SYSK’s Summer Movie Playlist: Josh and Chuck's List of Horror Movies that Changed the Genre

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Hi there, friends.

Welcome back to the playlist.

This episode is our list of horror movies that changed the genre.

It's from back in 2017, and it's as timely today as it was back then.

Horror is probably my favorite genre of all films, and I hope you guys like it too, even if you're not into horror movies.

And even if you're not into horror movies, I hope you guys will like this episode too.

It's just that interesting.

interesting.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark.

Charles W.

Chuck Bryant.

Howdy.

His middle name's Wayne.

His middle name's Malcolm.

There we have him.

I always forget about that, Malcolm.

Yeah, Wayne.

Named after Wayne Coyne, right?

Uh, no, John Wayne.

And you were named after Malcolm in the Middle.

That's right.

Frankie Munis

is my namesake.

I hope he's okay.

Early Brian Cranston, too.

I used to love that show.

Oh, it's a great show.

I watched it

within the last couple months.

I was cleaning the house and put it on Netflix, and still great.

Yeah.

Yeah, it really is a good show.

So you clean your house, you put on your VR goggles and just cue up Malcolm in the middle.

Yeah.

No, I just walk around and bump into things.

Right, exactly.

But I put on like a huge feather duster suit.

Yeah, so you're just cleaning and bumping into things.

That's right.

That's how I do it.

Wow.

Yeah.

It works kind of well.

Someone's going to take that idea.

Yeah.

Like the Sharknado.

Yeah, but they should sell that suit with

purple drink.

I think you just get one spot on the floor really, really plain.

What are you going to title this one, by the way?

Because this was your pick and we title our own shows, episodes.

Some horror films that change the genre.

All right.

And you should add this, aka.

How could you guys forget blank?

Yeah.

Yeah, we should say, like, this, first of all, this is a Grabster article.

So it's Grabster's list.

Sure.

And he knows what he's talking about.

If you look at some of the entries, some don't even have source tags.

Whoa, he's just like, I just know he should just trust it.

Grabster, but we even took his list and carved some out and put some in.

Sure, so this is how about this: this is Josh and Chuck's idea of some horror films that change the genre, featuring the mind of the Grabster.

Yes, in other words, it is not a complete list of every horror film that changed the genre.

Yes.

Because I would argue that,

well, and actually, I see Grabster put Texas Chainsaw Massacre in there.

He said that if this were a top 15 list, that would be in there.

So would Alien.

Yeah, he has that.

Alien, Ringu, and the U.S.

Remake Ring.

And I would lobby for...

Well, Psycho didn't make it onto his list, but we're going to put that in.

And there was one more.

Oh, even though I didn't really think it was that great, the movie Saw, I I think, kind of changed horror films.

And that's what this list is.

Not best horror films, but things that kind of changed the game.

Yeah.

It seems like Saw kind of kicked off that

torture porn.

Yeah, didn't it?

I can't remember if it was that or hostile.

One of the two.

It was definitely one of the two.

For a subgenre.

Well, it's pretty accurate, actually.

It is, but most of these are movies that either

were the first of its kind and maybe did start a sub-genre, or movies that were so popular that they just, you know, kind of rewrote how people view horror movies.

Some of them because of marketing, some because they were really good movies, some because of box office.

But all of these, I don't think anyone could argue did not change the genre.

How about that?

Sure.

Yeah, I think that's well put, dude.

And before we get started, speaking of horror, I want to give a plug to

my friend Toby's movie that's coming out.

He's a producer on a movie coming out called The Ghost Story.

Yeah, Toby,

when we met Toby, well, you knew Toby before me, of course, because he's your friend.

And I know him through Yumi, so really Yumi's friend.

But he was small time doing short films and stuff.

And since that time, and this has been within the last, like, since we've been doing this podcast, he's now big time.

Yeah, they did Pete's Dragon, yeah.

Um, and then, yeah, they have this, they did Ain't Them Bodies Saints, which I think the one that they kind of broke out with, which I love that movie.

And then this one, um, it definitely kind of falls into that same look and mood and feel.

It's called a ghost story, and I think it comes out in July.

And I think it's labeled a drama rather than horror, or even supernatural or thriller.

Um,

but the reason I tie it into horror is because A24 is releasing it, and A24 is killing it with horror movies lately.

Yeah, that's a good

outfit.

They did The Witch.

They did The Black Coat's Daughter.

Have you seen that?

No.

It's on Amazon Prime.

It's on Amazon Prime right now.

No, nodded and gave a thumbs up.

Dude, it's one of the best horror movies I've seen in a while.

I think The Witch is probably my favorite right now.

Black Coat's Daughter is a close second.

And then last night, I saw it comes at night in the theater

and it comes at night

actually upset my stomach the ending did it was it was that rough

yeah i think we're we've we're at a place with horror movies that we haven't been in a long time like a really genuine good spot yeah like the whole torture porn sort of era is over and the found footage thing is so played.

Oh man.

But I think we we'd like with movies like The Witch, I think we've really, like, there are some really creative

It Follows.

Did you see that one?

Yeah.

Like, some just really creative ways of bringing scares that I haven't seen before.

Get Out.

That was amazing.

Did you see Get Out?

Man, I still haven't seen it.

You're going to love it.

I'm envious of you.

It's really, it's a great movie, Chuck.

You're going to love it.

Well, I don't get to the movies much anymore, and the only time I could was a couple of weeks ago, and I elected to see Wonder Woman.

Yeah.

Not a bad choice.

So a long way of saying congratulations to Toby and his new film.

Well, that's funny.

We also need to congratulate Toby, too, because Toby just got married.

Toby and Anel are now married.

So, congratulations to them as well.

So, is this a new movie with his directing partner, David Lowry?

