Short Stuff: Spooky Recommendations

A new recommendation format

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1:41Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry sitting in for Dave. This is Short Stuff Chuck, and this is a slightly different kind of short stuff, I would say, for Halloween. That's right. Halloween and maybe beyond, everyone, because we had an idea a while ago about perhaps adding an episode here and there where we do recommendations, because people are always saying, like, hey, when you guys recommend books and movies and recipes and stuff, like, we really like that kind of thing,

2:12and this is maybe a chance to formalize it. So we're going to ask you to let us know what you think about this. If maybe once a month, in place of the regular shorty, we recommend things that we're watching and reading and eating and drinking or whatever. It could be like a new sleeping regimen. Maybe not that. Sure. It could be. So maybe we'll just, like, one of us will take their recommendation, and then after the break, the other one will do theirs.

2:43How does that sound?

2:45Sure. Yeah, like we should say, everybody, we're literally figuring this out as we go along in Stuff You Should Know fashion. Why don't you take it away? Let's hear what you're recommending.

Horror movie recommendations

2:55Oh, geez. Well, you know I love me some good horror movies, so I thought maybe I would just recommend a few good horror movies for Halloween. All right. Let's chat. Okay. Have you ever seen Trick or Treat? Trick or Treat? I don't think so. Is it the movie from the 80s? No, it's from the aughts, I think, the mid-aughts. All right. I'm saying it's from 2007. Yeah. Bizarrely stars Anna Paquin, the Oscar winner, the youngest Oscar winner of all time.

3:27Okay. And it's just this little sleeper movie that flew below everybody's radar, but it's actually one of the most interesting Halloween anthologies ever. It's really well woven together. There's some, like, legitimately scary stuff to it. There's a lot of creepy stuff. There's a lot of funny stuff, which to me is like, if you're able to pull off comedy with horror, that's a real trick to do, and I think they did that because it wasn't all comedy. It was like, you know, kind of here or there,

3:59there was some funny stuff. Now, I'm seeing it's an anthology film. Yeah. So it's several stories all by the same person. It's not one of those sort of co-directed things? No, no, no. It's all the same person, and I don't remember who directed it. I think it was a writer-director kind of thing? Yeah, Michael Dougherty. Okay, so he did it all, but in the way that it's an anthology is, you know, like with a normal anthology, there's like somebody telling somebody a story,

4:32and then in between them, you come back to that present, you know, reality. Yeah, like the Crypt Keeper or something? Yeah, exactly. With this, everything is all woven together, and it says like earlier that night or something like that, so it kind of jumps around a little bit, but it's not like, it's really well done as far as horror anthologies go. Awesome. Well, it says here in my little lookup device that it has gained cult status, even though it was not very much seen.

5:02Yeah, I totally buy that. Yeah, I don't want to make it sound like it's a high art or cinema. It's not supposed to be, so it's just a fun little, it's very bloody, so don't make any mistake about that. Basically, if I ever recommend a movie, it's either disturbing or bloody or both. Okay. I should just give you a caveat. You got another scary movie? Oh, sure. I got a million of them. Let's see which one. I will say, I'll tell you one that I've seen a couple times now.

5:33There's a movie called Moloch? Moloch? Moloch? How do you spell it? M-O-L-O-C-H. It's the name of a demon. I think like a real deal demon. It's not made up. Yeah, yeah. Although I don't think this is based on a true story. This looks scary. It is scary. It's not supposed to be funny. And it is kind of an attempt at cinema. I think it's Dutch. Yeah. It's a Dutch folk horror.

6:04And it's about this, I don't want to give too much away, but it's about this family that's basically being targeted by Moloch the demon. And there's all sorts of really interesting reasons why. And there's like subtitles and everything. Do subtitles bother most people? I know they don't bother you, but do you know anyone who are like, I can't watch movies because of the subtitles? Well, I don't know. I mean, back when we were doing Movie Crush, I do remember hearing from people

6:36that some people like it didn't bother them. Some people loved foreign cinema. And some people like had like really like solid reasons for not liking it. Like either they maybe had dyslexia or it was distracting for them or like in an ADHD sort of way. So there's all sorts of reasons someone might like them other than like, well, I don't like to read. Huh. I'd never considered that, but that's a really good point. Great. Okay, good. Well, if you don't like subtitled movies, I don't think there's an English dub to it. I think it is all subtitles, unfortunately.

