vampires

Lagniappe Podcast: Sister Midnight (2025)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the deadpan arranged-marriage horror comedy Sister Midnight (2025).

00:00 New Orleans Bookfair
02:40 Star Trek
06:06 Went the Day Well? (1942)
09:00 Black Angel (1946)
11:04 Angel’s Egg (1985)
15:00 Universal Language (2025)
23:00 Wicked: For Good (2025)
29:45 Friendship (2025)
34:11 The Running Man (2025)
40:30 Boys Go to Jupiter (2025)
46:06 Die My Love (2025)
50:35 Wake Up Dead Man (2025)
58:17 No Other Choice (2025)
1:08:22 Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025)
1:10:51 Keeper (2025)
1:15:27 Sentimental Value (2025)
1:19:10 Alpha (2025)
1:24:46 Dracula (2025)
1:28:20 Arco (2025)
1:32:07 Lurker (2025)
1:38:48 If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

1:44:22 Sister Midnight (2025)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Kill-O-Rama 2025

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Without question, the local MVP this Halloween season has been the original uptown location of The Prytania, which has provided the bulk of local repertory horror programming in the lead-up to today’s spooky holiday. Not only was the single-screen theater’s regular Classic Movie Sunday slot repurposed to feature Halloween fare this month (Dial M for Murder, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Haunting, 13 Ghosts, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein — all Swampflix favorites), but The Prytania also doubled down on its Spooky Season Content by staging a week-long film festival of classic horror titles. In collaboration with local MVP horror fest The Overlook, The Prytania launched a “Kill-O-Rama” lineup midway through the month, making up for the relatively anemic output of exciting new horror releases currently making the rounds. This year’s Kill-O-Rama lineup included perennial Spooky Season classics The Exorcist & Halloween, a 30th anniversary screening of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, multiple alternate-ending variants of the murder-mystery crowdpleaser Clue, and a victory-lap rerun of their 70mm print of Sinners (which they’ve been heroically exhibiting all year). It was the exact kind of Halloween-season programming I’m on the hunt for every October, conveniently gathered in one neighborhood theater. Although I was unable to give this year’s Kill-O-Rama the full mind-melting marathon treatment I tend to give other festivals, I was able to catch a few screenings from the program, reviewed below. Here’s hoping that this festival format returns to The Prytania next Halloween season, when I can plan ahead to live in the theater for a week solid — ignoring all non-scary-movie obligations in my schedule until All Hallows’ Eve has passed.

Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Sometimes, procrastination pays off. It’s likely shameful that I hadn’t seen the 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire saga Interview with the Vampire until this year, especially since I lived here through the 90s era when the French Quarter was overrun with gothy vampire cosplay inspired by Rice’s local cachet. It was especially fun to watch with a New Orleans audience, though, so I’m glad I didn’t spoil the experience by diluting it with ad breaks on cable. There’s a moment late in the runtime when Brad Pitt’s woe-is-me vampire Louis announces that he is traveling to reunite with his jilted master (Tom Cruise, as the dastardly Lestat) on Prytania Street, and the crowd erupted into titters. It’s the most firmly I’ve felt rooted in The Prytania’s geographical location since catching an early screening of Happy Death Day there (which was filmed on a college campus a few blocks away, with students filling out most of the audience). Interview with the Vampire is not entirely anchored to New Orleans, but instead globetrots between three international cities: New Orleans, Paris, and San Francisco — great company to be in. Still, its locality is undeniable in that New Orleans is the chosen home of its most infamous vampire, Lestat, who attempts to break away from the restrictions of his European coven to establish a new afterlife on American soil, starting his new family by turning the sad-eyed Louis into one of his own. There’s only trouble once that family becomes nuclear, when Louis gives into vampiric temptation by feeding on a small child, damning her to an eternal adolescence as her new two dads’ doll-like daughter. After about thirty years of faux-domestic stasis, she rebels in spectacularly violent fashion, burning their shared home to the ground in a righteous rage.

For all of the A-lister hunks in the cast (Cruise, Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas), I was most impressed with Interview with the Vampire as The First Great Kirsten Dunst Movie. Dunst has been a wonderfully talented screen actor for as long as I can remember watching the screen, but it’s still incredible to watch her out-perform her more famous, better-paid adult co-stars in a role filmed when she was only 10 years old. Dunst’s embodiment of Claudia, the eternally dollish vampire, conveys a world-weariness and vengeful fury far beyond the age of the actor behind it. Part of the reason she stands out so much is that all of the male leads are such sad sack yearners, all fitting neatly into the somber tone typical of director Neil Jordan’s work. Jordan’s interpretation of Rice’s text is more melancholy than it is sensual, finding its hunky, mutually obsessed vampire men jaded beyond repair long after they’ve lost their lust for sex & blood. As the latest addition to that damned clan, Claudia is the only character who’s going through a major emotional upheaval, so that the story’s most violent, extravagant turns rest on her little shoulders. Given the specificity of locale and the name-brand talent elsewhere in the cast, it’s likely the movie would remain undead in annual Halloween-season circulation with or without Dunst’s involvement, but it’s her performance that actually earns that cultural longevity. She’s eternally great.

Corpse Bride (2005)

I was drawn to Kill-O-Rama’s 20th-anniversary screenings of Tim Burton’s stop-motion musical Corpse Bride for a few reasons, not least of all because it felt like a rarer anomaly in the schedule than more frequent go-tos like The Exorcist & Bride of Frankenstein. That’s assumedly because it’s a lesser loved title among the rest of the heavy hitters on the schedule, despite it being a perfectly charming seasonal novelty. When it was first released, Corpse Bride was treated like the microwaved leftovers from earlier Tim Burton/Henry Selick productions like The Nightmare Before Christmas & James and the Giant Peach, but 20 years later it now plays like a precursor for later Laika productions like ParaNorman & Coraline, which have since become the go-to primers for lifelong horror nerd obsession among youngsters. Time has mostly been kind to it, give or take the biggest star in its voice cast (the wine-tasting spit bucket Johnny Depp), but I’ve personally always had a soft spot for it. It’s hard not to adore a movie that fantasy-casts Peter Lorre as a talking brain maggot with kissable lips and takes breaks from advancing its plot to animate a band of stop-motion skeletons playing saxobones against Mario Bava crosslighting. I missed the film during its initial theatrical run, though, so I had only ever seen it on a 2nd-hand DVD copy, which made this repertory screening a must-attend event.

