Terror Talk: True Crime, Serial Killers and Horror

⁠⁠In this spine-chilling episode, we dive into the life and career of Tom Holland, one of the most influential directors and screenwriters in the horror genre. From penning the thrilling script for Psycho II to redefining vampire lore with his directorial debut Fright Night, Holland has left an indelible mark on horror cinema. We’ll explore his creative process, his ability to blend terror with wit, and how his contributions have influenced generations of horror filmmakers

If you’re a fan of classic horror or curious about the minds behind the genre’s most iconic films, this episode is for you. Tom Holland’s career is a testament to the power of storytelling in scaring, surprising, and delighting audiences.

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📢 Listener Shout-Out:
Got a favorite Tom Holland film or fun horror trivia? Share it with us! Tag us on social media @terrortalkpodcast or email us at [email protected].

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Six Schizophrenic Brothers is a fascinating 2024 documentary on HBO MAX that we feel was an oversimplified but fascinating and unique documentary.

And yes we call it Six Schizophrenic Siblings sometimes but we promise we watched the right documentary as you will hear!

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This is a preview of our all-new Patreon exclusive episode where Shannon and Cathy discuss Cathy's work in court concerning forensic and personality psychology.

Want more? Head on over to Patreon and become a patron for 250 pieces of exclusive bonus content, to join our Discord and enjoy other perks depending on your level of support!

In this spoiler-free Shrink Chat episode of Terror Talk Podcast, we're diving deep into the Sweet Spot of Fear—that magical middle ground between thrill and terror—based on the article “Playing With Fear: A Field Study in Recreational Horror” by Anderson et al. But that’s not all...

We also serve up our unfiltered (and always slightly unhinged) takes on recent horror films and series, including:

MaXXXineA Quiet Place: Day OneLove Lies Bleeding
Dark Harvest
TV show Evil

Deadpool vs Wolverine

Plus, Cathy tests Shannon on her horror knowledge with our signature game segment: Horror Facts with Cath

Whether you're here for spooky screen talk, academic takes, or just horror-flavored banter with two psychologists who should probably be sleeping, this episode is packed with thrills, giggles, and gray matter.

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What the hell is with these ridiculous criminals?

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This is a preview of our all-new Patreon exclusive episode where Shannon and Cathy discuss spooky season events.

Want more? Head on over to Patreon and become a patron for 250 pieces of exclusive bonus content, to join our Discord and enjoy other perks depending on your level of support!

Why does silence frighten you more than anything a horror film can actually show you?

Longlegs and Oddity were two of the most talked-about horror releases of 2024, and neither of them scares you the way horror usually does. Osgood Perkins' Longlegs stars Nicolas Cage as a devil worshipper who has orchestrated the murders of entire families and evaded the FBI for thirty years, with Maika Monroe as the agent decoding the letters he leaves behind. Damian Mc Carthy's Oddity, from Shudder, is an Irish folk-horror piece about a woman using haunted objects to find out who murdered her twin sister.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy review both on the thing that actually makes them work: atmosphere over imagery, and what silence does to a viewer's mind. Silence puts you inside your own head, and the horror your brain builds there is worse than anything a director can put on screen. That is a clinical observation as much as a film one — and it is why both of these films land on an audience that horror has otherwise made very hard to frighten.

In this episode:

• Longlegs (2024) — Osgood Perkins, Nicolas Cage, Maika Monroe
• Cage's performance as something genuinely different from the meme — the Tiny Tim influence, and why horror deserves awards-season treatment
• Why the film is called Longlegs: the whole thing is filtered through a child's-eye memory, and children encode people by physical features
• Maika Monroe's agent as a character shaped by her own childhood, not just a procedural device
• Perkins as Anthony Perkins' son, Cage as Coppola's nephew — two people raised inside the industry making a film about inherited horror
• Oddity (2024) — Damian Mc Carthy, Carolyn Bracken, Shudder
• The folk-horror reading nobody else is giving it: isolation, rural Ireland, a summoning, and skewed moral belief
• Why the scariest object in the film is visible the entire time — the wooden mannequin — and how that inverts the usual hidden-threat structure
• Jump scares that go somewhere versus jump scares that cheat
• Desensitisation: why genuine dread is so rare for horror fans, and what both films do to get past it
• Mc Carthy's first film Caveat, and what a sophomore effort with real money looks like
• What's coming: Terrifier 3 · Nosferatu · Heretic · Nightbitch · Salem's Lot · The Crow · Smile 2 · Beetlejuice Beetlejuice · Alien: Romulus · The Man in the White Van

Clinical concepts discussed: the psychology of silence and internal threat construction · atmosphere versus gore · desensitization in horror audiences · childhood memory and how children encode faces and bodies · dread as a somatic response · folk horror, isolation and moral transgression

Two licensed therapists — one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

🎧 Follow Terror Talk wherever you get your podcasts and join us on Patreon for bonus content and access to the compound.📸 Instagram: @terrortalkpodcast | 🎥 YouTube: Terror Talk Podcast | 📘 Facebook: Terror Talk Podcast | 🎵 TikTok: @dark.psychology.girls🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising

What is it actually like to sit across a prison table from John Wayne Gacy, week after week, as the lawyer trying to keep him alive?

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussion of serial murder, the sexual assault and killing of teenage boys and young men, and the death penalty. Listener discretion is advised.

Karen Conti is a Chicago trial attorney who spent seven months representing John Wayne Gacy during his final death row appeals, the only woman among the lawyers who worked his case across his fourteen years on death row. She is the author of Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy: Defending America's Most Evil Serial Killer on Death Row, a professor who has taught law for more than twenty-five years at DePaul and the University of Illinois, host of The Karen Conti Show on WGN, and a legal analyst who has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Court TV and the Today Show.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy ask her the questions a clinician wants answered and a journalist usually doesn't; what he was like in the room, what it costs a person to defend someone they find repellent, and how you hold a professional duty toward a man whose crimes you cannot look away from.

In this episode:

• Karen Conti on representing John Wayne Gacy in his final death row appeals
• What Gacy was actually like across months of face-to-face visits
• Being the only woman on his legal team, in a case and a profession that made that difficult
• Opposing the death penalty while representing the man most people would make an exception for
• Killing Time with John Wayne Gacy — the memoir, and why she waited to write it
• What a defense attorney carries afterwards

Clinical concepts discussed: psychopathy · antisocial personality disorder · charm as a predatory tool · compartmentalization · vicarious trauma and moral injury in legal and clinical work · the ethics of representing someone you find abhorrent · the psychology of capital punishment

More guest episodes:

• S8E11 - Ann Burgess, FBI criminal profiling pioneer
• S7E54 - Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer — the Ann Burgess documentary

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

🎧 Follow Terror Talk wherever you get your podcasts and join us on Patreon for bonus content and access to the compound.📸 Instagram: @terrortalkpodcast | 🎥 YouTube: Terror Talk Podcast | 📘 Facebook: Terror Talk Podcast | 🎵 TikTok: @dark.psychology.girls🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising

This is a preview of our all-new Patreon exclusive episode where Shannon and Cathy discuss the Summer Horror Movie: The Final Girls.

Want more? Head on over to www.patreon.com/terrortalk and become a Patron for more exclusive bonus content!

Ted Bundy was offered a deal. Plead guilty to three murders, take three twenty five year sentences, live. He was going to take it. Then he realised he would have to stand up in front of the world and say the word guilty, and he could not do it. Nine years later he was dead.

Part three of three. The trials, the interviews, and the last two hours.

Dr. Cathy Barrett, forensic psychologist, closes the case. Shannon asks the questions.

CHAPTERS

(00:00) What we're covering tonight

(02:08) Five lawyers, all fired

(04:48) The plea deal he almost took

(06:50) The bite mark

(07:15) Seven hours, and two death sentences

(09:49) Orlando, and Kimberly Leach

(11:38) Carole Ann Boone, married in court

(13:58) Stephen Michaud, before the fall

(17:35) The man who wouldn't say "I"

(17:59) Bob Keppel arrives

(18:28) The Green River Killer gambit

(21:27) Georgann Hawkins, and the map

(24:21) "The ultimate possession"

(25:50) Preparing him for the chair

(28:22) Hacksaw blades and John Hinckley

(30:18) Diana Weiner, the last lobby

(31:38) Old Sparky, 7:16am

(32:22) Our very first series

IN THIS EPISODE

The plea he rejected. Public defender Mike Minerva said it plainly: Bundy realised he would have to stand up in front of the whole world and say he was guilty, and he just couldn't. Cathy on why a narcissist blows up his own best outcome at the last possible second.

The bite mark on Lisa Levy, and a forensic odontologist matching the castings to the wounds. Jury out less than seven hours.

Stephen Michaud's interviews, recorded before Bundy was convicted, in which he described the killings in enormous detail and never once used the word I. He would hold the recorder, close his eyes, and speak into it in what observers described as a trance, with a welt rising on the left side of his face that faded when he came out of it.

Bob Keppel, the detective Bundy contacted in 1984 offering to help catch the Green River Killer. He gave up far more about himself than about anyone else. Five years later Keppel came back and said, I want to talk about you.

Georgann Hawkins, the crowbar, and the panic afterwards, which is not something psychopaths are supposed to feel.

The last two hours. The sixty day request, the suicide threat, and the crowd outside Raiford setting off fireworks as the hearse went past.

Contains discussion of murder, sexual violence, execution and the death penalty.

CORRECTIONS

The third victim in the plea offer was Kimberly Leach. Cheryl Thomas, attacked in her apartment after Chi Omega, survived.

John Hinckley Jr shot President Reagan in 1981. The episode says Kennedy.

Bundy married Carole Ann Boone during the penalty phase of the Leach trial in Orlando, not at the Chi Omega sentencing.

Stephen Michaud wrote The Only Living Witness with Hugh Aynesworth. Those interviews are the source of the third person recordings.

THE SERIES

Part 1: Childhood, teenage years, college

Part 2: The killings, the escapes, Chi Omega

Part 3: The trials, the interviews, the execution

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

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