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 and welcome back to Southern Demonology. And as always, I am your host, JJ. Before I get into the main topic, I do want to announce that Southern Demonology as of this very episode has reached a bit of a milestone. I have officially released thirty episodes. Of course, it's taken me much longer than I expected to get to this point, but then again, if I'm to be honest, I'm frankly surprised I've even gotten here.
And the reason Southern Demonology was even created in the first place was because when friends found out that I studied angelogy and demonology for my master's degree, they would always demand to know some of the weird stuff that got lodged in my brain. And after hearing some of those tidbits, that prompted a few of them to recommend that I make a podcast. And the first few episodes were simply me rattling off things off the top of my head and trying to organize the material and can into recognizable topics. However, I long ago exhausted that lackadaisical approach.
In fact, I used to record each episode extemporaneously with quite a few practice runs beforehand, usually while driving or sitting outside having a cigarette. Yet now I actually sit down and compose either full scripts or vast swaths of outlines. So what's kept the episodes coming? Well the answer is definitely not money. To this day, this project is deeply in the red, considering that I have monthly subscription costs associated with producing and storing the podcast, and I have, as of yet, to get a single cent from Southern Demonology.
And before I go further, this line of reasoning will not end in me asking for money, though I would be remiss if I didn't mention the merchandise or Patreon pages we have. When it comes to work, I will admit that I am a mercenary deep at heart. Not to be rich, but to be able to properly support my family as a husband, father, and son should. And God help if an individual tries to interfere with that overriding priority in my life. So if money isn't the driving factor, then what is?
Well, it certainly isn't fame, as even if I desired that, and God knows I don't, this has the likelihood of making me famous as strapping a towel around my neck and suddenly joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But there are a few things that compel me to keep focusing on this passion project of mine. First, I love all of the topics that Southern Demonology covers.
Whether it's working on Ethiopic translations, studying biblical or pseudopigrial texts, geeking out over Japanese anime, or simply sitting back and watching hundreds of horror movies, I would do that no matter what, whether I had a podcast or if I was just by my lonesome. Second, this podcast has become one of the main ways that I can practically use the education on which I spent a fortune. But a last reason is that this podcast has put me in contact with some absolutely amazing people.
Whether it's been through emails, phone calls, and yes, there have been a few of those, Facebook, and most especially our Discord server, I have made some dear friends, learned a great deal, and have been made a participant in stories and events that would have forever been unknown to me otherwise. So whether you listen to one episode or all thirty, lurk on our Discord or an active participant, follow us on Facebook, or just occasionally visit the website at Southern Demonology.
com, I humbly and profusely thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the reasons listed above and for so many others. And once again, I find that I've gone several minutes into this episode before even revealing what we're going to talk about today. For episode thirty, I wanted to delve into horror in general. In fact, you can consider this a horror grab bag. Sorry, I couldn't resist. Now, let's get the obvious out of the way. Yes, the primary intent of horror is to frighten. And the point of movies, at least for those footing the bill, is to make money.
And where those two intersect, some truly horrible abominations have come to life, as it were. But horror writ large is an avenue to explore the worst case scenario, the macabre, and the messy side of organics. In short, horror is a way to play, to twist either one specific thing or the entire world out of context, to make the comprehensible into its shadow opposite, and the best of the bunch take that state of play to its utmost. Now I know that I've mentioned this in the past, but deconstructive postmodern philosophy takes the same approach.
At its heart, it states that there is no metaphysical truth with a capital T, and as a result, one should feel free to play with interpretations. To me, although I understand it and it is a logical conclusion to what it was proposing, this just kind of reduces postmodern philosophy to the high school graduate who moves to a new town or state and decides to be a whole new person but so be it. Yet fiction doesn't have such bold proclamations. Rather, it intentionally divorces itself from reality and or history, and horror does that through the darkest lens possible.
It dishes with a dial or the entire circuit board to see what you get. For example, let's take the writing writings of Bentley Little, a fantastic horror author. His novels are primarily named the blank, like the store or the association. And that's very emblematic for the subject name and the title is divorced from the reality that forms the entire basis of the work. What if a megastore was ruled by sap supernatural evil, or a housing association, or a mailman? And in his early works, his stories have pat endings. The good guys win or lose.
But his latest novels are to me more interesting and devious simply because the standard Dean Coont's pattern isn't followed. There is no set ending. Things just continue. That facet which is divorced from our reality and becomes the basis of the horror isn't allowed to be eliminated. It stays divorced. And at least for me, it leaves the reader unsettled and insecure. The consultant is the best example of this. I actually happened to listen to this book on audiobook, and I normally read, but I kept this one um in reserve for a very long car trip back to Tennessee one time.
And after I finished it, I was perturbed. This didn't follow the normal Bentley little pattern. Things weren't neatly wrapped up in a bow. In fact, uh that dissatisfaction that I initially felt after reflecting upon it, I realized how effective it was. That germ stayed in me and it kept uncomfortably poking me underneath my skin. To the point where looking back on it now, it's one of my favorite works just because it was so unexpected.
I had hoped to have a catalog of horror movies to go over, but we had a desert of anything worthwhile watching for quite a while now, and that's not just from the pandemic. I was so hopeful whenever a weekly refresh of movies were added to Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Shudder. For example, one of the new properties Shudder recently released is called Slats. The preview made it seem utterly ridiculous in that a pair of blue jeans come come back to life and start slaughtering everybody.
I actually had re wrote a you know pretty hopeful um uh statement on Discord when the preview had come out on Shudder's uh YouTube channel. If we're talking about playing with an idea, this one is just so out there that it would have to be a fun watch, no? No, it was not. With plot holes wide enough to float a medium sized asteroid through, the movie played the subject matter with a completely straight face and ignored the sheer idiotic of the plot. This thing had potential, but instead of actually playing with the subject, it refused to do so.
Rather, it simply settled on being a hate letter to the modern clothing industry and the tired trope of humanity is the true monster. Yes, if you go back and watch any news clips from the past decade or two, you'll see how you know people in third world countries are being abused to make super cheap, super fast clothes that don't last. But you can see that in a news article to try to anthropomorphize that into some lame horror movie is just sad.
Especially when just the idea of it is so bonkers that you could see everyone having fun with it, but at the end of the day, it just became a mishmash of ideas that didn't go anywhere. And I'm not sure if anyone had fun on set. You can't see that from any of the expressions people have or anything else. Then we had a new side venture to the Haunted series on Netflix called Haunted Latin America. If you hadn't seen it, Haunted is a show.
Telling his or her experiences to their friends, complete with actor reenactment. And most of them are really good. Although there's at least one episode out of each season that is so batshit crazy that you wonder why they even tried. And given that each episode, each season is only six episodes long, one out of that bunch being horrible, it's not a fantastic ratio. But anyway. However, haunted Latin America had none of the charm that the original seasons did. Though there were a few decent visuals, I was simply bored. I I couldn't even finish it.
Even my wife, who is much more sensitive to horror movies than I am, even she advocated for us speeding past the first episode, and she just did not want to watch any more. There were quite a few other bad movies, but I want to turn my attention to the handful of good ones I actually managed to find, believe it or not. And the first and foremost on that list is the second season of Creep Show. I adored the first season along with the holiday special and the animated episode, but the second season is even better.
If you ever wanted to know what might happen if demons from Evil Dead were unleashed during a PBS fundraiser and Bob Ross just turned out to be a consummate badass, look no further. One of the episodes actually explores this. Though this season only had four episodes, all eight stories were very well done. And though the ideas behind each are simple, whether they're revenge stories against a modern day Karen or a belligerent uncle, I had more fun watching this season than any other show that I can remember in quite some time.
To put it simply, Creep Show is the idea of play at work in the ultimate sense. Shudder also came through in that it had another winner, this time the Korean oddball zombie com zombie comedy entitled Zombie for Sell. A lone zombie shows up in a remote town in South Korea where it is finally able to bite the father of a family who owns a rundown gas station. But rather than turning, the father becomes more energetic and youthful, which creates a new business for the family rather than ripping off travelers.
The movie mixes horror and comedy to fantastic effect and actually plays them off one another, keeping the watcher guessing what in the world is going to happen next. I will say this, if you do give this one a watch, you'll never view ketchup the same way. While the ending wasn't the best, it is rather typical of Korean comedies. However, I highly recommend giving Zombie for Sale the watch. Now, I mentioned two shutter properties in this episode, and I've talked about them in the past. And as a result, I do want to take a bit of a step back and talk about Shudder in itself for a moment.
And I'm going to divide the review into two parts. One as the service and one as the platform. And for full transparency, Shudder is not a sponsor in any way, shape, or form. Uh, and it's rather easy for me to say that because I don't have any sponsors. But anyway, as a service, and by that I mean its catalog and produce material. It has definitely come a long way. When it started up, it simply sh served up a ton of schlock horror films. It was very reminiscent of browsing the horror shells of the local blockbusters on a late weekend, minus any big hits.
But over the years it has definitely found its footing. It won major bonus points in my book by securing the rights to One Cut of the Dead, one of the best Japanese horror comedies in existence. And it's continued to pick up big titles such as Peninsula, the sequel to Train to Buskan, along with others. And it's been pretty successful with its shutter originals, such as the movie entitled Terrified. I will say that while I haven't been properly scared by a horror movie since the early 2000s, this movie came the closest to creeping me out in a good way.
And yes, while their catalog does contain a ton of schlock still, there's a ton of quality as well. So on the service side, I do highly recommend Shutter. But then we come to the platform itself. And that's where everything falls apart in rapid succession. Let's take the website. It takes seconds, not milliseconds, to load. The main page is as anemic as one can get to the point where. I thought the page didn't render fully because really all it had were the four big movies that wanted to recommend.
And simply browsing through their catalog is an exercise in frustration for how unresponsive it is. The frustration only mounts when you go to play a movie. The controls are once again as bare bones as one can get. Subtitles are seconds behind or ahead of the spoken dialogue, and loading is a real issue. And while there are some equally bare bones mobile apps, forget trying to find a native app for a console. But then again, considering how horrible the website is, that's probably a good thing at the end of the day. And I wish that all of this was simply nitpicking.
But it's really frustrating to me as both an end user and as a web architect. If you're going to have a product that you actually want people to use, then it has to be as polished as humanly possible. And given that you're a company whose entire purpose is to get people to use your product for their enjoyment and pay money while doing so, then what are you doing? I I really cannot fathom what Shudder as a company is, even remotely thinking. The only saving grace to Shudder as a platform is the fact that you can use it without its platform.
You can access all of their content either through a Shudder channel or through the AMC Plus channel on Amazon Prime. And you can get several days for free through either one of those avenues. And Amazon Prime has a wonderful U video player that works extremely well even on low data connections. But that's been the only downside. And the upside is you don't have to use their website for anything. So at the end of the day, if you're willing to use Amazon Prime, then I do highly recommend the service.
If, however, you're wanting to consume it directly from their website, well, the horror will definitely stay or start well before you ever find a movie to watch. For a technology company in this day and age, there is simply no reason for shudder to be as bad as it is. Excuse the pun, but I shudder to think what their back end must be like. And yes, you may feel free to puke or punch me if you ever meet me in person because that was really bad. But you know what? I liked it. I enjoyed it.
I wouldn't be surprised if their entire stack is still an aging monolith just waiting to consume any developer with its ancient processes reaching forth from its dusty server to reveal the horrors holding it together. Lastly, as this is a bit of a meta episode, I do want to talk about the future a bit. I do have some exciting, at least for me, episodes that are forthcoming. There's the third installment of the name of the devil uh that's coming up, as well as one on the name of God. Because that has a lot more wrinkles than you would think it would.
Um I've also been working on one uh for free will versus the demonic, which I've been wanting to research for quite some time. And lastly, I do have some future episodes that will run through some of the uh Bakimono and Yudei, monsters and spirits from Japanese folklore, in addition to another that will explore angels and demons from different faiths. And that last one was actually recommended by one of our Discord members. So if you have a preference, please let me know on either Facebook or Discord.
And I have been watching and listening to other horror-related channels and podcasts that our Discord members have recommended. And one thing is for sure. The one thing that Southern Demonology will not cover is true crime or serial killers. Many horror-related podcasts and channels dip into these wells for easy material and because they're popular. But I'm not terribly interested in human evil. I like my evil like I like my text. Ancient and universal. Yes, that was bad, but I liked it. You have to give me a little bit of leeway here.
Uh and the other thing is that I'm not just gonna start reading things that are not produced or owned by me. Um yes, I like rus uh recitations, but I don't have the voice for it. I'm not gonna pretend like I do, so we're gonna stick with custom content that I create all the way throughout. Well, my friends, that concludes episode thirty. I do hope you give Creep Show the series and zombie for sale a go. What are some of your favorite horror movies, either from the past or the present day? Drop by our Facebook page at facebook.com slash southern demonology or join our Discord server.
You can find the link on the website at Southerndemonology.com. I actually upgraded our Discord server to be a community one so you can actually find it in Discord's listings now as well. Lastly, if you would like to support the podcast, please feel free to join our Patreon at patreon.com slash Southern Demonology. We're beginning to see the light from the dark tunnel of the modern day horror that we have faced for the past year with this pandemic. But we're not quite there yet. So I hope everyone is doing the smart thing and staying safe.
Please, my friends, take care, and we'll see you next time.