In short, Corpse Bride looks great. All of the visual artistry that distinguishes The Nightmare Before Christmas as a holiday classic is echoed here without any lost integrity. The worst you could say about it is that Burton borrows a little too freely from former collaborator Henry Selick in the production design, to the point where the underworld afterlife setting appears to be pulled from the live-action sets of Selick’s Monkeybone, entirely separate from the film’s production overlap with Nightmare. If I were Selick, I might be complaining, but as an audience member, I’m more than happy to spend time with the cartoon gals & ghouls in that underground otherworld where every day is Halloween. Much like in earlier auteurist works like Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood, Burton conveys a yearning desire to party with the undead freaks of the underworld instead of being stuck with the drab drips of the living flesh. Johnny Depp & Emily Watson voice a soon-to-be-married couple of awkward strangers who’ve had all the joy of life strangled out of them by their uptight, aristocratic parents. They seem to be instantly, genuinely fond of one another despite the grim-grey world they sulk in together, but tragedy strikes when the groom accidentally marries an animated corpse instead while practicing his vows in the spooky woods outside town. The titular undead bride (Helena Bonham Carter, duh) drags the poor, nervous lad down to her Halloweentown underworld where he’s forced to party with the lively dead instead of moping among the dead-eyed living. Song & dance and comedic antics ensue, ultimately resulting in a tender-hearted reunion for the rightful bride & groom and a cosmic comeuppance for the dastardly cad who sent the Corpse Bride underground in the first place. It’s wonderful kids-horror fare, especially if your particular kid has already re-run Coraline & ParaNorman so many times that you’ve become numb to their Laika-proper charms.

Frankenstein (2025)

The concluding event on the Kill-O-Rama schedule was a double feature presentation of James Whale’s iconic 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein and the latest interpretation of that text, directed by Guillermo del Toro. Besides the double-feature format of that programming, the most exciting aspect of the new Frankenstein film’s presentation during Kill-O-Rama is that The Prytania continued to run it weeks after the fest concluded on a 35mm print, the only venue in town to see the film on celluloid before it is shuffled off into the digital void of Netflix. After similar runs for titles like Sinners, Tenet, and One Battle After Another, The Prytania is making a reputation for themselves as the premiere film venue in town by default, since they’re the only place that can actually project film. Given the massive crowds that have been swarming The Prytania every night in the past week to catch Frankenstein in that format, it’s clear that the public yearns for tangible, physical cinema and are willing to pay extra for it. My screening even started with an audience member loudly booing the Netflix logo in the opening credits, to the rest of the crowd’s delight. Netflix’s omnipresence in urban & suburban homes indicates that most of these crowds could’ve waited a couple weeks to see Frankenstein at home for “free,” but they instead chose to attend a big-screen presentation with richer, deeper colors in projection and visible scratches on the print. It was a classic theatrical experience befitting such a classic literary adaptation.

As for the movie itself, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Guillermo del Toro adaptation of the Mary Shelley source text. It’s pretty, it’s moody, and it’s got a surprisingly sensitive heart for a movie in which a mad scientist stitches together leftover corpse parts to create a monster and then proceeds to abuse that monster. The biggest surprises in Frankenstein lurk in the intensity of the performances, given that the actors could have easily gone through the motions and let the exquisite sets & costumes do all of the work. Mia Goth conveys a defiant ferocity as Dr. Frankenstein’s uninterested love interest, matching his creative intensity but swatting down his god-scale ego in what feels like an onscreen avatar for Mary Shelley’s literary jam sessions with Percy Shelley & Lord Byron. Jacob Elordi plays Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrous creation as a big scary baby who’s convincingly dangerous when provoked but angelic when properly nurtured. Oscar Isaac is feverishly manic as Dr. Frankenstein himself, so fixated on his mission to bring dead flesh back to life that he doesn’t consider what kind of father he’ll be once he succeeds (having only Charles Dance’s physically abusive patriarch as a default example to follow once the creature is in his care). It’s in that cautionary tale of what happens when you single-mindedly dedicate yourself to a passion project at the expense of your own humanity that del Toro’s Frankenstein starts to feel personal to the director beyond its surface aesthetics. This is a project he’s been fighting to complete for decades and, thus, it has partially mutated into a story about the madness of its director’s own grand-scale, solitary ambition. The result is not one of del Toro’s best works, but it’s at least a more heartfelt, refined, accomplished version of what Kenneth Branagh failed to fully give life when he adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1994. After three or so decades of book-faithful Frankenstein adaptations, I’m excited that we’re approaching the point when Jack Pierce’s creature design will enter the public domain (in 2027) so that every new repetition of this story isn’t so fussy & literary, but del Toro’s version still feels like an exceptional specimen of its ilk. I appreciated seeing it big & loud with a full horror nerd crowd, instead of alone on my couch the way Netflix intended.

-Brandon Ledet

El Vampiro (1957)

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Between watching the infinite sequels to The Mummy & The Invisible Man and a few one-off Gothic horrors like 13 Ghosts and The Undying Monster, I’ve seen a lot of classic horror relics this month, mostly running from the 1930s through the early 1960s. There may be more exciting, grotesque monstrosities to be found in later decades like the splatter-fest 1980s or the neon-bathed horrors of the now, but there’s something about the black-and-white scare pictures of old that call to me every Halloween season. It’s purely a matter of decor. I love spending time in the old dark houses, spooky castles, and foggy moors of the classic horror milieu, the thicker the artificial fog the better. It’s simply the most Halloween-appropriate set decoration you can find in cinema, alternating between sound-stage surrealism and department-store deadstock. That’s at least what was on my mind while watching the 1957 vampire picture El Vampiro, which I purchased on DVD while traveling in Mexico. El Vampiro doesn’t achieve anything you haven’t seen before in a hundred other vampire pictures; it comfortably sits at the exact midpoint between first-wave Universal Monster movies and their later Hammer Horror echoes. And yet, because it’s so over-decorated with Spirit Halloween Store set decor, it’s exceptionally well suited to Halloween season programming. It’s the kind of movie where every surface is veiled behind a thick layer of cobwebs regardless of whether someone’s “living” in the space, with servants on staff. Every single object in the frame is stubbornly ooky-spooky, regardless of logic or necessity, which is exactly how horror cinema should be decorated this time year.

