The press box is here to catch you up on the latest media stories. Hosted by Brian Curtis and David Cheumaker, these guys have the insight on the biggest stories you care about. Check out the press box on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fennessy and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about cult or cults or cult movies.
We have a double shot of Toronto Film Culture today. First, our pal and rigor contributor Adam Neiman will join to discuss the elusive nature of cult movies. What makes one qualify? Why and when does a movie officially earn cult status?
We'll use one of our favorite movies of recent memory, the ominous, surprising and altogether impressive 2020 release, The Empty Man as a launch point for our discussion before sharing our favorite cult movies of all time. Later in the show, I'll be joined by another Torontonian, MS Elegman, the writer-director of a movie I could see picking up a cult of its own, the terrifically entertaining and terrifying first feature, Shiva Baby. And then I talked about how she made the movie, the anxiety cinema that inspired her, and what to do next after you've been dubbed a wonderkind filmmaker. But first, let's talk to Adam Neiman about cult.
Good science by definition, allows for more than one opinion. Which is why our gathering of data so far reaches. Otherwise you really have the will of one man, which is the basis of cult. Adam Neiman, how are you?
Thanks for coming back on the show. Well, how are you, Sean? I'm hanging in there. Adam, we're talking about cults, cult movies, and where they come from and what they really mean to us today.
And, you know, I wanted to talk about Bad Trip on the show, and I couldn't figure out who to talk to about it. And then I noticed that you were a fan of Bad Trip. Now, I don't know if Bad Trip is going to qualify as a cult movie, but it feels like it's in the spirit of some other cult movies that have come along over the years. What'd you make of this prank comedy from Eric Andre?
Yeah, a very good time watching Bad Trip, as I think you did as well, which is an extension of what he does sometimes on his TV work, right? This kind of spontaneous haphazard using the materials of reality almost as props, you know? And he's fearless in the way that some of those other extemporaneous comedians like Sacha Baron Cohen are. But it also reminded me of, and this won't go too quickly into the cult thing, but yeah, but it reminded me of Jackass just in the extremity of it.
I mean, I happen to think Jackass was very good for culture and probably belongs in the Louvre Museum and the Smithsonian and the Hall of Fame. It's one of the great things ever for me, for a lot of reasons. But also just that idea of the body and extremity and feeling like something is both very kind of disgusting and unembarrassed of being disgusting, which is kind of gets you into the territory of cults because cults is all about taboos and breaking them and exceeding them. But you also don't want to be too pretentious about it.
Like, this is a movie where two people's penis is stuck in a Chinese finger trap or where people projectile vomit were just absolute insane exchanges in public spaces. And maybe it was just my mood, but I found it like just devastatingly funny from from getting to end and laughed kind of the way I laughed at stuff like Jackass and Borat, which is this is like very liberating. One thing I have noticed in the conversation around this movie is that this film has maybe a little bit more in common with Jackass than it does Borat specifically because Jackass was frequently pranks at the expense of the prankers. This was a cadre of people who were doing this to each other.
And of course, Borat was frequently identifying victims and using the sort of the ignorant in the world, the people who we perceive as dangerous and making them the victims of Borat's shtick. This movie is much more oriented around other people's genuine reactions to the insanity that Eric Andre, Lil Rel, Tiffany Haddish are all executing against each other here. Well, it's oddly touching as a pre-pandemic movie. And I'm not one of those people who watches a movie now from like 83.
I'm like, oh my God, crowds, I'm crying. I mean, almost any movie shot before 2020 is a pre-pandemic relic. But it is interesting to see these actors freely mixing out in not just on sets or like in society, public spaces, private spaces. And yeah, you're right that it's closer to Jackass than Borat.
And also it seems to make the opposite point about him being a little lofty. It seems like the opposite point about America. I'm not saying that it's like affirmative nationalist portraiture, but the people are all very nice considering what Eric Andre is putting them through. And yeah, that's editing and that's a choice of what to leave in.
And again, I don't want to spoil it, but a movie like this always has credit stingers. And I loved the end credits of that trip, which are kind of moments where people are suddenly let in on what they're seeing. And there's such a sense of like euphoria and relief for the people. Like, oh, that shit's not actually happening.
But also for us, we're like, oh, they didn't actually want to murder him. You know, they didn't actually want to kill him. And I don't know Eric Andre at all. I'm going to watch a couple of interviews with him, not the ones he does, which are like dataist pranks.
His show is the greatest. The people have not seen the show on film. It's fantastic. But he seems, and I hope that this is true, you know, seems like a chill guy.
Like you see him in the end part of this film interacting with people after whatever he's done. And within two seconds, they forgive him, right? Because it's clearly just funny. Yes.
I think it's also just not mean spirited. And it's an interesting portrait. I think of a perverted sense of empathy. You know, there's a sequence in which Tiffany Haddish's character escapes from a prisoners bus.
And there's a there's a there's a looks like a maybe a sanitation worker or a local city worker telling her to hurry to get away. And then later, the authorities come to him and say, did you see where she went? And they point he points him in a direction and then Tiffany has comes back. And you can almost see the conflict that this guy is having in real time with whether to help this person who's down trodden or whether to help the authority figure.
It's an oddly nuanced kind of movie about human behavior, even though it also features projectile vomiting. Yeah, which again is a testament again to the way that it's assembled or edited, right? I mean, Borat some people are like, well, what's the nice stuff that got left on the cutting room floor? And in this movie, you're like, you know, I'm sure that there were some people who were real jerks.
But I mean, also, it's a great experiment. And this is how some of the people who've not been written about very seriously critically, which is a common theme with something else we'll talk about later. Where it's like, sometimes you wish that there was criticism that was more up to the good movies that were coming out. But no one really knows what to write about these days.
But on Letterbox, where there is some criticism of this movie, I like the people who've written about how what it's doing is it's staging a really now generic road trip romantic comedy within reality. And it's a wonderful genre critique too. It's like that great onion article where it's like, Real Life Man gets arrested for romantic comedy behavior. And I thought that that was sort of what you get in bad trip.
It's like those things that we see sometimes, like these spontaneous declarations of love after you've destroyed someone's workplace or these big gestures where you go up to people in public and stuff. They're actually like quite awful and horrifying. And you have to just sit with it, you know, as the movies happening. Yeah, it identifies that the conventions of general movie storytelling often feature sociopathic behavior.
And so this is just sociopathic behavior to an extreme. It's an incredibly fun movie. It strikes me that this movie was originally produced by MGM and was meant to be released in movie theaters. I think it was going to premiere at South by Southwest in 2020, if I recall.
And of course it was acquired by Netflix and that's where premiered now. On the one hand, I was very happy to have a movie like this on Netflix and very happy to have a quiet Wednesday night. Slightly lifted by getting the experience of watching it. On the other hand, could there be a better movie theater movie?
This would have been such a fun experience in a theater. And that did, I did feel a sense of loss around that. Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's a perfect movie to watch, as you say, not watch distracted because that does it a disservice. But like, it is a light, fun home watch.
It's also very easily excerpted and segmented. We're like, oh, I'll watch that part again, which will also end up happening as it gets put on YouTube. The same way that Jackass lives on it, like, you know, supercuts at the best moments for the three movies. But yeah, I would love to see it with a theater and comedy or horror or genres where you have a lot of catharsis.