Yeah, and Rooney Mara.

Man, they got a good thing going.

Yeah, they definitely do.

So, it's going to be good.

I'm looking forward to it.

Awesome.

Okay, so let's get started.

Thanks for indulging that.

Thank you, everybody.

So

the first movie on our list is what's widely considered the first horror movie.

And it's a 1920 movie out of Germany that basically was the first film that undertook what's the artistic movement known as German Expressionism.

Yeah.

It's called The Cabinet of Dr.

Caligari.

Yeah, I mean, some say, like you said, it was the first horror movie.

Some say it was the first cult film.

It,

well,

just you may not be able to get through the whole thing if you're not into silent movies, but you should queue up a little bit of it and watch a little bit of it because it's hugely impactful

and still

to this day, like very disconcerting to look at because of it, how

ominous and weird it looked.

Yeah.

Just physically looked.

Yeah, like the sets that they built are obviously um constructed manufactured they were not in any way shape or form going for realism they were going for surrealism for sure yeah and so like the staircases are at crazy weird curves and angles and um like everything from the house the house's rooftops to the blades of grass are super pointy and sharp and and the shadows that they employed were just perfect you've never seen a better use of shadows than this they didn't get in the way they just created this this mood.

And it was the first movie to really kind of do that, to just take to use the camera for something other than capturing realism.

And

for that reason, it's considered the first horror movie because that's such a standard part of horror, whether large, like in large part, like in a Tim Burton movie, or in small part, you know, where

you're using small

spaces to create claustrophobia.

The idea of using the set to mess with the viewer's mind, I think, is born in Dr.

Caligari's cabinet.

Yeah, it's almost like they took a child and gave them construction paper and said, cut out scary things.

Right.

And then like that movie, The Babadook, I think the actual book within The Babaduke was hugely inspired by this.

The actual movie itself, the plot is about a sideshow operator, a hypnotist who has a patient that he around to these sideshows with a sleep disorder.

Supposedly he's been asleep his entire life, and he uses this patient to commit murder.

Right.

He's like a sleepwalker.

Yeah.

Somnambulist.

So that in itself is a pretty frightening plot.

And to think about that being cooked up in 1920 when there weren't really not such things that you think of as horror movies is pretty impressive.

And then some of the deeper critiques I've seen of it was like the

explanation for why the filmmakers chose like these weird odd angles to kind of depict insanity or that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Was rooted in World War I.

The horrors of World War I had just been seen and revealed and recently taken place, and it upended Europe in general and especially Germany as well.

And the idea is that they might not have had this idea.

They might not have had this desire, this drive to create this weird set and, in fact, this weird movie had World War I not happened.

Yeah, there's this writer, Jeff Saparito, who kind of put it this way about German Expressionism, because I wasn't exactly sure how to define it.

But you're kind of right on the money.

He said, Germany was largely isolated from the rest of the world following World War I, so expressionism therefore became confined to the country.

Refers to a number of creative movements from World War I through the 1920s.

Expressionist works examine the current and future state of the culture through bold and artistic creations of creativity and often explore topics of madness, portrayal, and other intellectual concepts.

And nothing encapsulates these ideas more than the cabinet of Dr.

Caligotti.

That's basically what I said.

Yeah.

Did you read that or were you just that?

I don't know if I read that one or not.

It sounded kind of familiar.

Yeah.

No, just say you came up with it.

So

the idea of the set just creating like a creepy tone and texture to everything.

That was Dr.

Caligari.

That's how it changed the genre.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tim Burton, say thank you.

Yeah.

Have you seen Coraline?

No, but I know it.

They did that to very good effect.

You know, I think Hodgman does a voice in that, doesn't he?

He does.

He does The Dad.

He did a spectacular job because you actually forget it's Hodgman while you're watching it.

That's impossible.

All right, Chuck, moving on.

That was 1920.

We're going to fast forward all the way to what, 1960?

1963, if you're talking about Bloodfeast.

Well, I wasn't, but let's.

Simon Abrams of RogerEbert.com says this.

Bloodfeast is a terrible film and a historically important one, too.

Yep.

And I think that's sort of the deal with Bloodfeast.

It is not good by any accounts.

Did you watch any of it?

Yeah, sure.

It's not good.

No, it's not good.

It's terrible.

It was written basis on a 14-page outline.

Didn't even have a script.

It's got the same

cloying technicolor of like an early Hawaii 5-0 episode.

Yeah, for sure.

Directed by Herschel Gordon Lewis and producer David F.

Friedman.

And basically, the idea was this.

These guys did not see films as art.

They saw them as a business and thought you were foolish if you thought it was anything else.

So they sat around, they brainstormed movies that they thought no one else would make.

Yeah, because they started out making like porkies-esque type movies.

Yeah.

And they were doing fine with that, but apparently they were successful enough with it that they started to be imitators and the market was crowded.

So they said, where can we go make movies that no one else is going to make?

Yeah, because we want to shock people, essentially.

So a couple of ideas they had that did not make the list was Conman Evangelist and Nazi torture,

which

were later made.

Exactly.

And they finally said, you know what, no one's really done yet is hardcore gore.

Yep.

Like everyone always cuts away when the knife comes.

And you're like, what if we showed the grossest, goriest stuff imaginable on screen?

Yeah.

And even still, they didn't show.

So like one of the first murder, a woman stabbed through the eye, and then the murderer hacks her legs off with a machete.

And they didn't show the knife penetrate the eye, they didn't show the machete making contact with the skin.

But what they did in Bloodfeast, and what made Bloodfeast the first of its kind was they would show

what came after that.

They would show the brains on the ground.

They would show the entrails like on the knife.

