151. Demons

This week on The Rotten Horror Picture Show Podcast, Clay and Amanda are letting the winner of their recent horror movie trivia game choose the next film for them to cover! The winning selection? Lamberto Bava’s 1985 Italian horror classic Demons, a blood-soaked nightmare about moviegoers trapped inside a theater with some particularly unfriendly monsters. It’s the perfect movie to get the gang back together for another round of screaming, splattering, and wondering why anyone would ever go to a movie theater again. So settle in, horror fans, because this week we’re celebrating trivia, terrifying Italian cinema, and the questionable judgment of people who choose to watch movies about evil movies. And speaking of things that deserve more attention, can someone please explain to me what happened to Nostradamus? I’m serious. Where did he go? In the 1990s, Nostradamus was EVERYWHERE. You couldn’t turn on the television without some guy in a black turtleneck explaining how a 16th-century French astrologer had predicted the end of the world, the rise of some terrible dictator, or possibly a particularly nasty storm in New Jersey. Books about his prophecies were flying off shelves. Documentaries were devoted to his every cryptic utterance. People were absolutely losing their minds over quatrains that sounded like they’d been written by a fortune cookie that had suffered a nervous breakdown. And now? Nothing. Nobody cares! We’ve got podcasts about murder, documentaries about ghosts, and endless television shows about whether aliens built the pyramids, but where is Nostradamus? Where are the ominous reenactments? Where are the actors whispering vague predictions while lightning flashes behind them? Where is the dramatic narrator asking if an obscure 16th-century poem could have predicted the events of next Tuesday? I LOVE that stuff! I want to believe that some French guy who died nearly five hundred years ago knew everything that was going to happen. I want to hear about his predictions until I’m too frightened to buy groceries. Instead, society has abandoned him. Frankly, it’s disgusting. So while Clay and Amanda discuss Demons, I’ll be wondering whether Nostradamus predicted the decline of his own pop-culture relevance. And if he did, I hope he left us a clue about when we’ll finally get another prime-time special about him. Because the future is terrifying, and I’d much rather hear about it from a dead Frenchman.