It’s not entirely fair to say El Vampiro lacks narrative or imagistic innovation. The film is often credited for a couple major contributions to the classic horror canon. Mainly, its financial success kickstarted the Mexican horror cinema boom of the 1960s that led to more memorably outlandish works like The Brainiac & Santos vs The Vampire Women. More improbably, it’s also credited for being the first vampire picture to feature the stereotypical elongated canine fangs, as the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula was fangless and the fanged Christopher Lee version had not yet materialized. Surprisingly, the film’s titular vampiro is not a version of Count Dracula, but rather an entirely new bloodsucking gentleghoul. Germán Robles stars as Count Lavud (Conde Karol de Lavud, to be more accurate), a Dracula Type who keeps his coffin in a spooky old Mexican estate, adorned with the aforementioned cobwebs. His screen presence is clearly inspired by the iconic Lugosi version of Dracula, as he hides his lower face under a lifted cape with the same dramatic mannerisms, inviting bright studio lights to illuminate his hypnotically handsome eyes. Like all versions of Dracula (and its copyright-infringing Nosferatu offshoots), his monstrous motivations are also mostly a matter of real estate: in this case wooing ownership of his new spooky castle abode away from a grieving niece who doesn’t yet know she was born into a vampire bloodline. All other traditional vampire lore is present here too. The vamps don’t appear in mirrors; they’re ill at the sight of a crucifix; they sleep through daylight in coffins lined with their home soil; etc. Amusingly, Lavud also frequently transforms into a flapping rubber bat that flies around the haunted house set in an effect you’d more likely see in Bela Lugosi’s poverty row pictures like Devil Bat or Return of the Vampire than anything produced by a major studio like Universal.

If there’s any notable variation on the old school vampire picture here, it’s in the way women play a central role in the story. Not only is most of the runtime ceded to the distraught niece’s gradual realization that she was born to a vampire clan, but her surviving aunt is a Count Lavud convert who works on the bloodsucker’s evil behalf while he lurks in the shadows offscreen. Every time Aunt Eloise (Carmen Montejo) appears, she’s accompanied by a howling wind that guarantees her a dramatic entrance, even if most of her job is gaslighting her niece into sticking around on a series of domestic sets fit for a televised soap opera. While those two women’s quiet power struggle takes up most of the runtime, however, Germán Robles is very clearly the star of the picture. After transforming into a bat and draining a sleeping woman of her blood beneath the opening credits, he then disappears until about halfway into the film, when he re-emerges from his coffin to great musical fanfare and makes direct, hypnotic eye contact with the audience. It’s Robles’s commanding screen presence as the handsome, clean-shaven vampire that is mostly credited for the film’s success, as well as the success of the many Mexican horror cheapies that followed in his wake. After reprising the Count Lavud role a year later in The Vampire’s Coffin, Robles continued to ride that wave in subsequent horror novelties like The Castle of the Monsters, The Blood of Nostradamus, and even my beloved The Brainiac. From the few titles I’ve seen in that 1960s Mexican horror wave (mostly ones starring world-famous luchador Santo), El Vampiro‘s garish sense of Halloween season decor also continued in the films to follow. It makes for a wonderfully spooky atmosphere, especially recommended if you’ve already exhausted all of the Universal & Hammer titles that routinely get a lot more international attention this time of year.

-Brandon Ledet

Americans Under Siege, With and Without Context

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I recently caught a double feature at my local multiplex of high-style, high-tension thrillers about American soldiers under siege in claustrophobic locations. The stories told in Alex Garland’s Warfare & Ryan Coogler’s Sinners are separated by entire genres, decades, and oceans, and yet they both trap American soldiers in tight-space locales by surrounding them with enemy combatants, whittling down their ranks one corpse at a time. That shared Americans-under-siege dynamic puts them in unlikely conversation with each other as two feature films currently in wide release, but what really makes that conversation interesting is the films’ respective relationships with the cultural & historical context around their sieges. Warfare is so hostile to providing context that it borders on experimentation in narrative form, while Sinners is entirely about context, explaining its own supernatural siege’s relation to America’s past, present, and future. Together, they represent the two extremes of contextual explanation in cinematic storytelling, to the point where considering them together is something that would only occur to you if you happen to write movie reviews and catch them both at the same theatre in a single evening.

Assigning Warfare‘s authorship entirely to Alex Garland is a bit misleading, since he shares directorial credit with former U.S. Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza. In fact, the real-time, true-story siege thriller is most interesting for the battle between its two directors: one who wants to honor the soldiers depicted “for always answering the call” (Mendoza) and one who wants to examine them & pluck their limbs off like bugs he caught in a jar (Garland). An opening title card explains that the film’s reenactment of a failed 2006 American military mission during the Iraq War was made “using only the memories” of Mendoza’s platoon, who experienced the violent episode first-hand. After the reenactment concludes, surviving members of that platoon are shown visiting the film’s set mid-production to provide their insight, contextualizing the movie as an honorable commemoration of their service & sacrifice during the harshest conditions of war. Only, that final moment is undercut by inclusion of a portrait of the Iraqi family who were also present that day and whose home was invaded & destroyed to fit the American military’s needs & whims. Earlier, when the surviving American soldiers have safely escaped the real-time gunfight in rescue tanks, the camera then lingers on that family appearing puzzled & shellshocked in the rubble of their home, as if they were just invaded by space aliens and not fellow human beings.