They would show the leg being, you know, that had been dismembered being put into a bag and like the wound that was left by it.

Like that, this was

no one had ever done anything like that on film before.

No, and it paid off.

They, um,

depending on who you ask, the, the budget was

anywhere from like 20 to 30 grand, and it made between 7 and 30 million dollars, like I said, depending on where you get your info.

But by all accounts, it was a huge financial success

compared to what they paid to make it.

Yeah, and they shot it in, I think it was six days or something down in Miami.

Yeah.

Based on a 14-page outline.

There wasn't even a script.

It was an outline.

Basically, it was like, murderer goes and kills this girl.

Yeah.

Next girl.

Murderer comes in, kills girl, cuts off leg, that kind of thing, right?

Yeah.

I mean, if it matters, the movie's about a serial killer caterer.

Yeah, that's it.

There's your plot right there.

Yep.

But the, the, it was just such a revolutionary movie that the censors at the time, there wasn't such a thing as the MPAA, hadn't been formed yet.

And there was basically no one except for local censors overseeing movies.

Yeah.

So, you know, you you could be playing in one town

to all audiences, and then the next town over, it could be banned.

But the censors had never seen anything like it, and they didn't know what to do with it.

So

it was hugely successful commercially, too.

Yeah, and another big impact it had was it inspired a generation of special effects, but basically

let's be honest, young boys who were doing this on their own Super 8 films.

Right.

And said, wait,

I can get a job doing this?

Yep.

So

including Tom Savini, I think, was inspired by it, wasn't he?

Or was he inspired by...

Yeah, I think he was inspired by Bloodfeast.

Oh, wow.

And then we should also give a mention to the Grand Guignal.

Is that how you think it's pronounced?

Sure.

Grand Guignal?

Sure.

It was a theater in Paris, I believe, from the late 19th century on to, I think, 1962.

So the year before Bloodfeast came out, it had closed up.

But it used to do this stuff on stage.

It was like a gore fest.

And there was lots of like blood and sex and like depraved themes in the plays that were put on at this theater.

People loved it.

They were crazy for it.

And this was kind of like the Grand Guignol tradition put onto film for the first time.

And hooray for that.

You want to take a break?

Yeah, let's do it.

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And they're saying like, okay, pull this,

pull that, turn this.

It's just doing my eyes closed.

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All right, Charles, we're back.

So 1960 or 1969?

I've got 1968 in front of my face.

Okay.

And that could be no other movie than Night of the Living Dead, classic George Romero film.

Romero was a TV director, making TV commercials, commercial director, rather.

He was also making short films for Mr.

Rogers' neighborhood at the time.

Yeah.

And he was young.

Yeah.

I don't know how old he was, but he was a pretty young guy still.

I think he was 16.

I think when he made shot Night in the Living Dead, he was like 26 or 27.

Wow.

So, yeah, by any standard, that's still pretty young, unless you're 23.

So

he and his buddies were like, let's make a horror movie, but let's not make a stupid horror movie.

Let's make one with an actual plot that explores deep themes to

like a good movie.

Let's, let's make the first good horror movie.

Well, yeah, so and we'll delve into that a little more, but that was definitely a different thing at the time.

And the other different thing was that all the horror movies up to that point, they were called the Universal Monsters from Universal Studios, you know, all the kind of the classic Frankenstein and Dracula and Creature from the Black Lagoon and the werewolf.

And

that was where that was mainstream horror.

And George Romero comes along and says,

how about zombies?

And everyone said, what in the world's a zombie?

And he said, well, let me define that for every future generation of movie and TV goers and lovers.

Yeah, and there had been zombie movies before, but they had been things like Dr.

Caligari's cabinet, somebody who was under the control of something, someone else or something like that.

There was a hypnotist.

This was like the first time what we think of as zombies were ever ever introduced, like flesh-eating ghouls who were dead and had come back to life.

Yeah.

Just what you think of as a zombie.

This guy started that genre, like you said.

Yeah, they shot it outside in Pittsburgh on about $115,000 budget.

Not bad.

Ended up grossing $12 million domestic.

Not bad.

And I think close to $20 million worldwide.

And

was eventually selected by the Library of Congress Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry.

It's a good movie.

It's a very good movie.

He shot it in black and white to save on cost, even though color was the standard by that point.

And black and white is also a little more forgiving for rudimentary special effects.

And one of the revolutionary things he did was

cast a black actor as the lead.

for no other reason than, hey, this guy, Dwayne Jones, is really good.

Exactly right.

Like, he didn't go back and go, oh, well, you know, our hero is black, so we need to make the whole thing a meditation on race and have them confront racism.

It was just,

here's the script, and then the guy playing the lead just happens to be black.

Right.

And he was the best guy in the auditions.

And, you know, in 1968, this didn't really happen.

You didn't just cast a black guy as a lead actor for no, with no like ulterior motive, basically.

Right.

So I read this review from the, from the time, from 1969, the year after it came out.

Young Roger Ebert went and watched it and wrote a review.

And he wrote

a pretty pretty interesting review, which is basically, it was about the reaction of the audience.

And he went to a Saturday matinee that was populated almost entirely by 10, 11-year-olds.

Oh, wow.

And they were used to seeing.

the creature from the Black Lagoon or Frankenstein or,

you know, just

movies that any kid could handle and could enjoy watching and, you know, fun, scary kind of stuff.

Yeah.

And he said that's how the, that was how the crowd reacted for the first half of the movie.

But then about the point where, and here's, here come spoilers, everybody.

If you haven't seen Night of the Living Dead, just hit yourself in the knee with a hammer.

You, the, the, the,

the teenage couple go to get gas, and when their car blows up and is engulfed in flames, they die.

They're burned to death.

