halloween special
© SOTT
It's that time of year again: when All Saints's Day, the Day of the Dead, and Halloween come around and our propensity to view or read some horror becomes that much more likely. But why do we indulge in horrific stories year around? Or better put - why do we seem to enjoy horror? What is it about horror, which can be so unpleasant - yet makes people crave a dose of the willies from time to time? Is the viewing or reading of it cathartic? A reminder of something intrinsic to the human experience? Can it even be healthy in a way? Or is it just morbid fascination? Maybe all of the above?

This week on MindMatters we take a look at some of our favorite scary books and movies and, in an effort to answer the questions posed, get into those stories and ideas that we find truly frightening; a top 5 more or less. We'll also be sharing some of our own scary experiences, and seeing what, if anything about them, has brought value to our lives and a greater understanding of the world in which we live.


Running Time: 01:34:14

Download: MP3 — 86.3 MB


Here's the transcript of the show:

Corey: Welcome back everyone. On today's episode of Mind Matters we're going to be discussing horror, terror, everything scary, because it's Halloween. It's that time of year. So we've got to do it.

Harrison: There's no other choice.

Elan: The show just sort of presented itself to us. We had nothing to do with it. {laughter}

Harrison: Sometimes it's just fate. It's that time of year. Why is stuff scary? Why do we go to horror movies, for instance? What's the attraction there? Why do we like monsters?

Corey: What is it about horror that's not just some biochemical thing? There are definitely aspects to horror that keep popping up, bad decisions, really bad decisions, that people make that lead to absolute catastrophe. like "Don't open that door! Don't go into the cellar by yourself! Don't split up! Don't trip when you're running away from the serial killer!" and then just fumble around on the ground. But there's more to it too, but there's a lot of morals.

Harrison: Well I guess you'd call them lessons in some way. There are some horror movies for instance, that deal with natural phenomena, whether it's some kind of natural catastrophe or even Jaws, right, with a great, giant shark. But there's a difference between what you would classify as horror or thrillers or something like that, and a nature documentary that might be equally horrible in some ways but it's not scary in the same way.

Elan: No.

Harrison: It seems to be that the scary things have to do with some kind of threat, almost like a predatory threat, that is part of the realm of the unknown and not just the unknown, but it's the unknown that creeps into your life and then confronts you with a potentially life-destroying element. So whether that's in the thriller and horror movies dealing with the rampaging killer or the methodical serial killer or the paranormal aspects of this supernatural threat, something that's even further outside of the bounds of normality that intrudes upon your life and you don't know what it is. It's part of the unknown and, at least in these movies and in some like real life experiences as we'll see, it is a menace.

So there's that element of predatoriness and of the unknown. Once you know what it is, that deflates the threat of it. This has happened a lot I'm sure in people's lives, where something threatening happens. You think your house might be haunted, for instance, because you're hearing these noises, and then you realize there's some animal on the other side of your wall that's just knocking on it or scratching at it. You think, "Why was I scared of that? It's not scary anymore once you know what it is, but it still would be scary if you found out what it was that was something totally out of the ordinary.

So there's that 'out of the ordinariness' that continues to be scary even when you do know about it.

Elan: Yes, because as you were saying Harrison, the fear of those things that are outside of the realm of normal day-to-day living in reality, once you do come to understand that those things that are around us and exist in our world that we may get inklings of in books or movies or tales told by people you know who had experience certain things, we realize or are reminded of the fact that there are things that are horrifying, that exists in this world and that even once you do come to know or have knowledge of them, in some instances - at least for me - they become even more horrifying because then the question becomes how might I deal with such a horror if I had to confront it or be in the experience of knowing it directly as opposed to second or third hand.

Today we wanted to talk a little bit about our first, second and third-hand experiences of those things that we find horrific, that scare the crap out of us...

Harrison: In a click-worthy top five scariest things format.

Elan: Yes, because we want your clicks, {laughter}...

Harrison: We want your smash likes. We want your - what are they called? What's that button called?

Adam: The hit smash like.

Harrison: The hit smash. We want your hit smashes on those buttons.

Elan: The other point to this, in addition to gaining your hit smashes certainly, is to get to the nitty-gritty here on this most intrinsic human experience that we have, as much as we can do here at Mind Matters. Like you were saying Corey, why do we seek out these films and books that are designed to scare us?

Harrison: Why subject ourselves to these tortures?

Elan: Right.

Harrison: I don't know.

Corey: Well I'd say at least one element is because probably for most of our time on earth, life has been pretty terrifying. It's probably in our genes to be terrified at just the sheer, immense potential for absolute catastrophe and doom, whether it's a neighboring tribe coming and slaughtering your village or it's something like an authoritarian government, the spooky stuff that still exists out there, the unexplained kind of things that just pop in and out of the world. It's just this big, haunted globe that we live on. I guess horror helps you to wrap your mind around it. It helps you to incorporate it into your conscious psyche I guess, for lack of a better word.

Harrison: If horror and the things that scare are in that boundary between and beyond the known and the unknown, if that's where these things reside, then I guess in a sense the more you expose yourself to those things in manageable doses, perhaps maybe the more resistance you get, the more immunized you get to that sort of thing. I think back to all the things that used to scare me as a child and the natural progression from is that probably all of those things don't scare me anymore, like being afraid of the dark as a kid. That's not really a thing for me anymore. Even some of the movies and things that terrified me as a kid, I could watch them now and chuckle because they're not scary anymore. Maybe we can talk about some childhood experiences first.

Elan: I'd like to. I was saving this question for you guys for later on in the show but I think I want to ask you now because you just said that Harrison. You just said that having these doses of horror in our lives through this exposure to films and other things can be a type of immunization in the way that it creates awareness of certain things certainly. But in my observation of reading and watching certain things, you know how you have that kind of tingling in the back of your neck and gooseflesh and you become extra sensitized to certain horrific things, which could be your imagination running off with you, or could it be, I'm wondering, a true sensitization. Do you get where I'm going with this?

Harrison: Give an example. The first thing that came to mind is after watching a really scary movie, then being hyper aware of the things going on and wondering if every little creak and groan in the house is something scary. What situation are you talking about?

Elan: Well in particular - and maybe now would be a good time to launch into a personal childhood experience - I was thinking of my feelings after reading this book...

Harrison: Okay.

Elan: ...which is a bio of Ed and Lorraine Warren who were a couple of paranormal investigators. The Conjuring movies are based on their experiences.

