Tag Archives: movies

280 – The Turn Of The Screw: Henry James And The History Of Parapsychology

The latest adaptation of Henry James’ classic 1898 ghost story The Turn Of The Screw is called The Turning starring red hot teenage actor Finn Wolfhard but it’s not the only adaptation being released this year. Mike Flanagan’s sequel to his Netflix smash The Haunting of Hill House is going to be called The Haunting of Bly House and will rework James’ novella into a modern story as well.

One-hundred and twenty years after the initial publication why does James’ work still resonate? After all, in our current society, we’re about as far removed from the Victorian age as you can be. We laugh when we think of their “uptight” sexuality, their treatment of women as the “fairer sex”, and of course, the superior attitude that came along with “the empire on which the sun never sets“.

The Turn Of The Screw is a story about a governess who is hired to take care of a girl and boy whose uncle is a busy gentleman that can’t be bothered with raising them himself. While originally enjoying the job, the governess starts seeing ghosts surrounding the children and her thoughts are eventually consumed by the spirits which raises tensions to an untenable level in the house. Part of the story that makes it the most interesting is that no one else ever sees the ghosts besides the governess, so is it real or is it all in her imagination?

The original illustration from the first page of the 1898 serialization in The Atlantic Monthly

Now, Henry James’ inspiration for The Turn Of The Screw came from a supposedly true story he was told Archbishop of Canterbury, whose wife was involved with the Society for Psychical Research. And James’ equally famous brother, William, was also a member of that English organization and returned to the United States to form the American branch.

William James was not only one of the founders of parapsychology, he was also one of the founders of modern psychology. He was as interested in the study of spiritual pheneomena as he was in the workings of the mind and his psi research help set the template for modern experimental psychology still practiced today.

So Henry James was interested in ghost stories from a narrative standpoint while his brother was investigating them from a scientific standpoint! How might the reality of research into spirit communication have leaked over into the fiction?

We discuss the real-life paranormal influences behind The Turn Of The Screw as well as William and Henry James’ views on the paranormal and its effect on the world of parapsychology. Some of the topics include:

  • Henry James’ father’s own strange “vastation”, a spiritual crisis which lasted two years
  • Just what or who did Henry James call “The Others”?
  • William James’ work on religious experiences and how they might be a result of mental illness (a foreshadowing of using therapy instead of exorcism to help the victims)
  • What did Henry James really think about the afterlife according to his article “Is There Life After Death”?
  • Did William James return to talk to the dead after he passed away in 1910?

For this week’s song, we expound upon one of the themes from The Turn Of The Screw. One of the first lines introducing the character of the governess mentions that she’s in love, but that she’d only seen her love twice. That’s because it was the uncle that hired her to take care of the kids and she was constantly thinking of ways to prove her worth to him, because he was a gentleman and she was a commoner. The overwhelming desire to be worthy of your heart’s desire is the inspiration behind the song for this episode, “Mine Without a Holiday.”

Tell me nothing of your life, 
I painted you as an angel, 
These lines, these curves don’t do you justice, 
But if it’s all the same to you, I’ll draw them just as well. 

I can’t believe you’re not on paper, 
I can’t believe you’re made for me to touch, 
I will accept that you are mine without a holiday, 
But not that I deserve as much. 

Tell me nothing of yourself, 
I sculpted you as a goddess, 
This lifeless clay don’t hold a candle to your visage, 
But if it’s all the same to you, I’ll shape it in your image 

I can’t believe that you’re not fiction 
I can’t believe you’re made for me to hold. 
I will accept that you are mine without a holiday 
But not that I should be so bold. 

I will accept that you are mine without a holiday. 
But not that I deserve as much.

276 – The Mandela Effect: Bringing the Phenomena to LIfe With David Guy Levy and Steffen Schlachtenhaufen

The fun part of The Mandela Effect is talking about the memories you share with other people that doesn’t necessarily jibe with reality. When you remember The BerenSTEIN Bears with other people and you all can’t figure out just why the real world has the book series written down as the BerenSTAIN Bears, it connects you with those people on more than one level.

