The Projection Booth

Before E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) there was Night Skies, a rural alien-horror movie that Steven Spielberg developed, spent roughly $700,000 on, and walked away from.

Max Evry, author of A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch's Dune, returns to The Projection Booth to talk about his new book, Stranded on Earth: How Night Skies Became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, out October 27 from 1984 Publishing. A new book, a new look at old Spielberg.

Mike White and Evry dig into:

Why Spielberg traded a sinister project for a personal story about a lonely kid and an alien, and how the friendship at the heart of Night Skies became the whole of E.T.

The Rick Baker saga: his working aliens, the blowup that sent Spielberg to Carlo Rambaldi, and how much of the creature came from Baker.

Ron Cobb, John Sayles, Tobe Hooper and the myths the book corrects.

After School, the R-rated middle-school comedy from Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis.

How ideas migrated into Poltergeist (1982) and Gremlins (1984), and whether Night Skies could work after Disclosure Day (2026).

If Spielberg never lets a good idea die, what happens when someone writes down where they went?

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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

For five seconds of live television, Sammy Petrillo popped out of a crib beside Jerry Lewis on The Colgate Comedy Hour, the two pulling the same moronic face, and those five seconds shaped the rest of his life. WFMU's Dave "the Spazz" Abramson spent nearly two decades chasing the man behind the face for Your Time Is Now: The Sammy Petrillo Story, his new biography from Feral House. He tells Mike how it started: an 11-year-old reading one paragraph about Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), with Petrillo and Duke Mitchell as a knockoff Martin and Lewis; a punk single by his band The Sea Monkeys; a 1992 radio interview; and a blog comment war between Sammy and the son who says his father went out for cigarettes and never came back. Abramson worked it like a cold case, racing to reach sources in their 90s, and with help from cover artist Drew Friedman and foreword writer Scott Alexander got Jerry Lewis himself on the record. They dig into a Rashomon life: Doris Wishman's Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972), cable TV shows years before anyone had cable, film reels lost to unpaid storage bills, Barbara Loden's anonymous turn on the record All About Cleopatra, and why imitating Lewis, of all people, was a blessing and a curse. Plus: the original negative of Brooklyn Gorilla has resurfaced, and the 4K restoration screens at Nitehawk Prospect Park on November 12 and at the American Cinematheque's Los Feliz 3 on November 15.

Get the book, and sign up for news of the screenings, at Feral House.

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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

She has already buried her husband. Then a charming stranger comes to her aid during a robbery, and she lets him in. That's when the con begins. Cruel Love (2026), Nick Lyon's new thriller, now streaming, turns real marriage fraud into what star Elisabeth Harnois calls "a cautionary tale with an element of emotional horror." Lyon tells Mike how he and the late Christian Oliver made it their first co-production, how Ron Peer's twist-and-turn script grew out of real cons that exploit fiancé visas and even the Violence Against Women Act, and why he added a rainy Los Angeles opening in post to set a modern noir mood. Detroit-born Harnois builds Julia from grief: a woman who lost the love of her life before the movie starts and decides to trust again. Bai Ling, who tells reporters she landed from the moon, plays Mei Li, a role first written as a Russian named Lyudmila; Lyon's only job, he says, was pulling her back a little. A friendly argument breaks out over half a shot that didn't make the cut, and Lyon explains why even a favorite moment sometimes has to go. Oliver died in January 2024, before the film's release, and Harnois hopes it brings new eyes to his work. Plus: Lyon's FrightFest horror film Do You Want to Play? (2026), his next, about Arctic ice cores hiding insects you don't want on your spine, and Bai Ling's directing debut, My Quarantine Romance with Toilet Paper, in which she plays Charlie Chaplin.

Follow Cruel Love on Instagram and rent or buy it from the film's official website.

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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Why did the one campus-protest picture that drew a crowd end up forgotten? Mike White, Andras Jones and Bill Ackerman reopen Getting Straight (1970), Richard Rush's comedy about a Vietnam veteran, played by Elliott Gould, who is trying to finish his teaching degree while the faculty makes it hard and campus unrest makes it harder. Candice Bergen plays his girlfriend, Jan.

The panel digs into Gould's all-in performance, Rush's long-lens, rack-focus style on a glass-walled campus, Jeannie Berlin's scenes, and what the film keeps and drops from the novel. They test it against The Graduate (1967) and Five Easy Pieces (1970), and ask whether Hollywood would make political youth films now.