Corey: For everyone listening, the book is The Demonologist.

Elan: Yes, thank you, The Demonologist by Gerald Brittle. During and after reading it, I would just have to stop at some points, get out of my bed and get my bearings and felt - again, it could be imagination - but I felt like I was - I don't want to say vulnerable - but I don't know if it's just heightened awareness. My question is, when your mind goes in these directions, does it have a way of drawing them in?

Corey: When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.

Harrison: Maybe. {laughter}

Elan: That's actually very apt I think, because in a way it's like, okay you're aware of us. We're aware of you now being aware of us. That makes a certain amount of sense Corey. Thank you for that very quick kind of...

Harrison: Great, next topic. {laughter}

Elan: Next.

Corey: Next caller.

Harrison: Maybe we'll get into that as we go on because I think that's a tough question. I'd say in certain cases no, in other cases perhaps yes. So I'll be more wishy-washy about it. In the cases with 'no', with the example of true crime and reading about things like psychopathy and the kind of malevolent people that you probably will come into contact with if you haven't already in your life, the more you know about it, I'd say the better chances you have of dealing with it and perhaps avoiding certain situations. If you recognize the signs early, you can get out of a situation. Without that knowledge you would just run headlong into it, to the point where you probably can't extricate yourself from it.

So I think in certain cases like that, there is a protective element to exposing yourself to things of this sort. Now this might come down to your motivations and the intentions you have looking at these sorts of things because I think that people a lot of people can get almost a type of fetish for the sick and twisted. I think there's probably a scale of reactions from the people that just avoid it completely because they don't want that kind of stuff in their mind, they don't even want to think about it, to those who are intrigued by it. I think that's why a lot of people watch true crime documentaries and TV shows and things like that or just horror movies.

But then you get the people who are obsessed with that kind of thing. Then on top of that you get the people that, like the serial killers themselves who actually really enjoy that kind of thing, and maybe in that one end of the spectrum there's an element of the more you expose yourself to this, the more you embrace it and open yourself up to it - and I'm thinking about, for example, like people who get into like black magic and weird kind of rituals and things like that like the JPL guy who was into doing all kinds of weird rituals in the deserts, to...

Elan: Alan Parsons?

Harrison: Jack Parsons? Well Alan Parsons, wasn't he the musician?

Elan: Alan Parsons band. {laughter}

Harrison: Or Project. Aleister Crowley and stuff like that, where there's this element of really kind of wanting to invite that stuff into your life...

Elan: Right.

Harrison: ...as opposed to reading about it, having a visceral reaction to it, the way that you'd study something like a variety of poisonous snakes before going on a hike. The analogy would be studying those snakes because you identify with them and maybe you want to try out the venom on yourself or do some kind of weird thing with that knowledge.

So I think there's a whole spectrum of reactions and intentions behind that sort of thing. I think I knew a few people who are really into horror movies as a teenager, who really enjoyed watching the most horrendous things possible, what you'd probably call torture porn these days, the worse the better which is kind of a weird thing. But I think there's an element of that and for me personally, I've never liked that kind of horror movie, for instance. The stuff that I somewhat enjoy watching or just the things that are more scary or creepy, not necessarily the stuff that just is there to gross you out.

I think the creepy bits are the bits that, even then, a lot of people are attracted to for perhaps strange and unknowable reasons. That's part of the creepiness of the whole subject matter. There are individuals for whom these things are enticing in a way that most people couldn't understand. This goes back to our discussion of Israel Keyes when we were talking about serial killers and how you take a book like Mind Hunter or the other one that he read Dark Dreams or something like that, where most people who read those books are reading them for educational purposes or for professional purposes if you're actually getting into law enforcement or profiling or something like that. For Israel Keyes it was more like...

Elan: Your education.

Harrison: ...a reflection in the mirror. "Here are these people like me. Oh that explains the way I am and I can learn from this on how to be a better serial killer."

Corey: That's one interesting thing. I was listening to an interview with John E. Douglas, the original mind hunter and they based the series off of him. He was the guy who went and developed the whole behavioral unit for the FBI. He said that the serial killers really enjoyed talking to him because when he got really good, he could tell them why they were the way they were and he was the only normal person who knew them better than they did, which, I think, is one reason why people like Israel Keyes will read that. They get some insight and then also they get an idea of what everyone else is thinking and how to be five steps ahead of them.

Harrison: Maybe we can get back to that. Let's get on to our number five. {laughter} I'm not quite sure what number five will be yet. It's an exploratory process. But maybe we can start with some of the childhood things that scared us. I'll give some examples. This maybe will lead into the real scary stuff, but I remember when I was a kid there were three things that scared me the most as a young kid until probably my early teens. The first one I can remember is Indiana Jones-The Last Crusade. Not a scary movie but at the end when Indiana Jones gets to the chalice, the Holy Grail, there's that knight there that's guarding it, right? The bad guy chooses poorly. He grabs the wrong chalice and he drinks from it and then he starts disintegrating. So here's the image that haunted me as a child. I loved the movie so I'd watch it over and over again but at that certain age, until I got a bit older, I'd always run out of the room for that scene because it terrified me so much. So I'd run out of the room and I'd peek around the doorway to watch when it was over.

I never got nightmares about it. It was just something I didn't like looking at. I think it was just too gross. The thing that gave me nightmares was Ghostbusters. {laughter} Not the ghosts, but the terror dogs in the first film. So there are those like gargoyles, those dogs that come to life and they're these scaly beasts. I think we've got a picture of those. Yeah, it's up. I had nightmares about these dogs - I can't remember for sure, but it must have been maybe up to two years, maybe longer. It was a recurring nightmare that I had as a kid. I can still picture it visually. So this is a nightmare that I probably had more than 20 years ago, 25 years ago and I can still vividly remember at least one of those dreams. I've forgotten most of the variations but I still remember the one. Usually it was these giant, slavering beasts chasing me. From that point it was a pretty common dream, the feeling of being chased and then when you're trying to run and your body just won't move very fast so you're moving at less than walking speed and you're trying to run. You look behind and the dog is gaining on you. I had that dream repeatedly for years.

I think I only saw the movie twice but it stuck with me forever. I watched that movie again just a couple years ago and I think it's hilarious and funny and just a great movie, of course not very scary. So again, a second thing that, for whatever reason, was really scary and then stuck with me for years afterwards.

