Emily and Henley, you’ve said you grew up pretty scared of horror movies. Did either of you have any experiences that were particularly formative?
Emily: I’ve thought about this a lot. I can’t remember a moment that necessarily started my fear, I think I’ve always been very squeamish and scared of things. I do recall being in my second-grade class watching Pinocchio and being so terrified, but not being able to leave because I was in class and didn’t want to look like a freak in front of my peers. But I was horrified back then by a Disney movie—which I will stand by and say is still a little bit scary. So that’s my threshold, a pretty low bar to start out with.
I mean, the part where they turn in donkeys…
Emily: Yes! That’s the part!
Henley: I think that, for me, I always thought that I could be brave—until I was around 13 and saw the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was trying to be cool… there were older kids watching it and I was like, “I can do this. This is fine. This is for me.” Then I watched it. We were going to a party after and I remember the whole time being like “Well, my life is ruined. I don’t know how to interact with anyone. My worldview is shattered. I feel the worst I’ve ever felt in my entire life, and I can never ever see another horror movie for the rest of my goddamn life.” And so, that’s the point that I’ve been moving away from slowly through this podcast, trying to become less deeply, deeply affected by horror movies. And you know what? I think it’s happening. I think immersion therapy is working [laughs].
That’s impressive—I remember that Texas Chainsaw remake. It’s a rough one. Sammy—what about you? Have you always liked horror movies? Did you have any impact from them at a young age?
Sammy: Yeah, I actually did. I’ve always been intrigued by horror movies, but I also was scared of them at a young age. I think the formative scary experience for me was watching The Exorcist at a friend’s house. It was on HBO or something and we just turned to the channel and decided to go for it. And while we were watching it, a window in the house shattered on its own volition. It was so crazy. And the craziest thing is that it happened again; the second time we tried to watch The Exorcist, a different window in the house broke and I was so certain that demons were real. Since then, I feel like demon movies have been the ones that I continue to be the most scared by.
Well, that’s understandable!
Sammy: Yeah, and through doing this podcast, my appreciation for horror movies has grown more and more. I started out as the bravest one, but I wasn’t necessarily a die-hard horror fan when we started this, and now I kind of am.
Emily and Henley, how did you get away with not watching some of the classics? I think Sammy recapped the Friday the 13th movie for you on a recent episode and I was wondering how you never caught that movie on TV or got roped into watching it during a sleepover.
Sammy: A miracle. A true, true miracle [laughs].
Emily: That really speaks to our hatred of horror movies, how diligently we’ve tried to escape seeing them! But more seriously, I think it was just so clearly a thing that I could not handle. And for so much of my life, I didn’t have a lot of friends that liked scary movies either. It was just not a part of my world. Though I do remember, when I was a kid and I’d just be watching TV late at night, anytime anything remotely scary—even a trailer—came on when I was changing the channel, I was leaving the room. I allowed no space for it, which I think maybe made it into a bigger deal than it may have been if I just sat through something. But it turned into a big, huge, unapproachable thing for me. I would not accept facing that fear and created a safe little bubble where horror movies did not exist.
"...anytime anything remotely scary—even a trailer—came on when I was changing the channel, I was leaving the room."
Henley: I agree with everything you just said, Emily. And my original “Too Scary; Didn’t Watch” experience was actually when I was really little. I got my babysitter to tell me the full recap of the Freddy Krueger movies, because I’m pretty sure I saw The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror special where they mentioned Freddy and I was like, I need to know the details. After that moment, I was so scared, so deeply, deeply, deeply disturbed and unable to sleep.
Sammy: And that’s something we’ve realized—sometimes it’s worse to just have a scary movie described to you because your brain might create the scariest version of whatever the story is. But sometimes, like with Nightmare on Elm Street, there’s actually a lot of humour.
Henley: It’s silly!
Sammy: Yeah, and sometimes in a retelling you miss that. So, facing our fears is important because then we can see that sometimes they’re not so scary.
Henley: We just did a bonus episode where Sammy showed me clips from certain horror movies and she included one of Freddy running, and it’s just the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.
Sammy: Freddy’s a fun villain! He has fun with it, man. He’s having a good time.