You like to feel people acting the same way that you're acting. Nothing makes you laugh harder than other people laughing. And it's a little trickier, but sometimes nothing is because fear is very solitary. But when you're in a movie theater with a scary movie, like I remember going to see the first paranormal activity and just the feeling in the room being what was better than the film itself, right?
So yeah, bad trip would probably be very liberating to see in a theater. I miss movie theaters, Sean. Wouldn't it be great if we could go to them? I would just love to do it.
Well, I'll be vaccinated soon. I hope fingers crossed and then maybe I'll start going again. We'll see. I can't wait to hear about that from all the way here in Toronto, which is a demilitarized zone, but my digraphs.
Well, things will improve, I hope. Fingers crossed. Things have improved significantly for the empty man, Adam. I would say the empty man has been on a long journey to relevance.
And I sense the relevance growing over time. Now, people listening to the show, you know, bad trip, that's easily accessible. Fire up Netflix in the last two weeks and you probably saw it served up straight to you. The empty man is a little bit tougher to find, but I sense that there is something growing.
There is maybe perhaps like cult growing around this movie. So I was hoping that you could explain the arc of the empty man. What is this movie? Where did it come from?
And then why do we both like it? So this is a film that I checked out when I had a baby daughter this past year and I found it out of just basic addiction to genre cinema, right? And I don't remember what it was. And this isn't the point because all I want to talk about is how good this movie is.
But I saw something on iTunes because that's where I got it, spend money on it. It was like, you know, 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is even was middling grade. That might have changed by now, but it was something like that. And that's not even like a low enough grade where you're like, Oh, if people hate something, it must be good because that's actually my usual way of being.
I wrote a book on showgirls man. It's like if people hate something, it's probably good. And I figured that it would be a middling watch for a middling night because if it's a good new horror movie, surely I would have heard about it because that's kind of just what I'm into. And I got about three and a half minutes into this movie.
I thought this is a very good movie. Nothing's happened to me yet, but this is clearly good movie making. Let's see if it stays a good movie. And when it was over two hours and 20 minutes later, because it is a long movie, all I wanted to do was go and see who wrote about this because that's the way that I'm wired.
What do people say about something? And I think that part of the big story, and I have a piece on this movie coming out not for you guys somewhere else, but it'll be on a couple of weeks. And that's I think the story of this movie is just who didn't see it or how was it not presented because we're in a moment now where horror quote unquote elevated horror is film festival, catnip. I'm not denigrating any of the movies I'm about to mention, but things like hereditary and mid summer and Bob Eggers movies come prepackaged as a tour works director centric horror elevated horror.
And however you feel about that term, it exists. I like this movie more than most of those movies. I don't know whether David Pryor would agree that he's made elevated horror or that this movie qualifies. If this movie plays its own dancer, South by Southwest, it maybe gets the kind of eyeballs on it that then turn into a kind of advanced buzz.
This is a movie that has earned its buzz in retrospect, which I think in some ways is really cool, given what it's about, this idea of cult formation and ideas that kind of just metastasize and break through and you can't see them until they've gained critical mass. I mean, man, it's just such a good movie. It really is. It's really effective.
I had a very similar experience. I want to say it was reading a review by Brian Tallerko at rogereber.com that first really hit me to it. I had an awareness of it because I have this unhealthy addiction to organizing the release dates of every studio. I can remember.
And so I knew that this movie was coming out. And it was in fact released in movie theaters, frankly, at the height of the pandemic in October of 2020. And it was, I would say, dumped into theaters by Disney. And this is a film that was originally developed by Fox.
I believe it was filmed in is it 2017, 2016? I think I think it's I should know this because I talked to David Pryor about it at length, but I think it was shot in 2017 and completed in 2018. Okay. So it then spent north of two years on the shelf.
In that time, Fox was acquired by Disney. I would say this film does not have the hallmarks of a Disney film in any meaningful way. Disney is not well known for its interest in horror as a genre in the first place. And so the movie came and went and it got quite middling reviews by the critics who had a chance to see it and.
And to say something about those middling reviews. Yeah, you get it, right? This is like dog days release date. It's not an award season movie.
There's no festival premiere and people are so distracted by the incredible just changing of the exhibition landscape. Writers don't know what they're even being assigned for because release dates keep changing and then horror tends to be reviewed by stringers. Anyway, that's right. So the bad reviews of the movie reviews, they make me mad, but they're also so understandable.
In in context, it's like, of course, that's what happened. I think it's also completely. Askew from the rest of whatever we could describe as modern horror right now. So elevated horse, certainly it's not quite in that it wasn't marketed in that way, though.
Maybe perhaps it could have been, but even more specifically, it does not have the kind of fizzy horror comedy energy of some of the Blumhouse films. It does not have the sense of haunted house historical Annabelle creation sort of, you know, the conjuring universe affectations. It's it's a it's a movie that is a little bit difficult to compare to most traditional horror movies. The film, the films that I think it's been compared to most frequently are probably the films of David Fincher, the early films of David Fincher.
And there's a reason for that. And it's because in part David Pryor has had some exposure to David Fincher over his career. Can you just explain like where prior comes from and what your conversations were like? Yeah, I mean, he's a he's a filmmaker in his own right and he made a horror short, a long horror short that's kind of slightly Lovecraftian.
And I think in the way that short films sometimes serve as calling cards or advertisements, this one would be that. But I mean, what he is living and he's already good at it is he works on studio DVD supplements, which already marks him as a it's weird and already marks him as a slightly anachronistic specialist. Because DVDs and Blu-rays still exist, but now we have online streaming and behind the scenes isn't what it used to be, right? But David did the behind the scenes feature at on Fight Club, which he chose.
He told me that he went to Fox after working on the DVD for Ravenous, which he did a great job on all of the features and Antonio Birdsville, Ravenous, another great horror movie. And he said I want to do Fight Club and that began this association between him and Fincher, which is not an apprenticeship and it's not like he's part of the creative team of those movies. But yeah, as you said, it's exposure to and relationship to Fincher and his methods and he did the stuff for the Benjamin Button, which is a really good doc on the Benjamin Button disc and also on the social network, which is obviously like peak Fincher or peak late Fincher. And I think that what reminds me of Fincher and the Empty Man, which isn't so much themes or even the disaturated color palette, like you can get into both of those things.
But it's the sense of convergence that the movie has. This is a movie that feels like it's in a constant state, not just of momentum, but like of arrival. It is constantly arriving and its main character is constantly arriving exactly where things are most intriguing and most immersive for you as a viewer. It's like Fincher has this thing where when he's good, like I think on girls very good, it's like a silenced pistol shot that just keeps going.
It's like two and a half hours, but it feels like 10 seconds, at least to me. Empty Man, I think turned a lot of people off-site on scene because like who watches a two hour and 17 minute horror movie, but it does not flag for me. I mean, I think there's a triumph of pace and that's the fincher thing. It feels like it is constantly arriving, converging, coming together, assembling itself.
