Jamelle Bouie and Julian Sanchez join the podcast to discuss John Carpenter's 1982 sci-fi cult classic, The Thing, a film that made our skin crawl with paranoia. Based on the 1938 John W. Campbell Jr. novella Who Goes There?, The Thing, tells the story of a group of American scientists in Antarctica who encounter the eponymous "Thing", a parasitic extraterrestrial life-form that assimilates, then imitates other organisms, including humans. 

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The hook-handed son of a slave summoned by the chanting of his name 5 times, Candyman, was originally created by horror legend writer Clive Barker. But the legend has since been adapted for the big screen many times, first in 1992 and most recently in 2021. Peter Suderman and Jesse Walker help us dissect both films as part of a larger discussion about how horror movies tackle social issues. 

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The Simpsons is an American adult animated sitcom created by Matt Groening that follows the Simpson family who live in Springfield. The show parodies American culture, society, and ultimately the human condition. 

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The Hurt Locker was the first narrative feature to make full, unnerving dramatic sense of the war in Iraq, and it does so without polemics or speeches or phony melodrama. In fact, the director, Kathryn Bigelow, has been praised for making a war movie that is apolitical in nature. The film follows an Iraq War Explosive Ordnance Disposal team who are targeted by insurgents and shows their psychological reactions to the stress of combat.

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In Pulp Fiction, two hit men, Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega work for the crime boss Marcellus Wallace. The film is really comprised of six different stories that are very loosely connected to one another. And the title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue.

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Pan's Labyrinth is a 2006 Spanish-Mexican dark fantasy war film. The story takes place in Spain during the summer of 1944, five years after the Spanish Civil War, during the early Francoist period. The narrative intertwines this real world with a mythical world centered on an overgrown, abandoned labyrinth and a mysterious faun creature, with whom, Ofelia, interacts.

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Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel that was written by Ray Bradbury and turned into a film in 1966 and 2018. It’s a story about Guy Montag, a fireman, whose job it is to actually destroy illegal belongings, like books. Montag never questioned his job until he met his neighbor, Clarisse, who tells him about the past where everyone saw the world and its endless possibility through books.

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A paranoid, secretive surveillance expert has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that the couple he is spying on will be murdered. Julian Sanchez, Jake Laperruque, and Richard Theime join us to discuss how Coppola's The Conversation tells a story of a man caught between his own technological power and the nightmares of his personal responsibility.

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Winston Smith is a minor government employee, living in Oceania, whose job involves the rewriting of history in a manner that casts his fictional country's leaders in a charitable light. And in this closely-monitored society, there is no way to escape from Big Brother. A classic novel written by George Orwell and published in 1949 was adapted for the big screen in 1984.

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A Linguistics professor Louise Banks leads an elite team of investigators when gigantic spaceships touch down in 12 seemingly random locations around the world. As nations teeter on the verge of global war, Banks and her crew must race against time to find a way to communicate with the extraterrestrial visitors. Hoping to unravel the mystery, she takes a chance that could threaten her life and quite possibly all of mankind.

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