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Are you ever compelled to take to Wikipedia to read a summary of a horror movie if you’re too scared to watch it?
Emily: Absolutely. It’s kind of like true crime in that way—we want to know about the thing, but we don’t want to see it. And for me, the scariest part of a horror movie is the tension. I have a really hard time physically experiencing the tension of horror movies, even though it only makes me more interested. So, if I can read or hear about it and control the dosage of the scare for myself, I’ll opt for that. I also didn’t really feel the need to hear about them until the past few years, about the time we started the podcast, when all of a sudden there were all of these incredible horror movies everyone was watching. I felt like I was missing the conversation, so I’d force my friends to explain them to me.
Henley: That was the origin of the podcast—Midsommar had come out and one night we were hanging out and Emily and I were like, “Sammy, what happened?” We were very curious and we wanted to know the details, so we made Sammy recap it for us. We said to ourselves, “This is so ideal, this is the way we want to consume horror movies, just have Sammy tell us!”
Sammy, what’s the appeal of describing scary movies to someone who hasn’t seen them?
Sammy: Sometimes it makes me feel brave and often it’s fun to see Henley and Emily get scared a little bit! Some of my favourite episodes are the ones they really hate, like the Event Horizon one. Anytime it ruins their whole day, part of me feels very guilty but part of me enjoys it
Emily mentioned tension being the scariest aspect of a horror movie for her. What do you think are other particularly scary aspects of them? Jump scares, creepy music, gross creatures…
Sammy: The scariest things to me are always the real-life aspects. Usually, it’s the backdrop to the supernatural or scary thing that’s happening in the movie. For example, Let the Right One In is a vampire movie, but it’s also about bullying. And those scenes are what I find to be the most upsetting. Factors like child abuse and racism are other real-life things that are always the scariest part of horror movies.
Emily: I’ll second that because those aspects are often the parts that leave us feeling really terrible when we’re done talking about a scary movie. Those things are really happening. I’m slowly becoming desensitised and getting braver over the course of doing the podcast, but I often think about the moments in my life where it could’ve been the beginning of a horror movie.
"We always agree that the scariest thing is when humans are bad to each other."
Henley: We always agree that the scariest thing is when humans are bad to each other. Like in 28 Days Later, the twist at the end is that humans are bad. Or in Rosemary’s Baby, it’s a woman being manipulated. Those types of things are ultimately the scariest. And on a personal note, what I dislike most in horror movies is when they instill a feeling of dread in you, using the lighting to show how things are dirty and depressing and wrong. Some filmmakers are so excellent at giving you that feeling, and that’s why I strongly prefer to hear Sammy talk about it rather than watch myself!
Emily: Also, body horror movies can be bad, and I definitely prefer hearing about them rather than watching them. Even though they can be awful to hear about, sometimes you can turn your brain off a little and refuse to picture it. I truly can’t handle watching people’s bodies get separated or moved in ways they shouldn’t. Having a body is hard enough when it works right!
Sammy: As an alternative viewpoint, I love body horror.
Emily: Get out of here, stop showing off!
To side with Emily, that’s why I haven’t seen Crimes of the Future yet—it seems like too much!
Henley: Actually, there was something about it that was more tolerable than I expected. Maybe it was Kristen Stewart.
Sammy: I think it’s the absence of them feeling pain, because usually, the bad thing about body horror is the suffering, but in Crimes of the Future they’re evolved to not feel pain. So, while gross things are happening, it’s totally different from something like Saw or Hostel.
Henley: I found it much easier to listen to than, say, The Fly—another Cronenberg—which was all suffering in addition to nasty body horror. That was one of my all-time least comfortable listens!
What are your thoughts on the contemporary elevated horror we see a lot of these days? Jordan Peele’s films, The Witch, Midsommar—fare like that which have allegorical implications and elevated styles, compared to recent traditional horror movies like the Halloween sequels or The Black Phone, which are more about straight-up expected scares.
