Sitting in the Dark

Kynan has the curriculum this month, and two of us had never heard of it. Psycho-biddy. Hagsploitation. Grande Dame Guignol, if you want to be polite about it. You take an actress Hollywood has decided is done, you put her in a mansion that’s falling apart, and you sell the audience her face.

Baby Jane survives the rewatch. The one complaint is that Blanche is so hopeless at getting help that the movie never gives you a door that might open, which means there’s nothing to yank away from you. What saves it is the twist. Blanche built that prison herself and let Jane carry the guilt for thirty years, and the longer we sat with that, the less Jane looked like a villain and the more she looked like somebody who got broken slowly. Sweet Charlotte has a harder time. There’s a 1927 decapitation, a blackmailed widow, an English insurance man, a highway commission, a dead housekeeper and a gun full of blanks, all in service of a cousin who wanted the money. The jump forward is too long, the reveal hangs on a character we barely meet, and Olivia de Havilland doesn’t make a choice until the last reel. Chelsea has a firsthand account of how Joan Crawford really left that set, and the urn makes up for a lot.

Auntie Roo is the one that reverses the whole cycle. Shelley Winters never hurts anybody. Two orphans decide she’s a witch, lock her in a pantry, set it on fire, and walk away with her jewelry. The voiceover should have been cut. Everything else we’ll defend. All four of us came out Team Auntie Roo.

Also in here: why the house is always the body, why older actors get heist movies and older actresses get horror, Chelsea’s firsthand Bruce Dern tea, and Kynan’s closing math on how many Oscars this trashy little cycle kept employed.

Reference Links

From the show

• Show home: Sitting in the Dark
• Our papa podcast’s Bette Davis series — The Next Reel

Watch the films

• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd

Further reading (the trilogy)

• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962, dir. Robert Aldrich) — Wikipedia
• Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964, dir. Robert Aldrich) — Wikipedia
• Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971, dir. Curtis Harrington) — Wikipedia

• (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark

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Before the zombie ate anybody, it went to work. It was a Haitian creature—a body without a will, dug up and put on a sugar plantation—and the horror wasn’t that it might come for you… no, not at all. The horror was that you might actually become one. That’s the whole thing.

So Pete drags the room back past Romero to the three decades when the movie zombie was still a labor instrument. White Zombie (1932) is the first one ever made. This means of course that nobody had figured out yet what a zombie was for, so it lands on a mill full of enslaved men who are not, notably, Black. They’re the boss’s rivals and creditors, converted into staff. The movie is untroubled by all of them and scandalized by one white woman’s captivity. Tommy and Kynan both want to know whether the movie has any idea what it’s doing.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is Val Lewton handed a title he detested and answering it by adapting Jane Eyre, true story, which kinda almost works. After that, Wes Craven goes to Haiti in 1988, gets eleven of his thirty shooting days, and makes a zombie movie where nobody eats anyone and nobody is put to work. You’d think the mental model gets all broken with this one. Fear not. 

Running underneath: what these movies knew versus what we’re giving them credit for, why the creator is always scarier than the creature, and Pete’s standing position that being buried alive is the worst thing that can happen to a person.

Reference Links

From the show

• Show home: Sitting in the Dark
• Last month’s episode: The Land of the Screams and the Home of De-Praved
• Tommy’s cursed-objects episode: Articles of Loathing
• Become a member: The Next Reel family of film shows · join here

Tonight’s triple feature

• White Zombie (1932, dir. Victor Halperin) — Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd | Wikipedia (also public domain — free on Tubi, Pluto, Plex, and the Internet Archive, though print quality varies wildly)
• I Walked with a Zombie (1943, dir. Jacques Tourneur) — Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd | Wikipedia
• The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988, dir. Wes Craven) — Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd | Wikipedia

Mentioned on the episode

• Black Zombie (2026, dir. Maya Annik Bedward) — the documentary Chelsea caught at SXSW that complicated her relationship with Serpent. Letterboxd · in limited theatrical release from Kino Lorber since September 11
• Pete’s absurd comparison: Bulworth on The Next Reel
• Pete’s buried-alive anxiety, previously and at length: What’s That Smell?

The reading list

• William Seabrook, The Magic Island (1929) — the uncredited source of White Zombie, and the book that made “zombie” an American word. The Dover reissue carries an introduction by George Romero and an afterword by Wade Davis, which makes it the single most on-theme thing in this episode. Bookshop.org
• Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (1938) — Hurston went to Haiti herself, as an initiate rather than an observer. Bookshop.org
• Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) — the nonfiction book Craven adapted, and, per Chelsea, sensationalized wildly. Bookshop.org
• Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954) — Romero’s stated source for Night of the Living Dead, which is not a zombie movie and never uses the word. Bookshop.org

• (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark

Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:

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• Sitting in the Dark

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Haunted houses get all the attention, but at least a house stays where you put it. This month is about the other kind of haunting. The kind that comes home with you from the sale, the flea market, or just pounds away at your inbox.

A videotape, a mirror, and ten audio files sent from an address that clearly does not accept replies.

The Ring, Oculus, and undertone each hand their curse a clock: seven days, ten recordings, one weekend in the house. None of them has a practical reason to wait that long. All three set the thing loose on a family that had stopped functioning well before anything supernatural arrived, and not one of them will will ever tell you where the object came from.

• The Ring - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• Oculus - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• undertone - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd

• (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark

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• The Next Reel
• Sitting in the Dark

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Chelsea shows up to the Fourth of July with a "very loose theme" — fireworks and patriotism in horror — and then, somehow, makes it cohere. Blow Out, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Final Destination 3 have nothing to do with each other until you notice they're all doing the same trick: pointing your eyes up at the pretty lights while something ugly happens at ground level.

So we get into it. Is Blow Out even a horror movie, or just De Palma at his most gorgeous and most pervy, making a movie about making a movie? We defend I Know What You Did Last Summer despite ethical math that reads like it was written by a '90s AI — and land on why we love it anyway. And we finally give Final Destination 3 its due as a Rube Goldberg machine of presorted cruelty that dares you to enjoy it.

Threaded through all three: the illusion of safety in a crowd, the discovery that surviving the accident is the actual nightmare, and a TikTok ride operator who should absolutely not be employed. Also, Kynan watched his first summer slasher and lived to tell about it.

Links & Notes

• Our prior Final Destination episode: Death Edging with the Films of Final Destination
• Our papa podcast's breakdown of Talk to Me
• Blow Out - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• I Know What You Did Last Summer - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• Final Destination 3 - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• View Our List on Letterboxd

• (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark

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Kynan takes the curator's chair this month and leads with the question they drilled into him in grad school: why does this have to be animated? Three films answer it three different ways, and every answer turns out to be about the same uncomfortable thing — somebody's body as raw material.

Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997) starts the descent. A pop idol ditches her group for a serious acting career and watches her sense of self go with it. Parasocial dread a full twenty-five years before we had the word for it. Mad God (Phil Tippett, 2021) is a hard left turn. Thirty years and a Kickstarter in the making, it's a near-wordless plunge through a stop-motion hell of creatures stitched from meat and rot. This is the episode's "respect it more than you enjoy it" centerpiece.

Stopmotion (Robert Morgan, 2023) is where metaphor stops being… well… metaphor. An animator's assistant tries to finish her dying mother's film and starts feeding the puppets her own flesh.

What nobody planned, since Kynan hadn't even seen two of the three before slotting them together: the week kept circling back to the same grim idea: in animation, the artist is always the material.

Featured Films

• Tonight's Triple Feature:
  • Perfect Blue (1997) — dir. Satoshi Kon - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
  • Mad God (2021) — dir. Phil Tippett - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
  • Stopmotion (2023) — dir. Robert Morgan - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• View Our List on Letterboxd

• (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark

Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:

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• Sitting in the Dark

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AI. You may have noticed it's everywhere now — in your phone, your fridge, the suspiciously enthusiastic email your boss "wrote" last Tuesday. And cinema, bless its little reactive heart, has been trying to warn us about this for fifty years. The problem is we keep not listening, partly because the warnings have so often arrived in the shape of a sexy lady robot, which is its own diagnosis of the problem.

This week, Pete is joined by Chelsea Stardust and Tommy Metz III for a triptych spanning five decades of artificial intelligence horror: Demon Seed (1977), Cam (2018), and Companion (2025). Three films, one increasingly nervous question: what exactly are we asking of AI, and what does it keep becoming anyway?

The conversation runs the lineage of synthetic women in cinema — a trope factory that stretches from Metropolis through The Stepford Wives, Blade Runner, Weird Science, Her, Ex Machina, M3GAN, and Subservience, with a foundational-film round that lands on WarGames and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Along the way: the paperclip maximizer as a way of understanding what Proteus actually is, the cultural weight of releasing a forced-pregnancy AI horror four years after Roe v. Wade, platform terms-of-use as the modern book of the vampire, and the genuinely surprising argument that the most hopeful film in the set is the one where a robot drives off into the sunset with all the money.

There are detours, because of course there are: villain-era Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage doing the robot, Sophie Thatcher sliding her own intelligence to one hundred percent, and Tommy's new and frankly concerning bedtime ritual.

The films:

• Demon Seed (1977), dir. Donald Cammell, adapted from the Dean Koontz novel, starring Julie Christie
• Cam (2018), dir. Daniel Goldhaber, written by Isa Mazzei, starring Madeline Brewer
• Companion (2025), dir. Drew Hancock, produced by Zach Cregger

Also referenced: Colossus: The Forbin Project, Westworld (1973), Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, Get Out, Promising Young Woman, The Invitation, Assassination Nation, Barbarian.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark

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Tommy steps in as host this month with a triple feature about invaders that don't need to knock. Assassination Nation turns a Salem high school into a digital witch trial when a hacker dumps everyone's private data into the open. Return of the Living Dead lets the contamination loose inside a single warehouse-and-cemetery block, where the dead come back complaining and the living can't decide who's in charge. The Cell sends an empath into the dreamscape of a serial killer and asks whether the rescue mission is the same thing as the trespass.

The conversation keeps finding throughlines the collection didn't have to spell out. The witch hunt as American operating system. The body as joke, as prison, as kingdom. Style as argument — three films that all chose excess and never apologized for it. Where they part ways is in their relationship to the rage they put on screen: Levinson's is righteous, O'Bannon's is gleeful, Tarsem's is mournful.

The trigger warning that opens Assassination Nation gets read three different ways. The "it hurts to be dead" line in Return of the Living Dead gets a vote. The Cell becomes a real-time test case for whether visual ambition can carry a thin script. The answer depends on who's talking.

The Films

• Assassination Nation • Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• Return of the Living Dead • Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• The Cell • Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd

• (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark

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What does it actually take to make a horror film that matters? Not a studio green light. Not a VFX budget. Not a catering line.

This month, Chelsea Stardust curates three films that answer that question on their own uncompromising terms. Jeremy Gardner's The Battery strips the zombie apocalypse down to two former baseball players, a Discman, and a friendship slowly coming apart at the seams. Starry Eyes follows a young actress as the machinery of Hollywood ambition grinds her into something unrecognizable — and possibly exactly what she always wanted to be. And Hellbender, made by a real family in their real backyard, turns the mother-daughter relationship into a folk horror inheritance no one asked for and no one can refuse.

Together, these three films share a preoccupation with death and rebirth — not as plot mechanics, but as the thing transformation actually costs. Chelsea, Pete, Kynan, and Tommy dig into what it means to make something from almost nothing, and why the best low-budget horror isn't resourceful so much as honest.

Featured Films

• Tonight's Triple Feature:
  • The Battery - Apple TV | Amazon 
  • Starry Eyes - Apple TV 
  • Hellbender - Apple TV | Amazon
• View Our List on Letterboxd

• (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark

Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:

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• Sitting in the Dark

Connect With Us:

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This month on Sitting in the Dark, we go big: big monsters, big fear, and big systems that respond to catastrophe with the confidence of a guy who just Googled “what is monster” on his way into the meeting. Kynan, Chelsea Stardust, Tommy Metz III, and Pete Wright take on three modern giant-creature films—Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006), André Øvredal’s Troll Hunter (2010), and Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One (in its Minus Color presentation)—and find a weirdly consistent thread across wildly different cultures: when the giant thing shows up, the institutions mostly don’t.

The Host kicks things off with tonal whiplash as a feature, not a bug. The film’s mix of grief, comedy, and political bite becomes its own kind of monster, and the conversation circles what Bong is really lampooning, what still lands, and what hits differently on a rewatch. The creature design gets its due too—full daylight, hard to pin down, impossible to “know”—but what lingers is the movie’s sense that people become collateral long before anything with teeth arrives.

Troll Hunter shifts the vibe without letting you off the hook. The group gets into the found-footage push-pull—shaky cam, “why are you still filming,” all that—then pretty quickly agrees that Hans, the deadpan troll hunter, is the secret weapon. The film’s charm is how seriously it takes the ridiculous premise: folklore becomes logistics, mythology becomes fieldwork, and the jokes don’t erase the danger. It’s one of those movies that makes you laugh… then reminds you you’d die immediately.

Godzilla Minus One brings it home with a version of Godzilla that’s less “spectacle” and more “reckoning.” The group talks about the postwar setting, the human story at the center, why the black-and-white presentation changes the feel of the effects, and how this movie earns its impact through quiet scenes as much as destruction.

Across all three films, the episode keeps returning to the same uncomfortable idea: these are blue-collar fights. The people who do anything meaningful aren’t the polished experts. They’re ordinary, exhausted, under-resourced, and improvising. Which might be the scariest part.

Next month, Chelsea flips the table for her birthday picks with an ultra low-budget lineup: The Battery (2012), Hellbender (2021), and Starry Eyes (2014).

🎬 Featured Films

• 🍿 Tonight's Triple Feature:
  • The Host - Apple TV | Amazon 
  • Trollhunter - Apple TV | Amazon 
  • Godzilla Minus One - Apple TV | Amazon
• 📋 View Our List on Letterboxd

• (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark

Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:

• Become a member for just $5/month or $55/year
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• Sitting in the Dark

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You know that moment when the room doesn’t change, exactly… but you do? A joke lands a little sideways, a silence settles in, and your brain starts doing that ridiculous math where staying feels safer than leaving—even when every part of you is quietly screaming, “Go.” That’s the engine of this month’s Sitting in the Dark, as Pete Wright sits down with Tommy Metz III, Chelsea Stardust, and Kynan Dias to unpack “Overstayed”: three films built around the fear of the open door you don’t walk through.

They start with Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, a dinner party that weaponizes politeness, history, and that stubborn desire to not be the first person to say what everyone’s thinking. From there, they pivot to David Bruckner’s The Night House, where the trap isn’t social pressure—it’s grief, isolation, and a house that seems to rearrange itself into meaning when you’re not looking. And then there’s Damien McCarthy’s Caveat, a movie that takes the idea of being “stuck” and makes it aggressively literal, daring you to decide whether you’re watching realism… or a fable with teeth.

Along the way, the conversation keeps circling one question: what is it in us that wants answers more than safety? It’s a theme that feels uncomfortably familiar—and the kind of horror that lingers because it doesn’t ask what you’d do in a haunted house. It asks what you’d do at a party, in a marriage, in a moment where the cost of being wrong feels higher than the cost of staying.

Featured Films

• Tonight's Triple Feature:
  • 1 - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
  • 2 - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
  • 3 - Apple TV | Amazon | Letterboxd
• 📋 View Our List on Letterboxd

• (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark

Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:

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The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:

• Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and Movements
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• Movies We Like
• The Next Reel
• Sitting in the Dark

Connect With Us:

• Main Site: Web
• Movie Platforms: Letterboxd | Flickchart
• Social Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | Pinterest
• Your Hosts: Chelsea | Kyle | Kynan | Pete | Tommy 

Shop & Stream:

• Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & more
• Watch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussed
• Originals: Source material from our episodes
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