And I don't want to be too spoilery or too coy, but that idea of arriving and assembling itself, man, does it make sense in retrospect? And this ties into the idea that maybe in a cult movie because one of the hundreds of ways you can define cult movies as they tend to be rewocked, it is so good a second time. I was just going to say that to you. So I watched it for a second time last night and thinking about Pryor's experience as an extras creator.
I wasn't looking for the extras for this film and there were none, of course, on the release. I'm really eager actually to see if there is anything out there that will show us the creation of this movie because it seems like a complex production. There was some stopping and starting, there was some shifting in location. And also the movie itself does not have any of the standard, forget about horror movies, even just traditional studio Hollywood films not made by powerful oators, shape or arc.
It is not a typical three act structure it has. In fact, one of the most audacious openings to a conventional seeming horror movie that I can really remember in this 20 minute introduction set in the Himalayas. And I think it was pretty much by the time we got to the end of that prologue. I was like, oh, this is unique and perhaps maybe even special.
Well, when I mentioned earlier, I got about three minutes in. I wasn't kidding because there's a shot in this prologue, which takes place in Bhutan and has these American backpackers who are just hanging out. It's like, you know, summer break, but it's not a professional venture. They're on vacation and they pass where they're passed by a truck with these Bhutanese monks and they make eye contact.
And again, I'm sitting here with a baby and I'm kind of brain dead. I'm kind of brain dead anyway, but I look at it. I'm like, no, that's the cart from the Exorcist. That's the Iraq prologue of the Exorcist when Father Marin sees this cart go barreling by him.
The fact that several weeks later when I got in touch with David Pryor, he was kind of like, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't need it vindicated by the filmmaker though. He said that's exactly it and told me about scouting and trying to find Bhutanese monks in South Africa where the movie was shot just funny in and of itself. But the Exorcist thing for me, it's not just that I like the Exorcist.
I'm like, yeah, well, you can freakin used to do that. He shot an Exorcist in source for these 15 minute prologs. They're like mini movies. They're epic mini narratives.
And then the movie starts. And I was just so excited by that ambition. I was so excited by the idea that the first 15 or 20 minutes of this movie are a satisfying, interesting, unsettling short film in and of itself, but also not self-contained because they're so suggestive and feel like you do at the beginning of the Exorcist like something has been let out. And then you cut to America, you cut to Missouri and you're like, how is this going to add up?
And it's such a fun feeling of I just went through this one experience. How is that experience now going to contextualize what I'm watching? And I was mostly almost completely delighted by the answer to that question. Me too.
I was impressed that he was able to thread the needle. I have seen some people who have watched it and I have been advocating the people check this movie out ever since I saw it. But I've heard the response that for some people it doesn't all add up, so to speak. I candidly, I don't really care about that.
I'm not really necessarily interested. But to your point about the prologue, the prologue does add up and it does pay off and it does feel of a piece with the rest of the film, ultimately. Well, I'm torn. I mean, I'm torn in a couple directions because one, I'm writing about it later and I don't want to give away all my best thoughts.
But also I don't want to spoil it for the people who are listening. This is only doing a rewatchable for you where everyone has seen heat. You want people to be drawn to this movie. What I will say, the comment I've heard from some people, including some very smart people, is that not just that it doesn't add up, but it feels like a bunch of different movies at once.
And all I would say about that, to any perspective, viewers is it's such an interesting choice because it seems to inhabit and discard all these generic containers that I would recognize as kind of 21st century horror movies. It's kind of an urban legend movie and it's kind of like a high school gang movie and then it has this weird kind of slasher interlude and then it starts converging as a kind of cult movie. And I think that again, given how the movies about the relationship between editor and interforms and how ideas are kind of transmitted and carried in different ways, I just love that even if there's things that don't add up or if you call them plotable, which I think is debatable, the core tone of it remains so steady and solid and propulsive as the surface keeps changing. And that's a rare thing.
And the movie that it kind of reminded me in that sense of, which is much shorter, which I spoke about before, but it reminds me a little bit of Killist, the Ben Wheatley film where Killist seems to be one kind of movie and then it becomes another and then it definitely becomes another. And when I say about the empty man said it's very much of a piece and that's where it's satisfying or satisfyingly unsatisfying because again, without spoilers and it's a hard thing to get into in a granular way, though maybe we can try it. It's also an exceptionally bleak movie, right? Like not fashionably dark and I don't even think it's mean spirit.
I think it's quite empathetic and sad. There's a really, really downbeat. I agree with you. I think it is also there are moments of violence, but I would not describe it as a violent film.
No, no, no. I think the word that I would, I mean, there are a couple of words that I thought of when the first time I saw it. I think grave is one that, you know, again, I can't get the Disney connection out of my head and the idea of some executive at Disney acquiring this film and looking at it and being like, what is this? What do we do with this?
But it's also quite sinister and quite ominous and I really like films like that that are able to capture and hold that tone, especially at two hours and 20 minutes. I mean, that's not easy to do. No. And when you talk about that, I was saying honest, I would also say it's very contemporary and I don't just mean that it's said in the present tensor that it's not a period piece.
I mean, what is depicting? And sometimes I think it's very explicit about in the dialogue. Like for those of you who are a fan and if you're not what's wrong with you, the character actor Steven Root, who ennobles his book. He's a professional.
Every time he practices it and everything. He is fabulous in this movie. But he's fabulous in this movie. I mean, there's a big kind of exposition slash, I guess, ideology dump in the middle of the movie where he kind of talks about what the movie is about.
But even without that, the vision that you get is of such a kind of drained spiritually arid world. And sometimes when filmmakers do that, I get very impatient because I say, I don't why am I suffering through your bad mood, right? You know, and other times I think, oh, this is reflecting something pretty apt and there's something in this movie where you have all these bodies kind of clustered together in search of some kind of enlightenment, some kind of idea. There's lots of images of people on their phones, which I know sounds even when I say it out loud.
I'm like, oh, that sounds so lame, but it's not. There's like this dialect again, between connection and disconnection, you know, people who are searching for answers and people who stumbled across something I think is going to work for them. And also just such an incredible sense of loneliness, which is conveyed through the performance of James Baddjdale, who's great. And on the basis of this movie should be a big star.
And I'm not saying he's not, but should be a bigger one because this is what it means to carry a movie and he just puts it on his back and it's a physical performance and he's moving through the whole movie. I mean, he's a detective kind of his character. We should say plot wise that once you get out of Bhutan and whatever happens there, you're in Missouri with this guy whose friend's daughter disappears. And she says, I know you're not really a cop anymore, but you don't seem to have much else going on in your life.
Can you find her? And because he suffered through this trauma of his own with a loss in his family, this idea of a missing girl really activates something in him. And so he tries to find her and it sounds so cliche, but it's aware of that because everywhere in this movie, there are cliches, there are horror movie cliches, there are detective movie cliches, but by the time you have Stephen Root literally giving a monologue about cliches and what's what's dangerous about them and also what it would mean to re-imbut a cliche with its original meeting, you're sitting here being like, this is a smart movie. Yes, his deconstruction and reconstruction of a famous Nietzsche quote is like, as the centerpiece of the idea of the movie is so smart, but there are tons of moments like that.