Sammy: Those movies—the reason we started the podcast—are so zeitgeisty and popular, they are making horror more mainstream. Personally, my favourite horror is when there’s a metaphor, something allegorical about grief or loss. But that’s not necessarily a new thing, I guess it’s just a bit more common now, which is awesome because it means that we get more horror films. But good horror has always done that.
Henley: One of my favorite things to hear about are interpersonal stories, and all the horror that arises between us. Movies like The Babadook do that so well, speaking of grief and how a family can become disfigured when they are confronted with managing loss in different ways.
Sammy: Also, horror can typically reflect historical context. If you take a step back and look at horror of certain times, there are connections, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre having a Vietnam War message, and torture movies arising in the early 2000s when actual torture was happening in the world. Today, we’re in a stage where a lot of our horror has to do with mental health, and we are in a a mental health crisis right now. So maybe in this current era, we’re getting a lot of metaphorical horror leaning more into painful emotions.
Henley: Like anxiety.
Sammy: Exactly. Those feelings are so paramount in movies like Midsommar or Hereditary.
What do you think about slasher movies like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street?
Henley: They’re fun date movies! I mean, they wouldn’t be for me, but I think that’s why they became so popular in the ‘80s. Everyone was going to the movie theatre every week to see Jason or Freddy, as slasher movie after slasher movie came out. There are so many movies in each franchise—and there’s a reason they kept being made. People ate up the formula—one man who has one weapon who moves really slowly…
Emily: It is so funny to not be able to outrun a very, very slow killer!
Henley: And usually it’s teens who are having sex or doing some other nefarious business, just getting picked off one by one. The audience loves to watch it.
Sammy: Scream got meta with it, of course, identifying all of these factors. The group of teenagers is usually very unlikable—minus the final girl, of course. And usually, you actually end up rooting for the killer because the teens are very annoying!
Emily: Or too promiscuous!
And speaking of final girls—any favourites?
Sammy: I’ve got to go with Ripley from Alien. It really doesn’t get much better than Ripley. She’s so badass.
Emily: Yeah, she’s really an icon.
Henley: That’s definitely the best answer. But I’m going to say my favourite final girl I’ve heard about is Erin from You’re Next. She’s just so competent from the beginning and knows exactly what to do. You never see that with women in horror movies. Ripley is a similar character in that way—in charge and knowing exactly what’s going on.
Emily: Sammy always says that her favourite type of final girl are the ones you get to see her at the end, with nothing left to lose, in survival mode, getting gnarly.
Sammy: It’s when it’s literally life or death, that moment where the final girl just has a switch flip and she goes into a primal killing rage. It’s great. Very cathartic and awesome to watch.
"It’s when it’s literally life or death, that moment where the final girl just has a switch flip and she goes into a primal killing rage. It’s great. Very cathartic and awesome to watch."
Emily: I also really liked Samara Weaving’s character in Ready Or Not. In the end, she just goes ape shit on that guy, and it’s just so fun to watch a woman not give a fuck, especially when you’ve watched her earn that right.
For so long, white men largely ran the horror space, but in the past decade, it’s become so much more of an inclusive genre for women and people of colour. Any of those voices in particular that you admire?
Henley: Jennifer Kent. She did The Babadook.
Sammy: I love Jennifer Kent. Also, Karyn Kusama.
Emily: I’ve not seen any of her movies, and I never will, but we also love Julia Ducournau.
Henley: Love Julia.
Emily: Not only are the movies she makes so important, but she is so cool. Also, Jordan Peele’s movies are another thing that got me into watching horror movies. His movies just seemed like they had to be watched, like it would be unacceptable to miss them. And that’s something that has happened by just including more voices in the genre, then you get different perspectives and obviously that’s so important. That has also really elevated horror in the past few years; we’re not just seeing the same type of perspective in horror movies over and over again.
Henley: The formula of horror movies is so appealing, but also something is happening now where more people are making them and reimagining that formula, and breaking it and seeing stories in new ways. That’s what we’re excited for. There are so many horror movies coming out made for a wide variety of people.
Emily: We talked earlier about how the scariest thing is humans and the reality of living in this world. And the world is a lot scarier for people who aren’t straight white men. So that’s another thing about these new movies, getting into the horror and trauma of existing as different humans on this earth. There are so many perspectives. So that has really served to elevate horror recently as well because the world is a really scary place for a lot of people. And it’s important to show that.
