Live At The Death Factory

Projector's broken, welcome to season 2. This episode's book is Heart-Beast by Tanith Lee

We talk about Red Rooms, an unflinching, unforthcoming (meta???) scum classic about a woman who attends the trial of an internet murderer in Montreal.

The Scary of Sixty-First and Toolbox Murders, two films where the regular horror of having a landlord is compounded by moving into a building that lives as a summary of the rotten, putrid evil at work at the highest levels of power.

In this episode we discuss the entire span of Rob Zombie's directorial career before focusing on the much-maligned Lords Of Salem. He's great. I don't expect you to watch Three From Hell or anything, that sucks, but if we sat there and figured out he was great then you should too.

This week we discuss Bette Gordon's 1983 film Variety which focuses on a woman taking a job in a porn theatre by way of kathy acker, jane jacobs, laura mulvey and, briefly, henry rollins.

We take a look at a couple of SOV films we didn't enjoy so much and discuss the pitfalls of treating it as a genre instead of a format before a long-form discussion of SHATTER DEAD, a pretty incredible zero budget low-key post-apocalyptic film from 1994, haunted by a Messiah Of Evil atmosphere and dripping with Dell Abyss miserabilism.

Sean gives a quick update about the current state of the show (we're not putting out episodes for a while) before a rerun of an episode of another show in which he and Astrid discuss found footage classic Noroi

When does the agony of self-realisation begins to warp reality itself? Afraid Of The Dark merciless portrayal of childhood isolation through illness and the degree to which that isolation can cause a loss of self. Penda's Fen is a devastatingly beautiful story of queer self-realisation through the embrace of England's pagan history and then dismantling of its flatulent and evil conception of its own patriotism.

This week we discuss In The Dark, an adaptation of Richard Laymon's novel of the same name. This film was never officially released or distributed and wasn't screened other than in some festivals around 1999/2000. It's currently on youtube in full, though! It's a hidden SOV masterpiece, a deeply individual and confident adaptation that is shockingly underseen. We tell you to watch the film on Youtube, discuss the film strengths and then talk about when your perception of a film can wildly develop from that of the director. Also a shocking third act twist unveils what exactly Lil Nas X has to do with all this.

"Never knew how to be scared, just how to handle my infra-red. Love nothing: made my barber write a 'Fuck You' in my head." - Z-Ro An episode of Sean's old podcast during which he and Astrid spoke about the first three entries of the Female Prisoner Scorpion series

This week we talk about Luigi Cozzi's deeply, committedly deranged 1989 hallucination The Black Cat. The Black Cat is an unofficial sequel to Dario Argento's Suspiria and Inferno and, more importantly, an inescapable vortex of gobsmacking gore logic, unrepentant fake-outs and guitar-instruction-VHS metal.

This week we cover three deeply grisly short films from Japan, listed below, that fall roughly into the Ero Guro category. What kind of transgressiveness links these films? What is a satisfying definition of Ero Guro in the first place, aside from the basic "Erotic Grotesque Nonsense"? Have you ever owned art you were reluctant to cross international borders with? What was revealed by watching a copy of A Garden Without Birds with subtitles when it seems to be commonly watched without them? How is the least explicit film the best fit for the category? Why did we watch Lucky Sky Diamond? Seriously, it was the longest one and it was terrible? Answers to all these questions and more this week. Lucky Sky Diamond - 1989 - Izo Hashimoto The First Love -1989 - Mari Terashima A Garden Without Birds - 1992 -Akira Nobi

This week we cover James B. Harris' Cop (1988), an adaptation of James Ellroy's Blood On The Moon. We talk about how they managed wring such an incredible film out of such terrible source material and the ways in which the film functions as an essay on what Ellroy would become.