King Sorrow: An Interview with Joe Hill

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Hope I don't screw it up today.

It's an important day.

We got a nice guy, and I can't fuck it up.

Fuck!

Jesus,

stop saying, You're a mess.

Yep, you're a mess.

Well, I mean, I'm excited to read to uh, I read some of this stuff, actually.

I actually, for the very first time, not that we've ever made Eddie read anything before, no, but I have a picture of Eddie reading comic books that is the sweetest thing I've ever seen.

Incredible, it looks like it's just so nice.

He looks like an ex-con

that is rehabilitating himself.

I actually want to finish it.

I know.

That's the crazy thing.

Even like this, there's a girl.

Look at Tomorrow's books.

Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Marcus Parks.

I'm here with Dangerous Minds, Henry Zabrowski.

I'm going to teach you something.

Educating the people.

And we have also the man.

We're going to send a picture of you reading comic books to your old football buddies.

It's Ed Larson.

Ah, go ahead.

They hate me anyway.

I quit for weed.

I think that's the smartest thing you ever did.

Oh, man.

But yeah, no, it was a lot of great.

Lock and key is awesome.

I can't wait to see how it ends.

How many books is this thing?

Six entirely?

Six graphic novels?

Say five or six.

It depends on what collection you get.

But before we get to that.

Do you think I'll get the gist of it in three?

Yeah.

Today's guest is a legendary author whose works include Heart Shape Box, Horns, Nasferatu, the Fireman, and his upcoming novel, King Sorrow.

He's also a fantastic writer of comic books whose works include Basket Full of Heads and a comic that I consider to be one of the best series of the last 20 years, Lock and Key.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Joe Hill.

Woo!

Yeah!

Woo!

Hey, that's very kind.

That's very kind.

I appreciate it.

Now that we've blown you up about your books, what's your body count?

How many, Aria?

let's talk about how many ladies you've run through.

Oh, I assume, no, no, I'm a horror guy.

When you ask me what my body count is, I assume you're asking how many people I've killed in the novels.

Actually, that would be great if you would kind of lay that out.

That'd be awesome.

Do you know?

It's quite a few because

the fourth novel, The Fireman,

is an apocalyptic novel about a pathogen called dragon scale.

It's like a fungal infection, but it's actually sort of beautiful.

You get it on you, and it looks like a black tattoo, sort of, you know,

suggestive and, you know, pretty swirls and so on.

But when you stress out, it starts to smoke.

And if you can't control your anxiety and your anger and your fear, you burst into flames and die of spontaneous combustion.

And so this is all over the world, and whole cities are going up in smoke, and half the country is on fire.

I got to think I killed probably two-thirds of the world's population in that one.

That's huge.

That's great.

Billions.

Congratulations.

That's amazing.

Still, though, still though, not a, I'm not a touch on my dad.

You know,

not just not to, you know, not to get into the elephant in the room, but my dad's a pretty...

He's not, he's a, you know, he's also a horror writer.

Yeah,

a little bit.

Yeah.

Larry King, great interviewer.

He's done a few books.

He's done a few books and shows tremendous promise, you know, and I feel like if he keeps at it, who knows, sky's the limit.

I actually view your father as a musician first.

Wow.

You'd be the only person

that I've ever met who considers him a musician first.

You should have said you consider him a tennis player first.

You know?

Would you write your books?

Like, honestly, like, I heard you talk about another, like, fantasy series that you were working on.

Like, you had an idea that you were kind of like working, like an old interview of yours that you were saying

a process.

Like, do you just start with like a full idea or people?

Like, is it a hook or is it a it's always the hook.

It's always the hook.

You always start with, you know, um,

you always start with something that makes you laugh or you think, um,

oh,

that's weird.

I never thought about it that way.

I mean, I remember when I was like, I was probably 30 or 31 and I was thinking about that phrase, pop art.

And I was thinking, what if you did pop

art?

And so I wrote a story about a juvenile delinquent who becomes friends with a kid named Arthur Roth, who's made of plastic and

filled with air.

And he weighs six ounces.

And if he sat in a sharpened pencil, it would kill him, you know?

And that was like, and that was like some people, I, you know, I wrote that.

I mean, now we're talking 20, over 20 years ago.

And I still, I still kind of wonder if maybe I peaked early.

Maybe that was the best one.

But it was sort of like, it was sort of like, what was that film Ryan Gosling did where his date was an inflatable sex doll?

Oh,

my, it was like my life with doll or something like that.

It was like that, but, but about 80% less pervy.

Which is my failing, but I was a young writer and I didn't know, you know, I still had a lot to learn.

So, i mean if the you know if the that short story was too timid it's on me yeah

well i i think i find it really interesting that you said that the first thing you mentioned is as a horror writer is the the something that makes you laugh uh and

is that like because it because you know we all we know that you know horror and comedy are you know intertwined

yeah very kissing cousins is that something that you kind of keep in mind well you know you know the thing is is both comedy and horror are trying to get part past the part of the brain that thinks and into the reptile brain, you know, where you just react.