He said, right about that time, the tone, the mood of the theater changed, and there was no like gleeful screaming anymore.

Kids were starting to not move and were afraid to move in their seats.

And some were quietly crying to themselves.

And from that, the whole, the whole point on, it just got worse and worse for these little kids watching this movie.

So it was a huge

impact on horror movies.

A, it, like you said earlier, it was kind of the first one to really sort of delve into other issues.

Like if you look up like significance of Night of the Living Dead or

meaning of Night of the Living Dead or something like that, there are scores of articles that have been written over the years of how it was a metaphor for the Vietnam War or an allegory about distrust of authority or the collapse of traditional family.

And I think Romero said, like, I didn't necessarily mean all these things, but you can certainly find it in the movie.

That is art.

Like, one of the great revelations of my adult life is that the artist, the writer, the songwriter, the author rarely intends to imbue as much meaning into their work as people take from it.

That that's part of art is interpretation.

Isn't that neat?

Yeah.

Like you don't, if you're a writer, if you're a young writer right now who's just sitting there racking your brain for how to insert metaphor and meaning into this, just write your story and people are going to find it for themselves.

Yeah, agreed.

I wish somebody had told me that when I was younger.

I had teachers that said stuff like that.

Oh, I didn't.

Like good college professors in English that would, when students would argue, like, I think he means this, he would say, like, you know, he may or she may not have meant anything.

Right.

I had the revelation.

I had teachers that would just go, wrong.

The other thing about Night of the Living Dead is it spawned obviously the zombie genre and

sequels, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, The Walking Dead,

remakes.

Yeah, shout out Stephen Yoon.

Yeah,

right?

Yeah, why not?

I'm still into The Walking Dead.

You?

Yeah, we talked about this.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay, Stephen Yoon listens.

Anyway, zombies are, I think, still hot.

And we can...

So hot.

We owe that all to Mr.

Romero, master of the genre.

Yep.

Chuck, one more thing, too, that Night of Living Dead did, that they weren't the first, but very famously Romero did was kill off his hero senselessly and shockingly.

Yeah.

At the end.

Good point.

Thanks, man.

Okay, so let's move on.

Like I said, 1973.

Yes.

Day after Christmas.

If you've ever been in Washington, D.C.

at the end of M Street, you might have noticed a very,

during the daytime, ordinary set of stairs.

At nighttime, maybe they look creepy to you because those are the Exorcist stairs.

Yeah.

I'm trying to conjure the music in my head, but all I'm coming up with is the unsolved mysteries music.

It's not quite right.

So close, but it's not it.

I'm so unsatisfied right now.

So The Exorcist was based on a book by William Peter Blatty,

who wrote this

in 1971.

And then in 73, the movie was made.

And there's, I think I referenced not too long ago a great Mark Marin interview with

William Friedkin, where he talks about the audition process for Linda Blair.

So, you should go listen to that because it was pretty insightful.

But The Exorcist really kind of changed the game

in that it was

spawned a bit of a sub-genre of

demonic movies.

Sure, that were like religious-based.

Yeah, even though I guess Rosemary's Baby was before that, but The Exorcist was such a mega hit, and it was nominated for Best Picture, the first horror movie to be nominated

for that.

And so it was just like, it was a big deal.

It was.

It sold 6 million tickets in about two months.

Yeah, it's amazing.

This is a horror movie, right?

And it came came out of nowhere.

Apparently, the effect it had on audiences was extremely pronounced.

There was a woman in Boston who had to be carried from the theater, and she goes, It cost me $4,

but I only lasted 20 minutes.

So word, like, that's the stories of that got around, and people wanted to see, you know, this movie can't be that scary.

And they went and they were like, oh my God, that movie is that scary.

Yeah, and it holds up too.

I mean,

special effects are, they'd never quite hold up, but it's still a very creepy movie.

Very famously, Linda Blair played the little girl who was possessed by a demon, and

the heavy hitters were called in

to exercise this demon, including a Max Van Seidow, who was only 44 when he played this guy in his easily in his 70s.

Yeah, was he Benjamin Button?

Well, no, they made him up.

Wow, they did a great job.

Yeah, which I don't see why they felt the need to do that.

I know they,

God, who else did they almost cast?

Oh, Brando.

They almost cast Brando, but that would have been a colossal mistake.

Well, Friedkin said, you know what, as soon as you do that, it's a Marlon Brando movie.

Yeah.

And I think he said picture, a Brando picture.

Sure, that's what they said.

And he didn't want it to be a Brando picture.

He wanted to be the Exorcist.

So

you said it was based on a book from two years before by William Peter Blatty.

He apparently was known as a comedy writer, and he wanted to do something different.

He said, hey, wouldn't it be funny if the little girl's head spun around and she cuped green bile?

Wait, what will you hear what I have her do with a crucifix?

So

he actually wrote the book because he wanted to scare America back to church.

That was his aim with the book.

It may have worked.

He believed that there was real evil going on in the world and that part of it was because of a loss of faith or a loss of religion, I guess.

And that's what he wanted to do with it.

And when the movie came out, there was a huge pushback from religious authorities.

Like Billy Graham said he believed the movie itself was possessed by a demon.

I'm not sure how that would happen, but that was like a huge thing at the time.

And

a lot of other religious establishment types were like, don't go see that movie.

It's evil.

But there were some who

were

part of

religion, major organized religion, who kind of saw through it and said, No, no, this is it's good that we're talking about this, that they're we're telling people, you know, or people are seeing that there's such a thing as like good versus evil literally combating on earth, you know, and people are talking about this and thinking about it.

And so, in that sense, the exorcist like really kind of went to bat for organized religion.

Oh, interesting.

I saw another

criticism of it, though, that said one of the themes of the movie that the book hadn't really intended, but the movie picked up on and expounded on, was intergenerational conflict.

