The Projection Booth

Nearly sixty years after Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin shot the most famous footage in Bigfoot history, forty seconds of forgotten 16mm film locked in a safe for half a century threaten to blow the legend wide open. Capturing Bigfoot (2026), a SXSW documentary that had the Bigfoot community arguing before most of them had seen it, comes from director Marq Evans of Claydream (2021) and arrives October 20, National Bigfoot Day, on Prime Video and in select theaters.

Mike talks with Evans about the email from a colleague that started it, 130 interview tapes from researcher Greg Long, how Patterson's son Clint became the film's emotional heartbeat, watching the new footage on camera for the first time, being shut down by a bank president mid-interview, and why Evans pulled the film from festivals to protect its secret. 

Visit the film's official website.

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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

The Joe Louis Fist is among Detroit's best-known monuments, yet plenty of people have forgotten whose fist it is. Etched in Pavement (2026), a festival documentary from Detroit photographer-turned-filmmaker John Sippel, brings that legacy back through two young fighters from Southwest Detroit. Sippel spent four years inside the grassroots Guns Down, Gloves Up movement, where boxing becomes an answer to gun violence, addiction, and loss. After Woods Hole and a packed Detroit homecoming, the film is now on digital and VOD.

Mike talks with Sippel about two and a half years of shooting, screening the first rough cut for his subjects in his living room, an $80,000 post-production budget raised through boxing gyms and Kickstarter, and Joe Louis's children speaking on film about their father for the first time.

Visit the film's official website for more details.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

What does it cost to believe everything? Gimme Truth (2026), which had its world premiere at Hot Docs and went on to Fantastic Fest, follows UFO contactees, starseeds, anti-vaccine crusaders, and other seekers of hidden knowledge without sneering and without sharing their beliefs. Co-directors Simon Ennis, who made The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop (2024), and Brad Abrahams care less about what these believers believe than why.

Mike talks with both filmmakers about earning trust from wary subjects, including anti-vaccine filmmaker Mikki Willis, who took two years to say yes; shooting at the Red Pill Expo in Des Moines with no crew but each other; and a stash of footage that could become a film of its own. 

Follow Brad Abrahams on Instagram and see where Gimme Truth is screening, including Windsor and DOC NYC in November.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Mike talks with the two stars of Little Doors (2026) — married couple Anthony Oberbeck and Megan Koester — about a deadpan comedy in which a lonely woman, quietly living through the end of the world, discovers a small wooden door has grown into the side of her body and has to decide whether to open it.

It’s the feature directorial debut of Oberbeck (Dad & Stepdad, the Reveries trilogy), who wrote, directed, edited, and co-stars in the film opposite his real-life wife, shooting almost entirely inside producer Eric Cotten’s mostly empty Baltimore house because emptying a room, Oberbeck found, was cheaper than dressing one. The same logic put both leads in identical blue jumpsuits for the whole shoot — sourced from a used-workwear tent in the City of Industry — so nobody had to track continuity or hire a wardrobe department. First-time film composer Lars Finberg, of garage-punk mainstays The Intelligence and Thee Oh Sees, scored the film from demos of his own next album, handing them over with “use whatever inspires you.” Oberbeck cut the whole thing from his bed, having no desk, while directing his own wife forced an early, blunt conversation about where “lead actress” ended and “spouse” began.

Little Doors had its world premiere at the Calgary Underground Film Festival before playing its US premiere at Fantastic Fest.

Follow Anthony Oberbeck and Megan Koester on Instagram for screening updates.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Mike talks with Jake Allyn, writer-director of Clean Hands (2026), a true-crime drama about a celebrated Hagerstown, Maryland narcotics sergeant fighting the opioid pipeline he polices by day while his own daughter is consumed by it at home.

Allyn found the story on YouTube during COVID and became close enough with the real Kevin and Dana Simmers that he calls them second parents; they and the police officers who served with Kevin were on set throughout the 20-day Atlanta and Hagerstown shoot, alongside Brooke’s actual drug counselor, who appears in the film herself. Zach Braff, taking his first dramatic lead as a real person and a cop, reportedly came to need Kevin’s presence on set by the second week after initially asking for space; Esther McGregor carried the weight of standing in for every woman who’s passed through the recovery home the real story inspired. Allyn structured the film’s financing so that a third of its profits go directly to Brooke’s House, the real nonprofit recovery residence Kevin founded after his daughter’s story played out.

The film is Allyn’s second directing credit, made with his brother Conor, following their earlier border drama Ride; it opens Friday, October 16th, after premiering at this year’s Tribeca Festival.

Follow the film on Instagram, and visit Brooke’s House to support the recovery program.


