The Projection Booth
by Weirding Way Media
The Projection Booth features discussions of films from a wide variety of genres with in-depth critical analysis while regularly attracting special guest talent eager to discuss their past gems. The podcast has been recognized as a premier film podcast by The A.V. Club, IndieWire, Entertainment Weekly, and Filmmaker Magazine. Visit http://www.projectionboothpodcast.com Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Episodes
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Special Report: Do You Want To Play (2026)
What if the Ouija board were an app, and the app were hungry? Do You Want to Play (2026), a new horror film fresh from its world premiere at Tubi FrightFest, turns the spirit board into an algorithm and lets a serial killer's demon climb inside a teenager through her phone. Writer-director…
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Episode 821: Moontide (1942)
Is Moontide (1942) film noir, or a dockside melodrama with a hangover? Mike White, Heidi Honeycutt and Jedidiah Ayres take on Noirvember's strangest Hollywood experiment: 20th Century Fox's bid to turn French star Jean Gabin into a leading man. Archie Mayo directed after Fritz Lang shot three…
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Special Report: Stranded on Earth (2026)
Before E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) there was Night Skies, a rural alien-horror movie that Steven Spielberg developed, spent roughly $700,000 on, and walked away from. Max Evry, author of A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch's Dune, returns to The Projection Booth to talk about his new…
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Special Report: Your Time Is Now: The Sammy Petrillo Story (2026)
For five seconds of live television, Sammy Petrillo popped out of a crib beside Jerry Lewis on The Colgate Comedy Hour, the two pulling the same moronic face, and those five seconds shaped the rest of his life. WFMU's Dave "the Spazz" Abramson spent nearly two decades chasing the man behind the...
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Special Report: Cruel Love (2026)
She has already buried her husband. Then a charming stranger comes to her aid during a robbery, and she lets him in. That's when the con begins. Cruel Love (2026), Nick Lyon's new thriller, now streaming, turns real marriage fraud into what star Elisabeth Harnois calls "a cautionary tale with an...
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Episode 820: Getting Straight (2026)
Why did the one campus-protest picture that drew a crowd end up forgotten? Mike White, Andras Jones and Bill Ackerman reopen Getting Straight (1970), Richard Rush's comedy about a Vietnam veteran, played by Elliott Gould, who is trying to finish his teaching degree while the faculty makes it hard...
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Special Report: Restoration at Grayson Manor (2026)
A hedonistic heir loses his hands, so his mother buys him new ones wired to his subconscious. Big mistake: his subconscious is a nasty place. The Restoration at Grayson Manor (2025), Glenn McQuaid's new Irish horror film, premiered at Fantastic Fest and pits Chris Colfer against Alice Krige, the...
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Special Report: Kung Fu Deadly (2026)
Chinese hopping vampires have invaded Dublin. Kung Fu Deadly (2026), a martial arts horror comedy that had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest and plays Sitges next, sends two inept exterminators, Danny (Steven He) and Frank (Michael Tient), after a swarm of jiangshi, with Lian (Gemma Chua-Tran)...
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Episode 818: Cat People (1982)
At a Westwood preview, a teenage girl turned to her friend: "Oh, my God." Paul Schrader turned to Jerry Bruckheimer: "I think maybe we went a little far." Schrader took Cat People (1982) as a for-hire genre job, and it turned out as personal as anything he ever made. For Shocktober 2026, Mike…
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Special Report: Welcome to Dolly's House (2026)
What happens when your online avatar starts living a life of its own? Welcome to Dolly's House (2026), a Taiwanese animated feature chosen to open Annecy's Contrechamp section, drops a YouTuber into the home of Madame Dolly, a sorceress who has lived for two millennia, and a house full of dolls....
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Special Report: Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss (2026)
Barbarians lose their heads, monsters lose their guts, and not one actor ever set foot on the set: Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss (2026) is a blood-soaked sword-and-sorcery quest performed entirely by puppets, built in a family garage in Belleville, Ontario. Director Mason Newton DeRushie's feature...
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Special Report: Best Served Cold (2026)
Why would a 1977 revenge movie vanish for decades while cult-film obsessives begged to see it? Best Served Cold (2026), the new documentary from writer-director Eric Zaldivar and producers Mike Malloy and John Joseph Dunn, chases The Farmer (1977) from a Columbia release nobody could find to a...
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Special Report: Sell Your House (2026)
What does it cost to help a friend make his movie? For James Claeys, the answer was his house. Sell Your House (2026), co-directed by Eric Foss and Brandon Pickering, follows the making of The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023), Francis Galluppi's debut feature, and the years of debt, freak storms…
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Episode 817: Dellamorte Dellamore (1994)
A gravedigger shoots the dead a second time, his assistant answers every question with a single syllable, and the woman he loves keeps coming back as someone new: Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), released in the US as Cemetery Man, is a horror comedy that refuses to explain itself, and that refusal…
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Special Report: Hell's No Place for a Pretty Face (2026)
Two adult film stars run a cross-country crime spree, robbing porn theaters to fund a getaway to France, and the real question isn't whether they survive but whether they stay together. Hell's No Place for a Pretty Face (2026) is a new Texas-made road romance from writer-director Seth Magana…
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Special Report: The Dark Gets In (2026)
The scariest true-crime documentary is the one that stops being true. The Dark Gets In (2026), which premiered at Beyond Fest and heads to FrightFest in the UK, follows a documentary crew interviewing the parents of a teenage girl who vanished from a locked house, until the case turns somewhere…
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Special Report: Silver Screamers (2025)
A rejected horror-short application turned into a movie about what happens when retirees run the set. Sean Cisterna couldn't find funding for The Rug (2025), so he pitched a New Horizons for Seniors grant, recruited a crew in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and filmed the chaos as Silver Screamers…
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Special Report: Wicker (2026)
A fisherwoman the village won't let alone commissions a basket weaver to build her a husband, and the husband is Alexander Skarsgård, worn as ten 3D-printed pieces of woven prosthetic with no CG replacement. Wicker (2026) is a new fable from directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, fresh...
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Special Report: The Heretiks (2026)
Forget the cabin in the woods: this coven comes for you at home on Halloween night. The Heretiks (2026), a Fantastic Fest world premiere headed to Sitges, follows renegade witch Cai (Kimberly Epstein) as she protects two sisters and a friend from her former coven, led by the terrifying Neve (Tess...
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Special Report: Detention (2026)
What if detention were group therapy? Detention (2026), a quirky teen comedy from Washington State's Bainbridge Island, swaps the usual punishment for something harder: a room of kids made to talk about what is really happening behind closed doors. Writer-director Emma Cameron, who co-directed…
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Special Report: The Cycle (2026)
A body missing for 36 years turns up at a gruesome crime scene, and the daughter who goes looking learns her father's past is much worse than she thought. The Cycle (2026), a Fantastic Fest world premiere starring Deborah Ann Woll and Jeffrey Donovan, comes from Jordan Downey, the filmmaker…
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Special Report: We're Nothing at All (2026)
A bus explodes in downtown Hong Kong on Valentine's Day, and the trail of wreckage leads to two young men nobody was watching. We're Nothing at All (2026), a festival drama that has played Hong Kong and Udine's Far East Film Festival, intercuts a forensic investigation with the love story and...
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Special Report: The Long Way Home (1989)
In 1988, a Soviet underground rock hero flew west to record an album for CBS, and Michael Apted's cameras went with him. The Long Way Home (1989) follows Boris Grebenshchikov and his band Aquarium from studio sessions in New York and Montreal back to a Leningrad where glasnost was still a hope,...
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Special Report: Into the Sky (2026)
A man comes home from an alien abduction to find a tenant living in his house. Into the Sky (2026), a Fantastic Fest world premiere starring Sam Richardson, Sofia Black-D'Elia, and David Cross, pairs that premise with classic rom-com bones: the meet-cute, the estranged spouse, the big wedding.…
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Special Report: Corporate Retreat (2026)
Nothing says team-building like a trap. Corporate Retreat (2026), a horror comedy that had its world premiere at BIFFF in Brussels, lures ambitious young executives to a luxury desert estate where the trust games turn deadly. Director Aaron Fisher follows his debut feature Inside the Rain (2019)...
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Special Report: George Haddad on Lioness
Gunshots on Lioness aren't supposed to sound like movie gunshots. Supervising sound editor George Haddad, an Emmy winner for The Studio, talks with Mike about building Taylor Sheridan's CIA drama from authentic sources: researching how a specific weapon sounds in a specific place, recording a...
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Special Report: Capturing Bigfoot (2026)
Nearly sixty years after Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin shot the most famous footage in Bigfoot history, forty seconds of forgotten 16mm film locked in a safe for half a century threaten to blow the legend wide open. Capturing Bigfoot (2026), a SXSW documentary that had the Bigfoot community...
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Special Report: Etched in Pavement (2026)
The Joe Louis Fist is among Detroit's best-known monuments, yet plenty of people have forgotten whose fist it is. Etched in Pavement (2026), a festival documentary from Detroit photographer-turned-filmmaker John Sippel, brings that legacy back through two young fighters from Southwest Detroit....
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Special Report: Gimme Truth (2026)
What does it cost to believe everything? Gimme Truth (2026), which had its world premiere at Hot Docs and went on to Fantastic Fest, follows UFO contactees, starseeds, anti-vaccine crusaders, and other seekers of hidden knowledge without sneering and without sharing their beliefs. Co-directors...
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Special Report: Little Doors (2026)
Mike talks with the two stars of Little Doors (2026) — married couple Anthony Oberbeck and Megan Koester — about a deadpan comedy in which a lonely woman, quietly living through the end of the world, discovers a small wooden door has grown into the side of her body and has to decide whether to…
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Special Report: Clean Hands (2026)
Mike talks with Jake Allyn, writer-director of Clean Hands (2026), a true-crime drama about a celebrated Hagerstown, Maryland narcotics sergeant fighting the opioid pipeline he polices by day while his own daughter is consumed by it at home. Allyn found the story on YouTube during COVID and…
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Special Report: No Rest for the WIcked (2026)
Mike talks with Danish writer-director Kasper Kalle about his sophomore feature No Rest for the Wicked (2026), a queer gothic romance shot on the Faroe Islands that slides from love story into vampire tale into body horror without the audience noticing the ground shifting under them. Kalle built...
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Special Report: Lemonade Blessing (2026)
Mike talks with writer-director Chris Merola about his debut feature Lemonade Blessing (2025), a coming-of-age dramedy about a Catholic-school transfer student who falls for a girl who dares him into escalating sacrilege, all in the name of love. Merola wrote the script as a USC film student…
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Special Report: Ones Who Grieve (2026)
Mike talks with French director Quarxx about The Ones Who Grieve (2026), in which a mysterious plague called the Black Veil and a father’s religious cruelty turn out to be the same disease. Quarxx came to filmmaking through a decade as a painter before ever picking up a camera, and this is his...
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Special Report: Marcus Heslop on Frantastic!
Mike talks with author Marcus Heslop about Frantastic!: The Amazing Story of Fran Fullenwider, the Plus-sized Pioneer, the first biography of the actress whose single wordless scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) made her a cult fixture despite a stranger, richer career about which most...
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Special Report: Following Harry (2025)
Mike talks with director Susanne Rostock about Following Harry (2025), which picks up where her 2011 Sundance opener Sing Your Song left off and follows Harry Belafonte through the last twelve years of his life as he tries to pass his activism on before running out of time. Rostock and Belafonte...
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Special Report: Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025)
Mike talks with director Tom Stern about Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025), a documentary built to recreate the derangement of a Butthole Surfers show and then quietly answer what made Gibby Haynes this way. Stern first filmed the band at CBGB’s in 1986 and later folded…
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Special Report: This is Buzz (2026)
There’s no legal way to stream the original Buzz, Mark Pellington’s 1990 MTV collage series — so he built a documentary out of what survives of it. This Is Buzz (2026), fresh off its Slamdance premiere and newly picked up by Starboard Entertainment for a summer theatrical run, revisits that...
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Special Report: The Squirrel (2026)
What’s left to love once nature is gone? The Squirrel (2026) imagines a sterile future where animals have been engineered out of existence — until a lonely synthetic-pet designer finds the last living squirrel and breaks the rules to protect it. Now Finland’s Oscar entry, fresh off its...
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Special Report: Galicia! (2026)
What happens when a couple’s vacation home movie catches the end of the world? Galicia! (2026) is the no-budget debut feature from married filmmaking duo Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg — a found-footage hybrid documentary shot on a real trip to help real strangers harvest grapes at a rural…
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Special Report: Big Girls Don't Cry (2026)
Teenage desire doesn’t announce itself — it hides behind dial-up logins, borrowed MSN identities, and the older girls you’d kill to become. That’s the world of Sid Bookman in Big Girls Don’t Cry (2026), writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s queer coming-of-age debut, set over one restless New...
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Special Report: Double Trouble (2026)
Director Shaun Paul Piccinino — a former stuntman and martial artist who cut his teeth on Jackie Chan documentaries — tells Mike White how Double Trouble came together as "Home Alone meets Ocean's Eleven": a Vegas heist comedy built around real-life sisters Madeleine and Violet McGraw, anchored…
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Special Report: A Prayer for the Dying (2026)
Johnny Flynn talks with Mike White about playing Jacob Hansen (opposite John C. Reilly's Doc) in A Prayer for the Dying, Dara Van Dusen's directorial debut adapted from Stewart O'Nan's novella. Flynn breaks down the challenge of embodying an unreliable narrator — a Civil War veteran whose PTSD...
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Special Report: Donkey Princess (2026)
Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña built their new film inside a Santiago museum, in front of a live audience, using rear-projected scale models and painted backdrops instead of CGI. The Chilean directing duo talk with Mike about Donkey Princess, their shape-shifting reimagining of the Donkeyskin...
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Special Report: Ephemera (2026)
Bil Richardson's Ephemera was built backwards: instead of writing a script and shooting it, the longtime below-the-line filmmaker and West Virginia University professor emeritus assembled the entire 87-minute film from licensed stock footage on Artlist and Envato, recording all dialogue as ADR…
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Special Report: Bella Gonzales on Ted Lasso 4
Cinematographer Bella Gonzales talks with Mike White about shooting the season 4 premiere of Ted Lasso, the episode that sends Ted back to Kansas for the first time since the show began. Gonzales, brought on by director Declan Lowney as the show's first American DP, explains how she and…
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Special Report: Family (2026)
First-time writer-director Benjamin Finkel built Family (2026) out of his own childhood: his father died of cancer when Finkel was fourteen, and he spent the years afterward filling a script with "everything that was scary and interesting" to him. He tells Mike White how a screenwriting professor...
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Special Report: Never After Dark (2026)
Dave Boyle built Never After Dark (2026) around a lifelong passion for ghost stories and a desire to find something new in a "well-worn genre." He tells Mike White and co-star Moeka Hoshi about the sound design holding the film together: Japanese sound designer Natsuko Inoue (Godzilla Minus One,...
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Special Report: The Deputy (2026)
First-time feature director Matt Sukkar cold-approached William H. Macy with a letter to land his Sheriff Krueger, then built The Deputy's tone around Scorsese's After Hours: "one bad decision leading you on the course of a night where the protagonist is trying to get things back to normal, and...
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Special Report: Hellbilly Hollow (2026)
After getting killed off in John Carpenter's 2018 Halloween and walking that film's red carpet, musician-actor Kurt Deimer called his friend Kevin Wayne with a pitch: let's start our own horror franchise, the way Halloween launched Michael Myers. Wayne had already heard about a haunted attraction...
About this show
The Projection Booth features discussions of films from a wide variety of genres with in-depth critical analysis while regularly attracting special guest talent eager to discuss their past gems. The podcast has been recognized as a premier film podcast by The A.V. Club, IndieWire, Entertainment Weekly, and Filmmaker Magazine.
Visit http://www.projectionboothpodcast.com
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
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Weirding Way Media
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