So, so if you're, you know, if you're watching the three stooges

and Mo picks up a mallet and bashes Larry over the head, you laugh.

If you're watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Leatherface takes a mallet, you know, to a teenager and bashes her brains in and blood splatters into the camera, you scream.

But crucial.

You're going to say you laugh.

Well, I mean,

right.

If you're me, you laugh.

Convulsions can be funny.

We know this.

Yes.

At times.

You know, you know, the thing is, is it's the same scene.

Yeah.

It's fundamentally the same scene.

And your response to it is

a non-verbal vocalization.

You know, it's that shout of laughter or that shout of horror.

And certainly as a writer, that's what I'm always going for.

And if I can't get one, I'll get the other.

You know, and there's a lot of in the books and the stories and stuff, there's a lot of swerving between shit that I thought was funny, you know, and stuff that I'm hoping will horrify you.

And, you know, you know, I'm not.

I notice that in your work all the time.

I think that that's one of the coolest parts of your work is the moments of levity mixed with true horror.

Like, and it swings back and forth.

I love that you don't really know what's ever going to happen.

You're so good at that, dude.

You're so good at

taking the audience down an individual path.

I wonder now, though, do you think that the audience has so much information that it's almost hard to scare them originally?

Well, it's almost kind of like an arms race, you know, because the audience has seen a lot.

They've seen a lot of the same movies you've seen.

They've read a lot of the same books.

And so the question is always, what am I going to, how am I going to, how am I going to fuck with them this time?

What am I going to do this time that they've never seen before?

Actually, so I wrote a short story years and years ago called The Cape.

And it's about this, it's about this burnout.

He's in in his late 20s he just lost his girlfriend he just lost his job he's got his court case coming up you know it's all really bad and he's living and he's gone back to live in his mother's basement and he's down there it's really cold one night and he's fumbling around for a blanket and he finds the cape he used to war wear as a child when he was pretending to be a superhero only it really makes him fly

And it sounds heartwarming and sort of, you know, uplifting, no pun intended.

But actually, not everyone should have superpowers.

That's really the point of the story.

And this guy goes on to misuse his power.

You know, we already knew he was not a good guy and it gets worse.

And it was adapted into a pretty well-liked comic book by a buddy of mine named Jason Chirimella.

And that first issue just straight adapted the short story and it got nominated for an Eisner Award, which is like the industry's Oscar.

But then people wanted more.

And so Jason began to build it out into a continuing story.

And in the third issue, you know, Eric, who is our anti-hero, you know, the cops have started to get on to him because he's done some,

he's killed some people.

And they're hanging out in front of his house.

And he decides he's got to deal with them.

So he flies to a nearby zoo with a log chain.

And because the bear, the catechism superpower.

So he uses the log chain to pick up a bear.

And he flies over the car and he drops the bear into their convertible.

And then he lands and he's walking down the street and he's talking on his cell phone.

And behind him, you can see the car shaking back and forth and like the guys screaming and bullets going off and, you know, bear claws swiping.

And like, when that issue came out, the online response just exploded.

And ever since then, Jason and I and some other guys who worked on the comic have always had a shorthand, which is that every once in a while, you have to drop the bear.

You know, you have to, that's what people are paying for.

They're paying for the moment you're going to drop the bear and they're going to see some crazy shit they've never seen before.

And it's going to, you know, and that's what they're going to talk about later.

If you can do that, you know, if you can do that, that's, that's like 85% of the job.

And then, I don't know, maybe the other 15% is trying to touch the human heart, but really, who really cares?

I mean, the bear comes first.

And we agree.

Absolutely.

Well, I mean, in the realm of comics, like your career went from short stories to a novel and then straight into lock and key.

Like, you know, it's like boom, boom, boom.

You almost got it.

I was actually a failed, I was, it it was short stories, and then, and then I got into comic books first.

So I was a failed novelist and, and a working comic book writer before I ever sold a novel-length story.

Um, I wrote,

I wrote three novels that I couldn't sell to save my life.

And then I spent three years writing a fourth book, this massive epic fantasy that became an enormous.

international bestseller in my imagination.

But in real life, it was turned down by every editor in new york city it was turned down by every editor in london and then for like a final humiliating kick in the crotch it was turned down by every publisher in canada which is like you know no matter how low you drop there's always further to fall you gotta go to france

right you know um

actually actually it's a joke but i i'm pretty sure that james kane the great noir writer of um the postman always rings twice and stuff like that or maybe it was jim thompson one of those Noir guys actually couldn't get published in America anymore, but the French loved that.

You know, it was really nihilistic and dark and sexy and terrible.

And they loved that.

So he was getting public anyway, you know.

But

I had written some short stories.

A few of them have gotten in best of collections or won prizes.

And on the basis of that, I won the chance to write

a comic book for Marvel about Spider-Man.

And that was my big break, was an 11-page Spider-Man story called Fanboys, which was

about

three

pretty sordid and disreputable comedians who have a podcast, Judre Lake.

And they get their kicks pretending to be superheroes without powers and screwing themselves up.

Actually, it was kind of a riff on jackass.

And so that was what my comic was about.