Not only are you remembering something that you shared culturally, but it means that you’re probably of the same generation, or at least close enough in age to have read the same books when you were kids. And to top that off, you’re both remembering something incorrectly. It’s like an exclusive club where you have to answer three different questions to get in. So, people love talking about it because it connects them to others who are in a very specific tribe, a tribe defined by culture, generation, and shared (mis)memories.

We’ve talked about The Mandela Effect on the podcast before, it’s a phenomena that got its name after paranormal researcher Fiona Broome had a a discussion at Dragon Con in 2009 with other people who thought that Nelson Mandela died in the 1990s and was never let out of prison to return triumphantly to lead a post-Apartheid South Africa.

But it’s not that they didn’t know history, it’s that they remembered his funeral, they recalled seeing it on television. They have memories of it. In our reality, Nelson Mandela didn’t die until 2013, so how do you remember something that never happened?

It’s been a popular topic in paranormal circles for the past few years because more than just questioning what’s possible in our physical reality like ghosts or psychic powers do, The Mandela Effect makes us question reality itself. It opens up science fiction possibilities of parallel universes like Star Trek or the idea that we’re exisiting in some kind of simulation like The Matrix.

Screenwriter Steffen Schlachtenhaufen

The new film, The Mandela Effect, explores those science fiction possibilities to create a narrative out of these shared mistaken memories that we all love talking about. Starring Charlie Hofheimer (Peggy’s boyfriend Abe from Mad Men!), Robin Lord Taylor (The Penguin from Gotham), Aleksa Palladino (Jimmy’s wife from Boardwalk Empire), and Clarke Peters (Lester freakin Freamon from The Wire!), The Mandela Effect has a solid cast of actors that you’ll instantly recognize.

Screenwriter and Director David Guy Levy

And the acting particularly in a film like this is important because it centers on an emotional hook, this is an indie film and not some kind of special effects extravaganza. It looks great and does have a bunch of cool effects sequences, but that’s not where the heart of the story lies. Screenwriters David Guy Levy (who also directed) and Steffen Schlachtenhaufen take a fairly abstract concept like The Mandela Effect and turn it into a narrative that even non-paranormal aficianados can appreciate.

When the lead character learns about The Mandela Effect, he starts questioning the nature of his reality. And after a tragedy rips his family apart, he starts becoming obssessed with the idea that he can change the past. It’s this quest that leads him to meet renegade professor Dr. Fuchs, whose controversial ideas about our universe actually being a computer simulation provide a potential pathway that could alter history, but lead to either salvation or insanity.

We got a chance to watch the movie before the podcast and it’s a fun thriller, that most importantly, doesn’t use any narrative cheats even when it would be easy to pull the heartstrings. It provides a satisfying emotional story as well as some clever plotting but for paranormal fans, the real treats of the movie come from all the Easter Eggs. The Mandela Effect includes almost every example people have put out there on the Internet, but you’ll have to watch carefully to catch them all.

We talked with writer/producer Steffen Schlachtenhaufen and writer/director David Guy Levy about the movie as well as stuff like:

  • What are the real life paranormal influences that inspired the film?
  • Why doesn’t anyone else remember The Thirteenth Floor?
  • When have they experienced The Mandela Effect in their own lives?
  • How do you get great actors in an indie film?

You can watch The Mandela Effect on Amazon Prime and iTunes right now.

For the song this week, we were inspired by the ideas of the Mandela Effect to sing about pain that shouldn’t be there, but it is. In the movie, people are wondering how you can remember something that never happened? In phantom limb phenomena, people who have a leg or arm amputated still feel pain from the limb that’s no longer there. While there’s a scientific explanation for it (neurons in the brain that would usually be sensing those areas are getting stimulated accidentally by the neurons next to them), it’s the idea that something impossible is hurting you. Here’s our song inspired by The Mandela Effect, “Phantom Limb”.

