Scaring Children and Other Fun Halloween Activities — Ep. 21 of Intentionally Blank

[Music] so um my wife is the halloween grinch the halloween grinch the halloween grinch my wife does not like halloween if you're a halloween grinch though does that make you like some sort of nice fairy type individual right is it like reversal would like a a halloween grinch be expected um right like like it's yeah like it seems like the the polar opposite effect would be in place except of course that everyone loves halloween and so anyone who hates it is a bad person oh wow we'll see what happens when she uh watches she listens to this episode and i get in big trouble i love emily i don't wanna say that no but um that is interesting she doesn't like creepy things like the gruesomeness and things like that she thinks is kind of nauseating and discomforting um in a way that she just thinks why are we celebrating something that seems so evil uh she does not like how it fills her children with candy and how my children who love halloween get really excited about it way early and are every year break into the halloween decorations well before they should and have her house covered in tombstones and bloody fake prints on the windows and that stretchy spider webs spiderwebs everywhere and she hates that uh she hates the production of having to get everyone's costumes ready because all the kids want to have of course a costume but they don't want to do any work to have a costume yeah she just dislikes halloween in basically every way that is very interesting to me first of all big ups to her for still having the halloween decorations in the house and accessible even though she hates them like good mom vibes there uh but it's interesting because she hates all aspects of halloween yeah i haven't found an aspect of halloween that she likes there there are parts of halloween that i dislike i love halloween except i don't like being a dad for halloween taking the kids trick-or-treating that is onerous and terrible to me okay um i don't like having to coordinate the giant family themed costumes that the kids always want to do where we have to figure out like which eight star wars characters are we going to be able to dress up as this year so they theme your kids my kids theme okay um we talked them out of it most of the time um this year my wife and i and our six-year-old are theming and everyone else is just on their own my kids do the opposite of theming they get mad at another one's costume is too similar to what they came up with that's fascinating so like they can't even have like two marvel superheroes they get mad about that they sometimes are okay but usually they'll get mad that's crazy because if you're both superheroes then you can like play together that makes sense to me but whatever so you hate the dadding part i don't like the dadding part what i want to do on halloween is i want to watch scary movies and i want to like hand out candy and scare the kids that come to my house which i could do when i was single or when i you know just had babies but now you know the last 19 18 years i have to go trick-or-treating every time and walk around and they always get tired and ornery and it just ah trick-or-treating is not fun for me here's a couple things that surprised me of this my children when they're young enough to need an adult with them trick-or-treating get have gotten tired of it quickly enough that it's like a half hour or 45 minutes and then home right and by the time they want to go more than that they're 10 or 11 i'm like off you go we'll see ya when you get tired of it uh don't take more than one piece if people leave out a bowl uh be nice to the other kids and that's kind of the realm i'm in right now where even my eight-year-old is like goodbye have fun uh go with some friends man wouldn't that be the tops no i i maybe it's i don't know maybe i've just raised kids that like spending time with each other they theme their costumes and they all want to go trick-or-treating together except you know once they hit teenage years right then they don't have time for any of us but like my six-year-old first of all we have to talk about the six-year-old loves halloween she loves halloween more than like i used to when i was her age which i didn't think was possible she started planning halloween decorations and costumes the day after christmas last year and that is that is entire life um she you know every couple of weeks she'll come to me with a new thing she's sketched out about where she wants to put all the tombstones in the yard and things like that which is delightful because we didn't even actually own any tombstones until this year um but they became a thing a year or two ago maybe a little longer ago where you could buy the the kind of fake concrete ones yeah and then you like scratch a name on them or paint a name we've got a bunch of them that are all their friends um tombstones oh that's awesome so mine that loves halloween is my 11 year old which uh if anyone's watched my youtube channel he's the one that loves to come on and do meme reviews and it's dallin okay he is uh and he just clicks with spooky stuff um in a way that my wife does not in the opposite way uh he's the one that like you can show any horror movie to at 11 right yeah he's the one that i play doom the new doom with right in any movie he doesn't get scared he says oh how'd they do that dad um he finds it really fascinating where my older son joel does not like scary stuff does not want to be anywhere near it and you know he's two years older than alan but yeah dallin we have this problem with every year where he has this problem that what he wants to do all halloween night is lay on the porch face down in ragged clothing covered in blood yeah so