Elan: Well I would just posit that you trace back the chase dream to the devil dogs in Ghostbusters. I've had chase dreams too that felt like they went on for hours, that they were relentless, that I was being attacked and pursued by some thing. I've had a few of them. I had one in particular that felt like it went on. It's visceral. It's almost as though you don't have that distance you might otherwise experience in a dream where things just happen. You're an active participant in running away from this thing.

I've heard about other folks having dreams where they felt like they were attacked. So I think there's something archetypal about that devil dog in Ghostbusters that triggered something or that you assign to that imagery in Ghostbusters, but that really was part of another something in your psyche, in your experience.

Harrison: Well it's a pretty good representation of the ultimate hunting predator because it's not a canine companion. It is an exaggerated, almost demonic, dragon-like - I'm thinking of the Chinese cat dragons or Chinese lions for instance that you'll see in Chinatown or these giant dog-like creatures, dog-like, cat-like creatures, but in this demonic form that are hunting their prey, essentially. That of course, is a universal for humans, just being the weak, vulnerable creatures that we are in an environment that is just full of predators. It makes sense that for whatever reason, my child psyche latched on to that image as the one to represent that whole class of beings. Jordan Peterson quotes some researcher. It's the snake-lion something tree. It's like all of the super predators combined into one that humanity has faced for hundreds of thousands of years.

But then, one more from my childhood that was the scariest. I watched X-Files. My whole family would watch it every week. I can't remember what year it came out, but this was in season four I believe, it was the episode Home with the Peacock family. Let's get them up on the screen. Warning! So this was the scariest episode of the X-Files that probably there ever was. While I don't think I had nightmares from it, it was another one of those experiences that just stuck with me. I'm pretty sure I did watch this one when I was older, maybe in the past few years and it was pretty frightening even watching it now.

Did you guys ever watch the X-Files? Do you remember this one? It's the one where Mulder and Scully get called out to this house where something happened. They're trying to investigate and there's a family that lives there that are monstrous because all of the children, and probably the parents too, are all products of incest and Home takes place mostly at night and they keep the mother on this trolley underneath the bed and they've got booby traps set up and it is a horror episode, really. After they aired that episode, Fox told the producers that the Peacock family cannot appear on air again. {laughter} "We regret letting you guys do this so you're not doing it anymore." It's understandable because I think my whole family was freaked out by that episode.

That I think, is even scary today after watching it then. I can't say that about many things that scared me as a kid. What about you guys? Was there anything that you saw or experienced as a kid that still scares you today?

Elan: Yes. {laughter} To perhaps a lesser degree than it did when I was a kid, but when I was about eight years old a friend of mine told me about this movie he had gone to see with his family called The Amityville Horror. He was describing what had happened. This was a haunted house and it's a true story and the father was being driven to kill the family. This was based on a story that was about a real place in Amityville, a real house that was only a few hours from where I lived. The movie was based on a very successful book and this was in the mid-to-late 70s. I didn't even see the movie {laughter} and just the ideas that he was conveying to me about this scared the crap out of me. {laughter}

So for months I was wrestling with all these things that really happened at the house in Amityville. Finally I told my parents I was really scared and they told me that it was in fact a proven hoax. The whole thing was a hoax. There were articles in the New York Times about the idea that nothing really ever happened there. They were very upset that I had been upset by this stupid friend who told me about this movie that scared the crap out of me, that I'd never even seen. {laughter}

After that I never really followed up on the story of The Amityville Horror. Maybe I saw the movie at some point. I never read the book. Just a few years ago, as I mentioned a little earlier, I read this book called The Demonologist about the lives of Ed and Lorraine Warren. For those of you who've never heard of them or who haven't seen the film, these people were the real thing. They would go places where they were requested to investigate hauntings and poltergeists and really, really scary occurrences. But what they would also do is go to universities, churches and community centers and they would educate people. They would share their experiences, sometimes with photos and recordings. They would get people to understand that the types of events that they had experience with were in fact real, even if they were sensationalized quite often and that there were things in fact to be afraid of.

Anyway, so I'm reading this book and very early on in it - I'm just going to read a little bit from it because it kind of sets the tone for the rest of the book and it addresses the goings-on in the Amityville house.

"Ed Warren's office is located in a small cottage-sized building attached to the main house by a long, enclosed passageway. As Ed sat working on preliminary details of the Amityville case that fateful February morning, the latch at the end of the passageway snapped open followed by the percussive boom of the heavy wooden door. Footsteps then started towards the office. Ed leaned back in his chair waiting for Lorraine (his wife) to enter with a much-needed cup of coffee. 'In here!' Ed called-out. Long moments passed however and she did not appear. 'Lorraine?' I called out again, but there was no reply. What he heard instead, building in the distance, was an eerie howling wind. It was not the whistling of wind under the eaves but rather the menacing roar of a distant cyclone. Gooseflesh rose on his arms. 'Lorraine?' he asked forcefully. 'Are you there?' But still there was no response.

As the ominous swirling sound built in power and intensity Ed quickly thought back over the last few moments. It then occurred to him that he had heard only three footsteps in the passageway, not the continuous tread of a person walking. Something was wrong. Suddenly the desk lamp dimmed to the strength of a candle flame then abruptly, the temperature in the office plunged to that of a walk-in freezer. A rank, pungent smell of sulphur rose in the room.

Suspicious of the unnatural clamour, Ed Warren opened a desk drawer and withdrew a vial of holy water and a large wooden crucifix. He then got up and walked a few steps out of his office into the anteroom. As he did, there swirled out of the passageway a horrendous conical whirlwind, pointed at the bottom, broad at the top, the thing was blacker than the natural blackness of the night, far larger than a man. The swirling black mass moved into the dimly lit room and drifted slowly to Ed's left side and came to a halt some 10 feet away. As Ed watched, it appeared to grow even denser and blacker than it was before. Indeed, within the swirl, he could see that something was beginning to take shape. An entity was beginning to manifest in physical form. As a demonologist Ed Warren knew he had to act quickly, to take the initiative before this fearsome black mass transferred itself into something even more forbidding and dangerous.

Holding the cross toward what now was rapidly changing into a macabre hooded spectre, Ed Warren stepped forward. The moment he did however, the entity moved defiantly toward him. Ed stopped and stood his ground as the form slowly drifted forward. When the swirling black mass was no more than a few feet away, Ed methodically and with absolute determination, showered the thing in the sign of the Cross with the contents of the holy water vial. Then he spoke the ancient command, 'In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to leave!' For eternal seconds the black mass stayed motionless, no more than a foot away from the cross. Then slowly it began to back off, though not before giving Ed a clear vision of himself and Lorraine involved in a potentially deadly automobile accident along a highway.