There is literally a two minute sequence in which all we see is James Bajdale clicking on various Wikipedia pages. And frankly, I was wrapped. And if you read that in a script, I'd be like, this is the most hack work exposition you could possibly do, but it worked. So one thing I will say when I entered David Pryor, we talked about this.
I will go ahead on a limb. I try not to be hyperbolic on this podcast or anywhere else. It is the best Wikipedia passage in any movie I've ever seen. There you go.
I mean, I'm not surprised to hear you say that because it really is effective. And part of that is a clear sense of pace in the editing. Part of that is just the way that it's shot and lit. Part of it is James Bajdale, looking, gazing at Wikipedia in an effective way, but it is a really good performance.
He's a great reader in this movie. And again, that's where the fincher thing comes in because, I mean, you can talk about venture with the big capital capitalized words. Like it's about process and it's about method. But I mean, with venture, it's always about the cruel of information and knowledge, at least in his procedural, right?
The Wikipedia passage in Empty Man is great because the cruel of knowledge is so steady and the click through is so steady and the ideas are insane. You know, and the idea that this is all sitting out there on Wikipedia and these kind of Internet rabbit holes, which again, feels very contemporary. Like, it's not a movie about the Internet exactly, not as explicitly as say, Pulses as an Internet horror movie or Fear.com, but it has that feeling of click through hyperlinked momentum to it, which is kind of where it feels contemporary. But then it's also dealing with things that are very ancient.
And when you mentioned the Nietzsche quote, which the grad school listeners in the picture would probably guess is the famous one about looking at an abyss and an abyss looking back at you. If you're watching the movie and you have that in your mind and you think about the imagery in the cold open of this guy in a cave sitting and staring and adopting the posture of what he's staring at, you see just how carefully written it is. Writing and horror cinema sometimes don't tend to be talked about that much in the same breath because we're like, what is the director's compositional sense or how do the actors look? Look terrified and reflect our fear back at us.
All that good stuff. It is to me, holes or not. It is such a well written movie. And if I were to say you can keep one thing about this movie that you want to tell people you like about it, for me, it's the script.
It's exceptionally well made, but it's exceptionally well made within the parameters of the script that he went and wrote. And it actually is. I was going to say it's not a comic book adaptation, but it actually literally is. It's a graphic novel adaptation, but it streamlines and reconfigures that source material so much.
It's not about the source material being bad. He just didn't want to make it. He took almost everything in that comic away. It has heavy ideas and heavy influences.
You know, another influence that struck me as I rewatched it was, and this is overt. And this is also in that prologue is the film opens with a shot of a mountaintop. And then within two minutes, we are down in a tunnel in a cave and that's just pure. There will be blood.
That's exactly how there will be blood opens and that there's no way that's a mistake. You know, that's certainly the kind of film that you imagine David Pryor would be interested in. And this idea of reaching the mountaintop, you have to go to the depths of your life and existence is so obvious. And it's fun to play that game of the movie like this because you can see that Pryor has a brain that is kind of swarmed by influence.
And even though that makes it a frankly unoriginal kind of movie in some ways, it's also some of the very best movies of all time are peeling away pieces of their favorite films and and re-stitching them together. When you mentioned playing with it, I like it because it plays with you. And there's wonderful variations in this movie on that idea that if you call to something, it calls back. If you step towards something, it steps towards you.
Then if you try to move away from it, unfortunately, it also keeps coming towards you. It's right. And you know, it's got all this very granular gestural stuff. I think without those things, without the movement from a mountain to a cavern, without the incredible motif in it of bridges, this is like one of the most bridge centric movies I've ever seen, all kinds of bridges, without all the repeated motifs dropping underground and corridors.
Without that stuff, the ideas of it might be pretty lofty and they are kind of lofty, right? I mean, David, if you're listening to this, it's not an unpretentious movie, right? But the way that the somewhat high end or somewhat area ideas in it get tied and tethered or physically manifested in actual things in the filmmaking is very impressive. I sometimes feel like there are movies that kind of start as metaphors and then filmmakers look for ways to realize them.
This is a movie that achieves metaphor. I think it achieves it and it achieves it because seen by scene, shot by shot, location by location, prop by prop, it's solid and compelling. And that's venture to. Right.
Completely. There is a sequence in the film about halfway through in which James Batchdale's character is having a conversation in the police station with an older black detective and the comparison between seven is unmistakable. And the things that the older detective is saying, I would say are a bit overwritten. There is a moment in which the detective literally says it is communicable.
And then that idea of virality and something getting trapped inside you is obviously overt in terms of the story they're telling. And yet it seems incredibly conscious of the decision it's making to echo something that has come before it. And so to me, it's perfectly effective. Like it doesn't really matter that perhaps aligns a line.
It's not the most subtle telling. This is a mainstream ostensibly horror movie. Sometimes it has to be direct. Yeah.
And it has the scale of a movie that costs whatever it costs. Right. I mean, there's an irony here that again, I kind of discussed with the director, discussed about it where somehow if it was made smaller, it might have been bigger. You know, if it had that more underdog, and I hate to name a specific distributor, but you know, this is an 824 movie, you know, or neon.
Probably wouldn't have cost as much. And, you know, David Pryor has said not just to me that, you know, on the other hand, how do you complain? I mean, you got file cut on a movie you wrote, directed and edited for a big studio. That's a really kind of visionary cosmic horror movie.
I mean, that's not a bad outcome. And in a way, the bad outcome of the movie being dumped and ignored is what's going to create the conditions for a kind of cult resurrection. It's not only movies that are kind of left for dead that become cult movies, but it helps. And I'm going to talk about this a bit more later.
That's also rare now because things get reclaimed before they even come out because all we do now is review trailers or plot synopsis or source material before we actually watch movies. And you always know people are going to jump on something that's getting badly reviewed. The second it comes out to say, no, you people are idiots. It's good.
I'm not going to say that that's a bad impulse, but it's not like it used to be react to have time for revisionist criticism to achieve critical mass. This is a rare case of something that because it's being not reviewed by critics after the fact, but reviewed by social media after the fact feels culty. I agree. It is the newest, the latest iteration of cult, which is very exciting.
Before we get deeper into cult movies, we have a special guest on the show. I'm very excited about this. We actually have the empty man calling in through the big picture. This is incredible honor for us.
So let's let's patch him in now. Empty man are you there? Hey, Sean, thanks for having me on, man. What are you doing?
Yeah, you know, it's been a, you know, what a year, right? For everybody. But for me, it's been, it's hard to even keep track of time from the Euro Valley in Bhutan. You know, we go all the way to Missouri and now Silver Lake, but look, I got the J&J.
I'm feeling pretty good. And we and it's a team. I got to make sure I thank the team. We feel like Q321 is going to be a huge, huge moment for both empty man and PotFX Institute.
And it starts here. It starts on my favorite movie podcast. So thanks so much for having me on for the very first time. Well, it's our pleasure.
You know, Antifa, there's a lot of lore surrounding you. Adam and I have been talking about the lore surrounding your work. How do you think in a post COVID-19 world, your work will continue to prosper? Well, I mean, a lot of the conversations that we've been having are about how to, I wouldn't want to say weaponize, you know, because I mean, I don't want to scare anybody off, but just sort of like, you know, what are we not doing on TikTok?
