Quiet Little Horrors

Strap in, there's a lot to cover in director Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! We like its moxie, but are mixed on its results. Highlights include: the modern depiction of Frankie, Jessie Buckley's ferocity, and the unequivocal support for messy and mad women.

We tackle our first documentary with The Last Sacrifice, a sprawling look at the 1945 murder that inspired the story behind The Wicker Man and, by extension, the folk horror film genre and modern paganism. Like the doc, our discussion moves from the inciting incident and into why we think stories like these endure. Also, a moment of silence for never getting the opportunity to be 1970s witches.

In which we continue our Powell and Pressburger coverage and identity three primary life lessons: men should wear more shorts, don't repress your emotions and thus lose your mind, and no colonialism. Let's talk about Black Narcissus.

This episode is the all about the hallucinatory Technicolor, Japanese ghost story anthology film Kwaidan. We discuss the film's theatrical style, the enduring power of folklore and why you probably shouldn't marry strange women you meet in snowy woods.

We close another year and our sixth full season with a list of our favorite episodes and films from 2025, as well as what we're looking forward to in 2026. Thanks for listening and happy new year!

Things we like: difficult women, slices of the early 2000s, and weird little films turned cult classics. Therefore, we like director Lucky McKee's 2002 film debut May. In this episode, we discuss the unique tone, story and antiheroine of this horrifically offbeat character study.

Happy Halloween! We celebrate with the latest from director Oz Perkins, The Monkey—which swerves a bit from his usual tone, and our usual subject matter, but we found a lens that snaps both into focus. We discuss Stephen King adaptations, the absurdity of death, and how both horror and comedy prepare us to face life.

As Americans, we don't really get the whole British boarding school deal, but apparently at one point they were full of facades and jealousy, teenage girls bonding and bullying, and Eva Green being fabulous but also maybe unhinged. Cracks didn't make much impact on its release in 2007, but we make the case for its reappreciation.

We love it when a film hits squarely in our personal center of interest and Aislinn Clarke nailed it. We discuss Fréwaka and its themes of historical and generational trauma, women at the mercy of fate, and some good old-fashioned evil fae.

Bergman March continues with what is often regarded as Ingmar Bergman's only "real" horror film. We might dispute it's his only one, but not that this one goes to some horrific places. We discuss the figure of the tortured, self-absorbed artist, women's sustaining labor and if it's possible for artists to make the right bargains with the world.

We're not done with vampires yet. After sharing our favorites, we discovered that each host had one film on her list that the other had not seen and that the two films seemed oddly complementary: I Like Bats and Martin. So we both caught up and circled back to discuss two of the strangest and most psychological films in the vampire canon.

It's a new year and a new season, and we're starting things off with a dark, dread-filled, mustachioed bang: Robert Eggers's 2024 Nosferatu. We discuss filmmaking from another era, storytelling from another era, and the feminine urge for death. Also: cats! Who survive!

In 18th-century Austria, women be depressed. For pretty good reasons. We discuss the recent film, The Devil's Bath, and cover what it feels like to be trapped in an oppressive society, both sides of subtlety, and why maybe sometimes people should talk things out before resorting to murder (sometimes).