Then director Richard Rush joins Mike to talk about winning over Columbia, working with Gould, and shooting in widescreen.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

A hedonistic heir loses his hands, so his mother buys him new ones wired to his subconscious. Big mistake: his subconscious is a nasty place. The Restoration at Grayson Manor (2025), Glenn McQuaid's new Irish horror film, premiered at Fantastic Fest and pits Chris Colfer against Alice Krige, the Borg Queen herself, in a crumbling estate where mother and son know exactly where to cut. McQuaid, a Glass Eye Pix veteran and the director of I Sell the Dead (2008), tells Mike how a YouTube video of an amputee moving a prosthetic with his mind sparked the idea, and how The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), watched with his dad, kept a creepy hand on his tail all through childhood. He and co-writer Clay McLeod Chapman turned the killer-hand movie queer, a story of bodily autonomy and the paranoia of growing up in a straight world, and kept the family's cruelty fun with cues from Tennessee Williams, The Lion in Winter (1968) and Harold and Maude (1971), and one rule: say the nastiest lines deadpan. Krige thanked him afterward; nobody had ever asked her to do comedy before. And the young local hired to play the hands? He ended up co-writing the score. Catch it in US theaters from Chroma or on Shudder from December 1.

Follow Glenn McQuaid on Instagram and find screenings on the film's official page.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Chinese hopping vampires have invaded Dublin. Kung Fu Deadly (2026), a martial arts horror comedy that had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest and plays Sitges next, sends two inept exterminators, Danny (Steven He) and Frank (Michael Tient), after a swarm of jiangshi, with Lian (Gemma Chua-Tran) as their reluctant ally. Writer-producer Paddy McDonald, who produced Predestination (2014), needed 12 and a half years and roughly 30 drafts to get it made; BAFTA-winning director Fergal Costello finally cracked it.

Mike talks with both about the Mr. Vampire (1985) and Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980) obsessions behind the monsters, a Zoom chemistry read that made two leads click instantly, iPhone previs for the fight scenes, John Carpenter widescreen framing from Big Trouble in Little China (1986), and Costello's next film, a vampire movie shooting in November.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

At a Westwood preview, a teenage girl turned to her friend: "Oh, my God." Paul Schrader turned to Jerry Bruckheimer: "I think maybe we went a little far." Schrader took Cat People (1982) as a for-hire genre job, and it turned out as personal as anything he ever made. For Shocktober 2026, Mike White and guest co-hosts Josh Hadley and Heather Drain follow Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell into a New Orleans thick with humidity, incest and a Giorgio Moroder score. They set Alan Ormsby's very different script against what reached the screen, dig into Ferdinando Scarfiotti's Italian look, the dubbed dialogue and the mountain lions dyed black, and measure it all against Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton's Cat People (1942). Then Schrader himself explains the burning-house ending he threw out, why Bowie's song waits for the end credits, why he wishes he had changed the title, and how falling for his star ended his studio days.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

What happens when your online avatar starts living a life of its own? Welcome to Dolly's House (2026), a Taiwanese animated feature chosen to open Annecy's Contrechamp section, drops a YouTuber into the home of Madame Dolly, a sorceress who has lived for two millennia, and a house full of dolls. Seven YCH directs with Rady Fu and Tree Muta, blending live-action motion capture with 2D animation.

Mike talks with Seven about the ancient Chinese anthology Taiping Guangji that inspired the sorceress, an idea 25 years in the making that moved from live action to animation when costs soared, how rotoscoping cut time by half and expenses by 30 percent, actors performing every role twice, once on a bare warehouse stage and again in the dubbing booth, Taipei landmarks that became Dolly's house, and a sequel following the mysterious Catherine.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Barbarians lose their heads, monsters lose their guts, and not one actor ever set foot on the set: Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss (2026) is a blood-soaked sword-and-sorcery quest performed entirely by puppets, built in a family garage in Belleville, Ontario. Director Mason Newton DeRushie's feature debut had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest before heading to Australia's Monster Fest. Mason and his father, production designer Jason Derushie, join Mike to tell how a family raised on special makeup effects set out to bring back the '80s barbarian movie. They explain why a pandemic and a crowdfunding campaign pointed them toward puppets, how a list of ten creatures they wanted to see wrote the story, and how couch foam, chicken wire, old bedsheets and about $6,000 in spray foam became the caves. The puppet cast runs past 60 characters, from tiny insects to huge beasts, and the voice cast, led by Timothy Paul McCarthy and Ry Barrett of In a Violent Nature (2024), never saw one of them: the puppets were shot first and the voices recorded in two days afterward. Their touchstones run from Meet the Feebles (1989) to The Dark Crystal (1982). And the surviving puppets? Wet mattress foam is hard to dry, so they live in an airtight container, where nobody has to smell them.