What are we not doing on Clubhouse? That could bring people a little bit closer to what we, what we're all about. You know what I mean? It's like when you show someone an ancient demon that is just a skeleton with prayer hands, I think that there's a little bit of like a blanching that goes on.
Oh, what's that? But you know, if we can kind of come up with some fun dances, maybe some memes, you know, we're working with a lot of really important influencers and a lot of different spaces, mostly self care, mostly beauty. But you know, I think there's a lot of open paths for us. Yeah, you are redefining virality in so many ways, and Adam, you've been thinking about the empty man for a long time.
You finally have a chance to confront him. Anything you want to ask him? I have so many questions, you know, I mean, Adam, huge fan, by the way. I appreciate that empty man, me, me, you as well.
I mean, is it vindicating for you or validating for you that after kind of so many people missed you the first time, now they just kind of have to deal with the fact that you're everywhere? Like one of your guys was saying, you know, we were all one once, we're going to be one again, and we're in the second part of that formulation. It must be just very satisfying. I mean, identity is so fluid in the stage, you know what I mean?
And I feel like that's been a real, a real boon to our business, but also to our mission. And you know, we try to live by our principles that we're for everyone, even if we are just for one. And yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I really think that, you know, balancing the individual, the work life balance has always been kind of difficult for me as an empty man.
But I think that we have the tools out there to make it a success. Empty man, I'm hearing that you're considering joining the SPAC with Buzzfeed and Axios. Is there any truth to that? I mean, I'm just going public.
Look, I can feel Steve and Bernie getting really annoyed at me for even talking about this. Those are my business managers. You guys are crazy. Look, you know, I can't really talk about a lot of my investment plans.
You know, the GameStop thing was a hirdle, was a dip. You know what I mean? I mean, I'm not going to talk about the business and values in this market. The important thing is to stay calm and stay aggressive, you know what I mean?
And not that scared. So if bite-sized news combined with incredible list content is something that we think over the pond effects that would help get our message across, like, sure, like we're open for business. Can I ask you one other thing, Antimat? Oh, for sure.
Yeah. Who are your guys? Who are my guys? Well, you know, I mean, I came up at the store in the 70s.
So, you know, just seeing Eddie, like, you know, you have to understand, like if you were there on Friday night and Richard or Eddie walked in, it was like, if I may say so, it was like being in front of the empty man. I mean, you were like, I'm here. I'm in front of an actual gadget, a God. M.T.
Man, this has been incredibly informative. I feel like, I feel like in many ways Adam and I will be haunted by this conversation for years to come. So thank you for showing yourself to us. Is there anything you want to share with our listeners before you go?
First, you see me, then you hear me, then you pod with me. That is the M.T. Man, folks, thank you so much. So Adam, that was the M.T.
Man. Let's go from the M.T. Man to Colts at large. Now, cult movies are a fascinating subject to me.
I would say that my exposure to cult movies at a young age certainly changed my trajectory as a movie fan from what would have been strictly a Hollywood normie, which of course I am in many respects to someone who has got a much wider sense of taste beyond that. What about for you? When you think of a cult movie, what do you think of? Well, I mean, it's one of those things where you don't want to get the cop out answer because if you start saying that everything is potentially cult, then you're doesn't feel like you're talking about something special or specific or interesting.
But it is one of those things that has really elastic boundaries. A few years ago at the University of Toronto where I do sometimes teach, I was actually put together a course in Tata Course in Santa Fe, where I think the guiding principle of that, beyond just a survey of some of the key literature, like the Rosenbaum Hoberton book, Midnight Movies, and a lot of the writing like Danny Perry's cult movie books and writing on filmmakers like Edward. In addition to that, I put around the idea of extremity. I don't just mean extreme violence or extreme sexuality, which is a big part of cult, but movies that stick out or stand out or don't fold in easily and that that's where people's attraction to them comes from.
Sometimes it can be an extremity of aesthetics, sometimes it can be extreme intensity, it can be extreme length, extreme rareness, extreme scarcity, but irregularity basically. And since the standards for a constitutes normal or mainstream keep changing, it's interesting that some movies lose their cult aura and some movies kind of take it on. But I would also say that loss, scarcity, rareness, or movies that were missed or that were kind of not given their due the first time or that were misunderstood is also a big factor or facet of cult. I mean, again, I wrote a book on showgirls, which is probably one of the key Hollywood cult movies in the 90s.
There's a group of people who passionately love something and want to reclaim it and own it and worship it in a way. And that doesn't work so well with something that everyone likes in the first place. Yeah, it's interesting. I think that notion of a movie, sort of, I don't know if evolving is the right word, but moving beyond the concept of cult has been fascinating to me too, because I think there are many films in the 90s and in the 2000s when you and I were coming of age, so to speak, that seemed like they ought to be cult movies and then completely transcended that brand.
You know, the Big Lebowski is often identified as a cult movie these days, but that is a movie that has been seen by more people than perhaps have seen a film like Deep Impact, you know, including by your very website, where I believe it was, and which both makes sense that it would top a list like that because of a certain tone or demographic or readership. And in other ways, it's not remotely a cult movie, the way that, you know, Cobra Woman is a cult movie or the world's greatest sinner is a cult movie. There's different tiers in arenas and contexts for it. I think that cult in academic terms has always been seen as somewhat oppositional.
You know, and when something is oppositional, you have this idea of underdogs or fanlings or things that have been lost or that haven't been nurtured or movies that are weird and deformed and unwholesome in a way. But it's equally true to say that in the sense that they were passionately loved and that people still love and quote them that movies like the Big Libesky or Ferris Bueller's Day Off or What Hot American Summer, they're not cult movies. This is what I mean by it's a huge category. I think that those movies that you just named in particular have a kind of, I'll say sweetness for lack of a better word.
And historically in my mind, cult movies are a little bit more subcultural, a little bit more transgressive, a little bit more outside of the mainstream. And so there's an interesting bit of confusion, I think sometimes we talk about these things. We all have our own personal definitions. You know, you mentioned the Ringer did a list earlier this year, which I thought was a very good list.
And frankly, I would recommend every single film that appears on the list, the standards for that list were domestic box office gross of less than $30 million, a lack of initial widespread acclaim and a surge in sales popularity and or a claim once the movie hit VHS or DVD. And so in that respect, the remit is broad. That could be a whole number of kinds of movies. I would guess that my taste in cult is slightly more esoteric and I would guess that you having seen everything and having been deeply trained as a film scholar would run even deeper than that.
So I guess, do you think that it's still possible to have a cult movie? You know, we're talking about the empty man. We're talking about the way that this film seems to have attracted a sense of a sense of loyalty, I would say. I think it has advocates out in the world.
It has followers. And that is seemingly increasingly rare and or I think you could say that every movie kind of has this in a way now. And so the rise of stand culture has also kind of perverted the idea of cult movies. I mean, I'm going to mention a movie and I wasn't planning on mentioning it, but just to put a movie in play that some of your listeners might know and I'm pretty sure you saw, which is Panos, because Matos is called Mandy.