It's a good time to have a horror movie podcast.
Emily: It can be therapeutic to release a lot of the anxieties in the world into this format.
What were your favourite episodes to record?
Emily: Our Cabin in the Woods episode was one of our early quarantine episodes. That’s one of my favourite movies and episodes to record. We were all in a very loopy head space and while we love having guests, anytime it ends up being just the three of us it gets back to the core of what this podcast is—me talking to my friends and laughing. That episode is just a perfect encapsulation of how we talk to each other.
Henley: Another one I really enjoyed recording was The Descent because I actually watched it that time with Sammy and our dear friend Jenna. They had both seen it a million times and so watching it for the first time with them was so much fun, and doing the recap was great because I’d seen it. Also, that movie was one that I actually enjoyed.
Emily: It’s been amazing having guests on who have been in horror movies or directed them. It’s great to get their perspectives. Paul Tomkins, Haley Joel Osment, Eugene Cordero—those are some of the people we loved having on. And Betsy Sodaro is amazing every time she comes on. We feel really lucky that the podcast has allowed us to talk to people we think are cool!
Henley: Chuck Bryant, from the podcast Stuff You Should Know, did the movie Don’t Breathe and it was very exciting to have him talk to us about it.
Any plans for the future of the podcast?
Sammy: There are quite a few good horror movies that have come out—Nope, Bodies Bodies Bodies, one called Prey out on Hulu, made by Dan Trachtenberg who we’ll have on as a guest. We’re excited! We’d love to do some form of live show in the future, but TBD. We’ll do whatever it takes to keep doing this because we love doing it so much!
Emily: We started this podcast literally in my living room with the worst possible audio equipment and a very little plan about how to do it. I think what made the podcast catch fire at the beginning is we weren't trying to do anything other than talk about movies in a way that was interesting to us. I think not doing it for any reason other than that really helped the podcast find its voice, and we’re very grateful people enjoy listening.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Emily and Henley, you’ve said you grew up pretty scared of horror movies. Did either of you have any experiences that were particularly formative?
Emily: I’ve thought about this a lot. I can’t remember a moment that necessarily started my fear, I think I’ve always been very squeamish and scared of things. I do recall being in my second-grade class watching Pinocchio and being so terrified, but not being able to leave because I was in class and didn’t want to look like a freak in front of my peers. But I was horrified back then by a Disney movie—which I will stand by and say is still a little bit scary. So that’s my threshold, a pretty low bar to start out with.
I mean, the part where they turn in donkeys…
Emily: Yes! That’s the part!
Henley: I think that, for me, I always thought that I could be brave—until I was around 13 and saw the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was trying to be cool… there were older kids watching it and I was like, “I can do this. This is fine. This is for me.” Then I watched it. We were going to a party after and I remember the whole time being like “Well, my life is ruined. I don’t know how to interact with anyone. My worldview is shattered. I feel the worst I’ve ever felt in my entire life, and I can never ever see another horror movie for the rest of my goddamn life.” And so, that’s the point that I’ve been moving away from slowly through this podcast, trying to become less deeply, deeply affected by horror movies. And you know what? I think it’s happening. I think immersion therapy is working [laughs].
That’s impressive—I remember that Texas Chainsaw remake. It’s a rough one. Sammy—what about you? Have you always liked horror movies? Did you have any impact from them at a young age?
Sammy: Yeah, I actually did. I’ve always been intrigued by horror movies, but I also was scared of them at a young age. I think the formative scary experience for me was watching The Exorcist at a friend’s house. It was on HBO or something and we just turned to the channel and decided to go for it. And while we were watching it, a window in the house shattered on its own volition. It was so crazy. And the craziest thing is that it happened again; the second time we tried to watch The Exorcist, a different window in the house broke and I was so certain that demons were real. Since then, I feel like demon movies have been the ones that I continue to be the most scared by.
Well, that’s understandable!
Sammy: Yeah, and through doing this podcast, my appreciation for horror movies has grown more and more. I started out as the bravest one, but I wasn’t necessarily a die-hard horror fan when we started this, and now I kind of am.