7:08But there's a movie that I told you about before that I loved. It's called Lamb, the A24 movie with the girl with the dragon tattoo. Yes. The original one. So, know me, rapese. Yes. And it is completely bizarre and off the wall, but it's also one of the most heart-rending movies I've ever seen. It's so, it's just so, there's parts of it that you just want to like hug everybody. But it's considered a horror movie.

7:39Oh, really? Yeah. It is in Icelandic, I think. And there's subtitles. And it's so well done that I watched it once without subtitles. I think maybe even the first time. And I knew, I basically got everything that was going on except for like a couple conversations that really didn't matter that much. Oh, that's cool. I like that. I think I've had that experience before. Yeah, it is. It's kind of fun because you're like, I'm part of the universal humanity. I don't even need words. Yeah. I don't even need to understand what's coming out of your mouth. Well, I have,

8:09this is spooky season for movies for me, you know, and I watch a lot during Octobers. And I just last night was looking up like, what are the best horror movies of the last, you know, of the 2020s and, and have a short list going. So I'll add these to the list and I appreciate it. All right. Well, let's take a break and then come back and we'll hear about your stuff. Games on a break.

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Spooky book picks

9:55we are back and I am going to recommend a couple of spooky books, everyone, because I have talked before kind of briefly on the show about having never really gotten into horror or fiction, but jumped back on the bandwagon when I randomly picked up a book that just looked cool from the author Keith Rosson, a very great writer from Portland who Stephen King, no less than Stephen King, has championed. Wow. And I had started reading, you know, I read his duology, Devil by Name and Fever House,

10:27which was a zombie thing, and both of those are great. And then I read his follow-up to that, which was Coffin Moon, which was about a, it was a vampire story, which was great. I think all of these have been optioned, by the way, so hopefully they'll come to a movie or TV screen near you. And then I got an advanced copy. I know I shouted it out briefly, but I want to talk to everyone about his newest book, Crone. As we know, a crone is a witch, and this is a witchy story. And again,

10:57I don't want to give too much away, but it is a really great witchy story that goes in all sorts of kind of cool directions. What I love about Keith's books is that they are, first of all, they are expertly written. He's just a really, really great writer. And after having read some lesser horror novels since then, I've picked up another couple by other people. I now really appreciate like how great Keith is just with the pen or the fingies on the keyboard. Yeah. So he's a great writer, and all of his books

11:28have this humanity and this heart, and they always involve some sort of family story going on. So a lot of it is heartbreaking at the same time as being like super scary, and he has such a way with describing things in such a gross, gross way. Oh, yeah? That's tough to do, man. Yeah, I mean, he uses words like that people don't use anymore, like torpor and stuff like that, where like I got to look it up even to see what that is. And so he's just a very great descriptor,

11:59which are my favorite kinds of writers. So check out Krohn and all of his books, but Krohn is the most recent one, and I'm in touch with him via Instagram, and he seems like a really good dude as well. Well, sure. If you're on somebody's bandwagon, they're probably a good dude. Yeah, and we're both adoption dads, so we have that in common in chatting about that. Oh, very cool. And then the next one, you know, I think I told you, I'm not going to shout it out because I told you on the plane on the way home from the cruise, the one I was reading about the theme park

12:30wasn't very good. But I did read another pretty good one called Hidden Pictures. It is a horror fiction novel by Jason Reculak, and it was a New York Times bestseller, and I'll just read the description on the back because it doesn't give too much away. Okay. Mallory Quinn is fresh out of rehab when she takes a job babysitting Ted and Caroline Maxwell's five-year-old son, Teddy. She immediately bonds with a sweet boy who is never without his sketchbook. His drawings are the usual fare, trees, rabbits, balloons,