On the one hand, I think Mandy is a cult movie, which is I think it's made to order as one. And that's also an increasing phenomenon. I mean, I can't date it. I can't say that, you know, as soon as the Rocky Horror Picture Show came out, people tried to make cult movies, but Rocky Horror, which would make any serious list about cult in which I taught in my course and in some ways talk quite critically because there's a way in which it's not actually very transgressive movie.
It's a movie where in the end the forces of transgression disappear and the heroes emerge a little kinkier and wiser, but you know, we don't have to deal with Frank and Ferner anymore. But you know, with Rocky Horror, that's made as a cult movie. It's about cult movies. The music in Rocky Horror is about old RKO and Fa-Ray and King Kong and science fiction double feature.
It's already a 1975 nostalgic for the idea of true cult. And now 50 years later, Rocky Horror is like an old chestnut and kind of a classic or it to be on the attention span of people who are in their 20s. Now, you try and show them Rocky Horror Picture Show and maybe they're not into it. But movies made to order as cult movies, self-conscious movies, I'd say Richard Kelly falls in this category too.
Maybe Ben Wheatley falls in this category with Field in England. There is something about them that is valid and viable, but it doesn't excite me in the same way as things that are older. And it's not about being a snob and not about being an obscurantist. It's just the conditions of cult in the 30s and 40s and 50s.
Very different than what's considered cult. With some exceptions, a movie like showgirls, which was so toxic and so hated and had nobody willing to advocate on it's behalf in real time, which has been reclaimed in so many different directions. I think as an example of the movie that was on the regular list, but also just a movie in general for the last 20 years that I think actually qualifies as opposed to things that are made to order in a way to tap into an audience that wants something self-consciously weird or self-consciously strange. It's interesting.
I mean, you're taking a somewhat philosophical and critical approach to this. And I think when I think about my favorites in the category, I have a much more emotional and chronological relationship to it. And so it's frequently movies that I saw at a critical juncture in my life. And one of the movies that's on my list of my favorites, and I've written about this, was just my exposure at 14 or 15 years old to Profondo Rosso, Deep Red, Dario Argento's slasher, Giallo.
And that movie completely reordered my brain. It is as impactful on me as Jaws and Star Wars. And it was a very classical, I didn't know you could do this. I didn't know you could frame a story this way.
I didn't know you could tell a film like this. I probably had seen fewer than 24 films before seeing that movie in my lifetime. And that is, I think, in many ways a true cult film that has a cult film. It's probably not the signature cult movie of Argento's career.
That's probably Suspiria. But it is a movie that to this day, if you put it on, I will sit through the entire thing delighted and feeling the same pangs of emotional recognition that I get when I listen to Nirvana's bleach. It has the same kind of like, boy, when I was 13, I was discovering some wonderful shit in the world. And it's interesting the way that these things work on you.
No, I mean, in terms of being formative and in terms of that strong attachment, those are absolutely the individual conditions for that kind of cult love, right? And Argento would definitely qualify again because of that idea of extremity, formal extremity, and the palette of the movie starting with the title is so rich. Like it doesn't pass unnoticed. But I don't know if you have them and you probably did.
I mean, it gets you to do, I can't see them on your bookshelf. But I can see a book on The Coen Brothers that somebody wrote. Shout out to you. You know, do you have the Danny Perry cult books?
You know, the book. I do. It's a terrific interview on the Ringer.com with Danny. Yeah.
That's a little bit better than Ben Lindbergh. I was going to say it was a terrific interview because it spoke to how influential those books were and the way that they were so ecumenical and mixed. So you read Danny Perry's original cult movie's volume and there are illustrations and images from movies that are really screwed up, I guess, when you're a teenager, like a blue velvet. Yes.
And I'm like, what is this movie? Or Dennis Hopper with the Casemaskar? And you know, he's got, you know, Rowski in there, but he's also got Casablanca and the Wizard of Oz. And he's not wrong to have them.
I mean, for one thing, it's written in 1980. So things like Casablanca and the Wizard of Oz are only as old then as Ferris Bueller is now and home video hasn't really existed. So there's rareness and scarcity and legends and lore around these movies. You know, like people used to think that there was a hanged munchkin in the Wizard of Oz and that makes something to call me because then people like I got to watch Wizard of Oz to see the hang munchkin.
But also if you play Dark Side of the Moon, Wizard of Oz becomes a cult movie. And on the other hand, I'm just thinking of Wizard of Oz as my four-year-old who's watching it all week. It's also the most wholesome, big tent movie imaginable. The fandom of Star Wars is the definition of cult fandom.
It is obsessive re-watching. But I don't want to get into this now, but like Star Wars and Marvel are not cult. And the fact that they are perceived as such makes my blood boil. The product doesn't make my blood boil.
The perception of the driving me nuts. Where people talk about WandaVision and they say this is lynchy and it's not just an aesthetic observation. It has to do with like, no, it's not because of how Eraserhead was produced and shown and screened for three years in underground cinemas in New York before attaining critical mass. It was not widely and tyrannically available via a streaming service.
It's not a shot at WandaVision, which I've not watched one second of. It's more about the idea like, well, what is cult? Can the biggest thing in the world also be cult? And even if it is sci-fi-ish like Star Wars, it can't.
However, when David Lynch tried to make a Star Wars movie and failed with Dune, that's a cult movie. Absolutely. It's an interesting concept because I think what you're underlining is this idea of outsiderdom and operating outside the lines of traditional means of production. And so you have this nuanced concept where films like Rocky Horror and this is Spinal Tap and Heathers and Reservoir Dogs and, you know, Reebo Man, they all seem to be like, they seem to feature different shades of cult.
You know, these are very well known and frequently seen films that have been celebrated and restored and reissued time and again over the last 30 or 40 years. And I think to your work a day film fan, Reebo Man is a cult movie. You know, it's a movie that, you know, did not have a big successful box office release that very quickly gained a kind of intense fandom in a certain kind of community. It is speaking to a certain kind of community.
It features a number of actors in the same way that we were talking about James Batchdale as a guy who appears in a lot of good independent films and TV shows that basically were not hits. Harry Dean Stanton kind of had that sort of persona. And so when he shows up in a movie like Reebo Man, we sense that this film qualifies. And yet, if you're like me and you and you watch three movies a day and you're trying to you're on this quest to see everything and understand, Reebo Man then sort of starts to seem closer to Star Wars than it does to Cobra Woman, for example.
Is that fair to say? Yeah, or it becomes, which is a contradiction in terms of what it is and what it becomes like cult canon, right? The whole point of cult is that it isn't canon, but there is a cult canon. And then the movies in that cult canon are what these enterprising ambitious filmmakers sometimes purposely are trying to imitate.
Like you watch them like Mandy, I'm not picking on Mandy, but it's like this is a movie that is made in thrall to six movies that are in the Danny Perry book. You know, this is what Nick Rethin is doing now too. I mean, he's dedicating movies to Yodarowski. In the 1970s, people weren't dedicating anything to Yodarowski.
They're like, who the hell is this guy? And it was either hated or it was kind of passionately loved, but it wasn't establishment. It wasn't an established kind of aesthetic. But I mean, there's also levels and tiers of cult cinema that are below, we're not just talking about obscure.