that when people come up he can go and rise from the dead see that's awesome that's what i want to do on halloween and i have to go trick-or-treating instead why is it a problem that darwin wants to do that because he tells us he also wants candy right and so he every year has this like big war within himself do i go trick-or-treating or do i lay on the porch on the one night i can be covered in blood and be a zombie and everyone will think it's cool and by the way they don't he legitimately scares all the little kids he trails after them after they leave like all the way down the driveway to the next house over he's shuffling after them and things like that like he really leans into it that is wonderful and i love it he has the danwell seal of approval um yeah that's great see that that's that's the thing that gets me about halloween that i would love to do is you know set up the stuff and my dad was the same way scare people in the yard set out some kind of you know speakers and microphones and uh do that kind of thing my dad vincent price into the microphone as they walk up talk to people my dad and i used to work when i was a teenager we used to work in a local haunted house um and just we love that kind of stuff um so with dallin can you just like buy him a big variety pack of milky ways or whatever and say okay scare kids and then here's your candy at the end that's what we've done about half the years he's just agreed to take payment for being our halloween decoration um but the the other weird thing is he always comes up with some cool costume he wants to have and then is like but then if i'm that opportunity cost i can't be a bloody zombie on the doorstep so he always ends up with two costumes one he wears to school to show off a new costume and then by halloween night he's like i just need to be a zombie tonight we just always have the stuff in reserve because you know because you know he's gonna want he's gonna change man all the more reason for emily to not love this holiday yes uh that's delight and he wants the really expensive like wounds and things like that that look good like we bought him the cheap ones once and he's just like i do not look like i'm dead dad i i am not bleeding uh and he wants like the blood that is wet um that he can like kind of wet look bless and he always rips up a new set of clothing and covers it in like dirt and blood he'll go roll in the dirt and then rip it up um and he'll put on one shoe even though it's really cold yeah because zombies only have one shoe uh and it's kind of delightful and also just an interesting sign of who my son is he's totally going to work in a spook alley we've known it we've known it since he was like five and producer adam was talking about the um the zombie hunts they were having back then uh adam's nodding remembers this where you like shoot paintball at zombies and dallyn was super excited he's only five or six we're like what you and he's like yeah yeah yeah yeah and so they got ready to take him and then he found out that he didn't get to be the zombie that shot at he found out that he has to be the person shooting and he was just not interested and it just loses all its allure yeah no and i love that and and you know my sister is one of these as well who halloween is their christmas and it's the biggest part of the year and august you start getting excited for it and all through september you're just pumping up and then october 1st the house turns black and orange and is covered with stuff and like the way you describe dowling as this is the one night of the year i can be myself and not get weird looks for it that's that's the halloween crew that's gonna be my six-year-old that's my sister that used to be me before i had to be the boring dad that goes trick-or-treating see you say you want to be back watching movies and scaring kids i've found these two things to be mutually exclusive how do people watch halloween movies because i've never been able to do it because i'm usually on door duty this is in part because a significant portion of the people who end up at our doorstep are wearing costumes themed to my books um to the point that we've realized this is a socially acceptable time that people who know where i live can you show up on my doorstep and maybe say hi to you and we've learned that i need to be giving out the candy because otherwise every few minutes it's like dad someone's in a in a calendaring costume uh and they want to show it to you and things like this uh and so man well depending on when this airs this year or next year you're going to get a flood of those aren't you they everyone everyone knows like in the state and around people just know uh where my house is uh i think i've told this story to you before have i one year dallin was doing the zombie thing and someone came up early and found he found out they were fans because they were in costumes and so he's like we need to give them a book dad as their treat and he we ended up he went and got like a big box of the arithmetist which is my middle grade yeah um or young y a i guess it's young y a but and he was like we need to give these out and then i'm like all right to people who have a special costume she decided since it's halloween everyone's costume is special and he just went through like an entire case of books uh and i have to say after that we're not giving away books anymore uh but the year after that we got swarmed with people everybody wanted like signs gives out books we should go trick-or-treat his house wow that's crazy um i will say just as a total side note uh that i know um the reckoners books are your big ya arithmetist is my favorite of your y.a oh well thank you yeah i love that one i get so many that that's the book though i love it is is the