere else to go. But still, the cops won’t believe that he wasn’t driving, they’re about to graduate, their futures are in front of them — all of those things make a good point. They make you want to follow them, because it just seems impossible. I’m glad the movie took the time to do that, instead of just saying, ew, gross, push him in the water.

The other thing — this was written by Williamson. I like that this is an early version of his fascination with the illusion of safety. He likes to take scenarios or places where you’re supposed to be safe and make them deeply unsafe. This is one of two movies where people are locked in the back of a police car where you can’t get out. A police car, unless you’re the criminal, is supposed to be safe — you’re in the safety part. The idea of being so close to the alley and being killed while the entire parade is right down there. In Scream, remember Dewey is stabbed while Gale Weathers is screaming at him in a soundproof booth. He really likes showing that the safety is right there. But, almost to Pete’s point about the fireworks — look over here, we’re so busy with the vapid stuff that we’re not seeing the actual humanity, if we just turn our heads left. I like that as a through line.

Chelsea Stardust:
And that’s what I was going to bring up after Final Destination III, but since you brought it up now — all three of these movies specifically have that “should be safe in a crowd.” For the Liberty Bell celebration, for the carnival, and then Final Destination sort of at the amusement park, but also at the ending, a celebratory event where you’re like, oh, there are all these people around, everything should be fine, we should be fine. And it’s the opposite of that.

Kynan Dias:
That sequence is really, really smart. They set it up: I’m going to be in the balcony, I’m going to be watching, you’re going to be on stage, we’re going to be okay doing this. And then it works against her — when she starts to freak out and call them out, the crowd works against her, because they think she’s having some kind of episode. They don’t know the plan they’ve got. And then, killing the police officer for no reason — forgot about that one, why does he do that? But her in the alleyway is really devastating, because it is scary, and then you have this really cruel, kind of De Palma-ish overhead shot where she’s literally three feet away from it, and how awful that is.

Pete Wright:
This is an interesting movie in the career of Jennifer Love Hewitt, too. When you’re talking about the lack of gore — she was just off of Party of Five, where she played the virgin ingenue. That was her entire purpose on that show; she was not to be sullied. And I almost wonder if part of the reason she was given this part was because of that baggage, and they didn’t want to mess her up. She was kind of a precious gem. It feels like they were trying to leave her unmussed in this movie — to the movie’s discredit. I think they didn’t take the risk that would have been a gimme because of who she was, so popular on Party of Five. They could have really had some fun with the film, with her in it and her reactions. I wonder if that has any part of the discussion.

Chelsea Stardust:
So that’s our transition to — obviously, for anyone listening, we did an episode on Final Destination where we did not talk about three, which is one of my favorites. So I just wanted an opportunity to bring this one up. I highly recommend you go back and listen to that episode to hear us talk about the Final Destination franchise. But talking about 2006’s Final Destination III, directed by the incredible James Wong and written by Glen Morgan — and of course the whole franchise was created by Jeffrey Reddick. It has a big cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Sam Easton, Jesse Moss, Gina Holden, Texas Battle, and a lot of people you see in the James Wong / Glen Morgan universe. Wendy Christensen and a group of teens escape a fatal roller coaster crash and face a bloody date with death.

Getting into this one — I love the roller coaster setup, I love the crazy, wild, explicit deaths in this movie. I think it’s really going for it. I’d love to know your axes to grind with this one, and where you feel it stacks up against the other Final Destinations you’ve seen. Obviously, if you haven’t seen four, which is sort of known as the roughest one — but from the ones you’ve seen, where do you think it stacks up? A twofer question.

Tommy Metz III:
I’m going to answer a question that was not asked. I thought I had seen this movie, and it turns out I had just seen the roller coaster scene, and then it stopped. The idea of this new element, the photos predicting the future, is a brilliant addition — a really nice element, and needed. It needs to have this other thing, instead of just having wind blow things over like in the first two. I really like that. So I was really glad you put this on the list. I just assumed I’d seen them all. I think I probably saw a YouTube compilation of all the openings at some point, like a jerk.

And what a whiplash — from the gore of, or the lack of, in I Know What You Did Last Summer. I think this one ranks high because Mary Elizabeth Winstead is an incredible get for a movie like this.

Kynan Dias:
I was wondering about that — are we just projecting from the future, this great actor who comes out of this role? But I saw some contemporary reviews that were like, oh, this woman — some of them were condescending, saying she’s too good for this movie, but they were like, she’s going to be a big actor. So I think that’s right. This is a really strong performance from her. That elevates it somewhere in the franchise for me. Why did we skip this one when you were putting that together?

