The Horror Heals Podcast

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Thomas Lennon spends plenty of time making people laugh. When he’s choosing something to watch at home, though, he’s more likely to reach for horror.

"The State" and "Reno 911!" star joins Corey to talk about Christmas at the Kringles, working with director Kevin Lewis, and the fun of improvising alongside a cast that includes Arden Myrin, Rachel Bilson, Ron Livingston, Donald Faison and Beverly D’Angelo.

Corey first interviewed Tom in 1997 during the Viva Variety days and later spoke with him for his book, "The Union of The State." Their latest conversation includes an unexpected explanation for why "Viva Variety" has been so hard to find.

Tom also shares how horror became something he and his son enjoy together, including a memorable encounter with Guillermo del Toro. He explains what changed his mind about fan conventions and why appearing as Lieutenant Dangle makes those weekends fun for him, too.

Plus, we get into:

• The childhood plan to see "The Shining" that his parents shut down, and why he’s still annoyed about it.
• "Hell Baby," filming in New Orleans, and a drink that earned an onscreen credit.
• His writing project, "Casket Girls," and moving between comedy, horror and novels.
• Why "The Descent" gets under his skin.
• His love for "The Exorcist III" and "John Carpenter’s The Thing."
• The point where "Talk to Me" pushed past an enjoyable scare.
• The unexpected turn he takes with our favorite final person question.

It’s a conversation about scary movies, making things with funny people, and finding happiness in a genre that frightens you.

Horror Heals explores the connection between horror and mental wellness.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by Mosaic Multimedia LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Send us Fan Mail

For S.A. Bradley, scary movies offered comfort during a childhood filled with fears that followed him offscreen. Growing up in a fundamentalist religious group that predicted the end of the world, he found something unexpected in horror: room to question what he had been taught and characters who understood what it meant to be an outsider.

The author of Screaming for Pleasure: How Horror Makes You Happy and Healthy and host of Hellbent for Horror joins Corey for a conversation about the movies, monsters and fellow fans who helped him feel less alone. Scott shares the childhood viewing experience that made horror feel like something of his own, the late-night convention conversation that helped him find his community, and why the films we turn to for comfort often come from the years when we needed them most.

Along the way, Corey and Scott compare notes on religious horror, misunderstood monsters, found footage and the pleasure of being surprised by a movie when you think you have seen everything. There is also a Halloween memory involving an elaborately decorated house, a father willing to bend the rules, and a child who would remember that kindness for decades.

In this episode:

• Finding comfort in frightening stories during an unpredictable childhood.
• The Exorcist, The Devils and the freedom to question religious fear.
• Queer identity, outsider experiences and sympathy for the monster.
• Why The Thing, Dawn of the Dead and Phantasm can feel like comfort viewing.
• Horror conventions, friendship and finding people who speak your language.
• What still surprises a fan who has watched thousands of horror films.
• The community at the heart of Scott’s next nonfiction project, Defenders of the Faith.
• Our final-person question, with a survivor Scott believes earned her escape.

Which horror movie do you put on after a terrible day? Tell us your comfort watch and why you return to it.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Content note: Strong language and movie spoilers, including discussion of Obsession and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022).

S.A. Bradley’s website

Screaming for Pleasure and purchase options. Hellbent for Horror

Listen to Hellbent for Horror. Hellbent for Horror

Instagram: @hellbentforhorror

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by Mosaic Multimedia LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Send us Fan Mail

You’re awake. You can see your bedroom. You can’t move, and something appears to be standing in the corner. What happens when the psychologist who studies sleep paralysis experiences it himself?

Dr. Brian Sharpless joins Corey for a conversation about the strange places where horror movies, psychology and human experience meet. A clinical psychologist, researcher and lifelong horror fan, Brian is the author of Monsters on the Couch: The Real Psychological Disorders Behind Your Favorite Horror Movies.

From the unsettling familiarity of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the suffering zombies of The Return of the Living Dead, Brian explores connections between fictional nightmares and real psychological conditions. He explains what separates sleep paralysis from night terrors, why exploding head syndrome has such an alarming name, and how someone can become convinced that a loved one has been replaced by an impostor.

The conversation also considers what horror can offer us. Brian shares why confronting mortality through a movie might encourage us to take chances, reconsider our priorities and imagine how we would respond when survival depends on us.

Along the way: Corey’s startling encounter with a roommate’s night terrors, a shared appreciation for The Exorcist III, punk rock zombies, treasured horror memorabilia and Hollywood’s complicated relationship with mental illness.

In this episode:

• Sleep paralysis, frightening bedroom figures and supernatural explanations.
• Capgras syndrome and the unsettling premise of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
• Exploding head syndrome and the experiences behind the name.
• Cotard syndrome and its connections to zombie stories.
• Clinical therianthropy, including the belief that someone is transforming into an animal.
• How filmmakers can explore psychological distress without adding to stigma.
• Horror, mortality and imagining our own capacity to survive.
• Brian’s answer to our favorite final-person question.