millstone around my neck really i wrote it right before the wheel of time i was actually working on a cosmere novel called the liar partnel which was not working i finished the book but i did not like how it turned out and so often when that happens to me i just need some breather in between something completely unexpected uh and so i wrote the arithmetist doing all the art myself in the original edition uh though we of course had that redrawn and just was one of these things where i'm like i'm just gonna do something wacky completely unexpected um i'm gonna do this weird gear punk alternate history um bizarre thing and i really got into it i'm like wow i think i'll do a trilogy of these this is this is really cool i like this world and then right when that was happening the wheel of time fell on me like you know the proverbial ton of bricks um and though i'm not complaining it did derail my career ginormously yeah can a career be derailed generously by a i don't know if that uh applied but regardless yeah i went down a very different track in life and i shelved the arithmetist and the publisher i i gave to him said i just can't support this series um but sitting on as we came to learn a sanderson book that they can't publish is like painful to the publisher uh because you know they do well for their margins in quarters and things so finally they're like can we just publish this book and i had forgotten how much a cliffhanger the ending is uh i have forgotten as well i can't actually remember how it ends so it's one of those um actually on theme horror movie endings where it's like you think everything's wrapped up and then the epilogue says oh no you didn't understand it all there is a deeper darker mystery and someone uh that you thought you you defeated is actually a deeper darker evil right yeah like it's like oh no everything we've been doing is now recontextualized to be um be darker and more worrisome and they released the book uh it was very well beloved um but it promises a sequel which it has now been i wrote that book in 2007 yeah uh so long time been a long long time since i wrote that book and i'm like i owe people a sequel to that it's the number one most requested sequel i get uh but well and it is my favorite of your y.a um and so you know dear listeners out there if you hadn't read the arithmetist and you want to read a book with a cliffhanger that might never get resolved go check it out one of the great things about it uh is that it is a magic boarding school book yes where it actually feels like a school and they learn things um harry potter as much as i love harry potter is basically genetic access to guns yes and arithmetist is you actually learn the principles of the magic and how it works and it feels much more grounded and real in a very cool fantastical way from the original pitch to myself was the muggle at hogwarts right the kid who goes to the magic school but he's the son of the cleaning lady and gets free tuition right and does not have any uh he did not win the genetic lottery tower powers he can't actually do the magic um but uh which is you know in this world it's not uncommon that someone without the magic goes to the magic school all like the those schools are the prestigious ones so like the sons of senators and things will often go to the school even though they don't have the magic they won't take the magic classes yeah uh i thought that was kind of the other great part of your magic school is that they teach math and stuff yes um and so but anyway um that's anyway that's a tangent there we go um no let's get back to how do i both watch movies and hand out candy and the answer to that is connected to one of the reasons i dislike trick-or-treating i live on a hill you live in a nice flat area i live on the side of this big dumb hill and so not only is walking around onerous and getting back to the house when they're all tired is onerous because at that point we're at the bottom of the hill um but also we rarely ever get trick-or-treaters and i don't know if that's the hill or if it's my neighborhood specifically we will get a handful and then by the time it's dark we basically don't get anything at that point okay and so it is easy to you know pick up the early ones and the you know the tiny three or four groups of kids that we get and then the rest of the night we've got a bunch of extra candy and all this free time and we get a watch train to busan or something all right before we talk about uh movies because okay we're gonna we're gonna i'm sure spiral into movie talk i'm sure how late age-wise did you go trick-or-treating like for yourself oh for myself do you remember the last time you went trick-or-treating well that the last time i went trick-or-treating for myself in a costume was actually in college because i was at byu and it's pretty common for byu freshman to go trick-or-treating they just used to go to the other dorms like we trick-or-treat treated the girls store right like that doesn't count yeah that's no we actually went out into the neighborhood around like as like 18 year old kids you did yeah okay we sure did that is weird we did it one year but you know we were far from the only ones doing it it's definitely weird um and i don't know if the people who live near byu like that but it happens every year and there's lots of them that do it i had no idea like we went dressed up in costumes trick-or-treated the girls storm right yeah and then had a party right with everybody it was more like it was more done ironically that we're trick-or-treating i went as uh bill clinton's bodyguard with my roommate being bill clinton um so um oh that's funny um no but before that not counting the weird college one year that i did it it was probably 12 or 13 okay uh and that