Follow the film on Instagram and North Blood Films on Facebook.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Why would a 1977 revenge movie vanish for decades while cult-film obsessives begged to see it? Best Served Cold (2026), the new documentary from writer-director Eric Zaldivar and producers Mike Malloy and John Joseph Dunn, chases The Farmer (1977) from a Columbia release nobody could find to a gray-market YouTube upload that finally forced Code Red's hand. It had its world premiere at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival in Fort Lauderdale. The filmmakers join Mike to talk about a 40-minute YouTube short that grew into a feature, star and producer Gary Conway's stories, George Memmoli's on-set accident, Johnny Popwell's run-in with the law, Paul Schrader's interview after a year of agent runaround, and a cut chapter on the returning-veteran films that ties The Farmer to Rolling Thunder (1977). A bonus conversation recorded years ago adds the hunters' side: John Schuster and John Santo on how a trailer on a Hell's Ground (2007) DVD sent them searching collectors, archives and Columbia's lawyers, down a rights tangle that runs to Sylvester Stallone's Over the Top (1987).

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

What does it cost to help a friend make his movie? For James Claeys, the answer was his house. Sell Your House (2026), co-directed by Eric Foss and Brandon Pickering, follows the making of The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023), Francis Galluppi's debut feature, and the years of debt, freak storms and distribution dead ends that came after. It had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Foss and Pickering join Mike to talk about how a behind-the-scenes shoot titled Hire Your Friends became a feature (it took Richard Brake telling Foss to do it), how two filmmakers who have worked together for years edited it with no money and no editor, why Pickering lost a bunch of money for four years, the scene where James walks out of an interview, and why the story cannot end until they find out whether he gets his house back. No spoilers.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

A gravedigger shoots the dead a second time, his assistant answers every question with a single syllable, and the woman he loves keeps coming back as someone new: Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), released in the US as Cemetery Man, is a horror comedy that refuses to explain itself, and that refusal is the point. To close Shocktober 2026, Mike White and guest co-hosts Heather Drain and Rob Spencer take on Michele Soavi's dream-logic zombie romance, starring Rupert Everett. Is it a coma dream, a killer's solipsistic breakdown, or a joke about the death of love? They track how Anna Falchi's returns speed up, how Tiziano Sclavi's Dylan Dog world seeps in, what Soavi's Stage Fright (1987) and The Sect (1991) promise, and the Psychomania (1973) motorcycle that roars out of a grave. They also meet François Hadji-Lazaro, the actor behind Gnaghi, and his band Les Garçons Bouchers.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Two adult film stars run a cross-country crime spree, robbing porn theaters to fund a getaway to France, and the real question isn't whether they survive but whether they stay together. Hell's No Place for a Pretty Face (2026) is a new Texas-made road romance from writer-director Seth Magana, shot on one lens with his own money and headed for a November 17 premiere at Laemmle NoHo 7 before a theater-by-theater tour. Seth joins Mike to talk about why Bonnie and Clyde (1967), True Romance (1993) and Queen & Slim (2019) left room for a love story, the Warren Oates Dillinger (1973) soundtrack inside the film's theaters, lessons from The American Friend (1977) and Sam Peckinpah, a shootout co-directed by the still photographer, and a two-week editing trip to France.

Follow 42nd Street Pictures on Instagram and get tickets for the November 17 premiere.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

The scariest true-crime documentary is the one that stops being true. The Dark Gets In (2026), which premiered at Beyond Fest and heads to FrightFest in the UK, follows a documentary crew interviewing the parents of a teenage girl who vanished from a locked house, until the case turns somewhere far darker than anyone expected. Writer-director Sean Hogan, who made The Devil's Business (2011), shot it so convincingly in streaming-doc style that you may forget it's fiction.