Explore Brian’s work:

• Official website
• Monsters on the Couch: book information and purchasing options
• Books, research and supplemental materials
• More interviews and media appearances

Find more episodes at HorrorHeals.com.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by Mosaic Multimedia LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Send us Fan Mail

A romantic trip to Italy. An adoption match. A dinner that goes horribly wrong. For the couple at the center of I Don’t Understand You, becoming parents means surviving the vacation first.

Kendall talks with married filmmakers David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano about turning experiences from their own lives into a bloody horror comedy starring Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells. Behind the escalating chaos is a personal story about becoming fathers, navigating uncertainty and discovering that making a movie could help them process feelings they had never fully discussed.

The conversation moves from gallows humor and the laughter that follows a jump scare to the thoughtful portrayal of their son’s birth mother. Kendall shares his perspective as an adoptee, along with memories of the parents who encouraged his early love of horror.

There is also a young Dracula enthusiast in the family who takes Halloween decorating very seriously. Even the mailman has a role to play.

In this episode:
• Why horror and comedy can offer a shared emotional release
• How writing and directing became an unexpected form of therapy
• Bringing their relationship to the screen with Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells
• Portraying a birth mother’s care and deliberate choices
• Introducing children to horror and raising the next generation of fans
• Their upcoming ventures into slasher and religious horror
• Brian’s favorite final survivor and the question David needs more time to answer

Watch I Don’t Understand You, and follow Horror Heals for conversations about horror, creativity and mental wellness.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by Mosaic Multimedia LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Send us Fan Mail

We’ve spent decades rooting for Heather Langenkamp to survive. Now she gets to be the reason everyone else runs screaming. It’s about time.

Heather joins Corey and Kendall to preview "Last Chance Motel," the new slasher directed by and starring Danielle Harris and Scout Taylor-Compton. Their characters are getting married at a secluded desert motel, where Heather’s matriarch has a family to support, showgirl dreams to revisit and a deeply questionable approach to hospitality. Corey’s marketing brain has to ask: Is massacring your guests really a good business policy?

Heather talks about finally getting to play an outrageous villain and helping devise the movie’s gruesome makeup effects. There’s also the small matter of spraying blood around motel rooms the crew was supposed to keep clean. Apparently, “more blood” is easier to request than to mop up.

This is a special conversation for Corey, who named Nancy Thompson his favorite final person in Horror Heals’ first episode. He originally interviewed Heather for her documentary I Am Nancy, and they revisit why fans continue to share deeply personal stories with her about bullying, abuse and finding courage through horror.

We also discuss:

• Why Heather loved a queer wedding story that lets its couple simply be themselves.
• The opportunities women deserve to play memorable, wonderfully horrible villains.
• Loving Nancy while wanting filmmakers to see everything else Heather can do.
• The friendships that keep the Nightmare on Elm Street cast connected.
• Whether she would return to Nancy and what remains worth exploring between Nancy and Freddy.
• A Halloween duet with Mick Garris, featuring Robert Englund and Robert Rodriguez.

Plus, Kendall tries to imagine Heather in a historical role and immediately adds vampires. We may be part of the typecasting problem.

Last Chance Motel arrives on digital October 6, 2026. Visit the film’s official website for more.

Find “Scream for Halloween” on LVCRFT’s Skeleton Sam’s Deadtime Stories, available now.

Tell us what Nancy means to you, share this episode with an Elm Street fan, and follow Horror Heals.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by Mosaic Multimedia LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Send us Fan Mail

The Amityville house has been revisited so many times that it’s easy to forget there’s a real town around it. Robert P. Ottone grew up about 20 minutes away. In his new novel, "Amityville Awakens," he imagines the house being torn down and asks what happens next.

Robert joins Corey and Kendall to talk about his connection to the case, including the night his father announced news of the DeFeo murders on the radio. He explains why he returned to the original Amityville account for inspiration, what he thinks the movies have done to the story, and why he wanted his novel to include both Amityville and North Amityville.

There’s more on Robert’s mind than a haunted house. He talks about the changes he’s seen on Long Island, the migrant workers whose labor helps sustain it, and his experience teaching adults who came to English classes after long shifts. It’s a conversation about the people who live in a place most of us know only from horror movies.

We also talk about the films that made Robert a horror fan, trade opinions on newer releases, and get a Tubi recommendation. Robert had the title right: it’s "Match." And when we ask him to name a favorite final person, he takes the question in a direction we didn’t expect.

Amityville Awakens arrives October 6, 2026.

• Preorder a signed copy from CLASH Books
• Preorder the paperback through Bookshop.org
• Find the audiobook through Simon & Schuster
• Watch Match on Tubi

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by Mosaic Multimedia LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Send us Fan Mail

Haunted house season is here, and we are talking with a man who has been paid to scare people for nearly 50 years.