With that, the entity withdrew into the passageway from whence it came. An enormous sense of relief came over Ed Warren as he stood sweating profusely in the freezing cold room, yet as he attempted to collect his thoughts, the vicious snarl of fighting animals suddenly erupted outside the house. Immediately Ed realized there were no animals fighting. The visitation was still in progress. The entity had simply moved upstairs to attack Lorraine. Avoiding the passageway Ed flung open the door to the office and ran up the back steps of the house. He would be too late. Upstairs Lorraine Warren sat in bed reading the biography of Pedro Pio, a remarkable Capuchin monk who many believe is destined for sainthood."

In any case the story goes on about this attack that the two of them received at the hands of this entity. If you've heard interviews with them and if you read the rest of the book, there's so much about that event that feels grounded in a type of reality that is just frightening to the core. After reading it, I had one of these moments where I had to get up and take a breath and really compose myself.

Something that they get into in the book is that they make the distinction between evil human entities and evil non-human entities and they account for many of the experiences that they've had with what they would call non-human entities that are extremely powerful and that knew of them and that wanted to scare them enough and hurt them enough to prevent them from investigating into what they were doing. In this case he was reviewing some notes about what had occurred in this house in Amityville.

So it really kind of drove home for me something that Lorraine Warren says later on in the book, which is that the events as depicted in the movie The Amityville Horror and in the book, were actually much less than what had actually occurred there, that things were far, far more hellacious for the Lutz family that moved out of there after a certain period of time. They were only there a short while. They had bought the house only a year or two after the previous owner killed his family in the house. So there was something very dark about that and it was a very strange reminder of this fear I had as a kid.

Harrison: Well I think that we can say, on our list, number five scariest thing ever goes to the idea of The Amityville Horror because that was a great story. {laughter} One of the things I was thinking about while listening to that is your parents' remark and the newspaper articles talking about it and all of the debunking that regularly goes on about paranormal things. My one-liner response to that sort of response is it's what adults tell themselves in order to not be afraid. It's a very strong motivator for stupid adults to think that they understand the world and think there's nothing scary about the world because I think deep down they would be just as scared as they were when they were kids if they were to accept that maybe there are a lot of weird and scary things that happen and that we don't really have a grasp of the totality of reality and the scary things that actually go on in it.

That might also be one of the reasons why people gravitate to ghost stories and horror movies and things like that. I think there is a reality to all of this stuff. Even if we don't understand it in all its details, I think it's very arrogant and stupid for us to just deny it and to just think that reality is this mundane thing. Even within that mundane reality there are terrifying things that happen and that go on and that are out there. Look at the monsters that are in human form. But there are things that are way scarier than that too.

Maybe that'll lead into the next category that I was thinking of. One of the other things that really scared me when I first encountered it were two nonfiction books, one written by John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies and the second was a book by Budd Hopkins called Intruders. Intruders was a book on alien abductions written in 1987. Probably most people have heard about Mothman because they made it into a movie in the late 1990s with Richard Gere. I didn't find the movie very scary but the book I found terrifying when I first read it. Again I re-read it in the last five years and I find it found it really interesting, not really scary at all.

If you want to go down the rabbit hole of weird paranormal things, that book it has got pretty much all of them. I've read a lot of John Keel. First of all he's a great writer. He's really funny and despite a lot of people who think he's just a hoaxer, I've read enough by him, about him and behind the scenes correspondence, to know that he was actually a very serious guy despite his Gonzo personality and the way that he would write in the image of himself that he projected. He was a serious researcher and he had this motivation to get to the bottom of things. Maybe that's one of those examples of the abyss staring back because he wanted to get to the bottom of all this stuff and in the process, encountered all of it and it resulted firstly in some very odd situations, second, some very unnerving situations and third, just some completely mind-boggling, unexplainable and pretty terrifying situations and things that happened to him. Some weren't even very scary but were just odd and weird, like stepping into some kind of bizarro reality. Meanwhile he's still living his everyday, mundane existence, but intruding in that existence is all of this weirdness, all this this new strange reality.

The second book was Budd Hopkins' Intruders. I've heard this from a lot of people. I started reading some stuff about UFOs and alien abductions when I was a teenager. I'd tell my friends about it at the time. I remember telling them stories and about this stuff in these books and seeing the looks on their faces. It was as if I were telling them ghost stories around a campfire. The eyes got wide. I remember one of my friends even telling me how scared he was. He said, "Oh man, if that stuff's real that's so terrifying." I was like, "Yeah, yeah. It's really scary!" Again, if you look at the whole alien abduction narrative, the storyline is pretty terrifying. The message to take away from any of those books is "You're not safe anywhere and you have no control over your life. There are these beings that can insert themselves into your life at any given moment and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Not only will the experience potentially be very frightening, but you might have PTSD for the rest of your life" or something like that.

So before that I watched the movie Fire In The Sky which was the dramatization of the infamous Travis Walton experience. I think that happened in the 1970s. I can't remember which year, a famous abduction experience. I watched that movie alone in my basement at night. I think we've got a screen shot from it. I think there's another one with the alien in it. It's really a bad movie but it was terrifying at the time. Again, I watched it several years ago and I realized what a bad movie it was and how it wasn't scary at all. But as a kid, at this point I hadn't read anything about alien abductions. I don't even know why I wanted to see this movie because I didn't know anything about it. But X-Files just terrified me. I don't think I had nightmares but I was terrified.

Elan: Well there are some scary scenes in that movie.

Harrison: The thing I didn't like about it watching it a second time is he gets taken to this UFO craft or something. It's not even clear where he is. It almost looks like he's on a different planet, underground. It's all dirty and there's layers of dust and grime on everything and they're doing these medical procedures on him and he wakes up in this kind of organic cocoon-like thing. It's all really creepy. I didn't like it later because I don't think any of that was in the actual account. They just added that in for dramatic purposes. But it was kind of gross and creepy. That's been the experience of pretty much anyone that I talked to who read anything about this or who watched X-Files or watched this movie. On first encountering that idea, alien abduction, it's always terrifying. A lot of people then say they have nightmares about being abducted by aliens after that. It never happened to me but again, it's this almost universal like fear that's associated with that topic.

