Podcasts
The Positive Queer Representation in John Carpenter’s ‘Someone’s Watching Me!’ [Horror Queers Podcast]
City of Stalkers.
After five weeks of discussing hilarious camp with Drop Dead Gorgeous, Nurse 3D, Female Trouble, Flesh for Frankenstein, and Sleepaway Camp, it’s time to go back to some more serious horror with a look at John Carpenter’s 1978 TV movie Someone’s Watching Me!.
In the film, Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) takes a room in a high-rise apartment building where the previous tenant died by suicide. Soon after, Leigh begins receiving mysterious phone calls, getting anonymous gifts in the mail and finding that her room has been searched by someone. When a letter finally arrives in which her tormentor expresses his intention to kill her, she takes it to the police, but they’re unable to do anything. Terrified, Leigh teams up with her co-worker Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) in an effort to find the culprit herself.
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Episode 189: Someone’s Watching Me! (1978)
Brush up on your stalking laws because we’re heading to the City of Angels to discuss our very first TV movie in John Carpenter’s Someone’s Watching Me! (1978), which aired on NBC just one month after the release of Halloween!
Join us as we do a crash course on the status of television movies in the ’70s before analyzing Carpenter’s subversion of the Final Girl trope and then rightfully praising the groundbreaking positive queer representation in Adrienne Barbeau’s Sophie (before lamenting her inclusion in the “bury your gays” trope).
Plus, plenty of Scooby-Doo connections, all kinds of gazes, the “right” way to come home from work and the ultimate question: Is Forth Worth, TX some sort of lesbian haven?
Cross out Someone’s Watching Me!
Coming up on Wednesday: We’re diving back into the twisted mind of Clive Barker with a fresh look at his second directorial effort: Nightbreed (1990)!
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for more than 195 hours of additional content! This month, we’re discussing Netflix’s Resident Evil series, Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator film Prey, Peacock’s queer slasher They/Them and A24’s queer murder mystery Bodies Bodies Bodies. Oh, and we’ve got an audio commentary on Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon just in time for its 25th anniversary!
After kicking off July with discussions of Joe Dante’s seminal werewolf film The Howling (listen) and Ken Russell’s controversial erotic thriller Crimes of Passion (listen), we’re heading to Maine to dissect one of Stephen King‘s most misguided adaptations in Lawrence Kasdan‘s 2003 misfire Dreamcatcher!
Dreamcatcher sees friends Henry (Thomas Jane), Jonesy (Damian Lewis), Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Beaver (Jason Lee) reunite for their annual hunting trip in Maine. Their reunion is cut short when they find themselves caught in the middle of a war between a hostile race of farty-farty aliens and an elite US military unit led by Colonel Abraham Curtis (Morgan Freeman), who has been driven mad after spending decades tracking the extraterrestrials. When Jonesy is possessed by one of the aliens, the remaining friends seek out their disabled childhood friend Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg), who they believe has powers that can save Jonesy…and the world.
Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get a new episode every Wednesday. You can subscribe on iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, TuneIn, Amazon Music, and RSS.
Episode 396: Dreamcatcher (2003)
Watch out for “ister gay” (oof), take some Gas-X and bite our bags because we’re talking Lawrence Kasdan’s baffling 2003 adaptation of Stephen King’s equally baffling novel Dreamcatcher.
Join us as we go all in on the farty-farty aliens populating this hilarious misfire that often feels like a bad Kevin Smith script. It’s a film filled with characters who get a single defining trait (if they’re lucky), played by respectable actors who are here for the paycheck (looking at you, Morgan Freeman).
Plus: blown-out assholes, using guns as telephones, pitying poor Donnie Wahlberg, and wondering why the hell this movie is called Dreamcatcher.
Cross out Dreamcatcher!
Coming Up Next: We’re going to be lounging around a posh Greenwich Village apartment as we check in on Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for over 513 hours of Patreon content including this month’s new episodes on Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Forbidden Fruits, Saccharine, Evil Dead Burn, an audio commentary on Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (aka Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch), and the conclusion of our coverage of AMC’s The Vampire Lestat on the Requel Tier.