And Spider-Man is only sort of tangentially in it.

But that was it.

And so I was, and I, I had sold lock and key, although the issues hadn't come out, I sold lock and key to IDW

before

Heartshape Box, my first novel came out.

And I sold it to IDW by telling them the whole thing was going to be six issues long.

And they believed me.

And I was, I was only off by about 30 issues in seven years.

And,

you know,

but I didn't really know anything.

I was kind of clueless.

And so I guess I had this idea I could fit all this story into six issues.

And I remember thinking by issue midway through issue three, I was thinking, whoa, I'm fucked.

I'm not going to get, I'm going to get like 8% of this into the first six issues.

What am I going to do?

You know, and I was ready to grovel to get six more issues if the series was a flaw.

Because I thought, all right, I got a lousy ending, but I can, I can wrap it up in 12 issues if I have to.

But

fortunately, it took off and,

you know, and we had the TV series and we had a TV show and we had a comic book and we had a, you know, a TV show.

And we had, actually, we secretly had three TV shows, which is kind of weird.

But, you know, and it all worked out.

It was the lock and key, they filmed three different pilots across five years before we finally sold our show to Netflix.

Wow.

Show business is a wonderful.

reasonable place.

Yeah, totally.

It all makes sense.

It all makes sense.

You know, you know,

actually, the second pilot, the thing which still amazes me is the second pilot didn't get on TV and it was amazing.

Just no one's ever made any, just incredible.

It was directed by Andy Muschietti right after he directed it chapter one.

And it was just unrelentingly frightening and full of heart and stuff.

And

we did it for Hulu and everyone loved it.

And then Hulu decided not to make it.

And Carlton Cughes, who was the producer, said to, you know, production guy at Hulu,

well, what kind of shows do you want to make?

And the production guy didn't, they didn't, he didn't understand why they weren't going forward either.

He said, I'd make this all over again.

What was happening was one of these giant corporate things where Disney was buying Hulu,

you know, and so they didn't kind of know how to make anything because Disney was kind of like, you know.

We don't know what we are going to do with you.

We haven't decided right.

Exactly.

So we got lost in the corporate shuffle.

Wow.

now you talk about your first three books that you've written four that with including a long fantasy one that never

that never it that never got released is this the well that you could that you reach back into or are you just like it i hate this now

so the new book is called kingsar right and it's and it's it's a doorstop it's my first book in almost 10 years you know and that's a thick ass book i can't wait i can't wait

like well if you if you drop it on your foot, I can't be responsible for both of the homes.

You know, I hope you have health care.

I got married again in 2018, and I knew

I was going to dedicate the book to my wife, and I wanted to impress her.

And you know, the trouble a guy can get into when he wants to impress his best girl.

And so I like, you know, it got bigger and bigger.

I thought it would just be like essentially the first 200 pages.

And then it just, I just thought, well, and what if this happens?

And then what if this happened?

And so I wound up writing almost like four books of material as one single novel.

And it's got, uh,

you know, it's got a dragon fighting F-16s.

It's got, you know, an Indiana Jones style plunge into a troll's trap-filled cave.

We can't wait.

It's got, it's got a drunken brawl on roller skates.

I mean, I packed just about everything I could think of into it.

And also, because it is 900 900 pages long, you know, in a short story, you can be sort of introspective and people don't, because it's only, you know, it's like 7,000, 8,000 words.

You give people 900 pages, you got to mash the pedal to the floor right away and keep it there because, you know, the worst thing you can do to a reader is

make it a really slow burn.

And they get 150 pages in and they lose hope.

because they just think, oh man, there's like 750 pages left to go.

I don't think I could do it.

You know, so what you want them to do is you want the pages to fly so quickly, they're hardly aware of how fast they're moving through the book.

All this, but I haven't forgotten your question.

So I said all this because

the part one of the book is called The Briars.

And The Briars was

the third unpublished novel.

And

the setting is a house, a manor, you know, sort of big estate called the Briars, you know, that's walled off from the rest of its main community that's on the ocean.

And so I thought, I'm just going to, when I was working on the book, I thought, I'm just going to stick the location from the Briars into King Sorrow.

Why not use it?

I always, I always liked it.

Other stuff from other failed novels found its way into King Sorrow.

So I wrote a book.

in between heart shaped box and horns i wrote a disastrous novel called the surrealist glass but it had one really cool idea idea in it which was the glass itself and uh the glass is in King Sorrow.

So I finally found a story for it.

So I kind of feel like, I kind of feel like no work is wasted.

You know, I mean,

I mean, how many podcasts have you guys done at this point?

Thousands.

Thousands, yeah.

Thousands.

And let's face it, most of them sucked, right?

But it didn't matter.

It didn't matter.

This is our best show yet.

This is the number one that we've done.

Eventually, it would all come to fruition in this conversation with me.

You know, and so that's so it wasn't wasted.

It wasn't wasted time.

It probably felt meaningless.

Yes, no, no, no, no, no, yeah, no, of course.

I thought we were probably stewing in existential despair for most of the time.

That's true.

That is actually true.