I mean, we are talking about handmade, lost to time, not even lost to time, never found in the first place. And when you investigate and interrogate those, then you have a whole other level of cult creation. But what it also really has to do with, I think, is a rejection of this idea. And it's a rejection of the razis of the Golden Turkey award books that the Medved brothers did and a rejection to some extent of Siskelnibert, who famously gave Blue Velvet One Star and hated Showgirls and all that.
It's like it's a rejection of square criticism. And it's an inversion of traditional values. Not so bad. It's good, which is part of it, but more not bad, actually good.
And the ways in which something is good and has merit can be trashy. They can be sleazy. They can be incoherent. It can be wild.
It's a very participatory thing. And that also has to do with a lot of cult movies being movies that encourage or have led to the encouragement of audience participation around viewing them, like Rocky Horror, which is a prompt to viewers. And then you have something like The Room, which is not made with one, trying to think of a big number here, one gazillionth of the intention of Rocky Horror. And we don't have to re-litigate Tommy Wiesel and I don't really want to.
But that is the most participatory viewing experience you'll ever have. In Rocky Horror, it is not at the movie's expense. In The Room, it is at the movie's expense, but it's also at the expense of people who hired so humorless that they wouldn't watch The Room. That's absolutely right.
And I think one thing is external and one thing is internal. And whether films have a consciousness mandy as a movie that seems to have been made, and I don't mean it's an instant-seer movie in any way. I couldn't tell you honestly, but it seems to have been made for that four quadrant feature of photos on Twitter. It's like look at the most outrageous sort of rainbow-like configuration of blood across Nicholas Kade's face.
And so these two things I think coexist quite comfortably. Like my personal taste for these sorts of things are the opposite or sort of the, I guess, a third stream, which is purely internal, how I receive it and what it means to me, which I think is true for most people. But it's interesting that the vagueness, the broadness, the flexibility of this term can apply to so many movies. It makes it just a fun concept to discuss.
Well, like a landmark movie, I think in deconstructing this, if you were to teach a course on it, you would want to show Tim Burton's Edward because in a way it's a total love letter to someone supposedly the worst filmmaker of all time and it's supposedly the worst of all time by a certain standard. But it sanitizes him in a way that's not correct. If you read about Edward D. Wood Jr.'s life and if you watch his movies, not a two-minute clip reel of Play Nine Footers face, but you watch the movies.
They're not sweet and they're not innocuous and they're not just things that were misunderstood in their time. They're these wild, unruly, deeply personal testaments that earn, I think, not just cult status, but like seriously fascinating movies. But they're not what Tim Burton made of them. Tim Burton's grafting his own burdenness on top of this.
And there's a weird thing in Edward of a total front runner who's making the Batman movies trying to identify with someone who lived and worked in borderline abject poverty. I like Edward a lot. I like it a lot. But when I was 13, that was an entry point in to Edward, but it's not the real thing.
And I think that the cult film scholarship and cult film appreciation comes when you want to reckon with why Edward's movies are actually interesting. And it's not because they're the worst movies ever and it's also not because they're cute. It's like no one else could have possibly made these this way. Yeah, well, you just underlined something that I find so interesting, which is that so many of these movies and even the ones that could be perceived as slightly more conventional are gateway drugs.
You know, Tim Burton said, would is a gateway drug. It is a snapshot of a person's story that then, for the curious, for those who were touched in the idea of schlock or the personal storytelling of Edward, will go seek out his movies. And that's been true for me too, for many movies. You know, I have big trouble in little China on my list, which I think is extraordinary and quite strange John Carpenter movie, perhaps even more strange than it's given credit for.
But it's also a movie that sends you down a rabbit hole of ancient kung fu mysticism films, of films like Born Losers and the Billy Jack movies and this idea of like obscuring and redefining male American hero masculinity. And that is like the greatness I think of some of these movies too, even if they're a little bit obvious, even if they're office space, which I also love, that can also repel you down all of Mike Judgehole and make you figure out everything that he's done. And so they have this, this beautiful first toke of marijuana kind of feeling to them that I really appreciate. There's this very obscure American filmmaker named Quentin Tarantino.
No one's ever heard of him before. There's actually an alternate timeline where that would be a true sentence, right? You know, there's an alternate timeline where that's what could happen with the reception of a movie like Reservoir Dogs, which is so derivative of City on Fire and the Killing. I don't want to talk about Tarantino, but I want to talk about you.
Look at something like Kill Bill. Depending on how you want to look at it, that is either the best case scenario for what cult is, which is a powerful final cut, cart blanche, name above the title filmmaker, serving as a gateway drug dealer to 50 movies that are, you know, on any cult syllabus, or it's reprehensible because it's a hundred million dollar budget and multiplex appropriation of those things. And I'm not going to say which side I'm on, but that's the condition we find in the 21st century. We're post post post modern, you know, and what it means to be a cult film appreciationist, what it means to have been someone, not just someone who saw Racer had 20 times and 77, but who saw Star Wars 20 times and 77.
It means something different now. I think it means something different to have seen Star Wars 15 times and theaters than to be like, oh, I'm so into the Mandalorian. And I'm not trying to be a jerk when I say that. I'm just saying it's very, very, very, very different context.
You know what's interesting about the Tarantino point that you made though too is I think that it would be different if all of those things were happening for him today in which information and media is so deeply accessible. But even, and forget about Reservoir Dogs, let's say Kill Bill. When you see Kill Bill, you don't necessarily, I didn't necessarily have access to Drunken Master. I didn't, I don't know how I would have seen Drunken Master.
Maybe if I lived in New York City at the time and Kill Bill came out, I could have checked it out at a rep house, but I didn't, I lived in Ithaca, New York at that time. And there was no way for me to see Drunken Master. It wasn't at the video store. And so you know what I'm paying?
Like I couldn't find his early films. So the idea of watching Uma Thurman execute his choreography and then a lighting my mind to his work was so powerful. And I think a service to movie fans now in which everyone has a letter box account. Everyone is on Twitter.
IMDB exists. Netflix exists. There are the Criterion channel exists. Things are changing.
And so I wonder if this idea of the sort of like associative living homage filmmaking will evolve over time and if that will change too, because that always seems to be a part of cult too. I think it's a good point. And that's why in some ways one of the very first things you said about VHS, which are three very archaic letters, but VHS was not the invention of cult. It was not the invention of cult aesthetic or cult condition, but it was a huge, huge part of again a contradictory sentence.
The mainstreaming of cult or mainstreaming the awareness of cult where you're not dependent on a repertory screening or owning a print or being a quentantarian, you know, type person whose life is the obsessive chasing of those things until the point where you get to make them again with a million times the budget. It's more like the video store and but you know, we also all have our cult frame of reference based on when we're born and I'm constantly reminded when I do go online or when I'm going to read pieces or when I see papers turned in by students, I'm reminded how incredibly narrow my frame of references and that's not fake self-deprecation. It's like you talk about normie. I mean, so am I.
And that's even when I'm trying to seek stuff out. There are a few people I follow on Twitter to make a point of following on Twitter where the things that they are into and not just to wear it as a badge of honor and make people feel sheltered, but the things that they're actively into in terms of international cinema and older cinema and also just kind of like a weird semi-professional, quasi-amature, history of American film that exists on YouTube. I'm not there. I try.
