The Thing on City of Man Podcast

This year’s Christian Humanist Radio Network Halloween crossover ends today! This year the topic is the filmography of John Carpenter, and I volunteered for an episode of The City of Man covering the only John Carpenter movie I’ve seen—The Thing.

My friend David Grubbs hosts, and with Carter Smith-Stepper and I he leads us through not only the movie itself but also its source material, the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W Campbell Jr, and we discuss how the film adapts and improves upon the original. We also dig further back into the history of Antarctica as a scary place and threat to the existence of humanity, with Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and spend a good while pondering just what it is that makes The Thing so special and so intense: acting, special effects, music, cinematography, and, above all, atmosphere.

The Thing combines a lot of things I love in a genre I don’t usually like, and so I was excited to talk about this movie for this event. Other movies covered on other shows in the CHRN include Halloween, Prince of Darkness, They Live, and The Fog. Definitely check those out—Michial and Danny’s discussion of Halloween actually convinced me to give that movie a try sometime soon.

You can listen to The City of Man on iTunes or any other fine podcasting platform. You can listen to this episode at its very short show notes page at the CHRN website here or—next-day update!—you can listen on the Castos podcast player embedded in this post.

Happy Halloween!

Signs on City of Man Podcast

Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) and his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) looking for the titular signs in M Night Shyamalan’s film

This year’s Christian Humanist Radio Network Halloween crossover event begins today! The theme of this year’s event is the films of M Night Shymalan and the first episode comes from City of Man. On this episode, Katie Grubbs, Marie Hause, and yours truly—hosting for the first time ever—begin the crossover with a discussion of Shyamalan’s 2002 film Signs.

Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), a former minister who abandoned the faith after his wife’s untimely death, wakes one morning to find mysterious, impossible symbols pressed into his cornfields. Is this a prank? The appearance of similar crop circles around the globe suggests… something more sinister, or certainly something more complicated. Confronted with the growing evidence of alien invasion, Hess, his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), and his children Morgan and Bo (Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin) retreat to the family farm, where they’ll confront not only whomever made the signs in their fields but the lingering signs of their past. Is this all random? Or does all of this mean something?

Katie, Marie, and I discuss the plot of the film, its place in Shyamalan’s filmography, what Signs does and does not have in common with other alien invasion movies, and just what there is to learn from the film’s message about grief, faith, and providence. I had a really great time both revisiting this film—after more than fifteen years—and hosting this discussion. Tune in to hear more. It’ll be worth your while.

City of Man is a show on the Christian Humanist Radio Network. Visit the network’s website for shownotes for this and the other episodes in the crossover. You can subscribe and listen to City of Man via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting services and you can listen to this episode on those platforms or via the Stitcher player embedded in this post.

Thanks for listening! I hope y’all enjoy, and have a happy Halloween!

The Shining on Book of Nature Podcast

Current mood

I’m excited to participate in the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s Halloween crossover event again this year. Last year, we did a series of episodes on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and I was a guest on the Christian Humanist Podcast to talk about The 39 Steps. This year, the network is focusing on the novels of Stephen King.

I was honored to be a guest on the Book of Nature Podcast along with Jay Eldred and regular host Charles Hackney, and together we discuss The Shining, one of King’s great early works and a classic of the horror genre. Along the way we talk about Stephen King’s personal history, the inspirations for the story (all hail Edgar Allan Poe!), the novel’s dramatization of the psychology of alcoholism and abuse, the real hero of the novel, and the relative merits of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, including Jack Nicholson’s evil face.

If you’d like to catch the other episodes of the crossover, last week The Christian Feminist Podcast talked about Carrie, Monday my old haunt The City of Man Podcast dropped an episode on Revival, yesterday the flagship show talked about Misery, and tomorrow, Halloween proper, Danny Anderson’s Sectarian Review will talk about Pet Sematary.

Tune in and enjoy! You can listen in on the embedded Stitcher player above or via iTunes or other fine podcasting apps. And as always, thanks for listening! I’m blessed and honored to be involved with a network of such fun and intelligent people. Hope y’all enjoy listening as much as I did participating.