Emily and Henley, how did you get away with not watching some of the classics? I think Sammy recapped the Friday the 13th movie for you on a recent episode and I was wondering how you never caught that movie on TV or got roped into watching it during a sleepover.
Sammy: A miracle. A true, true miracle [laughs].
Emily: That really speaks to our hatred of horror movies, how diligently we’ve tried to escape seeing them! But more seriously, I think it was just so clearly a thing that I could not handle. And for so much of my life, I didn’t have a lot of friends that liked scary movies either. It was just not a part of my world. Though I do remember, when I was a kid and I’d just be watching TV late at night, anytime anything remotely scary—even a trailer—came on when I was changing the channel, I was leaving the room. I allowed no space for it, which I think maybe made it into a bigger deal than it may have been if I just sat through something. But it turned into a big, huge, unapproachable thing for me. I would not accept facing that fear and created a safe little bubble where horror movies did not exist.
"...anytime anything remotely scary—even a trailer—came on when I was changing the channel, I was leaving the room."
Henley: I agree with everything you just said, Emily. And my original “Too Scary; Didn’t Watch” experience was actually when I was really little. I got my babysitter to tell me the full recap of the Freddy Krueger movies, because I’m pretty sure I saw The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror special where they mentioned Freddy and I was like, I need to know the details. After that moment, I was so scared, so deeply, deeply, deeply disturbed and unable to sleep.
Sammy: And that’s something we’ve realized—sometimes it’s worse to just have a scary movie described to you because your brain might create the scariest version of whatever the story is. But sometimes, like with Nightmare on Elm Street, there’s actually a lot of humour.
Henley: It’s silly!
Sammy: Yeah, and sometimes in a retelling you miss that. So, facing our fears is important because then we can see that sometimes they’re not so scary.
Henley: We just did a bonus episode where Sammy showed me clips from certain horror movies and she included one of Freddy running, and it’s just the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.
Sammy: Freddy’s a fun villain! He has fun with it, man. He’s having a good time.
Are you ever compelled to take to Wikipedia to read a summary of a horror movie if you’re too scared to watch it?
Emily: Absolutely. It’s kind of like true crime in that way—we want to know about the thing, but we don’t want to see it. And for me, the scariest part of a horror movie is the tension. I have a really hard time physically experiencing the tension of horror movies, even though it only makes me more interested. So, if I can read or hear about it and control the dosage of the scare for myself, I’ll opt for that. I also didn’t really feel the need to hear about them until the past few years, about the time we started the podcast, when all of a sudden there were all of these incredible horror movies everyone was watching. I felt like I was missing the conversation, so I’d force my friends to explain them to me.
Henley: That was the origin of the podcast—Midsommar had come out and one night we were hanging out and Emily and I were like, “Sammy, what happened?” We were very curious and we wanted to know the details, so we made Sammy recap it for us. We said to ourselves, “This is so ideal, this is the way we want to consume horror movies, just have Sammy tell us!”
Sammy, what’s the appeal of describing scary movies to someone who hasn’t seen them?
Sammy: Sometimes it makes me feel brave and often it’s fun to see Henley and Emily get scared a little bit! Some of my favourite episodes are the ones they really hate, like the Event Horizon one. Anytime it ruins their whole day, part of me feels very guilty but part of me enjoys it
Emily mentioned tension being the scariest aspect of a horror movie for her. What do you think are other particularly scary aspects of them? Jump scares, creepy music, gross creatures…
Sammy: The scariest things to me are always the real-life aspects. Usually, it’s the backdrop to the supernatural or scary thing that’s happening in the movie. For example, Let the Right One In is a vampire movie, but it’s also about bullying. And those scenes are what I find to be the most upsetting. Factors like child abuse and racism are other real-life things that are always the scariest part of horror movies.
Emily: I’ll second that because those aspects are often the parts that leave us feeling really terrible when we’re done talking about a scary movie. Those things are really happening. I’m slowly becoming desensitised and getting braver over the course of doing the podcast, but I often think about the moments in my life where it could’ve been the beginning of a horror movie.