Yeah,

you know, and

staring into the dishwasher.

It's all together, and your lives have meaning.

Thank you, Mr.

Hill.

Thank you, Mr.

Hill.

I'm glad to.

I'm glad I can, you know.

Well, I use the word disastrous when

describing that novelist.

Oh, no, no.

That's enough.

With novelists, like with something like a novel, like with us, you know, it's we're, you know, things are somewhat disposable.

We come in and out.

We do this every single week.

We do this a couple times a week.

But with like a novel,

It takes so much time, so much effort.

At what point do you realize that a novel is disastrous?

Well, I haven't been in that situation in a while, exactly.

You know, it's been a while since I wrote a real smoke and turd.

You know, when was the last big piece of shit?

You know,

I mean, sometimes I worked on, you know, between

The Fireman, which was my novel in 2016, and King Sorrow.

I did fool around with a novel called Up the Chimney Down

that was sort of like a romantic, it was kind of like a rom-com almost, but sort of like one of the, I don't make that face, okay?

You're allowed.

You're allowed.

It wasn't, it wasn't, I wasn't stepping that far out of my comfort zone.

It was kind of, it had kind of a rom-com quality, but it was also like a Hitchcockian suspense story.

So Hitchcock did a lot of like thrillers that were really scary, but they also had a kind of fizzy romance at the center of them.

Like Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart and

Grace Kelly, I think.

I can't remember.

It was.

I think it was, you know, and

Vertigo and so on and so forth.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's usually, there's, there's usually, you know, a kind of sparkle of romance in those stories, but then they can also be incredibly chilling.

And so I thought I was, I thought I would do something like that.

And in the course of working on it, I discovered I'm not Hitchcock, you know, that I, I, it didn't

technically, it was polished.

I felt like it all sort of worked on a technical level, but it just didn't really feel like me, you know.

Do you think about genre like before you start writing?

Like, because you know, they say in movies, they they say directors they always kind of think about the idea that they need to know their genre, whatever the audience thinks.

They need to know what the genre is.

Well, like, do you think like that or no?

Well, when I was a kid, okay, so like when I was a kid, I used to read Fangoria magazine.

And I don't know if you guys, so you guys know Fango.

We've been in Fango.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

So I'm, you know, I'm, I'm preaching to the faithful.

It was like, you know, when I was like 13, I had friends who were jocks who never missed an issue with Sports Illustrated.

And I had pals who were rockers who always read Rolling Stone cover to cover.

But like, for me, Fango was my life magazine.

You know, like, I read it obsessively.

And you remember, do you remember that Fango used to to have center folds, like Playboy?

But instead of like some girl in soft focus just wearing her bobby socks, like Fango would have like some guy getting a hatchet to the head and his eyeball flying out.

You know, I love those center folds, and I used to stick them up on my wall.

And in an interesting sort of related note, I held on to my virginity for a really surprisingly long period of time.

You know, get on the top of the ball.

You know,

I used to read Fangled.

The thing that used to really piss me off was you'd have some director say, I don't really think of myself as a horror director.

You know,

I'm really, you know, making films about the human condition.

I'd be thinking, it's Sleep Away Camp Massacre 5.

You're not fucking Fellini, dude.

You know, come to grips with your reality.

As far as my own take on genre, you know,

for me, the odd-numbered books are straight down the middle horror novels.

So Heartshape Box, Nosferatu, and King Sorrow are meat and potatoes horror novels.

I love that kind of thing, you know.

I just, you know,

John Carpenter's The Thing,

John Carpenter's The Fog, Nightmare in Elm Street.

My favorite film is Jaws.

You know, I grew up.

a Stephen King fan like so many children of the 80s, you know.

My favorite TV show was the X-Files.

You know, there's really no hiding the things that I care about.

And so I do love to write straight horror.

But I also like to play, you know, I like to goof off a little bit.

And so the even-numbered novels are sort of like horror adjacent or like one step, one step to the left or right into a kind of different genre.

So Horns, the second novel was a horror, but it was also kind of a satire and also kind of a romance.

The fourth novel is an apocalyptic science fiction story.

So it's like it's near future.

And there's like, there's like a whole kind of medical explanation for what's going on.

And even sort of like, so there's some biology in there.

And it kind of felt critin-y.

It has like a little bit of that into it.

Yeah.

I was totally thinking of the kind of stuff that Crichton did, you know?

And, you know, the next book,

which maybe we'll talk about, but after King Sorrow, the next book out next year is a ghost story, but it's also a historical novel set in 1776 during the Siege of Boston and at the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

That sounds great.

Oh, thanks.

Thanks.

Well, we're nerds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Context is our favorite word.

We love historical.

We love context.

We're very, we love historical context.

You know, you know, so, so I, I had an idea for a story set in the Revolutionary War, a supernatural horror story.

And, and I had this idea seven years ago, and that's when I started researching it.

And for the book, I've also hired a research assistant who's like studying for his PhD in American history.

And so it's like, I'm a big boy writer now, you know, like I have like my own research assistant and stuff.

And so I've taken the history pretty seriously.