Oh man, since you’ve been gone away
nothing feels the same
forget a little every day
sometimes it feels like nothing’s changed

my eyes are drawn like a carwreck
to an empty chair
talk to a picture that’s been staring at me on my cameraphone
and I’ll pretend that someone’s there

wake up and the pillow’s wet
I call your name in a cold sweat
I wear your face like a faded tattoo
I never learned to cry
but I’ll drink until that bottle’s dry
I still feel you

my phantom limb
my phantom limb

Sometimes I feel a pain inside
and I’m just left confused
remembering a former life
cuz there’s nothing left to bruise

my eyes are drawn like a car wreck
to an empty chair
talk to a picture that’s been staring at me on my cameraphone
and I’ll pretend that someone’s there

wake up and the pillow’s wet
I call your name in a cold sweat
I wear your face like a faded tattoo
I never learned to cry
but I’ll drink until that bottle’s dry
I still feel you

my phantom limb
my phantom limb

270 – I See Dead People: The Paranormal Influences Behind The Sixth Sense

We’re back live from Wizard World Madison 2019 where we celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of the scariest movies of the 1990s, The Sixth Sense. A story about a boy who is visited by the spirits of the dead and the child psychologist that is trying to help him, it was the most financially successful horror film of all time until it was finally surpassed by 2017’s It: Chapter One. The movie turned child actor Haley Joel Osment into a star and it skyrocketed the career of its writer-director, M. Night Shyamalan, who became particularly known for his use of Philadelphia as a location and a penchant for Twilight Zone-style twists.

I was 22 when I saw the movie the first time and I don’t think I’ve ever been as scared in the theater as I was coming home from that film. I was walking with my girlfriend at the time up a dark staircase into my apartment and we were convinced that when we got to the end of the stairs and unlocked the door there was going to be a dead person behind it.

Re-watching it after twenty years, it’s at first most shocking to see Bruce Willis’ gorgeous hair or how skinny Donnie from the New Kids On The Block looks, but then you start seeing all of the clues that Bruce Willis’ character was dead the whole time and it feels so obvious, which why it was such a great trick the first time around.

But while The Sixth Sense might have been a completely fictional film, it doesn’t mean that a lot of the concepts in the movie aren’t taken from real-life hauntings and paranormal experiences and here’s what we talk about in this episode:

  • Everytime a ghost gets mad, the temperature drops, so what’s up with cold spots in real hauntings?
  • What do psychic mediums in real life actually see when they hear messages from dead people?
  • Bruce Willis’ character Malcolm becomes convinced after hearing an EVP, what’s the history of EVP phenomena?
  • Olivia Williams talking about how an object can be imprinted by its former owners. Does that mean an object can be cursed?
  • Poltergeist activity, apporte hauntings, and Munchhausen-Syndrome-by-Proxy as a potential explanation for paranormal activity

So, for the song this week we reached back into the archives for a track that we released not too long after The Sixth Sense came out. We thought that the chorus fit perfectly for this film where a child finally finds someone that believes in him and can stop being afraid of the ghosts that surround him. Here’s our old-school Sunspot song, “Flower-Child”.

Seeds of irresponsibility, 
and a selfish kind of love, 
birth the flower-child, 

Neglected with the grey sky, 
Beaten with the drought, 
Treated as immaterial grass, 
Cut down and shut out. 

Withering away, 
Dying slowly. 
Withering away. 
Dying slowly. 

Will you ever bloom? 

Don’t cry child of darkness, 
The sky will open up to dawn. 
The life-giving rains, 
will wash your flood of tears away. 

You’re not alone anymore

248 – Snatchers: Invasion of the Alien-Human Hybrids

Humans didn’t come with an instruction manual. We have only a few natural instincts. Reproduction is one of the only things in the universe that we don’t have to convince ourselves to do, the desire is there constantly. And in human society, is nothing as sacred or sensitive as children. We are hardwired to think irrationally about them. We are evolved to protect them at almost any cost. The sound of a child in danger is a biological air raid siren. Ask any person what the most important thing in the world to them and if they have children, it’s them. If they don’t, it’s family. People that would say something different are considered sociopaths.

And that’s okay, by valuing familial bonds above everything else is how we survived when we weren’t as fast as the tiger or as strong as the bear. But while we consider our reproduction to be sacrosanct, we freely interfere with the reproduction of other animals. We purposefully breed horses with donkeys to create pack animals, we regularly inseminate cows with the strongest bulls we can find, we have been mixing seeds and crops with each other since the dawn of agriculture (GMOs are a lot older than you think.). It’s how we came to dominate the planet.

