Tiki culture was all about creating a frozen-in-time, idyllic wonder that bore curious resemblance to the World War II Pacific Theater.
Jason Henderson Archives
We talk to Luke Sparke, writer and director of Occupation, about making great indy movies, juggling characters, and the endurance of films like Red Dawn.
Summer of the Mariposas is a story of children led by La Llorona herself, the misunderstood, weeping ghost, on a journey of hardship and magic.
We discuss Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), which has two main points: aliens are not to be trusted, and monuments look amazing when being blown up.
We discuss the deeply weird Cobra Woman, a 1944 South Seas adventure featuring evil twin Maria Montez, cobra dancing, and a mute Lon Chaney, Jr.
We talk to Lowell Dean, director of Another Wolfcop, an homage to '80s action movies about a cop who becomes a werewolf but retains his police officer role.
We augment the Atom Age Horror Retrospective with a strange, problematic expedition movie from adventure/disaster maestro Irwin Allen: The Lost World.
Paul Tremblay's new book is a terrifying home invasion story about a small family under attack from four strangely polite, very scary people.
We discuss the 1958 film The Blob. What is it about this independent film about a strange visitor that continues to command attention today?
We talk Voodoo Island (1957) a strange little thriller about a very modern Mythbusters-style hoax investigator trying to disprove the existence of Voodoo.
We talk to Drew Edwards about Lucy Chaplin: Science Starlet and about creating a new heroine who has garnered surprising attention.
We take on the best giant lizard movie ever to be filmed around Lake Dallas, 1959's The Giant Gila Monster. Also, a few thoughts on Godzilla 1985.
This week we introduce a new podcast on America's fascination with Tiki, which made everyone suddenly put on Hawaiian shirts and start downing rum drinks.
David Bowles, professor at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, talks about his sweeping new book Myths of Mexico: Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky.
We look at giant-bug movie Tarantula, which actually has a lot to say about small towns and the real fear of radioactivity. Plus we discuss whether there ever can be something "so bad it's good."
Gary Rhodes talks about his new book culled from thousands of primary sources and long-unseen illustrations, The Birth of the American Horror Film (Edinburgh University Press).
This week we look at a film that set the vocabulary for paranoid film from its release in 1956 to today: the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers starring Kevin McCarthy.
This week we continue our look at Atom Age Horror with I Married a Monster from Outer Space. We cover the luridly named paranoid SF movie -- a film rife with subtext about homophobia, gender roles, and the claustrophobia of small-town America.
We kick off our new series on Atom Age Horrors, from Big Bugs to Teenage Monsters, with Them!, a well-made, high-budget-for-its-time 1954 story about giant ants threatening America. Then we have a spoiler-filled discussion of Avengers: Infinity War, because we've been aching to compare notes.
We chat with Larry Blamire, creator of affectionate, keen parodies like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, The Lost Skeleton Returns Again, and Dark and Stormy Night, among others.
Jason chats with Cutter Wood, author of Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime from Algonquin Books. A gripping piece of creative nonfiction, Wood's book tells the story not just of the murder and its three suspects but of his own journey in telling the story.
We talk about Larry Blamire's knowing ode to 1950s low-budget sci-fi films like Plan 9 From Outer Space, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. We ask, what is this movie? Is it camp (deliberately bad) or parody (good, observing the bad?)
Chris Pardal co-stars in the new film Corbin Nash as the partner of a rogue detective who is murdered and reborn as a demon-hunting vampire.
R.S. Belcher is known for the urban-legends-based horror novel The Brotherhood of the Wheel, which has been optioned for TV and compared by The Wall Street Journal to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Belcher's new book is The Night Dahlia.
On Friday, April 13, 1984, the world saw the release of a movie Roger Ebert called "an immoral and reprehensible piece of trash" -- Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. That's enough to get us interested in looking once more at this film, which features Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover.
This week's discussion is on the 1972 thriller Frenzy directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The film, about a serial killer at large in London and an unlikable jerk framed for the murders, is daring, clever and sometimes very hard to watch.
Known in the US as Attack of the Mushroom People, the movie tells the story of a group of famous people who all get shipwrecked, only to discover that their uncharted desert isle is infested with deadly, transforming mushrooms.
Jamey Bradbury's The Wild Inside is an achingly personal debut about a teenage girl in Alaska who yearns to overcome family tragedy to compete in the Iditarod dogsledding race. Jason chats with Jamey about her first book, when not to read the internet, and what the cheesy '70s cover of this book would look like.
This week, the Castle Team discusses the best-awarded film we've ever discussed: Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water. We ask why this movie is del Toro's Oscar breakthrough and where the movie soars.
This week the Castle team go back to a movie that is the undeniable blueprint for Ridley Scott's Alien-- the 1966 Queen of Blood, starring Dennis Hopper, John Saxon, and Basil Rathbone.