Pete Wright:
I definitely left four off. And I left this one off because I just needed to prune, and I felt like one and two, and five and six, were the ones that told the arc I was most interested in about this franchise. No disrespect to Chelsea, who I know has been holding a grudge against me and that choice since then.

I actually deeply appreciate this movie, even though there are some things on rewatch that make me curious. The photos as death clues are genuinely clever, but I don’t always know if the film trusts it, and the rules sort of bend when convenient. Like the premonition on the roller coaster — it blames the camera strap for the derailment, but in the real timeline, she’s not even on the coaster. So what crashed it? There’s no camera strap on the thing.

Chelsea Stardust:
That was Frankie’s camera. That was the handheld, not the photo camera. There are two cameras — a different camera.

Pete Wright:
Oh, that was the second camera. Oh, thank God.

Kynan Dias:
No — Pete’s right, they all left. They’re not on the roller coaster.

Chelsea Stardust:
They all left. He wasn’t on the roller coaster.

Pete Wright:
Okay, then I hate it again. Do you see what happened there? Crazy.

Chelsea Stardust:
I also — well, go ahead.

Pete Wright:
I think this is an axe, or a real blessing — the cruelty in the movie is sort of peak Final Destination, presorted cruelty. Like the tanning-bed girls only exist to be punished. That’s why they’re in this movie, and the movie deeply wants you to enjoy it. It’s this queasy, mid-2000s, torture-adjacent appetite. This three, more than the two before it, just exalts in what it’s capable of doing.

Chelsea Stardust:
To piggyback on that — my only axe to grind is that there are too many characters. There are a lot of people to keep track of. When you look at how many people got off and all the deaths, there are a lot of them. And her sister, again — another sister character who’s also shitty and comes back around. We’re really dealing with a lot of cliché characters. The tanning-bed ladies — though, listen, I really want the whale tail to come back. I feel like that’s going to come back.

This movie is a little mean too, which isn’t for everyone. That can be a turnoff for some people, but I’m kind of here for it. It fits into — when you think about James Wong and Glen Morgan, they did the Black Christmas remake in the 2000s, which I love. Obviously The X-Files is what they’re known for. I’m still invested in the characters, despite some of them being kind of shitty. And I think that’s sort of bold filmmaking — challenging your audience to care about characters that are difficult and complicated, but really you’re just there to see how they die at the end of the day.

Tommy Metz III:
And the effect isn’t the death, it’s the leading up to it — what we talked about last time, death edging. Even if you don’t care for the person, you’re still on the edge of your seat, because you know it’s going to be gross, and you don’t know if it’s this way or this way. There are swords, and there’s the machine they set up, like four different things that could go wrong, and then they really play it out. Especially with the tanning-bed scene, there are so many different elements to it. In two locations.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s so Rube Goldbergian. There’s no way to not be kind of wanting it to happen and not wanting it to happen at the same time, which makes you very culpable as a viewer.

Kynan Dias:
The addition of the camera is interesting. That’s my minor axe to grind — I’m not always sure what it wants me to be thinking with these pictures. But when it’s really successful, it’s like, oh, after the fact you could see what was in this photo, and then it’s all very clear. It adds this new element — like Tommy’s saying, we’re culpable because we’re watching. We’re watching Wendy looking at these pictures; she has this giant stack of photographs she’s printed out, going, what could it be? It’s like we’re watching her play the game that we’re playing, which is different from the first and second. And she’s wrong every time, and it’s fruitless to do this, but that’s a fun addition.

Chelsea Stardust:
I felt like maybe James and Glen were homaging The Omen — that’s what it felt like to me. They can sort of see those premonitions happening. I may be giving them too much credit. And to piggyback on what Tommy was saying about the construction of the deaths in this movie — the tanning bed, the weight room, there are some really well-done ones. And then the nail gun feels a little bit throwaway — not throwaway, but you’re like, it could be this, it could be this, and then it’s her, and you think it’s going to be Ian but it ends up being Erin.

Pete Wright:
And yet her death was particularly, delightfully gruesome. The way they had her play being torn asunder by nails.

Chelsea Stardust:
In a Home Depot. The location is basically a Lowe’s or a Home Depot, which we never see, and it’s full of things that can kill you.

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Kynan Dias:
It made me remember that as a teenager I learned to drive a forklift for working at Target, and I don’t know why that was allowed to happen. Now, as a grown-up looking back — it’s like me looking back at my life in a mosh pit, which I never did. But now, me looking back working in retail, like, why did I delight in learning how to drive a forklift when I’m 19 years old?

Tommy Metz III:
Why did we stock all the nail guns loaded? What a weird choice.

Chelsea Stardust:
Exactly. How strange.