is because my best friend had moved oh so that means it actually would have been 14 years old my best friend moved sophomore year uh into a neighborhood that was apparently amazing for trick-or-treating and so i went and we went trick treating in his neighborhood and that was the last year that i did it because in separately inseparably connected to halloween is my memory of my eighth grade year so i would have been 13 turning 14. uh being out trick-or-treating with my best friend at the time in costume i don't actually remember what my costume was i remember his uh he was he was in army fatigues and like camo makeup um and things like that and realizing we i remember us both standing on a corner with a bag of candy and being like we doing why why are we here because something is wrong with our lives and we had a conversation about we're like we feel weird everyone else is really young and we weren't old enough yet to have jobs to just go buy our own candy which is like the joke you know now it's like why would i go trick-or-treating i can buy all the candy i want right when you but we weren't quite there yet but i remember that weird feeling of having like self-selected out of halloween in that regard and it was one of the pivotal moments in me realizing that i was growing up yeah interesting that the magic had gone out of halloween for you yes uh that is interesting now on the other hand you grew up in the midwest i did and in my admittedly limited experience trick-or-treating in the midwest was very different than trick-or-treating here interesting uh and that is because utah gets its seasons a little earlier so by the time we get to the end of october it's cold most of the leaves have fallen and it's very very cold in fact more often than not we have snow at least at my house right whereas when my sister lived in ohio and we went trick-or-treating with her one year when all our kids were you know six and seven years old um that was a delight it was cool without being cold and it was still in the middle of color-changing fall instead of at the end of it and so it was the halloween i'd always seen in movies and never really experienced growing up here ah i'd never put that together because nebraska in general is much colder in the winter okay than utah interesting um a lot snowier a lot colder it's the it's humidity and the wind chill and things like that but um i'm just kind of remembering in general terms i bet you're right that it stays warmer a little longer because i don't remember being as frozen cold as my kids have been some of the nights trick-or-treating here i do remember a couple of occasions where it was colder and it was noticeably colder yeah uh that year um but i mean my friend again was in just army fatigues he was not wearing a coat you know uh in that image in my head of us being trick-or-treating and i wasn't thinking wow we're so cold right yeah so well and that's the thing is you know i grew up watching movies of trick-or-treaters where the kids are all in costumes and yet i grew up in costumes with a coat over it because that's how you survive and so it took a little bit of the fun out of it kids have it kind of nice i want to put that in maybe an asterisk to that these days that the costumes are so much nicer than the terrible yeah like the oh man those were so awful the like full bodysuit with a picture of elmer fudd on it and then an elmer fudd mask yeah and that's sort of terrible like you're wearing a garbage sack with elmer fudd's picture on it in fact a garbage sack is more durable than those costumes were mm-hmm um they were just they were terrible the masks were the flimsiest plastic yeah that bit into your face and have these like bands that were really uncomfortable to wear i say kids have it better because they do have much better costumes but they're also like way more expensive yeah um so there is that asterisk you are paying for this paying for the nicer costume i mean my kids love dress up as i think a lot of kids do and so if you get a costume that is durable enough to throw in the costume closet and all their younger siblings can wear it in future years well and not on halloween they'll just show up in costumes a lot of times um dallin he got really into scps last year okay so last year was here he actually was able to resist being a zombie for part of the year he was still lying dead on our doorstep for actual halloween but he wore a different costume to school yeah and his different costume was a plague doctor costume which he has just became super enamored with because there's an scp do you know what scp scps these are like the forum horror stories right well kind of um so forum horror stories are usually either no sleeps or creepypastas right apostasy that's what i was assuming is scp different scp is not quite creepypasta so scp is like a collective storytelling wiki um about the idea that there are these creatures it's like x-files but uh with the serial numbers filed off except it's all focused on there these weird creatures living among us um and the scp foundation's job is to track it's like secure contain protect or something okay uh is to track them contain them if possible and things like that and all of the wiki art it's just articles about a given scp are very heavily redacted on purpose as part of this part of the joke yeah um and so people will write one and it's like becomes part of the lore this is a famous scp and you can go to its wiki page and i don't know that anyone can edit the wiki i have seen references to these on reddit yeah um and so it's like a little more formalized uh it's it's like a co it's like wild cards or one of these you know group storytelling um projects worldwide world except with very loose rules they're all doing together and um