Garland & Mendoza’s choice to reenact this one specific mission without explaining the larger context of the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq (under false pretenses of seeking weapons of mass destruction) has been hotly debated as a disingenuous, amoral screenwriting choice among the film’s detractors. From the Iraqi family’s perspective, however, that absence of context only makes the unlawful intrusion even more terrifying & cruel. The family is sleeping in their cozy duplex when Americans kick down their doors and sledgehammer their walls in the middle of the night, inviting enemy fire into the home as a makeshift military base while they’re gathered to huddle on a single bed, powerless. There is no warning or preparation for this invasion, nor is their any communication once the fighting ceases. There’s no context whatsoever, neither for that family nor for the audience. All that’s offered is a dramatic reenactment of the gunfight from the surviving American soldiers’ perspective, with the flattering casting of young Hollywood hunks like Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai to help sweeten the deal for those who “answered the call.” The absence of testimony from the Iraqi citizens invaded, shot at, and displaced by those soldiers’ mission becomes glaring by the final credits, though, and the questions that absence raises hang heavy in the air. I like to think that unease was Garland’s main contribution to the picture but, without context, I can only guess.

The political & historical context behind the all-in-one-day siege plot of Sinners is much easier to parse, since Ryan Coogler is much more upfront about what he’s saying through his art. The director’s fifth feature film (all starring career-long collaborator Michael B. Jordan) and his first not adapted from either pre-existing IP or real-life events, Sinners is set in a 1930s Mississippi overrun with bloodsucking vampires. You wouldn’t guess the vampire part in its first hour, though, which is mostly a getting-the-gang-back-together drama about two former soldiers and current booze-runners (twins, both played by Jordan) who return to their hometown to set up a juke joint for Black patrons during Prohibition. After a long stretch of friendly “Look what the cat dragged in” reunions (featuring consistently dependable character actors like Delroy Lindo & Wunmi Mosaku), the juke joint proves to be a communal success, if not a financial one. Unfortunately, the party gets to be a little too lively, which attracts the attention of white, vampiric interlopers (led by the consistently intense Jack O’Connell). The vampires are particularly attracted to the transcendently beautiful blues music played by the juke joint’s youngest employee, Preacher Boy (newcomer Miles Caton), which introduces an unignorable cultural appropriation metaphor to the vampires’ violent desire to be let inside the party. More practically, it also sours the vibe of the evening by trapping the partygoers in a single location, waiting to be drained of their blood and assimilated into the vampire cult.

Sinners is a truly American horror story, a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Every detail of the story that isn’t character-based drama registers as commentary on American identity: the illusion of freedom, the fixation on money, the compulsory Christianity, the lingering infrastructures of slavery & The Klan. The only positive touchstones of American culture are, in fact, Black culture, as represented in a fish-fry dance party that offers a Mississippi farming community a few hours to cut loose before returning to a life of poverty & backbreaking labor . . . until the party attracts vampiric outsiders who want to claim that culture as their own. In one standout sequence, Coogler extrapolates on this idea to visually & aurally lay out how the Delta blues that Preacher Boy is playing in the juke joint is foundational for all fundamentally American music & pop culture, illustrating its connections to funk, rock, hip-hop, bounce, and beyond in a physical, impossible embodiment of the story’s context. It’s a moment that not only accomplishes everything Baz Lurhman’s Elvis picture failed to do across 150 extra minutes of runtime, but it also positions Sinners as one of the most distinctly American vampire stories ever told on screen (among which I suppose its closest competition is Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark).

The only dramatic context Warfare provides before kicking off its real-time siege sequence is a brief moment where all soldiers involved are watching a pop music video on a shared laptop, laughing at its over-the-top sexuality & pelvic thrusts. There’s just enough time allowed to that scene for the audience to discern a few key soldiers’ personalities through body language & facial expressions, before they’re immediately shown breaking into and destroying a sleeping family’s home. In contrast, Sinners spends the first half of its 140min runtime getting to know the gangsters, players, and partiers it eventually puts under vampiric siege, so that they feel like real people instead of walking, talking metaphors. It’s through that sprawling attention to context that we learn that the booze-running twins who open the Mississippi juke joint were WWI soldiers before they became gangster contemporaries of Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago. Even after the siege story is officially over, Coogler can’t help but pile on more context about cultural vampires & the blues, dragging the setting into contemporary times with a surprise guest appearance by blues legend Buddy Guy. Normally, I would say less is more when it comes to a movie explaining its own themes & context, but Coogler overcommits to those explanations to the point of academic scholarship, while still managing to deliver a fun & sexy vampire movie in the process. Meanwhile, Warfare‘s deliberate aversion to context threatens to implode the entire project, with only a few stray shots of Americans viewed from an outsider’s perspective affording it any sense of artistic or political purpose.

-Brandon Ledet

Nosferatu (2024)

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Wouldst thou like to live maliciously?

I attended my first live ballet performance this October, when the New Orleans Ballet Company staged its modern-dance interpretation of Dracula.  It was an easy entry point into the medium, not only because it fit in so well with all of the horror movies I was binge-watching at the time anyway, but also because the Dracula story in particular is something I’ve seen repeated onscreen dozens of times before.  From the more faithful early adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel by Browning & Murnau to its weirdo outlier mutations in titles like Shadow of the Vampire & Dracula 3D, the Dracula story is well familiar to anyone who’s seen a horror movie or two.  It’s even been staged onscreen as a ballet before in Guy Madden’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.  So, when the New Orleans Ballet Company had to cut some narrative & financial corners in depicting Jonathan Harker’s cross-sea travels to score a real estate deal with Count Dracula in Transylvania or in depicting the infamous vampire’s subsequent travels back to Harker’s home turf to seduce & destroy everything he holds dear, I never felt lost in the progression of the story – no matter how abstractly represented.  That trust in the audience’s familiarity with the source material plays no part in Dracula‘s most recent big-screen adaptation, since director Robert Eggers is more of a history-obsessed purist than a Guy Madden-style prankster of poetic license.  Eggers is as faithful to the original story structure of Stoker’s novel as the F.W. Murnau film from which he borrows his title, which itself was faithful enough to nearly get sued out of existence for copyright infringement by the Stoker estate.  Audiences can expect to see every progressive step of the Dracula story dramatized onscreen—including the all-important legal signing of real estate documents—with full reverence for the Murnau classic as a foundational cinematic text.  What they might not have seen before, however, is the intensity of the violence & beauty in the Dracula story cranked up to their furthest extremes, which accounts for Eggers’s other directorial specialty besides his kink for historical research.