But our planet is all we dominate and it’s a big universe. And just like cows can’t stop us from pumping some strange bull’s semen into them, we would be powerless to stop aliens with superior technology from violating our reproductive systems. It’s terrifying and it plays against three of our biggest fears, the violation of our personal bodies, the desire to protect our children, and the realization that we are impotent against the greater power of the universe.

From Mr. Spock to Counselor Troi in Star Trek to Evie in Out Of This World, or even Peter Quill The StarLord in Guardians Of The Galaxy the idea of a half-human, half-alien has been popular in science fiction. (Indeed, they tried to even make Doctor Who half-human in the 1996 TV movie.) But while that’s all fun and games and leads to psychic powers or the ability to freeze time, in the real world, cases of alien-human hybrids are far more terrifying.

Just this year, Korean lecturer Dr Young-hae Chi, who teaches at Oxford’s Oriental Institute, said “The primary purpose of abduction is to produce hybrids – human-alien hybrids – and the second one is the primary purpose of the hybrid project to colonise the Earth.” He just released a book called Alien Visitations and the End of Humanity.

The idea that aliens might be abducting women to impregnate them, use their eggs to create alien-human hybrids, and then releasing the hybrids into the world to eventually prepare us for First Contact (after all, if the children are half-human and they’re already here, how can we not accept them?) or to seed the population for an eventual alien takeover (if they are already here, then they can infiltrate positions of power in government and influence in society) became popular in the 1990s through the writings of Dr. David M. Jacobs.

Jacobs (a Wisconsin Badger, class of 1973, his dissertation was even published as The UFO Controversy in America, so let’s go Red!) founded the International Center for Abduction Research after interviewing thousands of abductees and regressing them hypnotically to remember their abductions. They all tended to follow a similar pattern, particularly the women’s experiences.

Jacobs is a doctor of history not medicine or psychology. So is there an Experimenter Effect on these reports? Carl Sagan thought so, but Jacobs stands by his story. In this episode, we talk about some of the history of alien-human hybrid theories and just what these theoretical aliens might be after before we get to something a little more lighthearted for the second half.

Snatchers is a horror-comedy about a Sara, a high school girl who has sex for the first time and wakes up 24 hours later fully pregnant with an alien-baby. It was an official selection for the 2019 SXSW Film Festival and we interviewed the writers, Stephen Cedars, Benji Kleiman, and Scott Yacyshyn (collectively known as the Old Money Boyz) behind the idea. The interview was in a bar in Austin at the premiere party for the movie, so you’ll have to excuse us as we pass the microphone around and suck on some fine Texas beers, but it’s fun to hear about their influences in the creation of the show.

The high school vibes from Snatchers were flowing through us as we were working on this episode’s song so we were feeling pretty emo. Here’s the Sunspot track “Hybrid”.

It’s a violation
of our very race
they sneak into our lives in the dead of night
It’s a breeding program
designed to replace
So are we going to go without a fight?

Too late for the arrival
A matter of survival

Should sins of the fathers
punish the progeny
where do you think their home is?
where do you think their home is?
How do you stand against the flood of destiny
where do you think their home is?
where do you think their home is?

These hidden hybrids
A sleeper cell
A secret colonization
It’s far too late now
how can we repel
Welcome to the new occupation

Too late for the arrival
A matter of survival

Should sins of the fathers
punish the progeny
where do you think their home is?
where do you think their home is?
How do you stand against the flood of destiny
where do you think their home is?
where do you think their home is?

245 – T Is For Terror In The Aisles: Antrum and the Deadliest Movies Never Made

If you read any of paranormal or horror movie blogs this week, you might have seen an article about a new “documentary” coming out that contains a film from the 1970s that has recently been rediscovered called Antrum. It was covered by Bloody Disgusting, Mysterious Universe, Unexplained Mysteries, and even Forbes magazine, who did the original interview with the producer Eric Thirteen.