"We always agree that the scariest thing is when humans are bad to each other."
Henley: We always agree that the scariest thing is when humans are bad to each other. Like in 28 Days Later, the twist at the end is that humans are bad. Or in Rosemary’s Baby, it’s a woman being manipulated. Those types of things are ultimately the scariest. And on a personal note, what I dislike most in horror movies is when they instill a feeling of dread in you, using the lighting to show how things are dirty and depressing and wrong. Some filmmakers are so excellent at giving you that feeling, and that’s why I strongly prefer to hear Sammy talk about it rather than watch myself!
Emily: Also, body horror movies can be bad, and I definitely prefer hearing about them rather than watching them. Even though they can be awful to hear about, sometimes you can turn your brain off a little and refuse to picture it. I truly can’t handle watching people’s bodies get separated or moved in ways they shouldn’t. Having a body is hard enough when it works right!
Sammy: As an alternative viewpoint, I love body horror.
Emily: Get out of here, stop showing off!
To side with Emily, that’s why I haven’t seen Crimes of the Future yet—it seems like too much!
Henley: Actually, there was something about it that was more tolerable than I expected. Maybe it was Kristen Stewart.
Sammy: I think it’s the absence of them feeling pain, because usually, the bad thing about body horror is the suffering, but in Crimes of the Future they’re evolved to not feel pain. So, while gross things are happening, it’s totally different from something like Saw or Hostel.
Henley: I found it much easier to listen to than, say, The Fly—another Cronenberg—which was all suffering in addition to nasty body horror. That was one of my all-time least comfortable listens!
What are your thoughts on the contemporary elevated horror we see a lot of these days? Jordan Peele’s films, The Witch, Midsommar—fare like that which have allegorical implications and elevated styles, compared to recent traditional horror movies like the Halloween sequels or The Black Phone, which are more about straight-up expected scares.
Sammy: Those movies—the reason we started the podcast—are so zeitgeisty and popular, they are making horror more mainstream. Personally, my favourite horror is when there’s a metaphor, something allegorical about grief or loss. But that’s not necessarily a new thing, I guess it’s just a bit more common now, which is awesome because it means that we get more horror films. But good horror has always done that.
Henley: One of my favorite things to hear about are interpersonal stories, and all the horror that arises between us. Movies like The Babadook do that so well, speaking of grief and how a family can become disfigured when they are confronted with managing loss in different ways.
Sammy: Also, horror can typically reflect historical context. If you take a step back and look at horror of certain times, there are connections, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre having a Vietnam War message, and torture movies arising in the early 2000s when actual torture was happening in the world. Today, we’re in a stage where a lot of our horror has to do with mental health, and we are in a a mental health crisis right now. So maybe in this current era, we’re getting a lot of metaphorical horror leaning more into painful emotions.
Henley: Like anxiety.
Sammy: Exactly. Those feelings are so paramount in movies like Midsommar or Hereditary.
What do you think about slasher movies like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street?
Henley: They’re fun date movies! I mean, they wouldn’t be for me, but I think that’s why they became so popular in the ‘80s. Everyone was going to the movie theatre every week to see Jason or Freddy, as slasher movie after slasher movie came out. There are so many movies in each franchise—and there’s a reason they kept being made. People ate up the formula—one man who has one weapon who moves really slowly…
Emily: It is so funny to not be able to outrun a very, very slow killer!
Henley: And usually it’s teens who are having sex or doing some other nefarious business, just getting picked off one by one. The audience loves to watch it.
Sammy: Scream got meta with it, of course, identifying all of these factors. The group of teenagers is usually very unlikable—minus the final girl, of course. And usually, you actually end up rooting for the killer because the teens are very annoying!
Emily: Or too promiscuous!
And speaking of final girls—any favourites?
Sammy: I’ve got to go with Ripley from Alien. It really doesn’t get much better than Ripley. She’s so badass.
Emily: Yeah, she’s really an icon.
Henley: That’s definitely the best answer. But I’m going to say my favourite final girl I’ve heard about is Erin from You’re Next. She’s just so competent from the beginning and knows exactly what to do. You never see that with women in horror movies. Ripley is a similar character in that way—in charge and knowing exactly what’s going on.