Tommy Metz III:
That was fun — to hear Tony Todd is the Devil voice in this, and I think the subway announcer.

Chelsea Stardust:
Yes, because we don’t have his character in this movie. I love that that’s a little Easter egg, if you’re listening.

Tommy Metz III:
My favorite part is always the Easter eggs — all the different advertisements on the subways. Two of the subway stops are Booth and Oswald. There are so many. If you want to freeze-frame and pause things, the art department had a great time.

Kynan Dias:
I went back and looked at that map, because I was so fascinated after the movie. I looked at all of them, and they are all murderers, or mass murders, or assassination victims. Just fun.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s outstanding. It’s really cool.

Pete Wright:
There’s a really interesting thing going on here that just occurs to me — all three of these movies are about how much it sucks to survive a vehicular accident. All three of them: the coaster, obviously; the body on the road; and then Blow Out, it Chappaquiddicks itself. Isn’t it fascinating that we’re fascinated by how hard it is to survive trauma?

Chelsea Stardust:
Survivor’s guilt throughout, the through line.

Kynan Dias:
That’s interesting. Obviously they might not be thinking about it in those terms, of car accidents specifically, but I’m reminded of Robert Altman’s Nashville, which is also about conspiracy and then assassination. It says, hey, what’s American? How about a car crash on the highway? We spend like half an hour just looking at this car crash. What’s as American as apple pie?

Pete Wright:
This is the part of the podcast where Tony Todd’s voice comes in and says, this is where the podcasters learn the truth.

Kynan Dias:
This roller coaster is so interesting, and again, Mary Elizabeth Winstead is so good. It brings up this thing that we have a little bit in I Know What You Did Last Summer and Blow Out as well — but with them being kids, teenagers, this feeling you have of, I’m afraid and I cannot convince my friends to take my feelings seriously. To put that in a theme park, which is different from the other Final Destinations — those are legitimate fears people have, of car crashes or airplanes. And just not being able to get into it, you’re not having a good time — I don’t think I’ve seen a movie deal with that, when I think it’s kind of a universal feeling. Unless I’m just, again, a scaredy-cat.

Tommy Metz III:
Well, that’s also kind of the illusion of safety in crowds. Everyone should be on the same page emotionally if we’re all together. And that rarely happens.

Kynan Dias:
They’re like, you’re going to be traumatized enough — which is what roller coasters and horror movies are about, you’re going to be traumatized enough that you’ll have a good time at the end of it, just trust us. And she cannot convince them — like, no, I really need to leave. And they end up strapping her in this thing and saying, no, you’re going to love it.

Pete Wright:
We’re trained that we’re supposed to feel this way in this context. There’s no way you can convince us otherwise, because we’re trained. You go here to feel this.

Tommy Metz III:
I hope this is enough on track, but there’s a TikToker I follow who is a ride operator at some amusement park. It’s a big drop where you get stacked in, and then they let you go, and it’s free fall. And his joke — he just lets the camera roll — is he presses the button, and there’s a good five-second delay, but he presses the button and goes, “Oh, shoot, you know what?” They don’t know that he’s pressed the button. And different phrases he says: “Oh wait, before we go, this one thing is jammed, this won’t work.” And people just fall out of frame in free fall. It’s not like “ahh,” it’s like, why? They are seeing their own mortality, and it’s crazy.

Chelsea Stardust:
I can’t believe that guy is still employed.

Kynan Dias:
I bet they thank him for it at the end, right? They’re like, that made it so much better.

Tommy Metz III:
I think they do. Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Also, that guy is Tony Todd.

Kynan Dias:
This particular amusement park — I keep calling it “music park,” but it really is a carnival they’re putting together for the tricentennial of their town, I guess. I like that it’s all run by kids their age, which feels more real. This is not a very safe roller coaster.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, it’s more mail than you.

Kynan Dias:
It’s been put together yesterday. They had a six-hour deadline to put it up, and it’s there. That feels much more real.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, there are already stories about these kinds of roadside attractions. You should be feared.

Chelsea Stardust:
I’m so glad that all of these movies went over well. I was not sure. They’re all very — I mean, aside from the fact that you can’t always tell what season it is in Blow Out — they’re all very summery, too, which felt appropriate, thinking about Fourth of July. Thank you for watching these movies, because I love them so much. And I am going to throw it over to Tommy, if we feel good about our conversation and you’re ready to dive in.

Tommy Metz III:
I am. One thing I forgot to say — you mentioned the score, going back two movies to I Know What You Did Last Summer. It was very ahead of its time, taking very pleasant older songs, slowing them down, and making them scary. The opening title is “Summer Breeze” — “makes me feel fine” — but slowed down into a horror song. I was humming it and I was like, this seems weird. And now that’s every trailer. Every trailer is A-B-C-D-E-F-G, whatever song everyone knows. I thought that was a really ahead-of-its-time thing.