Thirteen says that the movie was lost after a terrifying incident in a Budapest theater in 1988 and that bad things kept happening to anyone involved in the production of the film, or anyone who even watched it. Indeed the trailer even says that the film is rumored to be “haunted” or “cursed” and that you shouldn’t watch it alone, it says that it absolves the filmmakers of all liability. (Ha, let’s see that one hold up in court!)

The new release of Antrum: The Deadliest Movie Ever Made will feature a documentary with people who know the history of the production as well as have experienced some of the curse effects from watching the movie. What? You’ve definitely got my attention, so this has to be fake, right?

Of course it’s fake, producer Eric Thirteen even compares it to Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, a mystical evil spellbook that only existed in Lovecraft’s imagination. That was, until the author’s admirers created it and sold their fan fiction in book stores across the country and some people got convinced it was actually a reprinting of an ancient spellbook. He’s dropping the clues right in the interview that this is going to be a mockumentary!

COOL EPISODE UPDATE

Eric Thirteen himself listened to this episode and left a voicemail for us, which you can hear in its entirety in Episode 246 of See You On The Other Side.

Now, this movie sounds like a lot of fun and I love the cursed film angle as marketing (Zak Bagans even used it in his own documentary Demon House when he suggested that just watching his film could be dangerous and get you a spirit attachment who wouldn’t leave you alone!) But none of these blogs, who normally write about real people’s paranormal experiences bothered to let us know that it’s not a real documentary.

We just thought it was interesting, that these regular paranormal platforms wouldn’t let everyone know that this movie looks cool, but it’s just a movie. So, we wanted to handle that straightaway. This is pop culture using the paranormal as a marketing hook, because of course, that kind of buzz is great for publicity, as shown by the incredible financial success of the grandaddy of modern viral movie marketing, The Blair Witch Project. That was another fictional documentary where they tried to make the media believe it was real, and for awhile it worked just as well as Antrum is.

In this episode, we go into the similarities between the marketing campaigns of Blair Witch and Antrum, we’ll dissect Eric Thirteen’s interview with Forbes (as well as the incredulous coverage of it!), and then talk about some other fake films that used the illusion of versimiltude to get attention and sell tickets (or in our case, video rentals in the 80s!)

  • Faces of Death
  • Cannibal Holocaust (so real that the director was put on trial for murder!)
  • Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?
  • Mondo Cane

And we have bring up some other great films that deal with cursed movies as well.

  • In The Mouth of Madness (itself inspired by Lovecraft)
  • Masters of Horror‘s “Cigarette Burns” (written by a staffer of Aint It Cool News, a site that led the way in the success of The Blair Witch Project)
  • The real urban legend behind The Ring

For the song this week, it was a no-brainer. Just understand that you’re listening at your own risk and we take no liability for anything that might happen to you after you hear “The Deadliest Song Ever Made”!

And of course, to go with the deadliest movie ever made, we had to write “The Deadliest Song Ever Made”. You’ve been warned, listen at your own risk because we take no responsiblity for what happens after you’ve heard it.

Now that you’ve hit play you can’t go back
you’re cursed forever once you’ve heard this track
There’s just something so evil about this tune
It makes the listeners deceased way too soon

So listen at your own risk
you’ve sealed your fate
This is the deadliest song ever made.
Don’t plug your ears,
for it’s too late.
You’ve heard the deadliest song ever made.

It’s the world’s most fearsome melody,
just the sound of it will end your life early.
We’re not saying anything legally,
but you’re damned to Hell for all eternity.

So listen at your own risk
you’ve sealed your fate
This is the deadliest song ever made.
Don’t plug your ears,
for it’s too late.
You’ve heard the deadliest song ever made.

238 – Swamp Gaslighting: Project Blue Book Smackdown with Mark O’Connell

You might say that Mark O’Connell knows a little bit about Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who was in charge of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book. There, Hynek was charged by the military to investigate UFO reports across America and then summarily disprove them. In fact, Mark O’Connell literally wrote the book on Dr. Hynek called The Close Encounters Man.

We’ve had Mark on the show several times before and it’s always a treat. He’s written for Star Trek, has a UFO blog, and he even joined us for a remembrance of Bill Paxton, because Mark had written a script that Bill wanted to direct in the late 90s but unfortunately it never came to fruition.