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Mike talks with Danish writer-director Kasper Kalle about his sophomore feature No Rest for the Wicked (2026), a queer gothic romance shot on the Faroe Islands that slides from love story into vampire tale into body horror without the audience noticing the ground shifting under them.

Kalle built the film from an 1885 short story by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs — one of the earliest unapologetic accounts of gay love in print — and expanded its fifteen pages using the islands themselves: constant, unschedulable fog (created on set and in post), a 300-year-old stone village the crew stumbled on mid-scout, and composers from the Faroes so the score wouldn’t feel imported. Leads Egor Venned, a Faroese former model making his acting debut, and Danish star Pilou Asbæk (Game of Thrones) anchor the romance at the film’s center.

After premiering at Fantasia and playing its US premiere at Fantastic Fest, the film is headed to US theaters, with Kalle already writing his next two projects.


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Mike talks with writer-director Chris Merola about his debut feature Lemonade Blessing (2025), a coming-of-age dramedy about a Catholic-school transfer student who falls for a girl who dares him into escalating sacrilege, all in the name of love.

Merola wrote the script as a USC film student mining his own adolescence — a Catholic mother, a fake-named first crush, the general sense of being “unmoored” — and financed it himself, funneling 1,000% stock-market gains from a well-timed Tesla bet into New Jersey’s tax-credit system before approaching outside investors. He shot the film with a crew of first-timers (his editor, his production designer, his producers) in just 20 days, and credits his sound designer with the idea that reordered the final scene, flipping the film’s opening noise into closing silence. After a muted reception out of Tribeca and a near-miss with sales agents, the film found a second life through Letterboxd’s Video Store before landing distribution with Antenna Releasing, who are putting Merola on the road for a five-month, city-by-city roadshow.

Merola’s a philosophy-and-psych double major who treats directing less like genius and more like mediating a fight between departments — which, he argues, is most of what the job actually is.

Follow the film on Instagram for tour dates.


Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Mike talks with French director Quarxx about The Ones Who Grieve (2026), in which a mysterious plague called the Black Veil and a father’s religious cruelty turn out to be the same disease.

Quarxx came to filmmaking through a decade as a painter before ever picking up a camera, and this is his first script written with a co-author, novelist Frédéric Soulié, after years of collaborations that never clicked. He reunites actors Thierry Frémont and Zélie Rixhon ten years after they played an unhealthily entangled pair in his debut All the Gods in the Sky — only now she’s grown into the role that reverses their dynamic. The film’s plague victims wear masks designed and sculpted from scratch for the production, a deliberate swerve away from standard zombie iconography toward something that isn’t dangerous, just hungry and discarded.

Made on what Quarxx calls the lowest budget of his career after French funders balked at the material, the film premiered this year at Fantastic Fest following festival stops across Europe.


.Follow Quarxx on Instagram for updates on his next film.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Mike talks with author Marcus Heslop about Frantastic!: The Amazing Story of Fran Fullenwider, the Plus-sized Pioneer, the first biography of the actress whose single wordless scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) made her a cult fixture despite a stranger, richer career about which most fans never knew.

Heslop, a secondary-school drama teacher in northeast England who works on his books during school holidays, built the biography largely from letters, scrapbooks, and photographs a stranger rescued from an abandoned Texas mansion in the 1990s and donated to the Museum of South Texas History — the same archive that lets him trace Fullenwider from a wealthy, closely chronicled Texas childhood through a brief but real Italian film boom, a four-year run with Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror world, and a death scene in House of the Spirits that got cut for time, which Heslop confirmed really existed by tracking down director Bille August himself. The book features new interviews with O’Brien, director Jim Sharman, costume designer Sue Blane, and Jeremy Irons.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Mike talks with director Susanne Rostock about Following Harry (2025), which picks up where her 2011 Sundance opener Sing Your Song left off and follows Harry Belafonte through the last twelve years of his life as he tries to pass his activism on before running out of time.

Rostock and Belafonte shared an office for years — she’d hear his cane tapping down the hall every afternoon — and the access that grew out of that friendship put her camera in the room as Trayvon Martin’s killing, Ferguson, and the Women’s March unfolded around him. The film closes on Belafonte’s own account of a state trooper who, after witnessing the brotherly love Belafonte brought into a room in 1963, took the bullets out of his gun and said they could never go back in. Rostock, trained as an ethnographic filmmaker under Margaret Mead before an early detour into editing SNL-era shorts (including the Ruttles’ faux-blues number in All You Need Is Cash), shoots everything first and assembles the structure only once she has a mountain of footage to sort through.

This isn’t a legacy rewatch — the film is new, built from Rostock’s own archive of the last decade of Belafonte’s life, and arrives on VOD this week.


Visit the film’s official website for where to watch.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.