I know a lot of people that of course just write off the whole thing as some kind of hallucination or hoax, which it definitely isn't. There might be a huge element of hallucination in it, but I don't think that accounts for it all and it's definitely not just hoaxes. There are thousands of people like this all over the planet who have had experiences like this and there are psychiatrists and psychologists who at least take it seriously to find out at least what can be done to help these people because they have had these traumatic experiences, whatever the real nature of them is. But there's this almost universal reaction to the idea that is very fascinating.

We can add that to the category of really scary things. There are these human predators, serial killers and raving madmen like you find in all the horror movies, which is scary. There are the natural predators that are scary, like Jaws. There are these supernatural demons that are scary. And then there are these aliens that, for whatever reason, are scary. Why are they scary? Science fiction has been around for hundreds of years. just before that, mythological, fantastical worlds and these kinds of otherworldly beings like the Greek gods or whatever, the gods from any culture. If you look at science fiction though, if you watch Star Wars and Star Trek and there are all these aliens and they're not particularly scary, it's just a bunch of these other species that look kind of funky and they're aliens. But something about the alien in modern pop culture is frightening for some reason. I don't really know why that is. Why would the aliens in the X-Files shape and form, why should that be scary and Jabba the Hutt shouldn't? What is it about that that's actually frightening?

I think part of it is that intrusiveness of the phenomenon as described by all of these people that have these experiences. It's having no power over your life and being just seemingly at the whim of some being that you do not understand, that you probably can never understand, that introduces this element of terror and violation into your everyday life. It's something that you can't understand that you have no control over. It's probably why it's scary. I don't know.

Adam: Well with Jabba the Hutt you have somebody who's physically there in presence and he's just a big blob. He might be physically intimidating because he's just so big, but he has definite shape. He has definite form. He acts coherently, for a logical purpose. But the popular conception of what we think of as aliens is very foreign to us in that they don't necessarily have definite shape or form. You read John keels work and the grey aliens thing isn't always the case. It changes depending on the person. It changes. So they don't have a definite form. And you don't know their intentions.

Harrison: Right.

Adam: Because you might think that it's one thing, but then all of a sudden these weird anomalies start coming up, again like with John Keel. He'll be investigating something and he thinks he has this idea about what's going on and then all of a sudden he gets phone calls saying yes that's the thing that's going on, or whatever it is. Then he's like "Well that's weird. How does anyone know what's going on in my head right now?" So that throws out time into this weird, foreign conception that, like you say, is just so foreign that we have no way of containing it within our minds. So that that terrifies us because if we can't get a hold on it in our own minds, then we're completely at the whims of...

Corey: I guess I have an experience that falls into that realm. Take it with a grain of salt because I was young - 16 at the time. I remember it like it was yesterday. My parents had been divorced for a while and we had a family business and I was in charge of the shop. My dad had a boat an hour-and-a-half away on a lake and he was out for the weekend. So I had the shop for the weekend and that meant I had complete 16-year-old freedom to do whatever I wanted so it was like a little paradise.

So I went to hang out with my friends for the evening and before I left I hadn't even gone to the house yet, but I assumed everything was just quiet and tranquil at the house. When I got back it must have been around 11:00 p.m. or midnight and all of the lights were on in the house. I thought "What the heck is going on here? This is strange." I walk into the house and the TV is on and every radio in the house is on and they're all playing these different sounds and everything.

In the back of my mind I thought there must have been a power outage and then when the power came back on, everything else came back on, or something. We had a dog outside and she was pretty chill so I wasn't too worried about what was going on. I went inside and I turned off everything and was just relaxing. I sat down in front of this window. There's a couch in front of an open window, cracked so that fresh air comes into the house. I sit down and I'm just sitting there and it sounds like the wind. At first it's the wind, but then all of a sudden the wind started to speak. There was this very audible foreign language that I was hearing and I thought "What the heck is that?" Then I snapped out of it and then I heard what sounded like footsteps on the side of the house, two stories up! Footsteps along the side of the house and then on the roof! I was like, "Well guess it's time for bed. I'm out!"

So then I'm getting up and clearly this strange, ominous thing is going on and there's footsteps and I'm like, "Alright, so what do I do now? Well, I could pretend like everything is normal or I could get the heck out of here and just blaze down the highway as fast as I can." So I ran out the side door and on the side door there's this big porch. The porch wasn't finished so there was a big gap underneath it and I ran out there and I my car was down these steps from the porch to the lane, to my car. Between me and my car was my dog and this big gap underneath the porch and my dog is just staring into the gap under the porch, growling, just a gnarly, gnarly growl. I'm like, "Whoah! Look!" {laughter} So then I just stepped back and I just took a run for it and leaped the distance onto the lawn and then I ran to my car, got in and then drove off and came back a few hours later and everything was fine.

I never had any other sort of strange experience like that again. It's one of those things, like you said. There's no physicality to it. There was no evidence of anything that had actually been walking around on the roof. There weren't any damaged tiles. There wasn't any damage to the roof. So like I said, you just take it with a grain of salt, but there's that dimension of human life that's just so weird.

Elan: Do you remember if all the lights and appliances were on when you got back there later?

Corey: No. I think everything was off. Everything was back to normal. I think I waited a day though to come back. Oh, that was the thing! When I left, I realized I left the furnace on. So I was like, "Oh no!" It was a propane-fueled stove or something that, gas. I thought "Well the house is going to burn down. I've got to go back. I had to go back and turn it off. But everything was fine.

Elan: Wow Corey!

Corey: It was a weird experience.

Elan: That is pretty crazy and it reminds me of an experience I'd had when I was in my early 20s that was weird in probably a different way but really horrifying. My family and I had just moved into a new apartment and one night a couple of weeks into this living there, just as you're about to fall asleep and you're in that kind of middle zone, I was in bed and I heard - the wall is right next to me and I'm lying down - and just beyond the wall I hear this: "Motherfu**er! {mumbling cursing-unintelligible}, like that, ongoing. So I spring awake because I'm like, what is that? It went on and on. {makes the same sounds again} like that.

So I was petrified because it greatly reminded me of, in addition to just being awoken by this really loud screaming female voice just here, right next to me, just beyond the wall, I'm wondering 'what is that?' I can't see it. I'm only hearing it and it's incredibly loud and disturbing and horrible! Swearing! So my mind went to the granddaddy of all horror films in my mind which kept me awake for many a night - The Exorcist. If we have a picture of possessed Regan, it's just a reminder of this truly almost traumatic movie that came out, I think in 1972 or 1973, William Friedkin's movie based on the book by Peter Blatty, about a young possessed girl. Truly one of the most frightening experiences to be had in a movie ever and this experience of this crazy screaming was a direct kind of recalling of.

I later found out that we in fact had a neighbor who was mentally quite sick, schizophrenic, violently schizophrenic and unfortunately I had to endure this type of thing for years because it was a legal wrangle. She wasn't legally permitted to live there but her mother lived there and would let her back in all the time. And where she chose to have her outbursts was in the bathroom right next to my bedroom wall.

Corey: Oh my god! {laughter}

Elan: It was tough.

Corey: Well that is another terrifying thing though, isn't it? Mental illness. That is terrifying.

Elan Yes It raises the question in my mind, now that I think about it, of whether or not there was an element of possession involved there, or not. Mental illness can be quite damaging enough as it is. So I don't know.

Adam: I think a good question with that is to ask whether or not you are possessed by an archetype, let's say. Are you being a channel for some strange archetypal evil of a sort with mental illness, Joker style? Or is it an actual conscious entity that's like "I'm gonna be f**cking with everybody?"

Elan: That raises a question in my mind. If such archetypes exist and would manifest themselves in people who were mentally ill, it's just strange to me because, aside from The Amityville Horror that I mentioned earlier, The Exorcist - and this is true of many people, there's been a lot written about it - this is a powerful movie that you really have to, I think, prepare yourself to see. It's not sensational in the way that a lot of horror is precisely because a lot of the events in it are based on real things.

So I do recommend that if you've never seen it before, but I would just say that one should be prepared because there have been a lot of stories around the making of The Exorcist and the weird things that have happened. There are things that feel or seem to be metaphysically true because it's not only a movie about possession, it's a movie about the priests and the mother and all of the wherewithal and inner strength they are required to muster in themselves in order to do this spiritual battle with evil on a very big level. The priest has to see through the lies and be stalwart, just like Ed Warren in a lot of the experiences that he's had in supporting exorcisms and going places and dealing with things.

There's almost a preternatural psychological knowledge that a lot of these demonic entities seem to have about the people that they're doing battle with. It's like they can go right into their minds, hearts and souls and find those things that are most vulnerable about them and attack. It's not just scaring the living bejesus out of people and doing things chaotically willy-nilly. There's intelligence involved. Couple that with wall splitting and things flying and feeling physically ill and physically pained by all of this induced evil, all of this malevolence that gets directed at you in the form of negative energy.

There's a reality to this and I think it's good to know about it because like you were saying earlier Harrison, after a time, even though I've never confronted anything more directly than eventually telling her to shut the hell up, dealing with something like this is on a whole other level. But having some knowledge of it, I think goes some way towards strengthening ourselves and being wise enough not to do the types of things to ever invite these things into your environment, into your psyche, because they are powerful things that seek to control and harm. So that could go on the top five somewhere for me.

Harrison: Well I think number four could be aliens and demons. I think that's a good number four. {laughter}

Corey: Number four. {laughter} Stay tuned for number one.

Harrison: We'll get through the top three pretty quick. These are in no particular order I should say. On the subject of your scary neighbor, it just reminded me of a freaky incident I had like that. Again, probably dealing with mental illness, not quite as dramatic but the image will always stay with me. I was working at a bookstore in my early 20s. I was at the counter and we had this guy come in. I think he'd probably been in a few times so we recognized him and knew there was something off about him. So one of the other employees was in the back of the store just to stay in a proximity to him because we weren't sure if he might be stealing or something like that. The other employee was just re-shelving some books and I was watching. So I could see both of them. There were some bookshelves in between but I could see the employee looking at the bookshelf that he was working on and then I could see the guy standing at the other end of the store staring directly at the employee. He just had this look on his face, this extremely focused but blank and kind of empty look on his face. He was staring and he was doing these hand movements.

Corey: Spells?

Harrison: Yeah. It looked like he was trying to perform some kind of spells or something and directing them at the back of this other employee's head. I just looked at it for a second and he didn't see me, but he just did it for a few seconds and I was like, 'What the hell is going on?!' Then he stopped and left the store eventually and nothing weird happened. I'm pretty sure this was around the time when we came into the store one morning and there was a - can't remember exactly what it was - I think it was a homemade doll. I can't remember what it was made of but it was left right outside the back door to our building, to the store. It was just this creepy thing. We're like, 'Okay, pick that up, put it in the trash and carry on with the day.

Corey: It never came back did it?

Harrison: No, it never came back, thank god!

Corey: Okay, good. {laughter}

Harrison: But these two things happened around the same period of time and were just creepy experiences. I can't remember what the doll looked like but the image of that guy just staring, mouth slightly open doing these weird movements with his hand, directing them at this other guy, I'll always remember that just because I've no idea what was going through this guy's head,

Elan: Well I'm just throwing this out there, but there's one story that the Warrens tell of being in Manhattan and Ed Warren being compelled to walk into this alleyway where he sees this homeless guy who's festering in rot basically. He's living in garbage. He's got boils and just festering and what happens is this homeless guy speaks to Ed Warren like he knows him and says, "We're watching you" or words to that effect, which suggested this kind of non-local, almost puppet-like power that some beings have over individuals, kind of like in the Matrix where the agents can step in and take over a body. It's really the stuff of horror films.

So when you were describing this blank staring guy doing this kind of spellbinding with his fingers, it's like mental illness? Yeah. Most probably. Maybe.

Harrison: But maybe something else too.

Elan: Maybe something else too.

Harrison: How are we doing on time?

Adam: We're about an hour in.

Harrison: Really quickly, top three. {laughter} No. Maybe really quickly let's talk about some horror movies for Halloween. Let's get in some Halloween spirit, if you maybe want to check out some films this Halloween season to get scared about. Again, if you don't like scary movies then don't watch any of these movies because they're scary. I think there are a couple of movies that stick out in my mind, classics that still have some scare value to them.

I've seen The Shining probably a dozen times and I don't really find it scary anymore, but it is a genuinely creepy movie. I remember being pretty freaked out the first time I saw that. One other old movie that has to get a mention is Silence of the Lambs, getting into the more thriller genre. This would be the dramatization of what would otherwise be true crime, serial killers, strange scary villains and murders and that kind of thing. There's a scene in Silence of the Lambs that stuck out for me and it still freaks me out to this day. It's the scene near the end where Clarice is going into the house and enters a room and it's pitch black, right? She's got her gun out and she doesn't know, but the viewer knows that the guy is in the room with her and has these night-vision goggles on. So you see things from his perspective. Go to the other one for a second. I'll explain this one first.

So at one point he reaches out his hand. So he's right in front of her. He's about to touch her and she has no idea. Leading up to that of course, you see her stumbling around in the dark because they actually filmed this in the dark so it's very realistic. She can't really tell where she's going. She can't see anything. It's pitch dark. This guy is there watching her. It cuts back and forth between the green night vision and then just the really dark shadow where you can see the guy's face with these night-vision goggles on. Of course it leads up to the climactic shooting event.

I think this is why kids are scared of the dark, and some adults. You don't know what's out there! This scene was just expertly shot. It's such a frightening scenario, to be in the dark, to know that there's someone else with you and not to be able to see them and on top of that, they can see you and they can then toy with you and sneak up on you, do whatever they want, and you're at their mercy.

Elan: They might as well be aliens.

Corey: Another movie that plays on a similar kind of theme is a new one, Midsummer. It's from the producer/ director/writer, probably all three, of Hereditary. In this one, he describes the premise as a breakup movie. So just imagine the worst relationship you've ever had, with no communication, all passive-aggressive, covert aggressive, no bonding, no substance to the relationship and then amplify that times a thousand. It's about some grad students who are going to Sweden on this trip. One is an anthropologist I think. Another is a psychologist. This girl has a catastrophe in her family and so she goes along with her boyfriend on this trip, who is also I think an anthropologist, or he's getting his PhD, and he has to write a thesis. He's a lazy bum so he doesn't know what his thesis is going to be about.

They go to Sweden to visit a big festival held once every 90 years by this commune. Of course no one read the Yelp reviews on this commune before they went over there. So they are all oblivious and they are completely unaware of the kind of danger they're putting themselves in until it's completely too late. Even then, all of the danger that they're in is plausibly deniable and is denied, not just by the commune members themselves, but most of the people who are there, most of the grad students. Each of them develop some egotistical reason to push all of the red flags to the side, sweep it all under the rug, until the final breakup scene commences. But it was described by the producer as a movie that's either going to disturb you to the core or you're not even going to be really fazed by it because it's not a horror, it's not a slasher.

It's a psychological mind bender. You get into these characters and you see every moral failing, really, that you could see. There's no sticking together, all of the infighting. It's so realistic, it's so well-written that you see the desperation that some of the guys have to finish their thesis so they can get their PhD. So they're willing to just sweep everything under the rug, all this weird stuff. Through just a limited use of violence it creates this ominous aura combined with Hansel and Gretel imagery and beautiful music and beautiful scenery. It's one of those movies I would highly recommend if you are into horror movies in general, especially the psychological kind. But watch it with somebody else and be prepared to take breaks. {laughter}

Elan: Well it sounds like part of the horror you're describing there is induced through gaslighting where you're not quite sure of what the reality is, or you're pushing it aside, or you're subjecting someone else to your version of reality that doesn't jive with what's objectively occurring and would seem to have something in common with the alien abduction scenarios that you were describing too Harrison, where those things just don't happen! "Anal probes? That's as far as it gets buddy!" But no, it's getting into the heads of a character who is dealing with the lies, or not dealing with the lies, but engaging the lies, when the reality is staring them in the face, where they're unable to acknowledge the danger. Put yourself right into the scenario and it can be very jarring.

But along those lines and getting back to some of the earlier questions that were posed at the top of the show, why do we like watching horror or thinking about it and is there any value to it? Does it give us anything that's beneficial?

There is an article written by Sigrun Danke Scar from the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, the same part of the world as that movie, and what he says is that it allows us to feel anxious in a safe environment. "The first of the three main reasons we like watching horror films is quite elementary. They entertain us." Then he goes on to say that:

"Personality tests reveal that those who are bored easily often score higher than others on a trait called sensation-seeking and that there are several studies that those who score high in regard to that trait show an increased liking of horror films. Thus some people jump off mountains with parachutes while others go to amusement parks to enjoy roller coaster rides. Horror film enthusiasts watch films. Another reason we are drawn to the darkest of film darkness is that the horror film is a way of unraveling evil. Formerly religious explanations of evil are nowadays given a diagnosis. One subjects the evil actions to scientific or psychotherapeutic explanatory models.

We are familiar with the diagnosis from, for example, forensic psychiatry, where different psychosis or personality disorders are assessed from a psychological and social perspective. In society as a whole, little or no discussion revolves around evil anymore. We simply do not believe in a demonic as a force in itself, perhaps with the exception of some extremely religious environments. However, in popular culture and especially in the world of film, evil is presented as an independent phenomena through the horror genre. Evil is reserved for this genre of popular culture because we no longer believe in the compelling explanatory models that the local priest once gave us. Ideas and myths like Frankenstein provide us with, for example, an explanation for human technological arrogance where the man-made monster turns on its own creator."

A third and last reason which he addresses is what he calls the anthropological and therapeutic utility of a horror film.

"It teaches us to deal with our own anxiety. This occurs partly through the familiar frameworks that are found in every proper genre film, including the horror film and partly through the rituals we build around the viewing experience. We see it in the way teenage boys occasionally use horror films as part of a kind of manhood test where it's about keeping one's composure as much as possible. In this perspective, the horror film becomes a way to test our personal and collective limits in a safe environment. If it gets too scary you can just cover your ears, put your hands in front of your eyes, ease the tension with an amusing quip, or turn to your popcorn bowl for comfort. In psychology we call this activation of a feeling emotional regulation. By watching horror films, one can have a sense of control over both the situation or the viewing experience and over the feelings of fear. Watching a scary film may possibly also function as a distraction from other feelings."

He also goes on to say, "Psychologist Johnson also notes Sigmund Freud's term Das Unheimliche, the uncanny, as a common theme from horror films. The term refers to how everyday situations or objects suddenly seem to be ruled by unknown forces-frightening. In several films by David Lynch and in the Twin Peaks series, it seems that this principle has been used almost directly. The horror film is one of the oldest film genres. Dating back to the silent film of the previous turn of the century we have been dreadfully delighted with this particular type of film."

So basically what this guy is saying is some of the things that we've been saying here today, that it's the extraordinary in the realm of the mundane that really gives us a fright. You were saying earlier Harrison how friends of yours who in their teens would watch these films, some of it really like gore porn, but I think a lot of it horror, testing the limits of ourselves a little bit and maybe there's a kind of natural leaning towards or intuition that tells us that having horror in a certain amounts of doses is a natural reminder of the world as it really exists and that we certainly shouldn't indulge in it. That can be unhealthy as well. We don't grow and we're not healthy unless we're exposed to a certain amount of stress in our lives and the horror genre, when it's done well, and if you're lucky enough to find the film that speaks to certain truths, can be a productive thing.

