Friday the 13th Part 2 is where the series hits its stride, and for many fans, it's the best entry in the whole franchise. Not only does it see the birth of an iconic slasher killer with Jason, it also presents one of the Mount Rushmore Final Girls with Ginny (Amy Steele), one of the toughest, smartest and most resourceful characters to go toe to toe with Jason and live. 

This week we are joined by special guest AL WHITE, director of the new indie film Starfish and co-host of the We Are Geeks podcast to break down the movie, and try to make sense of how a drowned dead kid grew up overnight to become such a prolific serial killer. 

 

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This week we kick off our Friday the 13th extravaganza. All twelve movies covered over the course of our next 13 episodes, with special guests and surprises galore. For our first episode we are joined by Justin Beahm (The Justin Beahm Radio Hour) to talk about why it was a bad idea to repopen Camp Crystal Lake.

This week we wrap up the Scream series with the 2011 slasher film that would serve as the final film of Wes Craven's storied career. Set a decade after the events of Scream 3, the tagline was "new decade, new rules." Was that the case? The passage of time had seen advancements in technology that made the earlier films seem quaint by comparison. The horror landscape had also changed with the influx of films like SAW and Hostel that often placed a premium on extreme gore at the expense of character development, found footage movies and more. At the time of release, Scream 4 felt lost in the shuffle and underperformed at the box office. However, looking back close to a decade later, it's easy to see how prescient this film was as it predicted a day where followers took precedent over intimate connections and we would live our lives in a performative way online. We are joined this week by HEATHER WIXSON (managing editor THE CORPSE CLUB and author of MONSTER SQUAD).

By 2000, the slasher revival had started to wind down, and Scream 3 shows the effects of a series that maybe had run out of ideas, and instead became a sort of parody of itself. Does that mean the end of the planned trilogy is out of charms? Our special guest, Becky Sayers (Dread Central, co-director The Last Buck Hunt) tells Mike and Jerry why the broader, more comic tone was a fitting capper to the series at the time. We also look at the movie that almost was where Mathew Lillard would have returned as a more Machiavellian Stu. All this, plus a discussion of how McDreamy really gets Mike and you have our deep dive of our almost-to-an-end first series of episodes. 

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Mike and Jerry are back, and this time we're joined by a special guest host, Ryan Larson from Ghastly Grinning and the host of the podcast Keep Screaming. This time out, we're continuing our trek through the Scream franchise with SCREAM 2. By 1997 slasher movies were once again in vogue, and Scream 2 made sure to up the ante with a new whodunit, the surprise and shocking death of a much-loved character, and a whole new level of blood-soaked gore. Your hosts look back on all that, plus Mike talks about his irrational hatred for the movie Mandy, Jerry tells us about Scott Weiland's ghost haunting Christian rock bands, David Arquette's death match pro wrestling exploits, and we all try to figure out if there's anything more terrifying than a white guy serenading his embarrassed loved interest in a school cafeteria. 

 

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Welcome to the first episode of THE POD AND THE PENDULUM podcast. Hosted by to dedicated, lifelong horror movie fanatics, we are taking on the heroic task of covering every horror movie franchise under the sun, one gory installment at a time. From the heavy hitters and beloved favorites like Friday the 13th and Halloween to direct video fare like Subspecies and Ghoulies, we are plumbing the depths of horror. Each time out, we'll go behind the scenes and dive deep into the history of each film and run through what we love (or hate) about each chapter. 

For our first installment, we're taking a deep dive into the franchise that kicked off a slasher revival in the late 90s and early 2000s. SCREAM thrilled and terrified audiences upon its release in 1996 and was a breath of fresh air simply by taking place in a world where its characters knew that horror movies existed. Asking packed houses What's your favorite scary movie? the series reminded everyone that Wes Craven is one of the true masters of horror and gave us a new iconic horror figure with Ghostface. For our first episode, Mike and Jerry look at the first movie, why it was so important to horror at the time, but also why its legacy is a mixed bag as well.