That it was

Reagan, the child, represented the younger generation who was at war with the establishment.

And that it even goes

so far as to where her mother, the actress, the movie that she's working on, is about campus takeover by young radicals.

So that's kind of a theme that was apparently part of the subtext, but was a major part of it in the movie at least.

Interesting.

Yeah, I thought so too, because apparently, I mean, you think of intergenerational conflict now.

Apparently, in the late 60s and early 70s, it was sharper than it probably ever has been before or since.

Yeah.

The only other thing I got is that the

green stuff that she projectiles was Anderson's pea soup and a little bit of oatmeal texture.

Anderson's pea soup.

Well, but you can't get that anymore.

Chuck, let's do Jaws and then we'll take a break.

I love talking about Jaws.

Yeah, I mean, Jaws is on, you know, I did my top favorite movies list at one point on our website and I listed Jaws as my favorite movie.

Favorite of all time.

Yeah, I mean, that list changes, but it's Jaws is always in my top five.

I can watch it anytime it's on.

It is one of the, I've all, I've often said it's a perfect movie.

And what I mean by that is there's just not a misstep.

Like the casting was perfect.

The acting was great.

The script was great.

It played out just perfectly throughout the film.

He, like, Spielberg was just a master storyteller with that movie.

You were talking about how young George Romero was in Night of the Living Dead.

Spielberg was 26 when he made Jaws.

He was 13 years old.

And he was apparently scared to death when he finished filming.

The schedule had been for 55 days.

It went to 159.

Yeah.

He had, I think, been allotted $4 million.

He ended up spending $12 million on it.

Yeah, largely because, A, shooting on water is notoriously difficult.

And B,

the shark, mechanical shark they used was legendarily

wonky and how it are not wonky, but wonky.

It didn't work.

It rarely worked.

So they spent a lot of time and burnt a lot of hours trying to get this shark to do its thing.

And so much so that it didn't even make that many appearances in the movie.

I think they even kind of scaled it back and that ended up being better for the movie because you didn't get as much shark.

I looked up the

urban legend about the shark being named after Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce.

And apparently, it's true.

Oh, really?

Yeah, Bruce Raynor was the name of Spielberg's lawyer.

And that was the nickname for the mechanical shark on the set was Bruce.

That's pretty funny.

So, with Jaws, right?

We're talking about horror movies that change the genre.

Jaws not only changed the horror genre, it changed movie making to this day.

Yeah.

And in multiple ways, multiple massive ways.

It changed the entire film industry almost single-handedly.

Yeah, it was at the time there was a

there was no such thing.

You take it for granted now, but there was no such thing as a quote-unquote summer release.

No, a lot of theaters closed down because AC wasn't in every theater, and people didn't want to sit around in a hot movie theater for two hours.

Yeah, a summer release or a tentpole film or a blockbuster feature.

Like

Jaws was the first one of all those.

At the time when Jaws came out, they used to release a movie on maybe one, two screens in, say, New York or LA for a week, and then it'd make its way to, you know, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago for a few weeks, and then eventually it'd make it to your small town six, eight weeks later.

Yeah.

That was how movies were released.

Not Jaws.

Jaws was released on 435 screens across the country, which is huge, which is

part of the Summer Blockbuster release playbook now.

Yeah, and it was also the first movie to spend lots and lots of money on marketing.

And so I think the studios were like, wait a minute, if you spend some dough on marketing, you release this thing wide, you can make a ton of money in the first month that a movie's out.

And you're kind of set.

Like after after that, it's anything else is gravy.

Yeah.

And that's after the first like week or two, probably.

Yeah, it was, yeah, the whole, the whole point of Blockbuster now is to get that opening weekend to make all your money back in the opening weekend, and then everything else is gravy on top of it, right?

Jaws was, it didn't make its, I don't know, maybe it did make its money back in the first weekend because it hit $100 million in like 78 days or something incredible like that because it was the first movie to hit $100 million

and it did it in just a couple months even.

Yeah, it eventually went on to make about $260 million domestically, which is, I mean, that's a great take now.

Yeah.

You know, much less the mid-1970s.

Sure.

For a $12 million spend, for sure.

My only beef here is that I would not consider Jaws a horror movie.

Yeah.

I think he's an adventure film.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

With a scary antagonist.

Yeah.

But it's amazing how much I quote that movie in my day-to-day life.

Yeah.

A shusha shark.

That's a great, that's a classic.

All right, let's take a break.

I'm going to meditate on that line and we'll talk about a few other scary movies, including one that was originally titled Scary Movie.

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Okay, moving on to Halloween.

Halloween, Chuck.

1978, I believe.

Halloween.

Yes.

John Carpenter.

A youngish John Carpenter

who

originally titled this movie movie The Babysitter Murders.

No.

Little on the Nose.

Yeah.

Pretty terrifying title.

I guess.

Young Jamie Lee Curtis, her very first movie.

Was it really?

Yeah.

Well, she went on to become known as the Scream Queen for all the horror movies she was in.

Totally.

And this was

shot in 20 Days in South Pasadena as the Midwest.

And

it's credited as being

birthing the slasher genre.

Yeah, it did.

So there were slasher films before it, The Town That Dreaded Sundown.

Good movie.

It was like based on a true crime story, actually, in Texas.

One called Black Christmas, The Grabster Sites from 1974.

Haven't heard of that one.

But the idea of

a faceless, almost

like non-entity entity coming at you and

relentlessly stalking you, being impervious to harm, as the rapster puts it, and just coming at you again and again, trying to kill you.

That was all established by Halloween, and it was done to great effect as well.

Yeah, and it holds up.

It's still scary.