Ever since he jumped ship from A24 to the major studios, Eggers has softened the more alienating, unconventional touches of his first couple films so that he can stage his exquisite, traditionalist images on a larger studio-budget scale.  As a result, his version of Nosferatu does not add much to the ongoing ritual of reinterpreting Dracula, except in its attention to the period details of its 19th Century Germany setting (and in accidentally making a contrast-and-compare argument that Coppola’s version is the best adaptation to date).  He dutifully, earnestly goes through the motions of a traditional Dracula movie plot with what his Van Helsing stand-in (Willem Dafoe) would describe as a sense of “grotesque tediousness.”  The film makes for a great Yuletide ghost-story moodsetter, offering a Christmas Carol alternative for bloodthirsty freaks, but you can clearly hear some thematic preoccupations with the source text screaming for him to break from that literary tradition to deliver something new.  If there’s any new angle in Eggers’s version of this familiar story, it’s his interest in the internal struggles of his Mina figure (Lily-Rose Depp) as she finds herself undeniably drawn to the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, the copyright-infringing Dracula) despite her recent marriage to a doomed dupe of a real estate agent (Nicolas Hoult).  There’s a dark, soul-deep lust in her attraction to Orlok that affords the film a genuine sense of Evil at its core, with Depp pleading to anyone who’ll listen to answer the one question that haunts her, “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?”  Since she starts the film as a young girl possessed, years before she meets Orlok or his dopey real estate agent in the flesh, the answer is clear from the outset, but her personal journey to accepting that answer gives the movie a fresh, personalized take on the material.  So, it’s a little disappointing to spend so much time retracing the standard Dracula movie plot beats outside that central struggle.  Following Hoult on his journey to sign the legal documents that seal his life-ruining real estate deal is a little like watching Bruce Wayne’s mother’s pearls hit the pavement in yet another Batman origin story.  We’ve seen it before; you can stray your focus elsewhere without losing us.

No matter where Eggers’s Nosferatu may be a little straightlaced as a literary adaptation, it’s still a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, which obviously goes a long way.  Anyone who was frustrated with the director’s looser, atmospheric approach to horror in The Lighthouse & The Witch will find much more traditional genre pleasures here, delivered through a series of jump scares and horny gasps.  If Eggers had fully drilled down into Depp’s acceptance of the darkness within herself and never left her sweaty bedside, the movie would lose Orlok’s absurd introduction of his What We Do in the Shadows voice & domesticity and Dafoe’s maniacal prancing among the vampire’s army of plague-carrying rats, which together account for most of its deviant levity.  When Eggers fully settles into the supernatural cuckoldry of the central trio in the third act, things get thematically exciting in a way that makes you wonder why he bothered depicting anything else, but Skarsgård’s Orlok is a spooky enough image in itself to keep the tension up until that payoff arrives.  Eggers’s longtime cinematographer Jarin Blashke puts in typically astounding work as a visual stylist, finding a terrible beauty in natural on-set lighting and the immense darkness it barely keeps at bay.  It’s a ghoulish ghost story told over candlelight on a blistering winter night, which keeps it from feeling like the most daring onscreen interpretation of Dracula to date but still manages to scare & chill despite its narrative familiarity.  I would’ve loved to have seen what the gonzo Robert Eggers who made The Lighthouse would’ve done with the erotic Mina-Dracula tensions of this film at feature length, but the more restrained, traditionalist Robert Eggers who made The Northman is almost just as good.  If it sounds like I’m complaining more than praising here, it’s only because I’m holding the director to the impossibly high standard that he set for himself early on.  It’s a very good, traditionally satisfying horror picture by any other metric.

-Brandon Ledet

Abigail (2024)

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The earliest press releases for the Universal Pictures horror Abigail reported it as a reimagining of the 1936 classic Dracula’s Daughter, citing Leigh Whannell’s 2020 remake of The Invisible Man and last year’s Nic-Cage-as-Dracula comedy Renfield as similar examples of what the studio is currently doing with its Classic Monsters brand.  Technically, Abigail does feature a vampire’s daughter in its main cast, but that titular, bloodsucking brat’s similarities to Countess Marya Zaleska end there.  No matter what the original pitch for Abigail might have been in first draft, it’s clear that the final product was more directly inspired by last year’s killer-doll meme comedy M3GAN than anything related to the original Dracula series.  Anytime its little-girl villain does a quirky, TikTok friendly dance in her cutesy ballerina outfit, you can practically hear echoes of some producer yelling “Get me another M3GAN!” in the background.  The Radio Silence creative team kindly obliged, churning out another M3GAN with the same dutiful, clock-punching enthusiasm that they’ve been using to send another Scream sequel down the conveyor belt every year.  The movie is less a reimagining of a 90-year-old classic than it is a rerun of a novelty that just arrived last January.

To juice the premise for as many TikTokable moments as possible, Abigail never changes out of her tutu.  The seemingly innocent little girl (Alisha Weir) is kidnapped after ballet practice and held ransom in an old dark house to extort millions out of her mysterious, dangerous father.  She naps for a bit while her captors bicker & banter downstairs, so that each of the likeable, sleepwalking stars (Dan Stevens, Melissa Barrera, Kathryn Newton, the late Angus Cloud, etc.) can all get in their MCU-style quips before they’re ceremoniously slaughtered one at a time.  Then Abigail wakes up, reveals her fangs, and throws in some pirouettes & jetés between ripping out throats with her mouth.  The violence is bloody but predictable, especially if you’ve happened to see the movie’s trailers, which plainly spell out every single image & idea from the second hour while conveniently skipping over the tedious hangout portion of the first.  There is no element of surprise or novelty here beyond your very first glimpse of an adolescent vampire in a tutu, which you already get just by walking past the poster in the lobby. 