Mike talks with Hogan about a found-footage video-diary idea that sat for years until a pandemic-era chat about true crime gave it a shape, a script used as a roadmap for actors who improvised in character, an open casting call with roughly 6,000 applicants, a young lead who invented material over email, and the childhood monster books that made him a horror lifer.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

A rejected horror-short application turned into a movie about what happens when retirees run the set. Sean Cisterna couldn't find funding for The Rug (2025), so he pitched a New Horizons for Seniors grant, recruited a crew in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and filmed the chaos as Silver Screamers (2025), a Fantastic Fest world premiere reaching U.S. viewers on BloodStream November 6. Cisterna joins Mike to talk about the 96-year-old who raised her hand first, an insurer that refused to cover an 80-year-old camera operator, a rug brought to life by a marionette rig, Super 8 lifer Sonny at last handling an Alexa, and why the short plays free online as the doc's companion piece. His message: imagination doesn't retire.

Follow Silver Screamers at the film's official page.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

A fisherwoman the village won't let alone commissions a basket weaver to build her a husband, and the husband is Alexander Skarsgård, worn as ten 3D-printed pieces of woven prosthetic with no CG replacement. Wicker (2026) is a new fable from directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, fresh from its Sundance premiere and opening nationwide October 30, with Olivia Colman, Peter Dinklage, Elizabeth Debicki and Richard E. Grant in a village where loneliness, marriage and gossip are funny because they are true. Eleanor and Alex, the pair behind Save Yourselves! (2020), join Mike to talk about 18 months with Weta Workshop, adapting Ursula Wills's short story, casting the village with comedians, and a test-screening crowd that went to war over the tailor's wife.

Follow Wicker on Instagram and visit the film's official website.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Forget the cabin in the woods: this coven comes for you at home on Halloween night. The Heretiks (2026), a Fantastic Fest world premiere headed to Sitges, follows renegade witch Cai (Kimberly Epstein) as she protects two sisters and a friend from her former coven, led by the terrifying Neve (Tess Williams). Director Gregg Bishop of Siren (2016) and Dance of the Dead (2008) spent ten years shopping the script by Luke Piotrowski and Ben Collins.

Mike talks with Bishop, Epstein, Williams, and Josie Wert, who plays Ada, about the concept trailer that finally won a green light, 26 night shoots, two weeks of rehearsal, child actors on strict curfews, real suburban locations near Bishop's hometown, handprint makeup effects, and watching it with a Fantastic Fest crowd. https://www.instagram.com/bishopgregg/

Follow Gregg Bishop on Instagram.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

What if detention were group therapy? Detention (2026), a quirky teen comedy from Washington State's Bainbridge Island, swaps the usual punishment for something harder: a room of kids made to talk about what is really happening behind closed doors. Writer-director Emma Cameron, who co-directed with her husband Mark Cameron and also plays the sleep-deprived Dr. Messerschmitt, joins Mike after the film's Pasadena International Film Festival screening and a summer theatrical run, just as it arrives on Amazon Prime and Apple TV. She traces the idea to The Breakfast Club (1985) and a job on a school mental-health commercial, explains why she cast 90 percent of the film in Washington, how she recast a major role two weeks before shooting, and how two nights of magic-hour light captured the final scene at the water's edge.

Follow Detention on Instagram and visit the film's official website.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

A body missing for 36 years turns up at a gruesome crime scene, and the daughter who goes looking learns her father's past is much worse than she thought. The Cycle (2026), a Fantastic Fest world premiere starring Deborah Ann Woll and Jeffrey Donovan, comes from Jordan Downey, the filmmaker behind The Head Hunter (2018). Stephen King has already called it special, and it arrives on Shudder October 23.

Mike talks with Downey about the idea that consumed him and co-writer Kevin Stewart through the pandemic, protecting a twist as long as possible, shooting in weathered coastal Oregon locations, a body farm built from medical-grade bones, a life-cast practical corpse, and the Critters (1986) love-letter short he made hoping to land the reboot. https://www.instagram.com/jordandowney/

Follow Jordan Downey on Instagram.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth

A bus explodes in downtown Hong Kong on Valentine's Day, and the trail of wreckage leads to two young men nobody was watching. We're Nothing at All (2026), a festival drama that has played Hong Kong and Udine's Far East Film Festival, intercuts a forensic investigation with the love story and desperation of a gay couple pushed toward disaster by poverty. Herman Yau, the Hong Kong veteran behind Taxi Hunter (1993), directs.

Mike talks with Yau and stars Anson Kong of the boy band Mirror, who plays Fai, and Ansonbean, who plays Ike, about 40 years in the Hong Kong film industry, why the pace of local cinema has slowed, a script written in three months and shot in 16 days, a tunnel scene where the actors really slapped each other, and the risk of offending audiences.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth