Our First Fears Dan Poblocki

On episode 18 of Our First Fears, NY Times and USA Today bestselling author, Daniel Kraus joins me in a conversation about Fangoria Magazine – the tentpole horror movie publication that debuted in the late 1970s and quickly became a shocking staple on magazine stands and in bookshops due to the gory horror makeup effects and grody titles displayed on its covers.Daniel Kraus is the co-creator of The Shape of Water with Guillermo Del Toro, the co-author of The Living Dead with George A. Romero,...

On episode 17, WE ARE BACK . . . this time, chatting with writer and horror podcast-rock-star, Neil McRobert about a movie that made him cry when he was just a wee lad - James Cameron’s 1984 science-fiction classic, The Terminator. Our conversation runs from ideas of cyborg body horror, to the trope of the unkillable thing that chases you, relentlessly. We poke around in notions of how time-travel stories work (or don't), fiction writers as prophets, and the existential terror I feel wh...

On episode 16 of Our First Fears, NY Times bestseller, Tracey Baptiste reveals the map of her childhood village where her friends and family banded together to protect themselves from jumbies, the creepy creatures that haunt the Caribbean nation, Trinidad and Tobago, in the dark of night. We discuss the secret things that hide inside the stories we write, how tales of monsters help keep people in line and also reveal our biases, and how we writers’ trickster-like powers allow us to dare audie...

On today’s episode, author Sara Farizan chats with me about the 1982 cult film Halloween III: Season of the Witch. We also tie the film’s themes pretty tightly to her recent YA horror novel, Dead Flip, which is set in the late 80s and early 90s and revolves around a possibly haunted pinball machine. We get into the pop-culture of cursed objects and cursed capitalism, how nostalgia can be used for both good and evil, why certain story-tellers of the past might have gotten burne...

On episode 14 of Our First Fears, author and illustrator, Derrick Chow joins me in appreciation of the genius and creativity of beloved actress Shelley Duvall’s possibly-accidentally-terrifying television show from the 1980s, Faerie Tale Theatre. Together, we explore the connection between slasher-film final girls and faerie tale heroines, what makes a great faerie tale villain, and whether or not these old stories might have been a prototype for modern psychological analysis and therapy.Derr...

We’ve reached lucky episode 13 of Our First Fears, and today, I get to talk with author Russell Ginns, or R. U. Ginns, about the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Together, we dig into how artists use elements of unease to create a sense of paranoia for their audiences. We talk zombies versus pod-people, cults of the 1970s, how much we love actress Veronica Cartwright, and finally, we discuss what many consider to be one of the most chilling endings of any horror film EVER and h...