In short, Abigail is corporate slop.  The best way to enjoy it is either chopped up into social media ads or screening on the back of an airplane seat headrest, wherever your attention is most often held hostage.  I attended its world premiere at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, which likely should have heightened its fanfare through pomp & exclusivity but instead had the opposite effect.  Screening in a festival environment among dozens of no-name productions with much smaller budgets and infinitely bigger ideas really highlighted how creatively bankrupt this kind of factory-line horror filmmaking can be.  Using the legacy of something as substantial as Dracula’s Daughter to rush out a M3GAN follow-up before a proper M3GAN 2.0 sequel is ready for market conveys a depressingly limited scope of imagination in that context, especially since horror is the one guaranteed-profit genre where audiences are willing to go along with pretty much anything you throw at them.  At the very least, Universal & Radio Silence could have better capitalized off the production’s one distinct, exciting idea by flooding the house with dozens, if not hundreds, of ballerina vampires instead of relying on just one.  That way, it wouldn’t be so boring to wait for her to wrap up her nap.

-Brandon Ledet

Blood of the Virgins (1967)

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There’s been a lot of recent online conjecture & debate about the future of Tubi. Following the streamer’s rebrand with a uglier, bubblier logo, rumors spread that Tubi has been requesting that distributors upload censored versions of their films, with all graphic depictions of sex & violence obscured from public view.  It’s unclear whether this is true for the entirety of Tubi’s streaming library—which is miles deeper than any of its fellow competitors’—or if it’s just true for the movies that play on its “Live TV” channels that simulate pre-streaming movie broadcasts.  Or maybe it isn’t true at all.  There’s more speculation than evidence out there so far, so the only thing that’s really resulted from this scrutiny over Tubi’s supposed swerve into puritanism has been the constant reminder of who owns the company: the same Murdoch family who owns Fox News.  It’s not out of the question, then, that Tubi might go squeaky clean in the near future, which makes it my solemn duty as a film journalist to watch the most degenerate smut I can find on the platform just to keep an eye on the evolving facts of the situation.

You have to search for 1967’s Blood of the Virgins by its original Spanish-language title “Sangre de Virgenes” for it to populate on Tubi, but I can confirm that it has not yet been censored or removed.  The dream is still alive; tits & gore are still welcome on The People’s Streaming Service.  This apparently includes movies where tits & gore are the only thing on the filmmakers’ minds, as is the case with this sub-Jesús Franco vampire smut – a genre the poster specifies as “Erotomania”.  Blood of the Virgins is an oddball novelty even within the context of dirt-cheap, horned-up vampire schlock.  If nothing else, I’ve never seen a vampire movie try to pass off stock footage of seagulls as if they were its vampires’ bat form, aided only by a red color filter and some unconvincing squeaks on the soundtrack.  I’ve also never seen a vampire movie produced in Argentina, an unusual cultural perspective that shows in the film’s vintage telenovela blocking & scoring and in its central location of a vampire-infested log cabin instead of a vampire-infested Gothic castle.  Of course, these cultural & aesthetic details are all secondary to the film’s main goal: dousing beautiful naked bodies in artificial stage blood.

If you cannot tell from its listed 72-minute runtime, Blood of the Virgins was designed to pad out a double feature for drive-in make-out sessions, not to scare.  It’s closer to softcore pornography than it is to horror, especially in its best, earliest stretch where it chronicles a Swinging 60s ski cabin trip taken by its doomed hippie victims, who eventually break into the wrong cabin to their own peril.  After a period-piece vignette establishes the existence of vampires in centuries past, the audience is bombarded with an energetic Russ Meyer-style nudie cutie montage in which hippie freaks indulge in dive-bar go-go dancing between bouts of road trip heavy petting and wholesome downhill skiing.  It’s an invigorating, titillating start to what’s ultimately a low-energy Hammer Horror knockoff.  Once the vampires isolate & drain those hippies (who, I must note, are very much not virgins), the movie slows way down and loses both its momentum and its overall sense of purpose.  By then, it has outlived its function as background noise for drive-in canoodling, and it’s really your fault if you’re still paying attention to see how the story plays out.

There are a lot of fun little touches to this Argentinian oddity for anyone familiar with this genre.  Its hand-drawn credits, its soap opera zoom-ins, its seagull shaped “bats”, and its main vampire’s predilections as more of a titty sucker than a neck biter all make it an amusing novelty for anyone who can stay awake long enough to gawk at those details.  Blood of the Virgins is just slightly off in its bargain-bin approximation of Jesús Franco vampire erotica, making it a fascinating outlier for anyone who knows how these things are supposed to play out.  For instance, it’s weirdly sheepish about depicting lesbian acts between the hippies & vampires, but eager to gesture at male-hippie-on-female-vampire cunnilingus, which is a much rarer treat.  The Russ Meyer-style hippie montage at the beginning is also remarkably energetic for a genre that’s usually so sluggish & unrushed, and this might have been a bonafide cult classic if had sustained that rhythm throughout.  As is, it’s still great fun and great confirmation that you can still find boobies on Tubi despite recent reports otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Lifeforce (1985)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Hanna, Boomer, and Britnee watch Lifeforce (1985).

Brandon:  Lifeforce is a Golan-Globus production directed by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s Tobe Hooper and adapted from the sci-fi pulp novel The Space Vampires by Dan O’Bannon, screenwriter for Alien.  It is an absurdly lavish production for a Cannon Group film—or really for any film with this chaotic of an imagination—especially considering the scrappier genre pictures its creators usually helm. 

It starts as an Alien-style sci-fi pulp throwback where dormant “space vampires” are discovered in both bat & humanoid form on an abandoned spaceship parked on Haley’s Comet, then brought back to London for scientific examination.  Once the lead vampire awakes on the autopsy table and sucks the electrified “lifeforce” out of the first nearby victim, the boundaries of the film’s genre classification explode into every possible direction.  This is at times an alien invasion film, a body-possession story, a sci-fi spin on vampire lore, a post-Romero zombie apocalypse picture, and an all-around genre meltdown whatsit that keeps piling new, upsetting ideas onto each subsequent sequence until you’re crushed by the enormity of its imagination.  With Lifeforce, Hooper & O’Bannon found the rare freedom to stage a gross-out B-picture on a proper Hollywood blockbuster budget, and they indulged every bizarre idea they could conjure in the process – complete with extravagant practical effects and a swashbuckling action-hero score performed by The London Symphony Orchestra.