Michael Myers, of course, was the killer.

The music that John Carpenter...

scored, I mean, he scores most of his movies himself, but

very iconic,

basic thing.

I think he only took a couple of days to come up with it.

But, like, the Michael Myers character and the mask are so iconic.

The music is so iconic.

You know about the mask, right?

Shatner.

Yeah.

Yeah, go ahead.

I went and checked that one out too to verify that it was true, and it definitely is true that the Michael Myers mask is actually a Captain Kirk Star Trek mask painted white.

Yep.

And that is history.

Yep.

In the script, when it came to the mask, it just said, pale, neutral features of a man.

Yeah, which makes the whole thing even creepier because he's an implacid or

is that the right word?

I don't know.

He's just

almost like just an emotionless killer.

Oh, yeah.

It made the fact that he was merciless, ruthless, pitiless, and

arbitrarily killing people almost all the more pronounced because his expression never changes.

Well, to me, the two things that were creepiest about Halloween was the expression never changed because of that mask

and he did not run.

Like,

he would just walk, and you still got the feeling like you can't outrun this guy even though he's walking.

That was another creepy part about It Follows was the walking aspect of it.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

In the same way that like 28 Days Later was freaky in that it took zombies and made them run.

Yeah, or I remember when I saw Friday the 13th, I'm sorry, Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time, and Freddy Krueger was running around.

I was like, that's not what scary dudes do.

Yeah, scary dudes don't trot.

No, they walk very creepily toward you and still somehow gain speed on you, even though you're running full speed.

Well, Freddy scared me to death the first time I saw that movie.

Yeah, first one was a pretty good one.

But Halloween established the,

like you said, it established the slasher genre and everything about slasher films still today,

all rooted in Halloween, John Carpenter's tropes.

Yeah, and again, like you said, there were a couple of other slasher films before, but none of them grossed close to 50 million bucks.

Wow, is that how much Halloween made?

Yeah, $47 million domestic at about a $300,000 budget.

So it,

you know,

it's sort of like with the Exorcist, like there were other movies that sort of did this thing before, but when you have a huge hit that does it is when it sort of redefines the genre because it makes money.

Yeah.

And that's all that matters.

Everyone starts paying attention after that all right what's next what's next my friend is a movie that came out when i don't know were you still in college uh no

you must have just been out then i was out a few years okay well regardless around our college era this movie came out because up to this point everything's come out either when we were little or before we were born.

This one was right in our wheelhouse.

It was the Blair Witch Project, which came out in 1998.

Yeah, and one of the big things that um blair witch project did well two things really it established the found footage uh genre or subgreg that is so overplayed now

uh and the viral marketing campaign and that's how i came upon it i remember very specifically uh being in the apartment of sky depellito who you know sure he shot our tv show one of my oldest friends and i was sitting in his apartment on claremont avenue uh in decatur and i happened upon this and this was pre-facebook i don't even know how i found it you know, before things were being shared around.

Right.

And I happened upon this website, the very first Blair Witch Project website.

And I was like, dude, come over here and check this out.

This is the scariest thing I've ever seen.

And I remember the website set it up as if it was real.

And that this found footage thing, it's so overdone now.

It's hard to go back in time and remember when it was fresh.

But I remember looking at it and being like, did this happen?

Did they really find this footage of this murder in the woods?

Like, well, they got to see this.

That was the rumor that this was actually real, man.

And this was, like you said, I mean, this is before the found footage genre.

So people were being exposed to this concept for the first time and were kind of falling for it.

I mean, first of all,

you're either in college or you're just recently out of college.

So you're maybe slightly more gullible than you are 10 years on.

I'm ready to believe it.

You want to believe, right?

So, yeah, the idea that this was actual found footage, it just made it all the more more enjoyable and people were buying into it.

Then, I think the other part of it, too, was that the filmmakers, partly because they didn't have the budget for actual effects, left a lot of

the scariest parts to your imagination.

Yeah, nor did they have the talent to make a good narrative film.

I mean, they worked on a 64-page script, which I was surprised that it was that.

that big, but they shot it for eight days.

And originally, they were going to make it like a documentary about the found footage.

Right.

And then one of them had a flash of perspective.

I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Let's just release it like it's found footage.

And that was the rest was history.

Yeah, and I'm poking fun.

That was not very nice at all.

Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick or Meerick, the co-directors,

they should be credited with a truly ingenious

campaign and invention.

Well, they weren't the first to come up with found footage, right?

There were some films before.

I've never known how to pronounce it, Mondo Kane or Mondo Kane.

I think Kane.

It's from 1962, and it was supposedly a documentary about

weird tribal rituals.

I think there's head shrinking maybe involved.

And it purported to be like real footage.

Same with Cannibal Holocaust.

Oh, man.

If you've never seen Cannibal Holocaust, go out and watch it right now.

It's very disturbing.

And it's so disturbing that the director of the movie was charged with murder because they believed that the actual murders depicted, they were so realistic, they thought that it was a snuff film, basically.

But it was supposed to be a documentary as well.

So there was an idea of like found footage or documentary style horror movies that had come before, but nothing like the Blair Witch, where it was just straight up, these people, we found their old camera, and this is what was on it.

Well, and they were smart enough to kind of dig up an old thing that never went huge, you know?

And they're like, hey, man, like these other movies, they never really hit it big.

And it was a timing thing.

Hats off for them, to them.

Yeah.

Good for them and to them.

Nice going, dudes.

All right, Chuck.

Scream.

Yeah, Scream.

I teased that it was originally titled Scary Movie.

I'm glad it wasn't because Scary Movie is awesome.

I don't know what Scary Movie ever would have been called.

Maybe it would have never been made.

Or maybe they would have called that Scream.

Oh, yeah, I guess so.