So you think when the “History” Channel decided to create a show called Project Blue Book where J. Allen Hynek is the lead character, they might contact Mark because they were look for true life stories for their show. Well, the answer to that one is a big fat no. They decided to go on a little more fantastical route.

Aiden Gillen as J. Allen Hynek talking to an alien in a water tank. Hynek biographer Mark O’Connell is not amused.

We kicked off the episode by discussing the trip Allison just got back from in Woodstock, Illinois before we started the recording. She was following the trail of a Mothman sighting she read about on The Singular Fortean because it sounded somewhat like the Flatwoods Monster story that actually forms the basis of the second episode of the new show. Allison also attended the Chicago premiere where the producers and Hynek’s son were in attendance.

But Hollywood history be damned, we talk about the real stories behind the man. J. Allen Hynek basically invented how we study UFOs, how you scientifically look at each report and take a look at each piece of evidence from the weather to the planets to the phase of the moon to the position of the stars, and you eliminate all the terrestrial explanations before you move into the extra-terrestrial. We also get into:

  • The real story of how Dr. Hynek first moved from the desk to the field investigating UFO cases for the Air Force
  • The cases that converted J. Allen Hynek from a skeptic into much more open minded about the reality of strange lights in the sky
  • How Hynek became UFOlogy’s Enemy #1 by suggesting some Michigan sightings might be just “swamp gas”
  • Mark’s favorite case from his own UFO investigations as a MUFON investigator (and what’s going wrong with some of the MUFON politics and investigative methods lately.)
The real guy and Littlefinger…

Hollywood loves to say things are “based on a true story” and then proceed to make them wildly inaccurate. Here, we understand that fiction is fun, but that often the best parts of even fantastical stories (like haunted houses, UFO sightings, etc…) are the parts that keep us grounded to the Earth. By fictionalizing the story to an X-Files extent, you’re doing disrespect to the actual man.

Hynek’s investigative techniques and open mind are what made him a legend in UFOlogy. He was dealing with a lot of things that couldn’t be proven and his mission to discredit UFO sightings is what made it all the more impactiful when he found cases where he could not find an answer. It was his rigorous scientific method of investigation that made the difference, not secret government informants or Werner von Braun.

For the song this week, we were taken by the fact that sometimes the media thinks we’re too dumb to think for ourselves. There is a language and shorthand to cinema that is meant to trigger our emotions quickly and too often producers think that they can exploit our beliefs with special effects and “dramatizations”, sacrificing quality for spectacle. Well, we’d rather hear the truth about Hynek and here is Sunspot with “Disinformation Nation”.

Don’t trust your eyes
and question what you see
They’ll tell you lies
the don’t care about history
A story to bewitch
that is designed to find your switch
you’ll never see it coming
when they activate your programming

Believe
Disinformation nation
Deceive
Disinformation nation
How loud can you shout with a
a mouth inside a mouth
we’re just hardwired for manipulation
Disinformation nation.

You’ll see all things new
with a mind that’s clean
A brain tattoo
imprints and memes
A tale to push your trigger point
Finding the weakness at the joints
Looking for a crowd to whip
and you’ll jump when your sequence is tripped

Believe
Disinformation nation
Deceive
Disinformation nation
How loud can you shout with a
a mouth inside a mouth
we’re just hardwired for manipulation
Disinformation nation.

185 – The Oscar Love Curse: Legends and Lore of The Academy Awards

From Joan Crawford to Sandra Bullock, Bette Davis to Hilary Swank,  actresses who win Academy Awards are said to have been cursed in love shortly after. In fact, everyone from Forbes to National Public Radio to The Washington Post have talked about it.

For example, Emma Thompson wins Best Actress for Howard’s End in 1993 and by 1994, it’s revealed that Kenneth Branagh was fooling around with Helena Bonham-Carter on the set of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein a year later. They’re divorced in 1995.

Reese Witherspoon wins for her portrayal of June Carter Cash in Walk The Line in 2006, five months later she is divorced from her husband Ryan Philippe.

Renee Zellweger is dating Jack White (from The White Stripes) in 2004 and she wins Best Supporting Actress for Cold Mountain, several months later, they split up.