I’ve been meaning to make time for Lifeforce since as far back as our buddies at the We Love to Watch podcast covered it five years ago.  I am not surprised that I loved it, but I was delighted to discover how much its space-vampire mayhem is a supernatural form of erotic menace, which is my #1 horror sweet spot.  It would have been more than enough for the soul-sucking space-vampires to turn Earthlings into exploding dust-zombies & leaky bloodsacks, but what really made me fall in love is how they start the process by hypnotizing their victims with intense horniness. 

Like with Alien, Dan O’Bannon is playing with the psychosexual terror lurking just below the surface of retro sci-fi relics like Queen of Blood & The Astounding She-Monster, but the approach to modernizing that erotic menace is much more heteronormative here than with the male-pregnancy & penetrative fears of H.R. Giger’s iconic alien designs.  Lifeforce portrays modern-day London as a city of sexually repressed Conservative men whose greatest fear is a confident, nude woman.  The lead nudist vampire is not only too sexy & self-assured for the terminally British subs who fall under her spell, she also terrorizes them by linking that intense erotic attraction to the blurred gender boundaries of their own psyches.  Some of the best scenes of the film are when her victims describe her as “the most overwhelmingly feminine presence [they’ve] ever encountered” or when she confesses that her physical form is just a projection of the femininity trapped inside their own minds.  By the time a silhouette of her breasts is framed as if it were Nosferatu‘s creeping shadow, I was fully in love with the way this film attacks its uptight macho victims through the vulnerability of their erotic imaginations.  I love a good wet nightmare, and it was endlessly fun to watch them squirm.

Hanna, what do you make of this film’s sexual & gender politics?  Does its erotic terror add anything substantial to the more traditional zombie & vampire scares that throw London into chaos, or does it just feel like an exploitative excuse to cram some straight-boy-marketed nudity onto the screen?

Hanna: Boy howdy!  Lifeforce was one of the exponentially wildest things I’ve seen in recent memory.  Brandon, I think you mentioned The Wicker Man during our screening, which is the exact vein of horny fear I found in this movie; the ill-fated, repressed sexualities of Anglo-Saxon men never cease to delight me.  I was completely on board with a beautiful naked woman walking her way—unbelievably slowly—through quivering throngs of Brits.

Overall, Lifeforce is a fantastic addition to the vampire canon, which has always had lots to say about the terror of sex and sexuality.  Most of the vampire movies I’ve seen feature naturally hot, youthful vamps, lounging around in sensuous mansions.  I’ll never turn down a coven of hot Draculas, but I loved that these vampires of Lifeforce were truly horrifying space hell beasts using the fantasies of their hosts to craft their appearances (I like to imagine the other aliens that these vampires have sucked dry throughout the galaxy – imagine the hottest tentacled space glob in the universe).  Human sexuality is so specific to particular events and images at different moments of a person’s life that I think lots of people don’t understand where their kinks and preferences come from.  I loved that moment Brandon mentioned when the lead space vampire (named “Space Girl” in the credits, which tickles me) tells Col. Carlsen that she’s the manifestation of his femininity; he’s totally locked that aspect of his sexuality away from himself, but it’s plainly obvious and extremely easy to exploit.  What would Space Girl find in my mind?  I kind of want to know, but I kind of don’t!

I do have to say that I was a little disappointed by the exclusive focus on heteronormative sexuality.  On one hand, part of the humor of this movie is that Space Girl exerts minimal effort while successfully throwing London into unchecked chaos with her cadre of androgynous space vampire hunks, due in large part to the desperately horny male leaders of foundational institutions.  Clearly, this was the correct tack to take from a strategic standpoint.  It’s just that for a super sexy movie that featuring exploding dust zombies, shapeshifting space vampires, and a floating, coagulated blob comprised of torrents of Sir Patrick Stewart’s blood, couldn’t we have gotten just a little touch of queer flirtation?  (I guess she sucks the life force out of a woman in the park, but we don’t actually see it happen, so I’m not counting it!) We get a little touch of that in the femininity scene, but I wish the movie would have delved into even kinkier territory.

Boomer, I thought these space vampires were a great direction for film’s hall of vampires.  What did you think?  How do these monsters compare to their terrestrial blueprints? 

Boomer: I was also hung up on the vampires’ heteronormativity.  We spend so much full-frontal time with Space Girl that I could draw her labia from memory right now, weeks after seeing the movie, but we (of course) had plentiful and abundant convenient censorship of our hot space twunks’ docking equipment. I suppose it’s logical that a film that exists solely because of the male gaze and which requires the ubiquity of the male gaze to make narrative sense should also cater solely to it, but that doesn’t mean one can’t complain about it. 

Unusually for me, I prefer my vampire fiction mystical rather than scientific.  It’s not just because most sci-fi vampire films are pretty bad (Daybreakers immediately comes to mind, followed by Bloodsuckers and Ultraviolet); there are plenty of terrible supernatural vampire movies. Still, when measuring good against bad, the ratio of good sci-fi vampires to bad ones skews much more negatively than their magical brethren. As much as I liked Lifeforce, that this (blessed) mess counts as one of the good ones kind of tells you everything that you need to know, right? I just like it when vampires have to glamour people or have to be invited in; I think it makes for more interesting storytelling than vampirism-as-a-virus or, as is the case here, vampires are extraterrestrial beings that suck out life force.  When it comes to twists on the lore, however, there was one thing that I really did like: the reanimation of victims who must likewise consume life energy, and which turn to dust if unable to do so.  The effects in these scenes were nothing short of spectacular, and they were the best part of the film.  I know that they must have been remastered at some point, but those puppets were really something fascinating to behold. 

One of the things that I did have some trouble with was the pacing, especially with regards to character introductions.  For the first 20 minutes or so, it’s like watching 2001 (or Star Trek: The Motion Picture) on fast-forward as spectacular vistas and space structures are explored, before we’re suddenly in a very boring office space, and we’re figuratively and literally down to earth for the rest of the movie.  There’s not that much interesting about any of the spaces we explore (other than that one lady’s apartment with the Liza Minnelli poster), and it felt like every 20 minutes a new guy just sort of walked into the view of the camera and the film became about him for a while.  I wasn’t sure who was supposed to be our protagonist, which left me spinning.  That our leads were all largely indistinguishable white dudes also contributed to this for me; when Steve Railsback reappeared after not having been seen since the ship exploration sequence, I thought he was the same character as the guy who had exploded into dust in the scene immediately prior.  Was this also an issue for you, Britnee?  Did the pacing work for you? 