you know they're very popular among the on the internet and with 11 year old and 10 year old boys who are obsessed over monsters creepy stuff and so uh there is one scp that is a immortal plague doctor who wears a plague gospel costume and uh whispers to everyone that he has the cure and things like this and the cure is for they're still being alive his cure is to kill them everyone just needs to be killed that's uh they they have a disease that is life okay uh and so it's a creepy plague doctor with needles that tries to just kill everyone um and he just fell in love with this this scp and needed an scp 049 i think is the right one costume and uh he is lo and behold upgraded that costume this year so he can be 049 and a zombie at the same time no just on different days but a better version of each one um so who knows what he'll do if he falls in love with something else i don't know if he can let go of scp-049 for his costume yeah i had to get him like a really nice trench coat because last year he just kind of faked it and said cpo49 wears like this trench coat thing um and you know we bought him the plague doctor mask last year and this year he's got a really nice trench coat he's got a really nice trench coat because he's got a that's awesome i love that i know that uh scps based on that description sounds like something i would love and therefore cannot get involved with yeah at any level because then i would lose all my time and you would productivity spend all your time reading them feel like you want to write some because you'd be like i can do better than this um and then suddenly you're instead of doing your job you're writing um writing free horror stories for people on a wiki instead of making money on yes which still sounds like fun but i won't do it um all right so let's talk about movies you talked about how you never get a chance to really watch the scary movies because you've got to be on door duty if you were able to given the chance what scary movies would you watch because you don't strike me as a horror movie guy in general i'm not really um i'm a suspense movie guy i like i'll watch hitchcock uh that would be my go-to right let's let's pick a hitchcock movie uh watch that and you know it strays into horror but it's not i i don't think it's like not true horror right um i watch a john carpenter movie basically okay take your pick of the better ones um and things like that like i love really cool practical effects um and so not some of the later john uh carpenters but um but you know you can fly and that sort of thing uh well fly's not john carpenter but oh that yeah but yes that exact like i will watch the old like the the one with uh with what's his name um from um from thor ragnarok oh yeah yeah him that's that's the fly isn't it yeah i'll watch that it's got really great practical effects uh but i mean my favorite john carpenter is uh his big trouble single china which is like his non-horror movie um i mean he's got a couple i don't know what you call escape from new york or whatnot but you know like if you give me the choice i'm not gonna pick halloween even though i like halloween i'm gonna watch big trouble in little china so um and if you're like you know do you want to watch a has to be horror how halloween themed i will probably like can we watch nightmare before christmas um right or something like this like you're right i'm just not a huge horror movie fan i don't know yeah i'll watch one of the the the good sean milan films i don't know if those count i mean some of them do i mean depending on how much of signs you watch it's a fantastic horror movie yeah yeah it is you just try to turn it off at a certain point yeah and say okay that was a good movie oh wow and they all got an ambiguous ending when the light goes off in the basement that's when you end it do you remember that the basement's the best scene sign has that thing and the uh the sun swings the axe right and hits the light bulb it's the light and it sends them into darkness you just cut the movie well i like the i would want to watch the whole i don't remember how much longer the basement scene goes on after the acts there is a good uh piece of abatement basement scene with them all terrified as they get a light going right after and just kind of huddled on the floor yeah absolute terror uh but i bet there's a place right after that i bet you could you could cut it right there and shyamalan for all his faults uh that basement scene is a fantastic horror mini movie yeah all on its own merit um no my favorite my favorite halloween movie is cheating because it's coco which is which is not scary and it is only peripherally halloween but that's my favorite one that's actually what we're dressing up as this year okay i'm hector six-year-old's gonna be miguel dawn's gonna be mama imelda that is shocking to me not that shocking because i know your history with mexico and uh things and and things like that but the fact that you don't pick like the most terrifying movie um what is the most terrifying movie you've ever seen the most terrifying movie that i have ever seen that is a very difficult question to answer yeah uh because it is going the answer is going to depend a lot on you know who i was and and how old i was and and those sort of things that's true the scariest experience i've ever had with the movie was actually when i was five years old and my grandma took me to c-e-t right and we showed up late and all i saw was the monster stuff and we talked about this a few weeks ago yeah never-ending story was mine uh same thing but let's say as a late teen or adult as late teen so um the old vincent price movie the pit and the pendulum okay um is a suspense kind of schlocky horror-ish movie until the very very end where they have defeated the bad guy and they have they escaped from the pit full of torture implements and they say now we are going to leave this place and seal it up so that no one can ever come here again and they close the door and then the camera pans over to the iron maiden where there's the character they all forgot about and you just see her eyes and that freaked me out because she knows that she's you know bound and gagged and she can't scream for help and she's just gonna die in this iron maiden and they seal up the pit in the pendulum um there's a lot of that dna in mr monster um and the woman in the wall and all this sort of stuff um beyond that boy that's a really scary moment it's a very scary moment but it isn't a scary movie right it is a moment that had a big impact on me um oh man i don't know like i've got a list of horror movies that i introduced to my kids as they hit certain ages right like you're old enough now that i can show you jaws or i can show you train to busan or i can show you um what's one of the other ones uh scream i love introducing people to scream and to cabin in the woods right but you need a history and horror movies for streaming for scream to work and for cabin in the woods to work you need a history of horror movies and so specifically slasher movies which though i guess i have not seen a lot of actual slasher movies they just don't interest me but i know all the tropes enough yeah that both cabin in the woods and scream worked very well for me so maybe you don't need to have seen those right well yeah but you do have that grounding i do uh the other one in that category is tucker and dale versus evil you've seen that great movie yeah okay yeah i i do enjoy that movie which again you need to kind of know the tropes they're playing with in order to get it though i do think uh that scream in particular works really well on its own right it has a legitimately horrifying sequence right at the beginning i don't find the rest of scream horrifying but i find that opening some of the the best slasher like horror i've ever seen well and that i i think scream is a is a truly brilliant movie and one of the things that makes it brilliant is the way that it constantly breaks the fourth wall and they did that with the ad campaign putting drew barrymore into your movie who was at the time the biggest star in it she was all over the posters and then she dies in the very first scene that was such a brilliant way of dragging the world around you and the ad campaign and everything into this experience and freaking you out great i love it yeah what's the most horrifying movie i've ever seen um it's hard because again like the hitchcock horror is very different from like modern horror yeah uh in a lot of ways and i wouldn't like the hitchhock movies i watch and i'm like oh watch how he's creating such great suspense in this sequence this is really great yeah but i'm not scared right um but to get scared is hard for me um right i'm not a very emotional person as we've talked about um and so i need like the people with me to be very scared and i need it to be a movie that involves legitimate evil yeah right like something like misery right okay um like i can be scared by misery better than i can be scared by scream because it is less about what's happening and more about the fact that this is a plausible real world situation and just being trapped in that situation right like um and screams perhaps a bad example because scream could yeah it's it's more realistic than a lot of these um but at the same time like being religious and watching exorcist is a different experience i think than if you're not religious i have the same kind of experience with the ring where you know there is a demon involved in the ring and doing things um i i found the ring to be legitimately scary uh just from a kind of conceptual uh sort of standpoint not that i think that anything in the ring could actually happen yeah um but it kind of had the right mix of jump scares uh good twist ending horrifying descent into immorality by protagonists and all of this stuff in a way that i thought came together really well what i don't watch and am not interested in is something like uh the saw franchise yeah uh even though i know the saw franchise is uh is much better than its knockoffs like the hostile and things like that where i think it's just hostile i am not interested in people being tortured in that way and misery i don't even really want to watch misery right but i find misery horrifying i don't think i would find saw actually horrifying i think it would just be too convoluted and too focused on the misery of the people it's more gross than it is horrifying or or nihilistic and you know beloved i i like you i'm not really into that kind of torture porn subgenre um but okay so why do you say beloved like the movie beloved uh no uh it's a beloved genre it's a beloved series so beloved right i i went to beloved because the book is a ghost story yeah that's true it is but it's a capital l literature story so it doesn't count as genre fiction it does not you can tell it's capital l literature because there may not actually be any ghosts the person might just be um having delusions yeah but see that happens in horror stuff all the time okay so here's i don't know if i can say this is the scariest thing i've watched but a movie that i watched as an adult and that genuinely freaked me out is actually the changeling with george c scott okay i have not seen it it is my very favorite haunted house movie and the experience of watching it for me was very interesting because it's got a lot of creepy stuff in it there's a seance scene where they're trying to contact uh basically george c scott who's this big burly dude who typically plays you know he was patent and things like that um he moves into this big old house and finds that it is haunted by a child in a wheelchair and they do a seance to try to contact him and that scene is pretty creepy and it it does a good job but what's interesting about it is that george c scott is a big burly dude he's not a teenager he's not really in peril and so he keeps inserting himself very bravely into situations that you know a typical horror movie protagonist would not go into uh there's a place where he goes down in you know he's dug a pit or a well or something and at the bottom of it he finds a necklace and then it gets sucked down into the well and he's not really ever scared of that and i remember watching this is with my wife and you know leaning over to a couple of times and saying this is really interesting but because the main character is not scared therefore i am not scared and then there's a scene where a red rubber ball keeps bouncing down the stairs in the house and he you know keeps locking it up or putting it in different places and it keeps bouncing down the stairs and he takes it and he throws it off a bridge into you know the bay the ocean essentially and then he comes home and the ball bounces down the stairs again and he freaked out and i freaked out the movie played me so perfectly because they built him up as never afraid of anything and then george c scott got scared and i got scared with him it was really cool and really well done i love that movie did uh blair witch project work for you um blair witch not as much uh i was one of the ones that kind of got sick with the shaky cam and so the movie didn't yeah i wasn't able to focus on the the the storyline as well i would have loved blair witch at 30 minutes um i i still think it's really cool like what they did uh it wasn't the first found footage but it really did a good job with it and it's certainly the popularization yeah and the ending of it i do think is genuinely affecting yeah uh with the guy kind of standing in the corner and staring at the wall that all works really well the shining um shining i love okay i do not get scared of the shining but it is a movie that i very deeply love yeah i wonder i'm the same way i think the shining is great but i wonder if it's a mix of things for me like i look at the shining and say why doesn't the shining freak me out partially because by the time i was old enough to watch the shining i knew what the shining was like the movie i knew the plot i knew the story i knew this is a story about um you know the man going insane and all of this stuff and uh so beyond that by the time i saw the shining i was getting into how films are made and stories are made and was more like i didn't watch signing when i was a teenager right um and i was more interested in how shots were being set up how the lore of how kubrick got the performances um and kind of the idea of it being the stephen king book that stephen king didn't like the adaptation of despite everyone else loving it all of these things surround the shining and so i had a very different experience from the shining than i did for instance from the sixth sense where i went to the sixth sense knowing nothing about it it was just the movie that was opening um it was someone's like hey it's kind of creepy i'm like all right we'll go see the sixth sense and thought wow i'm legitimately enjoying the horror aspects of it even though the sixth sense is not you know i think more horrifying than the shining if that makes any sense no it does make perfect sense and so i want to ask uh how long has it been since you saw the shining because i had a very similar experience with it and then re-watched it for the first time in a long time last year with my son okay and was able to kind of see it with new eyes divorced from its lore and from its kind of position in hollywood history and really enjoyed it a lot okay i i maybe i need to give another watch maybe i don't know it's very good either way um but okay but i mentioned this one earlier and before we finish i do need to ask if you've seen train to busan i have not seen trained in busan i know it's a tragedy um uh i haven't seen parasite yet either um i know parasite is really good it's not really a horror it's a thriller yes um train to busan is so good it is my favorite zombie movie um and so it's the same director right no no parasite is the snow piercer okay that's what i'm getting mixed up the train and snow piercer is probably just which is different from the train and train to busan um i know you've talked about training to busan before on the podcast which is i don't think i'd even heard about it until you talked about it well which is why i'm mixing that up a modern classic that i i recommend it is a zombie apocalypse that takes place um you know while these characters are on a high-speed train right hoping they can get where they're going before the few zombies that have gotten onto the train spread and and conquer everything it's so great um and it revitalized for me zombies zombies have been so played out over time and then trained busan made them fresh again fresh is not a pun there [Laughter] so dan has homework you have to see train to busan to watch train to busan and um the other horror movie you mentioned that you talked at length about that i now is escaping okay so here's the five horror movies dan wants you to watch okay you need to watch train to busan you need to watch the changeling you need to watch scream you need to watch cabin in the woods and you need to watch psycho how's that been [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: Brandon Sanderson

Views: 31,669

Keywords:

Id: aDA3efoZeTo

Length: 45min 17sec (2717 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 27 2021