Episode 163 -- 2026 Halloween Film Spooktacular
In honor of spooky season, we asked you for some horror movie assignments, and boy did you deliver! We had so much fun that we're planning a bonus episode about more films sometime in the coming weeks, but for this main feed installment we're talking about two films that rose to the top of your list: 1987's The Lost Boys and 1996's Scream. These two actually have a lot in common: central California! The youths! The long 1980s! Come for the House Hunters view of Woodsboro real estate, stay for the serial killer history of Santa Cruz, CA!
ONE NOTE: Adrian misspoke in the episode and identified Woodsboro in Scream with Santa Rosa, CA, but it was of course filmed in Sonoma, CA (with one house in Healdsburg thrown in). Apologies to the true Wine Country Heads out there!
Comments (20)
love the pod and would be super interested in your analysis of Wicker🙈🙈
Commenting after finally listening to the episode: Your discussion of place and setting in these horrors made me remember an epiphany i had a few years ago. I'm not really a horror person, cannot look at blood, but i like uncanny and creepy stuff. A friend made me watch Infinity pool and the feeling of unease hit me harder than any creepy movie i've seen. Why? It was filmed in my home country. And it was basically about rich tourists doing whatever they want in a foreign country. I've seen many american movies but all of them are set in places i've never been to. Yes, a serial killer is scary, but seeing these tourists (people i've seen every summer at the seaside) kill people on their holidays...undescribable
I saw Scream (twice) at the movies when it first came out (I'm the same age as Adrian), and I got to see it again at the cinema on Halloween. I loved how much the attitude toward Billy has changed in the last thirty years; every time he wailed about his blue balls, the audience hissed. Even if he hadn't been the murderer I think he would have been the clear villain of the movie.
speaking of movies that pulled their punch at the last second, I watched something very bad is going to happen and at first I was such a fan of the whole like marriage is a form of death kind of thing. but because it's made by the fucking guys that made stranger things, they pulled their punch at the last second and get real gender regressive with it in ways that pissed me the fuck off.
also re: 90s politics and not having a motive, there was a mass shooter in the 90s who shot up a school in san diego i think and the answer she gave for why she did it was "i hate mondays", so that also feels like. place & time accurate to me? not having a motive but doing it for fame/notoriety/boredom feels thematically appropriate to the era. edit: lol it was 1979 actually, not the 90s, i think i just assumed that based on my dad telling me the story. but that itself becomes an 80s-ish reference then!
Wiest… not West….
Hello IBWTR and you had me as a subsriber when I recently came across your 2-parter on bari weiss (yes, lower caps intentional). Regarding this particular episode, just fyi-ing another Patreon ally called "Movies vs. Capitalism. And, listening to you both is like ear candy for word geeks. Thanks for all your hard work!
The Robert Putnam joke killed me, "Serial Killing Alone" 🎳😆
Checkov’s taxidermy lol
On the prevalence of serial killers in the 70's & 80's in the area around Santa Clara, Caroline Fraser's book 'Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers' discusses the hypothesis that burning leaded diesel and other industrial pollutants in the 50's & 60's made the people who grew up at that time more violent. She focuses on the Pacific Northwest, but it sounds like this part of California had a similar industrial history. There is a fair amount of evidence for the lead-crime hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
idk if you can see this tumblr post with a tiktok video, but it's a song titled "victims run, killers walk" https://www.tumblr.com/panpteryx/764594798117240832/video-id-house-interior-a-pair-of-stereotypical
A podcast about gender politics....and California! I live in Maine and have genuinely learned so much about CA just from listening to this show.
Homework for everybody in patreon: watch All cheerleaders die. I heard someone call it trashier and gayer cousin of jennifer's body It's far from perfect but it's a trip. Just watch it.
Quietly chanting “lovecraft lovecraft lovecraft” over and over again until the bonus episode launches …
My roommate in 1989 randomly called Anne Rice without ever having met her and Rice talked to her for about 2 hours. I was present during this and remember it well!
This is so much fun and clearly you two are having a blast! Would love more episodes like this. Halloween is a natural but I also love how Kanopy (fun free library streaming service) then pivots to Noirvember and there are definitely some fun gender conversations to be had about the conventions of film noir, and how it morphs in subsequent generations of noir. Just a thought.
I mean, a noir episode would be incredibly cool!!!
Guesting on A Bit Fruity and dropping a new IBWTR episode on the same day? This is like finding a house that is giving out full size candy bars for Halloween, not the mini ones! Thank you!
I just opened this latest A Bit Fruity without knowing they were going to be on it, and you should have seen the grin that broke out on my face when I heard Moira’s laugh!
Its like you guys have an extra sense for when I have a project I need to cram and need something good to listen to, THANK YALL!