Britnee: When looking back on the scenery in Lifeforce, all I can recall is the color brown. All of those wood paneled walls and dull office spaces made the sets feel a little musty. The one major exception is when the space crew explores the mysterious 150-mile-long spacecraft (a scale I still can’t wrap my head around). I loved the uncomfortable rectum-looking entrance that leads them to the collection of dried-up bat creatures and the hive of nude “humans” in glass containers. I wasn’t ready to leave that funky space place so quickly. I wanted to see more compartments of the craft explored. There was 150 miles of it after all, and they only went through what seemed to be less than a mile. I know poking around the craft would cost money, but with the massive budget for this film, the money was obviously there. It just should have been spent better. 

As for the pacing, I was so focused on all of the space vampire mayhem that I didn’t pay much attention to all of the boring white guys who were main characters . . . unless they were getting their life sucked out of them and exploding into dust. It was pretty difficult to keep up with who was who and how they plugged into all of the insanity, but it didn’t really bother me because just about everything else in the movie was so much fun. 

Lagniappe

Britnee: Lifeforce would do so well as an animated series. I saw that there was talk about a potential remake, but it seems like animation would be the way to go. That way, there would be fewer financial limitations, so all the freaky stuff could be even freakier. 

Boomer: That both of our male leads (at least I think they’re our leads) had hard-C alliterative names (Colonel Carlsen and Colonel Colin Caine) was a real detriment.  But once Kat pointed out that Carlsen was Steve Railsback, aka Duane Barry, I could at least keep track of him. 

Brandon: I was initially disappointed by the lack of onscreen peen myself, but the more I think about how much this movie is about straight men’s psychosexual discomforts the more I’m okay with it.  If you’re going to frame your lusty B-movie this strictly through male gaze, you need to at least interrogate the limitations & vulnerabilities of that gaze, and I think Lifeforce does that well.  Rather than a remake, I think there’s an angle for a spinoff sequel that follows the two Nude Dudes around the entire night instead of Space Girl, since most of their adventures were off-screen.  Coming to Hulu as soon as Disney buys up the Cannon Group catalog, after they’ve gobbled up the rest of the pop media landscape.

Hanna: Speaking of constant female nudity, my favorite tidbit of trivia about Lifeforce is that it was extremely difficult to find a female lead willing to be naked for the entire movie. Hooper had to resort to chartering a plane of German actresses to London after failing to find an English actress; by the time the actresses got to London, they had collectively agreed not to audition for the part. Thank God for Mathilda May! Maybe it would have been too much trouble to get some peen in the picture; I’m glad we got at least a little ethereal, vampiric nakedness.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
January: The Top Films of 2021

-The Swampflix Crew

Bit (2020)

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After watching the retro erotic thriller The Voyeurs and the teen vampire wish-fulfiller Bit in the same week, I’m starting to come to terms with the terrifying reality that the house style of The CW has become one of the major cinematic influences of our time.  The channel’s decades of flat digi cinematography and robotic line deliveries from an endless parade of hard-bodied hotties has now seeped out into the wider cinematic bloodstream, so that all low-to-mid-budget #content aimed at youngsters looks like an unaired pilot for a CW series.  Let’s call Bit the modern successor of shows like Buffy & Charmed, a gothy but harmless horror primer for teens turned off by the macho gatekeeper end of the genre (slightly retooled for a post-Riverdale world).  It even opens with a affectionate potshot at the Twilight saga, which very well might be the birthplace of the CW’s unholy stylistic reign on the big screen.  It’s all very cheap but cute, making up for what it lacks in momentum, tension, and scares with a gothy wish-fulfilment sense of cool.

A trans teen vacationing in Los Angeles is inducted into a hipster lesbian vampire coven who target male predators around the city.  She occasionally feels remorse over abandoning her family & friends for this new social circle (self-described as “Bite Club”) and reluctance to drink blood to sustain herself, but for the most part everything’s safe & comfortable.  At its core, this is a teenage fantasy about a small-town outsider who finds her all-accepting, empowering clique in the big city.  Our bloodsucking heroine repeatedly muses that “This feels like a movie,” or “My life’s like a horror movie,” to point out the daydream happenstance of her stumbling into a feminist vampire collective her very first night in L.A.  Her vampire elders offer her a tantalizing power fantasy in “a world where every woman is a vampire” and “men are the ones who are afraid to fucking jot at night.”  There’s some infighting about how the coven’s No-Boys-Allowed policy applies to her brother, some changeups in local leadership, and a few run-ins with vampire-hunting MRAs, but that’s not really what excites Bite or its baby-goth target audience.  The film is much more wrapped up in its venting-into-the-void misandry, chaste lesbian make-outs, and trips to see The Death Valley Girls live in concert.  It’s a hangout film for the teenage horror nerd set who grew up watching a certain broadcast-television station and are now ready to see its programming aged up with some swearing & gore.

Despite its on-the-surface feminist politics, Bit is more adorable than it is searing or provocative.  I would’ve enjoyed it best in high school, but I happened to grow up with The Craft instead.  I can’t say with any authority that The Craft is necessarily any better than Bit in terms of its . . . craft, no more than the generations before me could say the same about The Lost Boys or, I dunno, I Was a Teenage Werewolf.  Each generation deserves their own teen-goth induction ceremony movie, and this entry in that canon just happens to be aimed at kids young enough to appreciate an off-handed Cheetah Girls reference. 

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #139 of The Swampflix Podcast: Daughters of Darkness (1971) & Lesbian Vampires

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Welcome to Episode #139 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four stylish, retro horrors about lesbian vampires, starting with Daughters of Darkness (1971).

00:00 Welcome

03:00 Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021)
04:20 Pig (2021)
08:20 Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
10:10 Zola (2021)
15:00 Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)
22:00 The Night of the Hunter (1995)
29:30 Disclosure (1994)
33:22 French Exit (2021)

39:50 Daughters of Darkness (1971)
1:00:35 The Vampire Lovers (1970)
1:11:42 Vampyros Lesbos (1971)
1:24:55 The Hunger (1983)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on  SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew