Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
Hello all. Welcome back to another episode of Southern Demonology. As always, I'm your host, JJ. I have some big news. A few months ago, I was contacted by American Paranormal Magazine, who graciously offered to do a story on the Southern Demonology podcast. And of course, I said yes. Lo and behold, this won't just be a story, but it's in fact the cover story for both the national and international versions of the magazine. And this will be for the November release. If you have ever wanted to see my ugly mug or the magical spooky basement where all the magic happens, i.e.
, my underground office, or learn some more about the backstory of me or the podcast, then please be sure to check out American Paranormal Magazine. I can say with definitive experience that they are absolutely lovely people who are a sheer joy to work with. I even received my official 2022 Featured Researcher emblem from them the other day, which will be gracing the website and the footer of all my emails very soon. They are on every social media platform there is, and I will have a link to their website in the show notes and on Southern Demonology.com.
Show them some love, for they absolutely deserve it. I have one more bit of news. For the first time, the podcast has consistently hit 5,000 downloads over the past 30 days. I know I'll repeat myself sometimes, but thank you all for every single listen. I appreciate y'all more than I could ever say. I know it's been a while, but in honor of spooky season and the graciousness of a new Discord user named Rathmar, I have a new listener inbox feature to share with y'all today.
Rathmar writes, I was about 14 years old, sharing a room with my youngest brother, who at the time was around eight years old. Our room was very close to the kitchen, so it wasn't uncommon for us to get up and go get food or something to drink during the night. One night while I was playing Xbox, he had got up to go get something from the kitchen. I always keep the lights off and the screen pointed away from his bed because I hate interrupting sleep because he had left the door cracked open when he left in the kitchen, and the lights all were off in the house.
I heard him start talking, having a full-blown conversation in the kitchen. I thought maybe it was my older brother. It might have also been in the kitchen at that time. My youngest brother kept talking and talking to what I had to be was my older brother. Finally, he stopped talking and came back. But when he left, the blue light also left. When he came back, I asked him. I was obviously incredibly I would see the blue light either outside my window, coming from the upstairs, which had a large staircase leading up to it with a sharp left turn.
The accompanying picture is something that's been written into the floor next to his bed, not long after this. We had moved out of that house since, and he's perfectly fine. There are other stories with that home though. The picture that was shared in our Discord server clearly has text written that says, I'm going to die. Beware of her. Thank you so much for sharing that very chilling story. If you have a personal paranormal experience that you would like to share, then please feel free to join our Discord server. Link is in the show notes or on Southern Demonology.com.
Speaking of Discord, we're going to watch the fantastic Japanese zombie film, which was one of the several movies I mentioned in the last episode of Bites, Episode 3, entitled I Am a Hero. If you ever wanted to see what being able to blast apart heads at sniper rifle ranges with a shotgun, then you'll definitely don't want to miss it. Movie nights happen every Wednesday at 10 p.m. Eastern. With all of that out of the way, let's get to the topic of today's episode.
I do have some exciting academic pieces coming up, but as Halloween is just a few days away, I wanted to touch upon something in particular. While my limited run series called Bites is gearing towards getting you in the mood for spooky season, I wanted to take a little bit of your time to tell you what kills the vibe faster than anything in the world. For me, at least, in the hopes of maybe, just maybe, someone out there responsible for these trends in horror movies will take note so we will all have a better Halloween next year.
For the record, I do not think for one single second that my opinion is important enough to influence anything or anyone. But leave me to dream, okay? Horror movies. For the love of God, please stop playing the Oracle for your own films. Now, what in the world do I mean by that? There has been quite a visible trend in horror movies to signpost the future. For example, some character will say what seems to be a completely innocent sentence, such as, I'm going to kill you, or oh, she'll be the death of me yet.
A phrase that sounds completely natural and the audience will forget about it completely the moment the next scene begins. But wouldn't you know it? Later in the movie, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some might remember it depending upon how strange the sentence was at the time. Some may only pick up on it if they happen to re-watch the movie. For example, in Shawn of the Dead, the main character writes out what is essentially going to become the main action points for the rest of the movie. And when I saw that, I thought the planning was very clever.
As an aside, it was terribly clever, as well as all the other interconnecting pieces woven all over the movie. I've seen it eight times. Okay, maybe more than that. And I am still picking up pieces that I have missed in previous viewings. That is how clever that movie is. Then in Hereditary, probably one of the best horror movies since The Exorcist. I saw a few self-fulfilling prophecy lines embedded. And I once again found it clever. And again, it was, as there are so many little details in that film that it blends into the complex tapestry. Yet now, this trend is everywhere.
So much so that at this point, I am actively on the hunt for this phenomenon when watching a horror movie for the first time. And I have yet to be wrong when I find one. For instance, when I watched Deadstream a few weeks ago, I spotted a few candidates, and each one turned out to be bang on the money. Horror movies, when you do this in isolation and are just riding the wave without understanding the intricacies of the tactic, you are doing nothing more than giving away the plot way in advance. Sometimes so much so that it sucks any hint of a surprise out of the rest of the movie.
I knew how Deathstream would end 10 minutes into it, just because of this, and I hate it. If you're going to tell me how everything is going to happen, then why in the world would I stick around to watch? Yes, people will chase a fad. The moment something innovative comes along, then there will be 30 clones of it within a year, sometimes more. Just hoping to capitalize on the success of the original. But for the love of God, please stop doing this. Find other ways.
To do foreshadowing. Discover new avenues to link pieces of the film together. I just want to scream at the screen Emmanuel Kant's famous phrase, stop away all the way, or to use the very much not literal but still magical translation, have the courage to use your own intelligence. Another lovely trend that has been going around as of late is for a series of films to show true signs of brilliance, only to prove that was a fluke and revert back to its normal idiocy. And when I say this, I am looking straight at you, Shudder. See, there's this little series of movies called VHS.
I've never bothered watching them, as even though I really love horror movie compilations, nothing about this series caught my eye enough to tempt me to hit the play button. Get it? VHS play button. Yeah. Not much of a dad joke, but hey, I take what I can get. Well, Shudder released last year VHS 94, and I was intrigued. And by God, I loved every single moment of it. The individual stories were so well done, the effects practical and amazing. And there was such a creepiness factor to each one that just left me enchanted.
In fact, I loved the movie so much that I went back and watched the others. The namesake VHS, the second, unoriginally named VHS 2, and then the follow-up VHS Viral. And I learned something pretty important. Listen to your gut. These first three entries weren't horrible, but they were predictable and boring. Now I will say that the ending to VHS Viral showed signs of being interesting. But of course, as endings work, the movie then ended. So when Shudder announced a new entry coming called VHS 99, I was half hopeful and half fearful. Would it show the brilliance of 94?
Or would it fall back into the mediocrity of the previous three? Considering it's a Shudder original, I bet money on the latter, as the quality of those little beasties had been sliding down faster than the greased pig running through mud. That was further reinforced by the clips of the movie Shudder had posted to its YouTube channel. But what did I do on Friday night? You guessed it. I hit the play button on VHS 99. And dear lord, it was worse than I thought. The rapper story was actually rather charming as it featured stop motion animation of Army Men. But then the first story came along.
So the premise of the VHS franchise is that each one of these stories is being played or at least recorded on a VHS tape. So the video quality is trash with scan lines running through it. Yet whoever produced this utterly horrible movie decided to abandon that for certain sequences for no reason whatsoever. Worse, these stories are boring, predictable, and in one case nonsensical. I made it halfway through before throwing my hands up in disgust and going to bed. Yes, practical effects and plenty of gore are some of the hallmarks of the series.
But what elevated VHS 94 above all that were the strength of each individual mini. They weren't about just rude teenagers doing stupid stuff and then face the consequences. And this new entry decided to abandon all of the magicalness and double down on rude teenagers tempting fate, as both the first and the rapper story were exactly that. The only positive side of VHS 99 is that it made me sleepy enough to go to bed earlier than normal. Yet another case that I need to trust my gut and wanting to yell Sapari Audaway.
As a small aside, when I was trying to record this last piece, I first heard my cat meowing, and sure enough he had come down into the magical spooky basement to pay me a visit. After finally getting him back upstairs, I sit down, start recording, and then my dog, the 110 pound dog that she is, starts tic-tacking across the floor, and I have to put her back. So finally, we're back at the very last please don't do that example. And it isn't from a movie, but from a content creator I happen to follow on a few platforms. And normally I enjoy the stuff they produce.
And no, I'm not going to name names. I'm not here to target anybody. All I'm trying to do is to get a point across. Anyway, a few days ago I ran across their latest video, which was retelling a supposedly true ghost story. And this one involved a man who moved to a small southern town that supposedly had a haunted highway. And as luck would have it, the circumstances had this man driving down said road late at night when he saw a woman walking alone. The moment I heard this, I said to myself, Oh please don't tell me they're doing that same story again. And like a slow motion train wreck.
That's exactly what happened. Stop me if you too have heard this one a hundred times. To sum it up, man picks up woman, takes woman home, and miraculously discovers that she left her jacket in the car, goes back to the house the next day, meets an older relative who of course breaks into tears and mysteriously says that the daughter died years ago. In the better versions of the story, the jacket has suddenly disappeared, only to show up draped over the woman's gravestone. I grew up hearing the story. Heck, I've told it myself as a kid.
I've seen it retold time and time again in short horror shows from Kuala Lumpur, Japan, South Korea, India, and who knows how many other localities. There may be an original somewhere out there, who knows? But at this point, this tired tale has made it around the world quite a few times. Not because it's true, but because the first time you hear it, it's a damn good story. It's much less so upon the tenth hearing, no matter where it is based. I recognize that creating weekly or daily content is hard.
As Conan O'Brien is famous for saying, you will use every trick in your bag to keep making content and keep it fresh. Lord knows I have found that to be true. I know I've said this before, but when I first started off, I had about five episodes of content to share. And when I reached the end of that, I wondered what in the world I was going to talk about next. Now, of course, I wonder how in the heck I am ever going to shut up.
But if you're going to tell a story, then please, for the love of God, don't try to pass it off as a story so exhausted from being told that it might as well be a ghost itself, as if it's something brand new. It reflects badly on everyone involved. Well, I don't know about you, but I at least feel a little better for having getting that off my chest. I try not to go on rants very often, but sometimes it just Builds and builds until a vengeful episode like this one is born. Kind of like a revenant from D, raised from the dead to hunt the ones who hurt it in life.
Of course, I don't hunt, so I offer them as a piece of advice for anyone that would care to listen. Thank you for joining us for this episode 73, believe it or not. And for this Halloween season, I hope you stay safe out there. Thank you for listening to Southern Demonology. Find us online at Southern Demonology.com where you can find all of our social and podcasting links. Also, if you have a moment, please feel free to rate this podcast and leave any encouraging feedbacks that you may have. As always, I am JJ and it has been a pleasure getting to talk to you today.