Harrison: That description that he gave about using it almost as a method of emotional regulation, that's pretty much been my experience of watching movies like this. I hadn't actually thought about it in those terms but that description seemed really accurate. For instance probably my favorite horror movie of recent years is Hereditary but with any kind of movie like that I'm constantly watching my own reaction to what I'm watching at the same time. So when there's a bit of suspense leading up to what might be a jump-scare or just a situation that you're not sure what direction it's going to go, I'm always checking back at myself and being slightly amused at the fact that I'm having this funny reaction to what I'm watching. There is almost an element of "Okay, can I get through this without covering my ears and shutting my eyes like I did when I was a kid?" It's almost like an exercise when I'm watching a movie like this, to see what I find scary and what the flavor of that emotion is that it provokes and then afterwards to reflect on it and think why was that scary and what were they doing within the scene to actually make it scary?

Like with the Silence of the Lambs thing, there are a few scenes in Hereditary where there are these subliminal tricks that Aria Aster is playing on the viewer where you don't necessarily notice them at first. Any good horror movie has these subliminal things to get you scared. In The Shining the set was deliberately designed to be nonsensical, hallways leading nowhere and to unconsciously make you feel as if you're in a maze at the end of the film. I think it was the show Haunting of Hill House, the Netflix series, there were some scenes like that where if you notice in certain scenes there's an actor off in the distance behind the camera dressed up as this ghostly figure that's being reflected in the glass behind an ordinary scene and if you don't notice it, you might just be slightly creeped out and you don't know why. If you actually notice it, you think well that's pretty creepy. What is that strange ghostly creature there?

They do the same thing in Hereditary where there are a few scenes where there's a ghostly nude figure standing in the background that you may or may not notice and eventually that becomes significant in a later scene. Or there's one scene in the dark and it's in a bedroom, so again the archetypal scary scenario, something bad happening in your bedroom where you're totally vulnerable. But if you look closely, in the shadows there's a character - I won't reveal who - that's clinging to the top of the ceiling in the corner. You can see it's circled here. You don't really notice it but then in the shadow this character crawls across the ceiling and goes out the door and when I watched it with some people, some people didn't notice it when it happened. I guess I was just looking at the right part of the frame when it happened so I noticed it the first time. But noticing it is actually probably scarier than not. So there are tricks that can be used that are there for a purpose. It's to scare you. That's why these people are making these movies partly, to make it scary.

So maybe next time you watch a horror movie, try to pay attention to all these things at the same time - the film itself, your reactions to it, try to gauge your own level of reaction and what your limits are. There are some times where well - not for scary stuff for me - but there are times where I feel the urge to close my eyes just because there's something I don't necessarily want to look at. But also pay attention to what the tricks are. How have all the decisions that these actors and directors of photography and directors in these scenes come together to scare you? What is it they're doing to make you frightened? I don't know. I don't know if it's helpful in the real world or not. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But I just know that sometimes when it's dark and I see a shadowy figure I still get freaked out. But maybe through all the scary movies that I've watched I'm not as freaked out as I would be otherwise. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not.

But since we've run on for long enough we should nail down our top three on this list. Maybe we should split up number four - aliens and demons. They can each get their own category. So we've got 5) the idea of Amityville horror, 4) aliens, 3) demons, 2) maybe we can add serial killers there and what and then our number one. We can end with each of our favorite scary movies. I just said mine. I think mine's probably The Shining or for new ones, Hereditary. What about you guys?

Corey: Oh, I'm definitely going with Midsummer.That's my favorite one that has recently come out. I used to really like horror movies. I used to enjoy them quite a bit but I had so many nightmares! {laughter} Over time I fell out of love with them for whatever reason and Aliens has still got to be up there because that bugger has been in my nightmares for years. {laughter} But yeah, I think that whatever I wanted to get out of horror movies I got out of them and Midsummer presented something far more intriguing, interesting, psychologically challenging, that required two viewings to really digest, really got the moral out of the story and was able to watch it with that sense of not being scared anymore. Now you're like "Oh okay, so now this is why that happened. That's why this happened." Like you said, you start to see how they put all these pieces together and like you said Harrison, I think it's good practice for just emotional regulation, watching a horror movie and just regulating your emotions. That's probably one of the biggest reasons why we do watch them, right?

Harrison: And it's a bit entertaining at the same time.

Corey: Oh yeah.

Elan: Well I'll just say that I'm looking forward to seeing Hereditary and Midsummer sometime soon. So I appreciate the recommendations. But just getting back to what was mentioned earlier, certainly The Exorcist, which I have no plans on re-watching and I really enjoyed The Conjuring of a few years ago...

Corey: Yeah, that was a good one.

Elan: ...which did have its element of possession and poltergeists and really scary things going on, but also was an affirmation of love and the love of Ed and Lorraine Warren for a family that they were trying to help and a love of family that was trying to together deal with some very, very disturbing events. So it had a point and that point is that all of this really shocking, evil, whether it comes in the form of demons or aliens or psychopathic serial killers, should include a psychological or the beginnings of a psychological response in your own mind, in your own being in order to help mitigate that situation should it ever - god forbid - enter your experience.

Corey: And we can't forget horror comedy either because that is by far my favorite genre of movie. So if you check out Tucker & Dale vs. Evil because that's the funniest horror comedy I've seen.

Harrison: Shaun of the Dead.

Corey: Shaun of the Dead. Yeah, check out Tucker & Dale vs. Evil.

Harrison: Evil Dead II.

Corey: If you want something light-hearted and not as heavy.

Harrison: Army of Darkness.

Corey: Army of Darkness, Bruce Campbell.

Harrison: Yeah.

Corey: Yeah. Great stuff.

Harrison: But Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, I'd recommend that one too. Very funny and it's got some genuine scares in there too at the same time so yeah, I'd recommend that one. Thanks for getting that one in there. I forgot about those.

Corey: Well if you haven't got anything else to add then we will wrap up this week's show and we hope you have a great Halloween and hope it's not too cold wherever you are. Stay warm. Hit smash like and subscribe. Thank you for tuning in. Until next time, see you guys.

Elan: Take care everybody.

Harrison: See you guys.