Emily: Sammy always says that her favourite type of final girl are the ones you get to see her at the end, with nothing left to lose, in survival mode, getting gnarly.
Sammy: It’s when it’s literally life or death, that moment where the final girl just has a switch flip and she goes into a primal killing rage. It’s great. Very cathartic and awesome to watch.
"It’s when it’s literally life or death, that moment where the final girl just has a switch flip and she goes into a primal killing rage. It’s great. Very cathartic and awesome to watch."
Emily: I also really liked Samara Weaving’s character in Ready Or Not. In the end, she just goes ape shit on that guy, and it’s just so fun to watch a woman not give a fuck, especially when you’ve watched her earn that right.
For so long, white men largely ran the horror space, but in the past decade, it’s become so much more of an inclusive genre for women and people of colour. Any of those voices in particular that you admire?
Henley: Jennifer Kent. She did The Babadook.
Sammy: I love Jennifer Kent. Also, Karyn Kusama.
Emily: I’ve not seen any of her movies, and I never will, but we also love Julia Ducournau.
Henley: Love Julia.
Emily: Not only are the movies she makes so important, but she is so cool. Also, Jordan Peele’s movies are another thing that got me into watching horror movies. His movies just seemed like they had to be watched, like it would be unacceptable to miss them. And that’s something that has happened by just including more voices in the genre, then you get different perspectives and obviously that’s so important. That has also really elevated horror in the past few years; we’re not just seeing the same type of perspective in horror movies over and over again.
Henley: The formula of horror movies is so appealing, but also something is happening now where more people are making them and reimagining that formula, and breaking it and seeing stories in new ways. That’s what we’re excited for. There are so many horror movies coming out made for a wide variety of people.
Emily: We talked earlier about how the scariest thing is humans and the reality of living in this world. And the world is a lot scarier for people who aren’t straight white men. So that’s another thing about these new movies, getting into the horror and trauma of existing as different humans on this earth. There are so many perspectives. So that has really served to elevate horror recently as well because the world is a really scary place for a lot of people. And it’s important to show that.
It's a good time to have a horror movie podcast.
Emily: It can be therapeutic to release a lot of the anxieties in the world into this format.
What were your favourite episodes to record?
Emily: Our Cabin in the Woods episode was one of our early quarantine episodes. That’s one of my favourite movies and episodes to record. We were all in a very loopy head space and while we love having guests, anytime it ends up being just the three of us it gets back to the core of what this podcast is—me talking to my friends and laughing. That episode is just a perfect encapsulation of how we talk to each other.
Henley: Another one I really enjoyed recording was The Descent because I actually watched it that time with Sammy and our dear friend Jenna. They had both seen it a million times and so watching it for the first time with them was so much fun, and doing the recap was great because I’d seen it. Also, that movie was one that I actually enjoyed.
Emily: It’s been amazing having guests on who have been in horror movies or directed them. It’s great to get their perspectives. Paul Tomkins, Haley Joel Osment, Eugene Cordero—those are some of the people we loved having on. And Betsy Sodaro is amazing every time she comes on. We feel really lucky that the podcast has allowed us to talk to people we think are cool!
Henley: Chuck Bryant, from the podcast Stuff You Should Know, did the movie Don’t Breathe and it was very exciting to have him talk to us about it.
Any plans for the future of the podcast?
Sammy: There are quite a few good horror movies that have come out—Nope, Bodies Bodies Bodies, one called Prey out on Hulu, made by Dan Trachtenberg who we’ll have on as a guest. We’re excited! We’d love to do some form of live show in the future, but TBD. We’ll do whatever it takes to keep doing this because we love doing it so much!
Emily: We started this podcast literally in my living room with the worst possible audio equipment and a very little plan about how to do it. I think what made the podcast catch fire at the beginning is we weren't trying to do anything other than talk about movies in a way that was interesting to us. I think not doing it for any reason other than that really helped the podcast find its voice, and we’re very grateful people enjoy listening.
This interview has been edited and condensed.