And those are just a few of the more modern examples. Hollywood breakups have been happening to Oscar winners since the Academy Awards started, but is there any truth to the “Oscar Love Curse”? And is it always women who are unlucky? What about the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor winners?

Hollywood Ghost Tour guide and WhatsYourGhostStory.com founder Scott Markus joins Wendy and I to get the facts behind the Oscar Love Curse and we also dish some more fun paranormal facts about Hollywood’s biggest night, The Academy Awards.

oscar love curse
1999 Gwyneth sure seemed happy, two months before her breakup with fellow Oscar winner, Ben Affleck

This week’s song is all about relationships collapsing and the feelings afterwards, it’s Sunspot’s ode to bitter breakups, “Eat Out My Heart”.

I’ve been waiting so long for you to call,
but now you’re finally here and I’m a wreck.
Worked out a little, even did my hair,
but I’m not the man I used to be back there.

I hope you have an ugly boyfriend,
I hope you’re working at a carwash,
I hope your life went down the drain and everything is not okay,
I hope your best years passed you up.

I dodged a bullet,
One or two since then,
You’re not the only one who still calls me up.
I’m still the jerkoff who listens to your problems,
I never told you all the times,
I’d wished you died in a car crash.

I hope you have an ugly boyfriend,
I hope you’re working at a carwash,
I hope your life went down the drain and everything is not okay,
I hope your best years passed you up, I hope your life sucks.

I’m eating out my heart.
I’m eating out my heart.

And I’m not happy for you,
That you’re a better person without me.
I’m so glad you decided to apologize,
When I’m too numb to care,
I’m just too numb to care.

I hope you have an ugly boyfriend,
I hope you’re working at a carwash,
I hope your life went down the drain and everything is not okay,
I hope your best years passed you up.

160 – Texas Chainsaws, Space Vampires, and The Poltergeist Curse: Remembering Tobe Hooper

Filmmaker Tobe Hooper passed away on August 26th, 2017 at the age of 74. Hooper was most famous for being the director on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist, but he also set his indelible mark on great films like Salem’s Lot and (the extremely under appreciated, in my opinion) Lifeforce. While he’ll always be remembered for having a massive impact on the the horror genre with his first big film, his other works have had real life paranormal urban legends and inspirations behind them. Allison from Milwaukee Ghosts, Wendy, and I talk about they recent Mothman investigations (Allison in Chicago and Wendy just went to Point Pleasant, West Virginia) and then we get right into our favorite Tobe Hooper movies.

First of all, we discuss the marketing behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, because the original tagline said that it was based on true events – which is completely not true! Of course, that kind of marketing helps sell tickets and makes something even scarier (just think about The Conjuring as a modern example). That little bit of brilliance helped Tobe Hooper turn his $300,000 independent Austin, Texas movie turn into a 146 million dollar (adjusted for inflation) horror juggernaut that inspired sequels, remakes, and even launched the careers of Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger.

But Leatherface was inspired by our own America’s Dairlyand homegrown Psycho, Ed Gein, who created his own masks of human skin from corpses he’d dig up in the Plainfield, Wisconsin graveyard. Ed died in Wendy and my town of Madison, but Allison has a fun story about her college poetry professor who used to volunteer at socials at the Mendota Mental Health Institute here and even got to dance with Ed himself (who was prone to dementia and considered good natured in his old age.) That was about as far as the “Based on a true story”, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre got. Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, and a little known Roddy McDowell film called It! were also inspired by Ed Gein.

Tobe Hooper made a huge impact on the cultural zeitgeist with his adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot for television and 11 years before kids were traumatized by IT, it was vampires in Maine that gave them nightmares.

Tobe Hooper
Hooper and Spielberg on the set of Poltergeist

But then Tobe Hooper hit Hollywood pay dirt by scoring the directing gig for Poltergeist. While there was a controversy that Steven Spielberg might have been the real director, our interest comes from the curse that supposedly followed the actors involved with the production.

The story of the Poltergeist curse has been around for at least 20 years and it involves the fact that the two of the actresses died very young, Dominique Dunne was murdered by her boyfriend and Heather O’Rourke (the girl that says “They’re here”) died of bowel obstruction complications during the filming of Poltergeist III. 

