Podcasts
Celebrating 40 Years of Canadian Slasher ‘My Bloody Valentine’ [Horror Queers Podcast]
Heart-Shaped Box.
Following a month of ‘3s’ and Splice, my extremely WTF birthday pick last week, Trace and I are headed to the East Coast of Canada to celebrate the 40th anniversary of My Bloody Valentine!
In the George Mihalka classic, twenty years after a terrible accident and subsequent murder spree by Harry Warden, the adult workers of a small Nova Scotia mining town are planning for their first Valentine’s Day dance in decades. But TJ (Paul Kelman), Axel (Neil Affleck), Sarah (Lori Hallier) and their friends should be worrying about more than decorations and Moosehead beer.
Thanks to the secretive police Chief (Don Francks) and Mayor Hanniger (Larry Reynolds), the citizens of Valentine’s Bluff have no idea that the festivities are about to turn into a massacre! There’s more on the line than a few broken hearts in this iconic Canadian slasher…
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Episode 112 – My Bloody Valentine (1981)
Just in time for Singles Awareness Day, we’re losing our hearts to the 1981 Canadian slasher, My Bloody Valentine…or at least Joe is. Trace is more lukewarm on the George Mihalka film, which suffers from an uninspired villain reveal and too many characters.
We discuss the size (and deliciousness?) of hearts, why TJ’s narrative is important for small town Nova Scotians, the cost of dirtying up a mine and Joe’s strange personal connection to one of the film’s actors.
Plus: love triangles, the film’s censorship woes, Scream Factory gore and Scooby-Doo antics. Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody!
Cross out My Bloody Valentine!
Coming up on Wednesday: We’re exploring found footage horror for the very first time with our discussion of Adam Robitel’s The Taking of Deborah Logan!
– Joe & Trace
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for tons of additional content! In February we have minisodes on Religious Horror and a ranking of the Wrong Turn franchise, plus full length episodes on Willy’s Wonderland and Saint Maud. We also just released our audio commentary on My Bloody Valentine (2009) to coincide with our discussion of the ’81 original.
Maybe you haven’t thought about your good friend Sweeney Todd in a while, or maybe you have. The 2007 movie is a bit of a memory, though a fond one – it has a healthy 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, for what it’s worth. But 2023’s Broadway revival starring Josh Groban, who your mom thinks is “so talented” (she’s right!), was enough of a hit that its run was extended.
It appears we’re in a bit of a Sweeneyssaince.
For the uninitiated, Sweeney Todd is the story of a barber who kills his customers and disposes of the bodies by passing them off to pie shop owner Mrs. Lovett, who uses them as a special ingredient. But there’s more below the trap door.
Sweeney Todd isn’t just a late 70s musical that turned into a movie; it started as a penny dreadful called The String of Pearls: A Domestic Romance (author unknown), told week-to-week in the 1840s. Penny dreadfuls were essentially fiction zines featuring serialized stories that were usually horror-based and cost a penny, leading to the very literal nickname.
The String of Pearls differs from the more well-known Sweeney Todd plot in that it follows the investigation of a missing persons case that leads to the reveal of Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett’s arrangement, as opposed to the more modern iteration which treats audiences to the duo hatching their homicidal plan and then giving the worst haircuts ever. What a delightfully wild reveal that must have been if you were a reader in Victorian London after weeks of wondering what had become of the missing sailor carrying a string of pearls to deliver to a lovely girl.
Kristen and Will discuss the history and future of Sweeney Todd and works inspired by it this week on Guide to the Unknown. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to get a new episode every Friday.
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