So Scream was a very big deal when it came out.

The writer Kevin Williamson,

and this is still the highest growing slasher film of all time, basically.

Scream 1 is.

It was huge.

I got Nev Campbell's haircut as a result of it.

Like, it was a big, big pop culture watermark.

It was.

And one of the big things about it, aside from the boatloads of money that it made, was it spawned a sub-genre called meta-horror, which is,

even though it had been done by no less than its own director, Wes Craven, with Wes Craven's new nightmare

two years before Scream, it wasn't nearly as popular.

But metahorror is this idea.

And if you've ever seen Scream, you know they're constantly just referencing horror movies like, this is where, you know, you don't go out and make out in the car because that's where you get killed.

And then they would do do that and get killed.

Right.

Although I don't think that specific thing happened.

Like, don't go back into the house.

Yeah.

Like, all the tropes of horror movies are addressed in the movie.

And they're talking about them as the horror movie tropes.

Yes.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Meta horror.

Yeah.

And there are plenty of other things that came along, meta-horror

examples.

Like, have you seen Tucker and Dale vs.

Evil?

No, it's a good.

Oh, check it out, man.

All right.

That's a good movie.

Zombie Land.

Yeah, I did see that.

Where he's rattling off all of the things that you need to know to survive a zombie apocalypse that he learned from zombie movies, right?

And then Cabin in the Woods.

Did you see that one?

Great movie.

It was a great movie.

I thought it was really good.

I mean, from beginning to end, it was a great movie.

Did you like Scream?

Yeah, love Scream.

I liked all the Screams.

I only saw the first two.

The second one, I think, might have been even better than the first.

to me.

And the second one was shot, Emily worked on that.

It was shot here at Agnes Scott College, partially.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah.

Huh.

I'll have to go back and watch it knowing that now and be like, oh, I've driven past that place.

So I got a few tidbits.

Like I said, initial title was Scary Movie.

Number two, The Weinstein Brothers initially offered it to George Romero and Sam Raimi.

What else do I have here?

Drew Barrymore was originally supposed to play Sidney, the lead character, and then she said no

how about if I just play that girl at the beginning which kind of was a big thing because you see Drew Mary Barrymore and it was a big shock when she died in the first scene right you know you can't kill off your heroine right away yeah and like I remember I remember that first scene really really scaring me when I saw it the first time in the theater yeah it is it's a scary gruesome gory part yeah very well played uh and then before he went to

Nev Campbell, he went out to Alicia Witt, Brittany Murphy, and Reese Witherspoon.

And then Nev Campbell is like

that was your first choice, right?

And then the mask, the iconic screen mask, apparently was an off-the-shelf mask.

Wow, that made that company's money.

Yeah, and the Weinsteins didn't like it.

They were like, I hate that mask.

Everything else is fine.

Huh?

But Wes Graven said, no, it's got to be that mask.

Don't be stupid, Bob.

All right.

Are we going to finish up with our own edition here?

Finally, 1960.

Yes.

Psycho.

I can't believe this wasn't in the list.

I think Ed kept this off the list to toy with somebody he doesn't like specifically.

That's the only explanation.

Yeah, because psycho changed everything.

Yeah.

It really did.

I mean, it was the, you could say that it was one of the first slasher flicks.

It was a early psychological thriller.

Yeah.

It was

based on the real life story of Ed Gein.

Yeah.

I mean, it doesn't exactly mirror Ed Gein's life, but the idea of being obsessed with your mother so much that you will commit murder

is definitely rooted in Ed Gein's story.

Yeah.

If you're not familiar with Ed Gein, he not only

he was a

I don't even know if he was a serial killer.

I think he only I think he murdered one maybe two people but more than anything he was a grave robber but he liked to dress up in people's skin women's skin and pretend he was his own mother which

man that's a lot of years on the couch working that one out yeah or you can just die at the hands of cops one of the two um and he also inspired leather face from texas chainsaw massacre yeah and buffalo bill of course oh yeah yeah silence of the lambs Yeah, one guy inspired

all those guys.

So I found this article, Psycho Colon, the horror movie that changed the genre

by Owen Gleberman, or is it Gleiberman?

Gleber.

Gleberman, I think.

He wrote for, legendary critic, wrote for EW for years and years and now writes for Variety.

Oh, he does?

Yeah, but

he put it best.

He said,

Well, you know, the iconic shower scene, first of all, is hugely important because it was

Hitchcock really kind of ripped up the script, not literally, but the horror movie script when he kills off Janet Lee halfway through the movie.

It was, you just didn't do that at the time.

No, and we've seen nowhere.

And we've seen that come up later on, like at the end of Night of the Living Dead or Drew Barrymore and Scream.

Hitchcock was the first one to do that.

Yeah, and Gleberman puts it this way.

He said he was also slicing through years, decades, centuries even, of audience expectation that the hero or heroine of a fictional work would be shielded and protected or would at least die, usually at the end, in a way that made some sort of moral dramatic sense.

And Psycho, the murder made no sense at all.

Right.

And he really kind of hits it on the head there.

It was like, if you've never seen Psycho or heard of it, the movie's just going along about this woman who like steals some money from her work and she's kind of on the lamb and checks into this hotel and you don't even know it's a horror movie.

You're thinking it's

movie about a lady who steals money and is trying to get away from getting caught.

Right.

And then just out of nowhere, she's hacked up in a shower.

And at the time, audiences, and still, if you haven't seen it, it's shocking, but audiences were just like, they didn't know what they'd seen.

Right, exactly.

So

not only is the hero no longer safe, that means maybe you're not either.

Yeah.

So

it had a really huge, unsettling effect.