Leonard Pickel has designed or consulted on more than 300 haunted attractions. His résumé includes work for Universal Studios Florida, Six Flags and Madison Square Garden, along with creating Hauntrepreneurs, Haunted Attraction Magazine and HAuNTcon.

Leonard gives Corey and Kendall the inside scoop on how haunted houses are designed, what makes a scare work and how the industry has changed during his remarkable career. He also explains what haunt designers notice that the rest of us completely miss while we are busy screaming and searching for the exit.

It is a playful trip through the art, psychology and business of making people pay to be terrified.

Learn more about Leonard at https://hauntrepreneurs.com.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by Mosaic Multimedia LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Send us Fan Mail

Nicole Davis loves horror. Kendall loves horror. But neither one wants anything to do with a home invasion movie.

In Part 2, we compare notes on the horror we simply cannot handle. Home invasions are a big one, but caves, claustrophobia and a few other nightmare scenarios make the list, too. Just because you host or appear on a podcast called Horror Heals does not mean you have to watch ALL the horror.

We also hear more of Nicole’s adoption story, and this is where things get wild. She shares the story of the letter her adoptive mother wrote to Alabama Gov. George Wallace and why Nicole still has questions about the role it may have played in her adoption. Then there’s the Ancestry DNA match Nicole almost ignored.

She had spent years trying to identify her biological father and believed he had died. So when another DNA notification showed up, Nicole wasn’t exactly rushing to investigate. Eventually she did, and discovered a 27% match that changed everything she thought she knew.

There’s a lot packed into Part 2: horror movies, adoption, DNA, family secrets and plenty of laughs along the way.

And we want to hear from you: What horror movie, scene or entire subgenre can you absolutely NOT watch?

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by Mosaic Multimedia LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Send us Fan Mail

Writer Nicole Davis grew up afraid of haunted houses, but not necessarily because of what might jump out at her. She didn’t trust the people inside them.

Nicole grew up adopted in rural Alabama, at the end of a road where anyone showing up had a reason to be there. Kids came down specifically to mess with her family. Wild dogs roamed farther back on their property. News of an escaped murderer left her terrified that someone could be outside her window. And she never knew what kind of mood her father would be in when he came home.

Then there was evangelical Christianity. Nicole grew up with Hell Houses, Rapture movies and the very real fear that if she didn’t do everything exactly right, she could die and spend eternity in hell.

She tells us that was scarier than The Exorcist. We’ll forgive her. Somewhere in all that fear, horror became a source of comfort.

Stephen King gave Nicole an escape. Freddy Krueger was terrifying, but at least Freddy was predictable. He had rules. The movie ended. The book closed. When real life could change without warning, fictional horror gave Nicole a place where she knew where the danger was coming from.

That relationship with fear followed her into adulthood. Home invasion movies such as The Strangers still scare the hell out of her. The Descent managed to ruin something she once loved: exploring caves. Pennywise helped make sure clowns were permanently off the list.

We also talk about horror’s long history of portraying adoptees as the dangerous outsider, the “bad seed” whose mysterious biology might eventually turn them against the family that took them in. As an adoptee herself, Nicole has some thoughts.

And that’s where Horror Heals collides with our other podcast, Family Twist. Nicole’s adoption story, childhood and love of horror are so tangled together that separating them would almost miss the point.

In Part 1, we talk Stephen King, Freddy Krueger, Pennywise, The Strangers, The Descent, rural horror, Hell Houses, adoption trauma, abandonment, childhood anxiety and why sometimes knowing where the monster is can make it a whole lot less frightening.

Part 2 is coming next week.

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by Mosaic Multimedia LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Send us Fan Mail

In Part 1 with Ash from Dead Puppy Studios, we heard how someone once terrified of horror ended up making human-skin masks and scaring the hell out of people for fun. Part 2 gets even more personal, with a lot of laughs along the way.

Ash talks about finding a home in Salem and a horror community where the people who might look scary to outsiders are often some of the warmest and most welcoming people in the room. It’s a place where, as Ash puts it, the “weirdos and queerdos” can show up exactly as themselves.

We also get into the stigmas that still surround mental health and horror fandom, and why Ash believes scary movies can give us a safe place to deal with anger, fear and trauma. Then we geek out over the movies themselves, including Midsommar, The Purge, Saw, Rob Zombie’s Firefly family and why some horror movies deserve more credit for what they’re saying underneath all that blood.

Ash also answers our favorite final-person question, offers a few potentially controversial horror opinions and introduces us to the true mastermind behind Dead Puppy Studios: Zombie, the company’s Cat Executive Officer.

He came up with the name. He contributes no money. He refuses to work the booth. Typical management. Listen to Part 2 with Ash from Dead Puppy Studios on Horror Heals.

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by Mosaic Multimedia LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.