I was, I was saying the odd-numbered novels, the straight horror novels, the even-numbered novels are kind of playing a little bit with genre.

And actually, in some ways, Hunger is my most horror, horror novel.

The last 120 pages play like, you know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a Tricorn hat.

Yeah.

It's really, it's, it's really, you know, like a slasher movie.

It's really brutal.

And I've never really written anything that went there.

So that's, that's fun.

2026.

It's not too early to begin bugging your bookseller to make sure they stock up on it, kid.

No, you need to start going every time you're in Uber, just pre-order it.

Take their phone, pre-order it, just grab it from the guy and just do that.

That's the way to do it.

Yeah, yeah.

Then give them his phone back.

Have you ever been timing for the 250th anniversary of our country?

It is.

So I started working on, I started researching it seven years ago.

I want to say I started writing it three years ago.

There was some urgency to finish because I'm not totally

closed off to the marketing side of things.

And I thought, you know, if you're going to sell a book that has a musket on the cover, it would be nice to have it.

at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

And at one time, we were aiming for July, but I actually think the book, you know, I think the book is going to be in October 2026

because

people like to buy scary stories around Halloween.

They do.

Do you have any interest in creating a video game or writing a video game?

You know,

so

I've been asked a couple of times.

I bet.

And I timidly avoided it because I thought this could turn out to be a huge time suck.

And video games take a lot longer to make than novels.

And sometimes they don't even, and sometimes they don't even get released.

And I thought, I just, you know,

I'm very conscious with every passing year, I get more and more conscious of my limitations, how short my day is, how little I can do in a week, and how much less runway I have ahead of me to do the projects I want to do.

And so, you know, if you want to know why I've never worked on a video game, fear, you know, an awareness of my own mortality is what's kept me out of, you know, and I don't really, I mostly stop playing them about

the last game I really fell into hard was Beatles Rock Band.

You know,

I killed.

I absolutely killed.

You know, oh, yeah, I was very good at Maxwell Silver Hammer.

I just did the bang, bing.

Have you guys ever talked to or is Ed Brubaker on your radar, the crime?

Oh, I love Ed Ed Brubaker.

I'm a massive Ed.

I'm the comic book nerd here amongst us.

I'm a massive Ed Brubaker fan.

So, Ed Brubaker did Gotham Central, which I think wasn't there a TV show that basically spun off his work for Gotham Central.

I kind of had a show called Gotham or something that was like.

It was called Gotham.

It wasn't as good as Gotham Central.

I mean, Gotham Central is incredible.

Were you talking about the Gotham show, the Batman Muppet Babies?

Is that what that is?

Yeah, it's Batman Muppet Babies.

Okay, yeah, because Gotham, yeah, because Gotham said, yeah, Gotham Central is the procedural.

yeah gotham is batman muppet babies yeah you know ed rubaker is great but i have to say and he's he's a stud he's a great writer he's done terrific work he's got a tv show uh based on his comic criminal coming out in amazon next year and i think he's terrific but but but I just absolutely stomped his ass in rock band.

We were out in Portland, Oregon, and we said hello.

And Rothband was sitting in the corner and he's like, we should pick up the key tars and go for it.

And I'm like, dude, you don't want to do it.

Let's just

let's just not i've got you know i've got uh an 11 year old a 13 year old and a 15 year old at home and all we do is play rock band i'll destroy you and you know and ed brew baker you know he had to learn the hard way

you know if you want to know why his fiction is so bitter there's so much

permeate permeated with this sense of defeat

me

me he took revenge actually he took revenge he Sean Phillips, the artist who works with him on all his big projects, drew me into one of the comics, made me a huge prick, and then shot me in the head.

Which is fine.

I'm a good boy.

I could take it.

We know

when it was time to play Mississippi Queen on rock band, we know who was still standing at the end of the song and who wasn't.

Well, but sticking with comics for a bit.

I absolutely adored Rain, the adaptation.

Thank you.

And the story and the adaptation that that zoe thoroughgreg did like it was just an incredibly beautiful book like it was just so fucking beautiful it really was and she's a huge star i think she got nominated you know like for like five eisners in a single year or something she's absolutely extraordinary but fortunately she's still moderately young and naive unaware of her own talent she was willing to work for us you know and so like she wasn't i don't think she knew yet what a big deal she was.

And so she was like, oh, yeah, that would be great.

I'll work on rain without realizing that like, you know, like she was leaving us behind in the dust and stuff like that.

And so, yeah.

Yeah.

So we're buying Facebook stock at the beginning.

We got in early before it was like, you know, too expensive to buy.

Yeah.

So I guess, so when your work is adapted like that, like how.

How involved are you with the, because your work's been adapted a number of times at this point?

Yeah.

I mean, and if it was really great, I was closely adapted and did most of it.

But if it's somehow, you know, I have to say, I was really removed from the whole project.

Have you ever watched something of yours, though?

Like, honestly, I know, like, you don't name one.

Have you ever watched one of them?

You're like, oh, well, that's not really what I thought they were going to do.

You know, all bullshit aside,

I've been super lucky.

