This episode we're chatting with Daniel Kraus, author of Bent Heavens, a new, horrific SF novel from Henry Holt/Macmillan Books. As of this writing the book is listed by Amazon as the #1 New Release in "Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Death & Dying." The publisher sums up Kraus's storied career thusly: Kraus […]
Imagine that you walk into a record store and suddenly find yourself in a time that looks almost like our own, except that nothing you use to navigate your world works. That time would be the 1980s, and that's the concept behind Connor Hoover's new book. Trapped in the 80s is the brand new "Pick […]
This episode we're chatting with Simon Cox, the writer, director, and producer of Invasion Planet Earth, a new film about a doctor who leads a group of patients at the clinic where he works in their journey to escape a massive alien invasion. In the film, Simon Haycock plays Thomas Dunn, a doctor who has […]
This episode of Castle Talk we're chatting about Color Out of Space, a new science fiction horror film that marks the return to feature directing from Richard Stanley, who brought us such films as Dust Devil and his cult favorite debut Hardware. The new film stars Nicolas Cage as a man who's moved his family […]
I watched the Star Wars Holiday Special for the first time on November 17, 1978, the one and only time it broadcast, when it bumped that week's episodes of The Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman on CBS. I was seven years old and I remember three things about it: I remember Bea Arthur singing in […]
This week for a "hangout" episode (between more structured panel reviews) the podcast looked at a couple of films, one of them being the 1969 Spanish film The House That Screamed, or La Residencia. We chose it as an excellent example of Eurotrash horror. Eurotrash horror is a slightly unfortunate term for mid-century horror films […]
This week we spoke to Kathryn Leigh Scott and Steve Smith, the reader and publisher respectively of a new series of audiobooks releases of the curious and compelling 1960s Dark Shadows audiobooks. Scott, a writer, and actress is well-remembered as waitress-turned-governess Maggie on the original show, and she reads the books with warmth and an […]
This episode we're chatting with Tara Westwood, who stars in Sony's new reboot (more on that later) of The Grudge. The film will release in theaters on January 3rd and is a new take on the 2004 film of the same name which itself was based on the 2002 Japanese original Ju-on. The film is directed by Nicolas Pesce and […]
In our final Castle of Horror movie panel discussion of the year, we focused on a Christmas movie: Saint (2010) also known as Sint in its native Netherlands. We could have chosen any of a number of films in which the "hat on head/suit that's red" brought cinematic mayhem, but what made Saint special was […]
In Beyond the Gate, scientists are returning from an edition only to be turned into a pile of gray, mushroom-like mush, and that's not nearly as scary as what they left behind. This episode we're chatting with Mary SanGiovanni about her new book Beyond the Gate from Kensington Books. Ms. SanGiovanni is the Bram Stoker-nominated author of the Kathy […]
This episode we're chatting with Adam Egypt Mortimer, director and co-writer of Daniel Isn't Real, which the studio describes thus: Daniel Isn't Real is about a troubled college freshman Luke (Miles Robbins) who suffers a violent family trauma and resurrects his childhood imaginary friend Daniel (Patrick Schwarzenegger) to help him cope. Charismatic and full of […]
This week we continue our Stephen King retrospective with a look at the 1987 film A Return to Salem's Lot directed by Larry Cohen. This is a film made by one fascinating, iconoclastic director—Larry Cohen, who would give us movies like the 1985 commercial-culture horror satire The Stuff and the bizarre 1982 giant-monster film […]
Antrum is a new horror film from directors David Amito and Michael Laicini with a decent gimmick and a better movie in the middle. The gimmick is the tagline: Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made. We open with a faux documentary of talking heads telling us the movie Antrum was made in the 1979, shown […]
This episode we chat with David Moody, whose new book Chokehold comes from St. Martin's Griffin books. The book ends a couple of book cycles for Moody, it's the final book in the Hater series that began in 2006, and the Final War series which began in 2017 with the acclaimed One of Us […]
This week we're chatting with Cory Doctorow about a topic that just fascinated the science fiction writer and futurist—enough that he wrote the amazing novella The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow—and fascinated host Jason Henderson: the Walt Disney World attraction Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress. Doctorow (at craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist […]
This week we continue our Stephen King Retrospective with a look at the 2004 miniseries Salem's Lot, starring Rob Lowe and Andre Braugher and Rutger Hauer. Directed by Mikael Salomon for TNT, Salem's Lot had to fight an uphill battle, to begin with. Tobe Hoober of Poltergeist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre had delivered a scary, […]
The Castle Talk Podcast chatted with Leanna Renee Hieber while the prolific author was pulled over "in Amish Country" on the way to the Steampunk and Fantasy Showcase in Manheim, PA. Hieber is a creator of what has been termed "Gaslamp Fantasy," a cousin of steampunk that tends to take place in the Victorian/Edwardian eras […]
This week we talk with Roger Corman, who with wife and filmmaker Julie Corman are the focus of the new Shout Factory series Cult-tastic: Tales From The Trenches with Roger and Julie Corman. An extraordinarily prolific director and producer, Corman occupies a unique place in Hollywood history, because as much as he was responsible for […]
[SPOILERS FOR THE SHINING] This week we continue our Stephen King retrospective with Doctor Sleep, directed by Mike Flanagan and starring Ewan MacGregor as Danny Torrance, the boy who escaped the Overlook Hotel at the end of The Shining. Which The Shining, you might ask? There are so many: from the Stephen King book came […]
In the lobby of the lovely Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado sits a gift shop, right next to the wide, wooden central stair. The gift shop long ago embraced the one thing that the Stanley is most famous for above all else: its place as the inspiration, so the legend goes, for Stephen King's […]