I know I've seen more movies than most people, but not as many as they have. And it's a humbling thing. And that's why the piece I wrote for you guys for the ringer about this was like, you just want to share something. Maybe that would have been a shorter answer to all this, but it's that idea of sharing something when you find like-minded people who want to share it with you.
Well, I mean, that's what a cult is. And hopefully it's not Scientology, you know, hopefully it's showgirls. I would rather people share showgirls in Scientology, but that impulse of like, oh, I found this thing that appeals to me and I believe in it and it's worth believing in it. Have you heard the good news?
Absolutely. Have you, have you met the empty man? That's what it is. Evangelism is the reason I like and wanted to do this show.
There are things that I've seen that I care about that I want people to check out too. And even if they disagree, that's okay. So the list that I made, I would say is somewhat normy and I did that purposefully with the expectation that you would come and blow me out of the water. And in a way, you have.
So I will just very quickly identify the movies that I want to talk about. And then I want to let you talk about the list that you made. So I mentioned deep red. I would encourage anyone to check out.
Frankly, the first 10 are gentile films that he made. They're all wonderful in my opinion, all fascinating to varying degrees. I did put office based on my list as a nod to the ringer list. The idea that the cult movie can also be mainstream in a way, big trouble in little China, altered states, the extraordinary Ken Russell adaptation of Patty Chiaske, two of my favorite creative minds of the 20th century, working together on something that doesn't totally work, but also works in my heart.
Amazing William hurt performance in that movie. And then Evil Dead 2, which much like profound the roso, I think opened my mind and showed me a world that I wanted to spend more time in. So exciting to imagine both Sam Raimi and the Coen Brothers still being active in the way that they are right now. And also the strangeness of Sam Raimi making a Marvel movie in 2021 and Joel Cohen on the verge of releasing an adaptation of Macbeth and just the way that paths can diverge as well as so fascinating to me.
I mean, Evil Dead 2 is one of those cases of something purely good and wonderful got put into the world. It's not as ferocious or as serious horror movies the first one. The first one's already funny. I mean, the second one is more of an overt comedy.
But that movie, I mean, here's a really precise film critical term. Evil Dead 2 is a vibe, you know? It's got such a good vibe, which is this is disgusting and disreputable and to some extent not correct, but it's so relaxed about it. And I remember as a kid, I was very influenced by reading Roger Rebert's reviews.
And I remember reading Roger Rebert, both on Dawn of the Dead, which is a different kind of movie, but also Evil Dead 2 and being very interested as a 10 or 11 year old that he liked these movies. And that way, he said what Evil Dead 2 was. I think he made some, it might not have been this review, but he was talking about how you know, Ggard said that it's not blood, it's the color red. Evil Dead 2 is like a great example of that where how you can't possibly take this gore seriously.
This gore is so excessive that if Call the Movie Disgusting is just fundamentally misunderstanding what disgusting it's joyous, it's affirmative, it's like kids flinging finger paint around. And that movie is Looney Tunes, it's Tech Savory. Yeah, it's Looney Tunes, it's Tech Savory. And talk about a movie that captured the imagination, not just to viewers, but of filmmakers, because that DNA is visible everywhere.
And Ramey is one of those guys like Peter Jackson, for me Peter Jackson declined badly as a filmmaker and Ramey never did the same way. But those are the sort of guys who are like, boy, isn't it interesting that they got huge budgets? You know, when you look at Bad Taste, a true cult movie that Peter Jackson made in which I showed him my students every year, and then you're like, that guy made Lord of the Rings, it actually makes me like Lord of the Rings more. Because this guy was chasing his friends around with a camera pretending to scoop each other's brains out.
And then a few years later, he got $190 million, whatever it was to make this trilogy. And that's an example of the mainstream of cult that I think is good, weirdos like Jackson and Ramey kind of infiltrating and inflecting Hollywood is a good thing. I completely agree. So I asked you to make your list and what did you do?
I just did a list of five cult movies about cults because I didn't really feel like, I felt like the category was too wide. So very quickly my list, I have Kill List, which is Ben Wheatley's second feature, which I've spoken about and written about a lot. I think it's great. Starts like a hitman movie and does not end like one.
And that's that's all I'll say. A movie that I'm not even sure I like, but that I was interested to write about and have thought about, which is David Robert Mitchell is under the Silver Lake, which I think you like more than me. I've been dragged more in the direction of liking it because of the conversations I've had about it. Obviously a riff on Noir, a kind of stoner Noir.
It's like the Big Lebowski is already a past station and this is a pastiche of the Big Lebowski. But as a movie about looking for meaning and signals in popular culture and the question of whether it's scarier for them to be there or not, it's a little bit like the Empty Man and definitely Andrew Garfield is playing an empty man and it's a very impressively unlikable performance. It's also to this point without knowing it, the best Epstein movie, which I won't go into because it's unpleasant to talk about and also I don't want to spoil the movie. But as a movie, but like richness, wealth and privilege insulating you from like, morality.
I had not drawn that correlation, but that's a wonderful call. Yeah, it's like a good Epstein movie. I have Cobra Woman, which I hope people seek out. I think it's on YouTube.
It contains one of the great performances of all time by Maria Montes, an actress who is not conventionally good, but conventionally good sucks, you know. It's a kind of performance that would never get an Oscar nomination and that's why it's great and it features an island snake worshipper cult. It's an ecstatic film in the 1940s. Timothy Carey is the world's greatest sinner.
Sean, have you seen that? I've never seen this. I've never seen it. I love Timothy Carey, but I've never seen it.
So Timothy Carey was among other things, a very unfulsome presence in the early movies of Stanley Kubrick. Like if you watch The Killing and Pause of Glory, he's just there and you're like, this is not good news. You know, he is weird as the day is long. He's a very strange person as a character actor.
And in 1962, he wrote, directed, I believe produced and definitely starred in this movie, but someone who drops out of the business world. So basically we become an evangelist and form a cult and it's so unpleasant and maniacal and allegory of itself because it's all about this narcissist who wants to exert influence on the world around him and that's Tim Carey making this movie. But it's incredible. I mean, a real artifact and considering America's love affair with insane demagogues past and present, it's a pretty good little riff on that.
Very small movie because it's handmade basically, but it rules. And number one, without talking about, I'll just say if you want to read the piece I did during the Ringer cult movie week, I anchored it to Todd Rannings' movie Freaks, which isn't necessarily about a cult, but more about the inclusion in a particular society, a society of carnival performers who are simultaneously in the film rendered completely other and terrifying and rendered so close and empathetic. And in 1932, an audience is just completely torn by like, not just what's this movie about and how real is it because you cast real circus performers, which is very uncomfortable, but also like where do our sympathies lie? And I actually say the movie answers that question and in answering that question, it's the great cult movie of them all because you are pulled out of your comfort zone and into a place where you're like very happy to be welcomed.
And I'd say for people who find it made 1932, it's insanely scary. Now, you know, that's not sent to condescending head padding where it's like, oh, they still mate, you know, those are still pretty good. I mean, of course, they're still pretty good, but it's really nasty movie. I love Freaks.
It's a wonderful choice. I love the way that you tweak the list. Adam, any final thoughts on cult? No, I think that we covered it except, you know, we didn't cover it at all.