My, the, the, the, you know, there, every single one of the films or TV shows that's been adapted of my stuff had the virtues of not sucking.

You know, it was all really good.

Yeah, Black Phone ruled.

Blackphone

is awesome.

I mean,

Black Phone is the best of them.

You know,

and we've got the sequels coming out this October.

And the script is great.

I haven't seen the film yet, but the script is great.

And did you help expand that at all?

Like for Black Phone, or do they take it and run it?

So, first of all, I wrote the short story around the same time I wrote Pop Art and

The Cape.

So I think if this podcast has revealed anything, it's that I did all my best work 23 years ago, 23 years ago, and I've just been riding the fumes ever since.

Same.

Same.

I know exactly right now.

No, I, you know, I wrote this story called The Black Phone

23 years ago and got paid 35 bucks for it.

The black phone at the time almost became a novel.

I had ideas for it.

I had scenes.

I actually wound up writing something like 50 or 60 pages of material.

But in the end, I didn't have the nerve to write a novel because I'd been turned down too many times.

Someone just blew by with their trans am or something like that.

No muffler, glass pack, and the muffler.

Hey, that guy's got a huge dick.

We should be super envious of him.

No, so

anyway,

you know, I had like 60 pages of material, but I lacked nerve.

And, you know, because I had so many books turned down, I just thought this one will just get turned down too.

But if I can keep it 30 pages long, I know I can, I know a magazine where they'll buy it, you know, and so

Scott Derrickson and C.

Robert Cargill, who were the co-writers of the film and Scott directed it.

Amazing directory.

He did.

Doctor Strange and Sinister, which has been scientifically proven to be the scariest film ever made.

You know, it's the,

I love the home movies and sinisters.

That's like my favorite.

It's all.

Yeah, the snuff films are amazing.

And I mean, if you folks listening at home, if you have, if you doubt me, Google it.

Google, Google, and find out what is the scientifically proven scariest film ever made.

It's sinister.

They recheck every year, and every year it's sinister.

Just so you know, we're going to clip out where you said the snuff films are amazing.

Yeah, I definitely think that's in the

promo for this episode.

You

These films are awesome.

No,

you know, so they made this great picture and they expanded on the material and are really interested.

Everything in the short story is in the film, but that's only like one third of the film.

And so the film also like a third of the film is.

you know, an autobiographical reflection on Scott Derrickson's own life growing up in dirty North Denver in the 1970s.

And then C.

Robert Cargill is a terrific, you genre writer and thriller writer.

And he engineered this whole escape room tactic that was sort of crucial to making the film work.

So everyone added something that was, you know, that's what you hope for is that everyone will click and there'll be this collaborative success.

Sometimes a team of three guys will come together and make something wonderful.

You guys haven't experienced that yet, but there's still hope.

One day.

One day.

Yeah.

One day.

We had a younger group that's watching.

There's training.

We have a couple of Zoomers that are going to fill in soon yeah after my first heart attack

when i watched the film i thought the first thing is when i saw the film the first time and i saw the mask that ethan hawks wears i thought oh there's going to be like nine of these pictures because the mask is like jason's hockey mask or Freddie's glove.

It's instantly iconic.

It's the kind of thing that chases you into your nightmares.

And I just thought people are going to want more of this guy.

You know, they're going to want to see this guy again in more stories.

So then the question is, are there any stories worth telling?

Or do you just sort of have to go full leprechaun and send the grabber to space, you know, for like the second movie, the grabber and space, black phone in space, you know?

Well, you got to get him in the hood.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then you got to get him to space.

And then Vegas probably.

Yeah, Vegas first.

Yeah.

So.

So when I watched the first film, the other thing is there was this one little scene.

And I thought, oh, there's a trapdoor in that scene into the whole second movie.

I wonder if Scott and Cargill know that they just put in this little piece, this one little piece, and you've got like your whole second movie right there.

And so I worked up a pitch for him and I said, I think this is what the second movie should be about.

Because Scott and Cargill weren't sure they wanted to do another one.

They were really happy with the first one.

They saw the pitch, they loved it.

And then it was the same kind of thing where Scott was able to bring in some stuff from his childhood.

And Cargill was able to think, like, all right, how are we going to engineer this for maximum peril?

You know, and that's where we got to the second film.

And hopefully, people will dig it, you know.

I can't wait.

Black Phone 2 looks incredible.

If it bombs, I'd like to remind people that

I really contributed next to nothing.

You disavowed.

Yes, mostly them.

Yeah, you wanted to call it Grayphone.

Right.

Can I ask just straight up?

This takes King Sorrow takes place in Maine.

Obviously, you guys have long roots in Maine, you and your family.

What's so scary about Maine?

Ever been there?

No.

No.

Yeah, we have.

Well, wait, we were in and out.

We did a show in Portland once.

We were in and out.

My hotel room was frighteningly cold.

What's so frightening about Maine?

So, so at least in the case of my dad and in my own case, you know, it's not that Maine is frightening.

It's that it's what we know.

I've lived in New England my whole life and I know how the people talk.

I know what it's like to work there.

I know what the winters are like, you know,

I know what it's like to raise children there.

And, you know, if you're going to write about something like,

you know, a road vampire or a man slowly turning into a devil or some friends pulling a dragon through into our world,

that requires, you're asking your readers for a big suspension of disbelief.

You know, you're asking them to go along with something pretty crazy.

So what you do is, you know, by what I do by anchoring it in New England is, you know, I convince you the world is real with concrete details about the place and the people.

And if you believe me about the place and the people, you might also believe me about the dragon, you know, so it's sort of like, it's almost like evidence in a case.

Every book is like you're arguing a case in front of the jury.

And so you begin by giving them unquestionable evidence, but then, you know, then you bring in the rest of the story, which,

you know, might be less evidence-based.

I don't know.

Maybe that's not such a good analogy.

No, it's fine.

It's how the Ditty trial went down.

So yeah, it makes sense.

So it makes sense.

Wow.

That is actually a great piece of advice.

So I think it's an amazing piece of advice.

Because I just came back from James Gunn Superman, and the first thing in my head is that idea of James Gunn understands that this is a world filled with superheroes and that's not crazy, that it's just a point blank, that is the beginning of the world and that you if there's something about the the gravitas of it of or like literally just being like a matter of fact these are the details of this world and you but you buy it and then you're into it

uh i'm i'm i'm pretty stoked to see superman myself but i don't get into the movies all that much um you know you're yeah you're an indoor you're an indoor cat Well, pretty much.

I mean, the movies are indoors.

I had kids when I was a kid myself.

So I got three 20-somethings, but I remarried in 2018.

I have three sons.

And then when I remarried in 2018, I said to my wife, you know,

not too old yet.

I could do one more kid.

I want us to have everything we could have in a family.

You know, I don't want to feel like, you know,

it's all on the table.

So I could have one more kid.

Maybe I'll have a girl and find out what that's like.

Well, we had twins and it was two more boys.

Wow.

So I got five boys.

Dude, that's in the batter, man.

That's that's a batter thing.

That's you.

Yeah.

It might be.

I don't know.

There is some, I don't know.

There is, I don't know.

There is, I do want to see some biology there or something.

But something's got a basketball team, but they're all probably nerds.

I'm afraid so.

I mean, I said at the beginning, you probably think that, you know, my dad's great talent is tennis.

You know,

the New Yorker did a profile on him years and years ago.

And at one point

during the profile, because I spent a day with my dad, my dad went out and played tennis with my younger brother.

And the profile writer said, one of them was terrible at tennis.

The other was worse.

Yeah.

He's like, fuck you.

Whatever.

What else am I going to do?

He's reporting it.

You know, yeah, we're not the most.

athletic folk you've ever met.

Can I, I don't want to ask too many questions about your dad, but there's one question I can't leave here without asking you, sir.

Okay.

Your father made...

No, of course.

Yep.

Yes.

Your father's made many controversial statements over the years, but one rings the true and one that just kind of keeps bouncing around in my head.

And I've been scared to even think about this.

And I'm sorry to even bring this up.

Mambo number five.

Stephen King mentioned that his wife threatened to leave him because of his love of the song Mambo Number Five.

Yeah.

Were you affected by this as well?

I was.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that is real.

So the Mambo number five scenario is real.

Now he is not real.

Somebody he played it a thousand times.

Okay.

And it was it.

Is it just about the lore?

Or is it just imagining the ladies?

I have scars.

I have scars all over my body because I leapt through a window naked.

I just ran from the cellar and threw it through the window because I had to get away.

I couldn't take another minute with this song.

The thing is, is I get that.

I understand that completely.

Sometimes when you're working on a story, you get a playlist.

And then the playlist always gets you right in the right spot.

You start hearing those songs again.

But with a short story, you know, if you're working on a short story, a lot of times it's not a playlist.

It's just three songs or two songs or something.

It's one song, you know, and you find yourself, you know, you sit down to write, you find yourself hitting that song again.

You You get a little, things start to slow down, you play the song again.

You know, it's weird, but it's sort of like, you know, what are the, you know, all the internet scams are like.

this one weird trick will make you productive you know this one weird trick will sort of make you productive if you can sync the your imaginary output to one particular set of songs then in a pavilovian way every time you play the tune the story is there so i presume he was working on something and that song was the theme song and so he had to play it because unfortunately the first thing that comes to my mind is, of course, Mambo number 666.

But

I'm not a writer, Joe.

Like, I don't write like you write.

I don't do that.

That's not what I do.

Apparently, you're not a comedian either.

No, I'm garbage.

The only question that I have about...

I was going to ask you,

who are your, each of you, who are your comic inspirations?

Who did you look up to?

Chris Farley and Bill Cosby, unfortunately.

Yeah.

back in the day it was a big deal back in the day it was a big deal in our house i'm a rodney danger field boy i thought kevin spacey was so funny favorite actor woody allen is a good friend uh it's really you know i'll tell you something i'll tell you something about i tell you something about my dad

my dad grew up in a single-parent household was raised by his mom his dad went out to get the milk never came back when my dad was two years old you know and

after all the stuff came up with cosby and cosby went to jail i asked my dad how he felt about it and he said i feel rotten i love the cosby show i i watched it to learn how to be a dad i i thought that's i thought that's i didn't know how to do it i had no idea and so i trusted that man to teach me all the skills that I never got when I was growing up.

And he's like,

I don't know if I'll ever sort out my feelings about it.

And I was kind of, I was kind of,

you know, stunned by that.

I kind of felt so, yeah, I know, right?

I just felt so no.

My parents used to watch Bill Cosby himself when they were pregnant, when my mom was pregnant with me.

It was the only thing.

And it was like, and then when I got out, when I emerged,

it was just the same thing.

As a child, they would put it on.

As a toddler, they'd put it on.

I'd laugh at just the sounds of it.

So it's like, and then I started in elementary school.

Your mom in the delivery ward.

And the Cosby show is like, oh, right there.

Oh, yeah.

When I was unemployed,

oh, yeah, very much unemployed.

It was the third season.

Oh, yeah.

I saw his secret.

Felicia Rashad, I met.

She was lovely.

Oh, nice.

Well, the only question that I have about your father, or I guess it's not even necessarily about your father, it's more about your childhood.

Were you around when the Ramones came to write Pet Cemetery?

No.

No, but my dad did do

a movie called Maximum Overdrive

in the early 1980s.

And he wanted AC DC to do the soundtrack.

And they came to the house.

And, you know, I was about, I want to say

nine, 10 or something.

And the whole crew,

Brian Johnson and Angus and Malcolm, they were all in my dad's study.

And my mom came in

and she had like a, you know, midriff-bearing shirt and was kind of wearing like a tight pair of Wranglers.

And she brought them a tray of drinks and walked out.

And Brian Johnson's eyes followed her.

And after she walked out, he went,

a ginger.

So, so anyway, anyway,

I got into therapy in 2011.

I still occasionally get routine checkups with my therapist because you don't really come back from something like that.

No, no, no.

Knowing that the man who wrote a whole lot of rosies looking at your mother.

I don't know if he did the tongue thing like Hannibal Lecter, but I kind of remember it a little bit.

You know, five of these.

Well, this is, this is amazing, Mr.

Hilt.

Thank you so much for being here with us, man.

Thank you.

This is a great thing.

You guys were great to have me on.

And, you know, I wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors.

You know, it's all downhill from here, but,

you know, carry on in the best possible spirits.

We'll try.

I hope that whatever you shit up next is one of the best things possible.

Guys, rock on.

Thanks a lot.

Have fun.

Thank you so much, man.

It was a good time.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you so much.

That was great that was so much fun man it's just nice to meet guys that you really look up to like i i hope the audience cannot kind of even understand like he dropped some great tips incredible tips yeah he really was like that's that's somebody especially like because him and his dad are workhorse artists yeah and they show up every day and they view it like a craft and they have an exact brain about what they want to do that's so inspiring funny thing is we have not said once who his father stephen king yes Stephen King.

We didn't say once who his father was.

I didn't want to do the thing.

No, I didn't want to do the thing, but I'm going to guess if there's any listeners out there the whole time that have been wondering, like, who's the father?

Is it Stephen King?

I wouldn't have known unless we told someone.

Thank you.

We should have.

The one question I forgot to ask is, who's hairier?

Ah, that's right.

Yeah.

What are you going to do?

Well, he gave us his email address.

We'll send him an email.

Yeah, send him an email, Rob.

Thank you so much.

Well, that was a lot of fun, man.

But, you know, now I got to say, I'm over the hill.

Fuck you.

That's fucking good.

I'm glad he wasn't on.

I'm glad he wasn't on.

We got to go.

Patreon.com/slash last podcast on the left.

If you want to see Joe Hill making the tongue noise, like making the actual tongue movement.

He didn't put his fingers up, unfortunately, but it still was good.

It's still pretty good.

You can go watch video episodes of all of our podcasts there,

as well as watch last stream on the left every Tuesday at 6 p.m.

PST.

You can also interact with us live on the chat as we do the stream.

And don't forget to come see us on tour.

We're all over the United States in the coming months.

So go to LastPodcastonTheleft.com to see if we are coming to a city near you.

We cannot wait to be inside of your family.

Portland, Milwaukee, all sorts of shit.

Inside your family, inside your home, without your permission.

I'm pregnant with excitement.

Pregnant with its pursing against my pursing against the bottom of my ears.

Hail Saint Nevermore.

Oh, hell game.

Hell, Joe, hello.

Seriously.

Yeah.

When

you sacrificed the borrow poro ramunas monetas, por eso soy una fan del dulce sabor caramello, del camo frape de muctanos azo lutre eso 10 new entamaño mediano.

Y para nos a crificar variadad por ahoro, tamiem podo pediridun moca frape mediano, al zismo porécio, a iced coffee median por 2001.

y noso lo ordinero tambiientiemfo porque pido pora delantado en el lab.

Vara ta ta ta.

Preso si participación pueden vari no puede convinarce con iguno troferdo cambo míó.

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