And then Owen Gleberman points out that Hitchcock was so smart that

he even made a nod to the

type of pat expected horror that the audience was used to in the house that he used for Psycho, the Bates house.

Yeah.

It was this huge rambling Victorian mansion on a hill.

There's lots of taxidermy and it was like over over decorated and just creepy.

But up to that point, like that was horror.

That was what a horror movie looked like and felt like.

And

this was kind of Hitchcock's homage to that.

But at the same time, he was also putting the heel of his shoe on it as well.

Yeah, and that house was, I mean, almost a character in itself.

Like, if you've ever seen the recreation of it

in Los Angeles, I think it's at Universal.

Did you see it?

Oh, yeah.

I never did.

The closest I came was,

I think, when different strokes went there.

That's the closest you got to it?

Yeah.

Yeah, man, if you've ever seen this thing in person, like it's, it sends a chill up your back just seeing this thing in like a sunny Los Angeles day.

Still.

That's awesome.

It's such an iconic house.

It's like, oh, man.

There it is.

That's where Norman Bates lives.

He's the most disturbed human of all time.

Right.

So in the movie, of course, there was the mother character who is sort of referenced throughout the movie.

And it is not until the end that you realize that there is no mother, mother's dead, right?

There's just Norman Bates and all his rage and hang-ups, yeah.

So, all the monster movies about giant ants and or the creature from the black lagoon, monsters, things that were an other that a normal person had to do battle with, that was gone.

Yeah, now the monster had been on screen the whole time, and you hadn't noticed it.

And now, what do you think about your neighbor who has seem a little weird from time to time before?

Could he be a murderer who thinks this is his mother?

Who knows?

Yeah.

This is what Hitchcock did to everybody back in 1960.

And you almost get, like, I think Owen Glieberman points it out.

Yeah, he does at the beginning.

He basically says, like,

we probably didn't see psycho.

If you're reading this, you're probably too young to have seen psycho in 1960.

And we should all feel sad that we didn't because it's so changed everything that we can't do anything but take it for granted now.

And everything that's come since then has been trying to regain that shock and horror that it instilled in audiences.

And thus far, no one's actually been able to do it.

Yeah.

And the other thing I remember when I saw it when I was younger, I think I saw this when I was like 14-ish.

And I think it had this impact on just about everyone.

I don't think I took a shower for a month.

I was straight up bathtub, curtain open, doors open, windows open.

Making your mom watch.

So she's keeping watch?

No, that would have been full circle back to Sydney.

Oh, yeah, I guess so.

Yeah.

You didn't even want to have anything to do with your mom.

No, man.

Like, it changed the shower curtain industry for a while after that.

Yeah, I'll bet.

Very good movie.

And

there were a couple of Hitchcock movies in the last few years.

Two different ones.

One with Anthony Hopkins and one with Toby Jones

that were both really good.

And one was about the years that he was making Psycho.

The other was about the years when he was making The Birds.

And they were both really, really good movies.

And you should check those out too.

You should repeat that.

We just got a retro interjection from Noel.

So go ahead and say it again, Josh, in case it didn't come through.

So Noel just said that

the director of The Black Coat's Daughter is Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in Psycho's son.

Wow.

He also did another movie now that Noel says that.

Thanks, Noel.

It's called The Pretty Little Thing That Lives in the House, which was another horror movie, a ghost story.

I think that was his first one, and I think that might be on Netflix.

It's great.

It's a really great movie, too.

Man, this has got me fired up to see some horror movies.

It's a renaissance of horror.

Yeah, it's tough, though, because Emily doesn't really dig it.

So I have to just find a lone time to do that.

Go to watch it in the bathroom.

All right.

Well, if you want to know more about horror movies, go watch horror movies.

Go forth.

uh and let us know what we missed for god's sake yeah if you want to check out grabster's list type in horror movies on the search bar at houseofworks.com and it'll bring up this fine fine list that you'll disagree with and um since i said disagree it's time for listener mail

uh this is from eric and i'm going to call it what he called it a schoolhouse rock nostalgia theory all right i think he's pretty right on This just came in, actually.

This is a hot take.

Hey guys, in Schoolhouse Rock episode, Josh made the statement that Gen Xers are are most nostalgic generation and attributed to the success of Schoolhouse Rock.

I'm going to offer my own theory.

I propose that Gen X is nostalgic, mostly for pop culture, because of the proliferate,

that word, of child-targeted advertisements and marketing in the 70s and 80s.

Certainly something we've talked about.

This theory's got legs.

While our little impressionable brains were developing, we were being taught by those who were steering pop culture to long for and find fulfillment in the toys and other products our cartoons were pushing on us.

Now as adults, those messages are still deep in our psyche, and we can't shake the idea that we still really need those Star Wars action figures to be happy.

Not because the toys and the shows were so great, but because we had been tricked into believing we need them.

I have nothing scientific to back this up.

Just a hunch.

Yeah, what, you mean there hasn't been a study from MIT

on Star Wars toys?

I'm kind of surprised by that as well.

I thought you were being facetious at first.

I wanted to take a turn.

Yeah.

I don't know which way is up at this point.

Yeah.

Nothing scientific to back this up, but I'd love to hear what you all think.

See if anyone out there has any respectable and informed input.

Love what you guys do.

Thank you, Eric.

That is from Eric Lewin.

And Eric, I think that's super valid.

Yeah, I do too, Eric.

I think you've really hit upon something here.

And that's all I have to say about it.

If you have a great theory, fan theory, real life theory, whatever, we want to hear them.

Especially if it's interesting.

You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast or Josh Um Clark.

You can post it on Facebook at Charles W.

Chuck Bryant or Stuff You Should Know.

You can send us an email, the stuffpodcast at houseuffworks.com.

As always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyushouldknow.com.

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