Chelsea Stardust:
And almost ten years later — 2006, just shy of that — Final Destination ends with “Love Train,” the cover. So still doing it ten years later. And then the one I think a lot of us think about is the “Creep” cover in The Social Network trailer. Those kinds — then it sort of started to take a turn. And to this day, we’re still getting that, which I think is great.

Tommy Metz III:
I’m trying to think of — “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” You’re like, okay, we ran out of songs.

Chelsea Stardust:
I should have done a creepy “Star-Spangled Banner.” My bad.

Tommy Metz III:
No, I loved your opening. Okay, yes — I am in charge of the next episode of Sitting in the Dark. My name is Tommy, and we’ve done a lot of episodes about haunted or cursed people. We’ve done a lot of episodes about haunted or cursed places. Have we done a ton of episodes about haunted or cursed objects? Well, we’re about to, because I have three movies for you.

I am ignoring certain ones, like the Annabelles of the world. At the top of my list was Talk to Me, until a certain Pete and Andy just did a wonderful examination on The Next Reel podcast — which I highly recommend you go listen to. Well, I guess we’re their sister podcast. You’re not our sister podcast — our papa podcast. It’s a great breakdown of that movie, so that took Talk to Me off. Instead, I’m going with one home-run classic, and we’ll see how it holds up; one that isn’t as well seen; and one that just came out and is divisive.

Here we go. To start, 2002, Gore Verbinski’s The Ring — everyone’s seen it probably a zillion times, but I still think it’s worth talking about. That, of course, is a cursed or haunted VHS tape, which is kind of like an MP3 file. In 2013, Mike Flanagan’s Oculus, which is a haunted or cursed mirror that haunts a family, and you learn about it throughout history. And then finally, 2026, the very divisive — people seem to really love this or hate it — Undertone, which just came out. This is the reason I asked you guys if all of you have HBO Max. It is on HBO Max now.

When you choose to watch this, I have one request: please put yourself in a situation, either with earphones or where you can watch it loud. The sound is the point. As much as you can, try to replicate a theater experience, because I saw it in the theater and I’ve seen it again since on HBO, and that’ll make a big difference for you. That is cursed — well, there’s a bunch of cursed stuff in that movie, but let’s go with the cursed audio files. There’s a lot of nonsense in that movie. So those are the three that we’ll be talking about.

Pete Wright:
Do you have a classic Tommy trademark punny title? Did you come here without having done all of your homework?

Tommy Metz III:
Oh no. I got so thrown for a loop with Talk to Me being taken off the list.

Chelsea Stardust:
It’s coming from inside the object.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s coming from inside the object.

Kynan Dias:
Love it.

Tommy Metz III:
Let’s do that. So those are the three, and I hope you guys enjoy them, or enjoy rewatching them, whatever. I look forward to talking about it.

Pete Wright:
I’m legit worried about Undertone. I haven’t seen it, I didn’t watch it. Sound is a real trigger for me in terms of horror.

Tommy Metz III:
Well, it’s about people recording a horror podcast.

Pete Wright:
Oh, I know.

Tommy Metz III:
That’s one of the reasons I wanted to pick it for this.

Pete Wright:
That’s why I haven’t seen it.

Tommy Metz III:
When I saw the trailer for it, I was like, did I make this movie?

Pete Wright:
It’s going to scare me to death, I’m sure.

Tommy Metz III:
Wow. I’ve been busy.

Chelsea Stardust:
I actually just finished reading the Ring book — Ring — so I’m very excited. And that author actually just died. I’m thinking I might talk about the book a little bit, too.

Tommy Metz III:
I wish you would. Please make some notes about that, because I have not read it.

Pete Wright:
And last year on The Next Reel, we did the Japanese original.

Tommy Metz III:
Ringu.

Pete Wright:
Ringu, yeah. They’re weird, man. There’s a lot of weird stuff going on in Japanese horror. I’m just going to say it’s weird.

Hey — this was awesome. Chelsea, thank you so much. A great fireworks trilogy. Now it’s a spiritual trilogy.

Tommy Metz III:
Thank you, Chelsea.

Pete Wright:
Who knew Blow Out would be included with I Know What You Did Last Summer and Final Destination III? I’m so glad we talked about it. And that’s it for this month. So everybody, go watch your horror movies. On behalf of Kynan Dias and Tommy Metz III and Chelsea Stardust, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you right back here next month, sitting in the dark.