Plenty of stories on the Internet and on reality TV try to make it seem like there’s something to the curse, and the actress who payed the mother in the first two films, JoBeth Williams, even added fuel to the fire by claiming that real skeletons were used during the making of the film (that part might be true!). But beyond the coincidental tragedies of the two young actresses dying young, there really is no other evidence of any Poltergeist curse.

Hooper followed up Poltergeist with the awesome Lifeforce, written by Alien‘s Dan O’Bannon, but also based on Colin Wilson’s work The Space Vampires. Wilson was a fiction and nonfiction writer who would often deal with the paranormal and metaphysical and what makes The Space Vampires extra fun is that Wilson wrote the book on a challenge from Wisconsin author, August Derleth. Derleth is the one who kept H.P. Lovecraft’s world and mythology alive after his death, and he challenged Wilson to write a book in the Lovecraft vein. The Space Vampires was the book, and Tobe Hooper made it come alive (or undead!) with his adaption in Lifeforce. It wasn’t a big box office hit, but it’s been critically reevaluated in recent years for the terror-filled science fiction extravaganza that it was.

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Tobe Hooper helping out one of Leatherface’s family onset

After the mid-80s and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 not lighting the box office on fire, Hooper did mostly television work and one of his coolest shows was a 1991 TV show (hosted by Leonard Nimoy!) called Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories where he dramatized the events of the haunted Toys R’ Us in Sunnyvale, California. Now, that story means a lot to me since I saw it on That’s Incredible! when I was tiny. It probably was the first “real” ghost story that I can remember.

tobe hooper haunted toys r us
The image captured during the seance

The ghost story of the haunted Toys R’ Us in Sunnyvale, California involves a farm hand in the Nineteenth Century named Yohnny Yohanson who was in love with the owner of the farm’s daughter named Elizabeth. He loves her, she doesn’t love him, he dies in a tragic accident. One hundred years later, there’s a Toys R’ Us built on the site and strange things start occurring. Famous psychic Sylvia Browne shows up, has a seance, tells everyone the story, and they capture a photo during the seance of a “ghost”. It’s a classic ghost story made for TV and it had a huge impact on me as a kid. The fact that Tobe Hooper made a dramatized version of the events (that had way more inventive camera work and effects for a time than these shows usually had!) blew my mind!

Check out this great in-depth article about the Yohnny, Elizabeth, and the haunted Toys R’ Us that is well worth the read! 

1991 Haunted Lives True Ghost Stories – Episode 1 (Real Ghosts) from Jonathan Moser on Vimeo.

And it’s the Toys R’ Us story that helped us decide on this week’s Sunspot song. “Broken Toy” is a track full of 1980s’ nostalgia, when Tobe Hooper was in his directing prime. In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre it’s Sally Hardesty’s “innocence” that saves her, which is  one of the most common tropes of slasher films that followed (deftly parodied in the third act of the first Scream film), but still relatively novel back in 1974. The main thrust of this track is how once youthful innocence is lost, nothing is eve quite the same.

I opened a box of toys I broke,
and the ones that have broken me.
Cruising in my lego car,
and Jem was my favorite star,
But I fell in love with a girl,
from a galaxy far, far away.
Hey boy, where did you go?
Life ain’t that simple, don’t you know?
And the Duke boys couldn’t get away,
when I painted in shades of grey.
Don’t look me in the eye,
I can’t take what it makes me see.
It opens a box of toys I broke,
and the ones that have broken me.
It reminds me too much,
of the way things used to be.
I can’t play with a broken toy,
I can’t live on a memory.

Ronnie’s got a million guns,
Protecting us from Mao Tse Tsung,
but I don’t want to think about,
”The Day After” today.

Hey boy, what did you say?
Can Voltron make it all okay?
Or will my faith that ran away,
bump into me someday?

Don’t look me in the eye,
I can’t take what it makes me see.
It opens a box of toys I broke,
and the ones that have broken me.
It reminds me too much,
of the way things used to be.
I can’t play with a broken toy,
I can’t live on a memory.

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