Our October marathon of John Carpenter continues as we find John returning to the world of independent film and total creative control. Perhaps John smoked a little too much weed and flew too close to the sun with this one. For all it's theoretical physics and spiritual nonsense it's still a fun little movie.

Prince of Darkness finds a Catholic priest discovering a hidden order of priests protecting a run-down church in Los Angeles that hides a terrible secret in its basement. For the last 400 years it has housed a strange, churning tank in its basement which contains the fluid essence of the devil. But now as conditions shift and the stars align, the tank is coming to life, manifesting in our world in order to pull an even older force of evil into ours from the abyss. A team of graduate students in the field of theoretical physics is gathered to study this phenomenon and ultimately stop it.

It doesn't make a lot of sense and it has a real mean sense of humor about it at time but we can't help but love Prince of Darkness. It's John Carpenter back where he belongs and fully producing movies that feel characteristically John Carpenter.

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This week Halle Kiefer of the fantastic horror podcast, Ruined, joins us for a three-peat as we kick off our Halloween 2026 series, a month-log exploration of the films of John Carpenter. We're starting strong with John's critically maligned The Thing, a movie that reviewed so badly that he lost an entire contract with Universal. Thankfully, in the fullness of time viewers have come back around and reassessed it, and recognize it as one of the greatest horror movies of the 80s and one of the greatest of all time.

The Thing finds an American scientific research station in Antarctica facing an unseen alien threat that absorbs its host and hides in plain sight. A Norwegian station nearby thawed a UFO out of the ice and woke up the frozen pilot after 100,000 years and now it has its eyes set on planet Earth. If it leaves the isolation of Antarctica, the entire planet is doomed. These men will drive themselves insane with paranoia as they narrow down who among them is The Thing and what will it cost them to stop it in its tracks?

The Thing is a frozen, paranoid nightmare of extraordinary imagination, with gross-out special effects from a very enthusiastic Rob Bottin.

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This week we're wrapping up our round-up of Latin American movies with maybe the deepest cut we've done yet. We're watching Muerte En La Playa from director Enrique Gomez Vadillo.

In this movie we find young David returning home from school on break following the temporary closing of the school after the murder of one of the professors. David's mom, hyper-glam Sonia Infante, and her boyfriend make several attempts to hook David up with one of the local girls but he couldn't possibly be any less interested in them. David is gay and all the people prying into his personal life keep bugging the shit out of him so he pushes them off cliffs, out windows, and even resorts to jamming a spear in a dude's butt. Who can stop his rampage? Perhaps his stepfather-to-be with a plot to catch him in the act with another man will expose David. Who can say?

Tonally impenetrable, Muerte En La Playa is an overwrought Telenovela melodrama of cartoonish proportions. Nearly all of the movie takes place in or around a swimming pool. Vadillo luxuriates in filming all of the toned, chiseled young men. The director, Vadillo, himself is a hard man to track down. He's a ghost, a cipher even among Mexican film directors. It's a hard movie to quantify and deeply, deeply weird.

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This week we're joined by our good friend and Laughing in the Dark co-host, Aileen Clark to talk about Brazil and Coffin Joe as we look at Brazil's first-ever horror movie, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul.

In this movie Coffin Joe is the local undertaker, a nightmare man in black with a top hat and cape to match. He's also an atheist who is on the hunt for the perfect woman who will bear him a son and continue his bloodline. But here's the thing, Coffin Joe is a huge jerk and everyone hates him but they're also afraid of him because he's a libertine who adheres to no apparent moral code. He'll kill his way through the community when things don't go his way, and as the bodies pile up he'll have to kill even more people to cover up his crimes. He should have listened to local witch when she issued him a dire warning. The spirits of the dead will rise up at midnight and take his soul.

Jose Mojica Marins was propelled to superstardom in Brazil with the release of this movie in 1964. He immediately set the pace for horror movies to come and used Coffin Joe as a mouthpiece to criticize the fascist military junta that was running Brazil at the time. It's decades later and some time since the passing of Jose Mojica Marins but the legacy of Coffin Joe lives on.

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We're getting real weird with it this week with a look at the life and work of a very troubling director: Alejandro Jodorowsky. Few directors are as storied and mythical as he is.

El Topo finds a mysterious black-clad gunfighter stumbling through the desert on his search for four master gunfighters and a path to spiritual enlightenment. In theory, defeating each master will bring him closer to God or it'll win him the love of the strange woman he abandoned his son for. Who can say? It's all so murky. When the final gunfighter outsmarts him, he dies and finds himself trapped in a cave with a community of cave people and vows to dig them all out on his new search for enlightenment.

Take a listen and learn about the sort of family life that creates a filmmaker who is constantly making movies where the main character is desperate for a father's love but buries it under layers upon layers of gnositicism and hermetic philosophy.

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This week we look at Phillip Kaufman's remake of Don Siegel's unimpeachable specimen of McCarthy era paranoia, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

In this movie Elizabeth, an employee of the city health office becomes convinced that her boyfriend has been switched with someone else. All over the city of San Francisco people are waking up to find that loved ones have somehow changed. They express no emotion now and spend all their time busily working with other strangers on a sinister project. Elizabeth at first isn't taken seriously by her co-worker, a man who trusts the American bureaucratic machine with all his heart until it breaks down. Along with a few friends they'll run all night to do everything they can to avoid being made into pod people while also resisting the the invasion.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a stone cold classic. It stars Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldlum, Leonard Nimoy, and Brooke Adams in one of the best remakes of all time!

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Come with us to a land down under this week as we head back to Australia for a look at Peter Weir's first feature film, The Cars That Ate Paris.

Paris is a small town with a terrible secret. Cars roll off the road at an alarming rate. The drivers are often killed in the crashes or rendered brain damaged. What's going on there? Poor mild-mannered Arthur finds out the hard way when his brother crashes the car and he is the only survivor left to find his way in this town where the people lure drivers to their deaths and then loot what remains. Things were going so well but the youth are restless. They tear around town in cars cobbled together from bits and pieces, nightmare vehicles that threaten to consume the entire town in a demolition derby of mayhem if anyone in town tries to impose any kind of order on them.

In many ways, Weir's movie is a forerunner for Mad Max, painting a picture of an Australia in crisis. Fuel is as hard to come by as work is. Everyone is on edge and the old order is desperate to hold onto its power. It's an odd movie that Dave loves and Bryan is conflicted over. Check out this episode to get all the info.

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This week we reach the terminal point for giallo in Italy. This is it, the bottom of the barrel, the definitive end, a bloated vanity project by director Al Festa to showcase his wife, Stefania Stella who ostensibly plays herself in this murder mystery in the style of old gialli.

In Fatal Frames we find music video director Alex Ritt, haunted by the recent murder of his wife, drawn to Rome to direct a blockbuster music video for Italy's hotted pop star, Stefania Stella. When he arrives, however, violence follows him as the bodies pile up and he is the prime suspect in the police investigation. But he's not killing these women. So who is? Why are they so focused on Alex? How does Stefania Stella fit in to all this nonsense?

Sporting a cast chock full of Italian movie legends and a few American horror favorites like Donald Pleasance, Linnea Quigley, and Angus Scrimm, Fatal Frames is an absolute shit show, a tremendously convoluted giallo that doesn't work as a giallo and definitely doesn't work as a showcase of Stefania Stella's talents. Not to be mean or nothin', but the lady has none to speak of. But this movie is a worthwhile watch. It's a baffling series of weird decisions and bad acting.

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