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.
Streaming services had a great idea. Rather than merely serve up the same content people already know, let's create our own. That's well and good. But combine that with the pandemic though, and the creation process already fraught with difficulties became an even more frightening landscape. Shows that started off brilliantly, such as the Kaminsky method on Netflix, disintegrated into gibberish. But a whole rash of new properties were generated which were cheap to produce. And guess which genre received a bunch only to face totally expected results? You guessed it, horror.
And today we're going to look at a few of these in depth. Welcome back to Southern Demonology. As always, I'm your host, JJ. Oh shudder. You've heard me talk about the horror streaming service before, and as you might recall, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with them. Yes, they are responsible for the creep show TV series, and for that alone, they deserve many, many awards and accolades. Season three was just as good, albeit far shorter than the other two. And beyond that, they have created some fantastic original movies.
Unfortunately, that is also where the hate side comes into play. I don't like to talk about this, but did you know that Shudder used to beat me up as a kid and steal my lunch money? No, sorry, bad joke. No, I have no personal relationship with the company, now owned by AMC, so I don't have a skewed perception of it when it comes to them, for good or for bad. Though, if you'd like to sponsor me Shudder, I would never say no to money. No, the issue comes into play with the fact that they can produce some fantastic originals. For example, The Terrified.
If you've ever enjoyed the rapid body movement found in the remake of House on Haunted Hill, then you will love this movie. Or VHS 94, which I have also covered in a previous episode. I honestly couldn't stop praising this movie to the nth degree. But for all of these positives, they have proven themselves either unwilling or unable to actually police the quality to the point where I inwardly cringe when I see a new promo being advertised for them. They can certainly make these look enticing. A prime example of this is the recently released film called The Seed.
The trailer they released on YouTube looked awesome. And there was one clip that really made me look forward to watching it. It featured one of the actresses sitting at a table and clearly under control of something else. She began to eat raw eggs, shells, and all. The way the actress's face would alternate between pleasure and a thousand-yard stare into nothingness while doing so, it was something to behold. So the first night it was released, I sat down in great anticipation, and 91 minutes later, I just sat there in stunned silence.
Not because the movie blew me away or made me think, rather, I was sitting there contemplating how a studio could screw up that horribly. In case you have no idea what in the world I'm talking about, let me back up for a minute. The seed is about three relatively attractive women who go away for a long weekend to hang out and have fun in one of their dad's houses, which just happens to be far away from well, anywhere. In fact, they are essentially cut off as they don't have transportation since they Ubered to the property.
That night, there's a major meteor shower that turns out to be much more magnificent than any of them expected. And then they find a strange animal after the fact. Then of course, a few of them start acting strangely, etc. etc. If you can't write the rest of the movie with about a 80% accuracy rate, then you are probably new to the genre. I wish to God that whoever made the trailer actually produced the movie. For it focused on the change in the women, the everyday turned in on itself. And that is one of the things that, when done right, makes horror so amazing.
It can either pinpoint the weird in our everyday lives, or it can take the most innocent of actions or items and cast them in such a way that they become terrifying. Yet to do that, sadly, takes a great deal of skill. The seed takes the exact opposite approach. It hopes the audience will be so distracted by the swimsuits and low-cut shirts that they won't notice botholes big enough to drive a cargo container ship through, or the fact that the entity responsible for the strange behavior is the worst designed creature I have ever seen.
Imagine, if you will, baby Godzilla crossed with a turtle without its shell. That's what you wind up with. You could have given a fifth grader a starter lesson on latex, and you would have gotten a better monster than this man-bear pig thingamajig. And the movie had the potential to be so well done. Cosmic horror is such a fantastic horror subgenre. Combine body horror with the everyday becoming strange, with the truly alien, and bam, you have potential out the wazoo.
I'm not sure when movies will learn that the moment you give the audience a root cause for all of the strangeness going on, or reveal the monster in question, and in this case, oh I don't know, let's do both at the same time and make the creature as idiotic looking as possible, then you have sucked the horror out of your movie. Unless you have a CGI budget large enough to launch a satellite into space, and maybe not even then, your audience's imagination will make them more scared than anything else.
If the seed focused on slowly altering the actions of the actresses in question really played up the otherness, then maybe it would have had a chance. Then again, now that I think about it, in the recent release of Lovecraft's Color Out of Space, it had all of that going for it, plus one of his best short stories ever. And they threw that all in the garbage almost out of the gate by casting Nicolas Cage in it. Even if you are making a bat sh crazy movie, casting a bat sh crazy actor isn't going to help you with that department. Letting go of the anger. Letting go.
Let's move on to the movie The Host. Oh, sorry, I meant Night's End. The two were so similar that I almost couldn't remember. But while I mentioned both, let's do a quick double feature. The host was the quintessential no-budget pandemic film as it involves friends getting together on a Zoom call. But spooky things are going to be afoot as they bring in a spirit medium to hold a virtual seance. Now, let me say up front that I don't care about shoestring budgets. In fact, having limitations and working toward overcoming them can be a phenomenal motivator. If that only happened here.
The movie starts off strong with some nice character building and showcasing the bonds between these video callers, but it goes off the rails pretty quickly at the end. Spoiler warning for anyone who was thinking about watching it, and I highly recommend against that. The spirit for one of the final people left alive unleashed the most potent supernatural weapon ever devised. A gun. Yes, the director was apparently so out of ideas that this thing just straight up shoots somebody. Yeah, that's the level of quality we're dealing with for this lovely film. But on the night's end, right?
It features a man somewhere in his 30s who is a shut-in and without a job tries his hand at being a YouTuber. And of course, one of his friends just happens to see something strange behind him and says, Maybe you have a ghost. We've seen this set up before quite a number of times. Now, the movie starts off well, it actually focuses in on the man's daily routines and shows little details about how they start to change as things begin to go sideways. Unfortunately, it doesn't take any time to explain any of them. For example, he counts down from 10 when waking up or going to bed.
Never explained, just left into some personality quirk. He makes coffee and splashes in a little milk. But as the day goes on, the amount begins to shift from mostly coffee to mostly milk to no coffee at all. What significance does this have? You tell me. You can tell that a lot of this movie was left on the cutting room floor. But dear lord, with the pandemic and everyone cooped up inside, this could have been such a powerful touch point with all of us. Yet nothing is done with this. The man even does part-time taxidermy in his apartment. And no one talks about this.
It's never mentioned, never discussed. Yet this film decides that its hook or gimmick to differentiate itself from all the other movies is to make the character as dumb as humanly possible. At the encouragement of his friends and ex-wife over video calls, he purchases a book on ghosts and then decides to craft a spirit jar in order to trap the entity he thinks is in his apartment. But the poorly worded Latin phrase he uses to invoke this power, oh, and don't worry, they even translate it in English, states at the end, all the evil to me, as in he's summoning all the evil in the room.
Perhaps that would be a sign that maybe you shouldn't be messing with this crap. And that is just one of many, many plot holes that this train wreck of a movie has going on. Lastly, this movie actually uses an actual McGuffin. For those unfamiliar with the term, it's an object which is never explained, but somehow makes the entire plot possible. It's the laziest plot device next to two roommates, one who is messy and the other who's a neat freak. The sad part is that the actors in it are actually passable, the main actor especially.
They didn't just pick up some community theater people who were actively trying to outperform each other in every scene. Yet that won't save your train wreck if the vehicle in question has no brakes and really wants to see what slamming into a brick wall at 200 miles per hour would feel like. Man, it's really getting hard to let this anger go. Okay.
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On to the third bad, bad pick, which is called Virus 32. Sadly, this film can be perfectly summed up if 28 days later happened in a YMCA. A mom who is apparently now living with the roommate because her youngest child died young and is now broken inside as strong armed into taking her daughter with her to work because reasons. And she happens to be a security guard at a rundown sports club, a la YMCA. And of course, there's a virus outbreak that somehow turns the people who contract it into violent, rage-filled monsters. A la 28 days later. Oh, but there is a catch.
The astute security guard who leaves her young child by herself in a gym, the floor, which is absolutely covered in water for some mysterious reason, deduces that after being introduced to these zombie-like things, that after a violent outburst, they stare vacantly into space for wait for it 32 seconds before proceeding onward. Wow, what a gimmick! The sheer genius of it is so absolutely astounding. Can we award this movie with all the awards now for thinking of something so out of the box? Can you tell I am being sarcastic?
The last part of this movie is that even though it tries to get the audience to forgive any obvious plot holes by casting the main actress as a broken-hearted mother who has lost her child, a plot device that I hate almost as much as a McGuffin. I mean, if you're going to go to such lengths to try to ask your watchers to ignore any stupid stuff, why not just, you know, do your job and actually make the person not do the idiotic things in the first place? Yeah, I think that was a parenthetical statement followed by another parenthetical statement. So apologies for that.
My point was even with trying to gain the audience's sympathy or at least understanding, this theoretical person still does crap that only serves to make it possible to have a plot in the first place. And does this person, when discovering that their daughter is missing, immediately go look for her? No, not really. And to top everything off, this film tries to have its cake and eat it too with the zombies, for lack of a better word. They are supposed to be stupid because reasons like a regular zombie. But hey, they can also work door handles and cabinets, not to mention jump through windows.
Oh, but oh, they can't swim. And they even have a super handy way of identifying exactly who has the virus and who doesn't. Isn't that super convenient? It was at this point that I stopped watching. And as for a bonus, let's take a look at one last shutter original that fits the exact same mold lines as Virus 32. 0.0MHz. It's a Korean-based horror film that starts off slow and gets even stupider. Group of college kids are part of a ghost hunting club called, you guessed it, 0.0 MHz. Why?
Because, according to them, when the brain raves during REM sleep hit that frequency, then that's when one can meet a ghost. So this club, complete with one rather quiet girl who, as it turns out, can also see ghosts without any equipment whatsoever, travel to a village where there is a very haunted house. In fact, in the beginning of the film, an exorcist gets her neck snapped at this location. Now what kills me about this film is that upon arrival to the shack, this spirit-seeing girl not only sees this vengeful spirit herself, but also the ghost of the exorcist warning her to shove off.
Then, when she hears the other is planning to invoke an actual necromancy to summon this thing by using two dolls and an animal's liver, she meekly tries to protest and is quickly shouted down. She then goes to lie down and wait for the bloodbath to begin. Now, I get it, in many Asian cultures, it's the nail that sticks up that gets bashed down the quickest. But to have someone just roll over this quickly without any kind of explanation, and you just hope the audience buys it, it was too much even for me.
The scientific Mumbo Jumbo, that is the film's name, is trotted out for a few minutes and then is abandoned for a by the numbers Vengeful Ghost Killed College Students News Fest. Someone at Shudder must have really liked bad gimmick plot lines that week. Why, Shudder? Look, I love horror movies. It is my go-to genre when I want to watch something for entertainment. Entertainment. My wife can attest to that because I drag her to a bunch of really bad horror films. But if all you do is put out crap, then you are actively hurting your brand. And that of the genre that you supposedly love.
See, Netflix started this trend of producing its own shows in order to drive more subscribers to their platform. And in the beginning, it worked. I mean, my God, a platform that can produce Santa Clarita Diet, a horror comedy TV show about a zombie real estate agent has to be doing something right. Then again, Netflix is infamous for canceling these new shows after three seasons, which they did to Santa Clarita Diet. And that just broke my heart. If you've been following the news, you may have heard that Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers this first quarter. And they deserved to.
Now, many will say the loss is because of so many other streaming services, and I am sure that played a part. I mean, dear lord, CNN Plus, which was, you know, launched just less than a month ago, was shuttered extremely quickly. But the other is that these companies are not ensuring that these movies and shows have the quality needed. With Netflix, the straw that broke my back was the movie Don't Look Up. It was the most ham-fisted, shallow, and smug. Hey, look at me for banging you over the head with how shallow everything has become. And ain't I smart for that thing that I have ever seen?
I stopped watching halfway through and immediately canceled my subscription. And I refused to restart it. Congratulations, Netflix. You spent untold millions on big name actors. But not only did you just succeed in producing a worst Mars attacks. Anyone remember that horrible stinker? But you drove away a paying customer who has been with you from the very beginning of your DVD rental business. And you can tell things aren't going very well for them. For just look at the service that time and time again is producing shows that become cultural touch points.
Yes, once upon a time, people talked about Tiger King. Watch any late night show now, though, and it's HBO that is stealing the show. And there's a dang good reason for that. They make good TV series. They actively police what they pay for and make dang sure that the shows are only going to enhance their brand, not detract from it. And shutter is in my crosshairs next if I don't see a decent movie in the next month. Your technology platform used to be the worst thing about you. But since AMC is taking over, things have slightly improved on that front. I mean, you have it in you.
You have the movie Terrified as a shutter original. If y'all haven't seen it, then let me set a scene for you. I actually stayed up super late re-watching it just to get the bitter taste of these other failed films out of my mouth. The movie opens up with a woman in her kitchen, and she seems to hear breathing coming up from the pipes in the sink. Her husband comes back, and she says that she didn't cook because she heard voices in the kitchen all afternoon. Human voices. And they said they would kill her. Early the next morning at 5 a.m. She wakes up and goes to the bathroom.
You hear the shower turn on. The husband tries to go back to sleep, but he hears banging on the walls. He thinks it's his neighbor Walter who is starting renovations early and starts banging on the wall in return. He even goes outside and rings his neighbor's intercom, telling him to stop with the noise. But he doesn't get an answer. Upon entering the house again, he notices that the sound is coming from the bathroom. He opens the door and he finds his wife levitating in the air over the tub.
And the banging has come from her body being forcefully propelled backwards and forwards into the walls, blood covering everything. And even when he traps his wife's body in the corner, her head is still being beaten against the wall over and over and over again. And that is just the opening scene. In fact, the movie is so well done that it even shows the apparition in question on its main promotional image. And it can get away with that, for the looks of the thing is only a very small component piece that inspires the dread it does. I did not mean for this episode to be one giant rant.
I am certainly not the kind of person who thrives off from anger or drama. In fact, I'm just the opposite. So let me wrap things up with a sincere plea to shudder. Do better. Please. As a super fan of the genre you cater to exclusively make better shows and TV films. I know you can. Channel the spirit of creep show, VHS 94, and Terrified. Don't just keep making these horrendous clones like The Seed, Nights End, and Virus 32 amongst many, many, many others. Don't make me bring up the horrible non-comedy horror film that you produced where a pair of jeans was the monster.
And I wish to God I was making that up. 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.