Podcasts
Delighting in the Deadpan of Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening’ [Horror Queers Podcast]
Why you eyein’ my lemon drink?
After kicking off April at the local Deer Cheer festival in James Gunn’s horror comedy Slither (listen) and checking in with Boris Karloff in The Mummy (listen), we’re headed to the weird and wacky world of M. Night Shyamalan to discuss his much-maligned B-movie The Happening.
In The Happening, a science teacher (Mark Wahlberg), his wife (Zooey Deschanel), and a young girl (Ashlyn Sanchez) struggle to survive a plague that causes those infected to die by suicide.
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Episode 383: The Happening (2008) feat. Lindsay Traves
Prepare for a colossal culling and try to stay ahead of the wind because we’re discussing M. Night Shyamalan’s much-maligned film The Happening (2008) in celebration of Earth Day! Tagging in for the conversation is Pajiba senior critic Lindsay Traves.
Join us as we offer up not a defense of the film, but rather a desire to see a paradigm shift in the way people view it (meaning: we want you to dislike it for the “right” reasons). This is Shyamalan’s self-proclaimed “best B-movie you’ve ever seen” and, as uneven as it is, the comedy is all intentional! Or most of it is, anyway…
Plus: math vs. statistics, declaring Shyamalan the king of the nonsense newscast, so many comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and debating whether or not Zooey Deschanel’s character is stealthily trying to kill that little girl for the whole movie.
Cross out The Happening!
Coming Up Next: We’re headed to the local SavMart to check in on Sy the Photo Guy (Robin Williams) in Mark Romanek’s 2002 chiller One Hour Photo.
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for over 483 hours of Patreon content including this month’s new episodes on Hanibal S03 E03-04, Faces of Death (2026), They Will Kill You, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, an audio commentary on the 2017 Tom Cruise-starring The Mummy and the conclusion of our episodic coverage of Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House on the Requel Tier.
On the DL.
After spending June on explicitly queer texts like Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (listen) and William Castle’s Homicidal (listen), it’s only appropriate that Horror Queers celebrate the American holiday with a blockbuster film with a not-so-secret gay connection.
In Independence Day, an unlikely group of people come together when the human race faces extinction from a threatening alien race. After spaceships destroy every major city, pilot Steven Hiller (Will Smith) must team up with secret tech genius David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), as well as the US President (Bill Pullman), to execute a daring plan to save the planet from annihilation.
Along for the ride are the two saviors’ romantic partners – WH Communications Director Constance (Margaret Colin) and stripper Jasmine (Vivica A. Fox) – plus eccentric scientist Dr. Okun (Brent Spiner), who is at the center of the film’s most horrific set piece.
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 393: Independence Day (1996)
Today, we celebrate our Independence Day…courtesy of gay German director Roland Emmerich.
As the summer blockbuster celebrates its 30th anniversary, we’re looking back on an alien disaster film that scared young Trace (thanks to that alien autopsy scene) and turned Will Smith into a star.
Plus: the death that upsets the most; bemoaning Vivica A. Fox’s career; pondering what could have been with the casting; why Smith’s bravado and the film’s patriotism doesn’t always work for Joe; and plenty of riffing on the atrocious sequel.
Cross out Independence Day!
Coming Up Next: We’re retreating to the country for some questionable therapy courtesy of Joe Dante’s 1981 classic, The Howling!
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for over 503 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 the utterly ridiculous sequel Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf (1985), and the conclusion of our Requel Tier coverage of AMC’s The Vampire Lestat.