You joke, but such a documentary would be legitimately fascinating

I wonder how much of it is regional. I lived in Ohio at that time and there was definitely a lot of nu-metal going on.

How odd it must have been, in turn-of-the-millennium high schools, to have had the loner music so fully co-opted by the jocks? How strange it must have been to be a jock and have 'Freak On A Leash' playing in your Jeep for all to hear?

I'm not sure I understand how Noel Murray is a "stupid young person." I'd like to see your work on that one.

Agreed - I'm not a big fan of Snyder's movies (outside of the excellent Dawn of the Dead remake) but I've never felt like watching his movies was wasted time. On the other hand, Ayer's movies are about as pleasant as finding a family of cockroaches in your ear canal

I don't usually have viscerally negative feelings about movies, but I flat-out hated both Fury and Sabotage. It's as though the angry Goth kid from my high-school English class - the one who always shouted about how "edgy" he was - got a directing gig and became obsessed with cops.

Plus it's directed by David "Grimdark" Ayer, which means there's even less chance of it being any good.

Nice! The Taking of Deborah Logan is excellent. It's much better acted than your average low-budget horror film, it's actually creepy, and it has a solid bad-taste horror premise that I'm surprised hasn't been used before: senile dementia can leave you open to possession by demonic forces. So, I'm cautiously…

God, I miss the days when Card wasn't a certifiable crazy person - he wrote some great stuff back in the day. I met him in the early 90s and he was a really nice fellow at the time. I'm not sure what happened to him, but it's a bummer.

Just speaking personally, this kind of query strikes me as unfruitful - questions of morality aren't mathematical proofs, where you have to start with a set of axioms and proceed rigorously from there. I'm aware that you don't mean it this way, but this kind of slippery-slope questioning is often meant as a gotcha,…

Agreed - Sandkings is possibly the best thing he's written.

I'm not sure it's true that NMH fans came late to the party. I saw them live in 1998 opening for Superchunk, right after Aeroplane over the Sea came out. I'd never heard them before that, and there was no mythology around them at the time. They blew me away - I was an instant fan, bought the album at the show, and…

Hush is better than Oculus, which is good but - ironically! - it gets bogged down in too many flashbacks/backstory.

He's dead-on about rejecting backstory, which is almost never useful in horror films (with some notable exceptions, eg Candyman) - I'm looking at you, Rob Zombie, with your craptacular Michael Myers backstory. I liked Hush a lot and this is one of the things that makes it a really good movie: it moves like a bullet.…

DM & Jemini, tho

If only they would put all of Robert Rodriguez's movies in a vault until 2115

I felt the same way about A Head Full of Ghosts. It seems like Tremblay set out to invert the tropes of possession stories but forgot along the way to make his story actually entertaining. (Plus I had serious thematic issues with the ending, which struck me as sour in an unearned way.)

I like Laymon and Lee, but I think splatterpunk is justifiably absent from this list. For example, I think Lee's book Header is highly entertaining, but it's so far from reality (like an X-rated Wile E Coyote cartoon or something) that I don't personally find it disturbing. It certainly doesn't hold a candle to Blood…

Evenson is great! If you like weird/transgressive literature you should definitely check out his his book Last Days (which he mentions briefly in the interview) - it's an exceptionally bizarre and entertaining series of stories about a cult that worships extreme body modification.

Daddy Lessons is a great song, and definitely country-adjacent, if not completely country. It's been both unsurprising and depressing to see all of the ~~white tears~~ about how Beyonce is invading country music or something.