13:01but one day, he draws something different, a man dragging a lifeless body. Yikes. Then his stick figures evolve into increasingly sophisticated sketches depicting one disturbing scene after another. Is Teddy troubled, or is he channeling forces he cannot possibly understand? Knowing just how crazy it all sounds, Mallory must decipher the images and save Teddy before it's too late. Nice. Who wrote that? His name is Jason Reculak, I guess is how you pronounce it,

13:31and Stephen King also has a cover quote saying, a one-of-a-kind thriller. I loved it, and it's good, and kind of one of the fun things here is the author draws these pictures along the way. Oh, yeah, that is cool. As well. So he's drawing these pictures, and it's the first sort of creepy one. There's just a nice impact you have when you're seeing these kind of just kid drawings, and all of a sudden

14:02you see the creepy one. And the story takes a lot of twists and turns. I'm sure this is going to be optioned. I'm sure it already has, and it's in that pipeline because it would make, I think it would make a pretty fun movie. You know, I think that a horror story is one of the hardest types to carry through an entire novel because you have to pay everything out just so, or you have to go all in and then top every scene, essentially, or else it's just like, what are you doing?

14:32I think short stories are the ideal or is the ideal format for horror. So if you can pull off a horror novel, you're doing something pretty spectacular in my opinion. Not many people can do that. Yeah, I'm with you. I'm kind of new to the whole thing, but we have read a bunch of short horror for, you know, our Halloween episodes, so I think I'm with you on that. So it's, I'm not sure how much more I'm going to go down the horror lane because I'm kind of one for two with the non-Keith Rossens when he was, I was four for four with him. Yeah.

15:03And I'll read every book that Keith puts out like as soon as it comes out. I'm like that big of a fan at this point. Keith spoiled you. He has spoiled me. He can't go back. I need to read a Stephen King. I know it's kind of silly that I haven't, so. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

15:20Wait. You've never read a Stephen King novel of any, like none of them? Is that what you're saying? Is that what I'm picking up? No, I've never read any horror or any Stephen King, and so I've had people recommend various ones. I would like to read a really scary one. Maybe I should read The Shining. That might be a good one to start out with. So it is nothing like the movie, you know, right? You know that from being a film guy. I've heard a lot of that, yeah. Okay.

15:45I think Stephen King's actually a great example of what I'm talking about. My beef with his novels is that very rarely by the ending are you just like, man, this is a great ending. It's like a great buildup. The payoff's up there. His short story collections are out of this world, though. All right. So, yeah, maybe consider that. Maybe I should do that. Yeah.

Short story collections

16:08Yeah, but let me know what you think of whatever Stephen King book you read. Do you have a particular short story or anthology of his that you can recommend? I like the earlier ones, like Skeleton Crew or whatever the other one is. I can't remember. It had like a bandaged hand with an eye in the middle of the palm. Ooh. Yeah. Creepy stuff. But he had some really good, like genuinely scary short stories. And then his son, Owen, whose pen name is Joe Hill, he has a great story collection,

16:39short story collection called 20th Century Ghosts that I think blows his dad out of the water. Oh, okay. Well, he has a quote on here, too, from Joe Hill. One of the best and most inventive ghost stories I've read in years. A beautiful dark rush of a novel. I didn't realize that was his son. I guess he did that to keep from appearing as a Nepo baby? Yep. And I think that was a great move. Yeah, that's cool. And even if his dad's calling publishers to get his stuff published, he deserves it. He's that good. All right. Well, I'll check those out. This was kind of fun. I liked it.

17:09I hope everyone else did. Yeah. I liked it, too, Chuck. I hope I didn't hog too many recommendations. No. This is great. I thought it was well-balanced and went down smooth, like a fine scotch. Well, let us know if you took this like a fine scotch or if you're just like, guys, don't ever do this again. We want to hear all of it. And I think short stuff is out. Happy Halloween. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

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