STBYM Listener Mail: The Magical Mystery Cult
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind Listener Mail. This is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And today, as Rob, I think just said, we are bringing you Listener Mail. Of course, at the end of every episode, we give out our email address for listeners like you to get in touch. That address is contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Okay.

Uh, it's been a little bit since the last one. So we are doing some catch up on, on series that have been a few weeks back at this point. Uh, but, uh, yeah, please keep the email coming. We do love all the messages we get. We're not able to respond to everything, uh, that comes into the inbox on the show itself, but, uh, rest assured we do read all of it. We appreciate all, all that we get. And again, that is contact at stuff to blow your mind.com. Get in touch anytime to let us know your thoughts about, uh,

episodes we've done on the show or just to suggest something for us to cover or even just to share something interesting, something you think that would would tickle our fancy. Yeah, you never know. Sometimes we can spin it off into an episode. And some folks also choose to take part in the Discord server for Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Weird House Cinema. If you would like to join that Discord server, we'll just shoot us an email at the aforementioned address and we'll shoot you the link to join.

All right. Well, I think we should kick things off with some responses to the series we did called The Mysteries. This was a collection of episodes about the mystery religions or the mystery cults of the ancient Greco-Roman world. Let's see, Rob, do you mind if I start with this message from Hannah? Yeah.

This message is responding to a part of the series where we were talking about the general context of ancient Greek and Roman polytheism, like how the cults of those gods were quite a bit different from what a person today might expect, especially if that person grew up in a culture primarily influenced by one of the big monotheisms.

Some of those differences were that within these ancient Greco-Roman polytheisms, there was generally no expectation of exclusivity in a person's relationship with any one god. The main public cults were not really focused on things like faith and belief, but instead on rituals and sacrifices, ritual sacrifices and festivals. You know, it's party time as well.

Uh, so, you know, people would perform rituals and sacrifices in exchange for the expectation of blessings from the God in question. Uh, another thing is just how many gods there were. There were lots and lots of them who could each provide blessings related to different parts of human life. Uh, things like economic situations, health and reproduction, uh, specific areas of geography and geographical features, uh,

And in this discussion, Rob brought up this analogy comparing the religious environment to a Cheesecake Factory menu, which I thought was a good one, except it

with the variation that unlike the Cheesecake Factory, which is centrally organized, it's a chain, the public cults of the ancient Greek and Roman world were not centrally organized. There wasn't really like a pope of Greco-Roman religion to make everybody do the same thing. Instead, you had lots of local cult control and even tons of local gods and local variations on the worship of widespread gods. And so listener Hannah gets in touch to offer a contribution to this analogy, which

Hannah says with subject line, a variety platter of deities. Hi again. I had to pause the mystery cult episode just to send you this. The perfect metaphor for ancient polytheism isn't a cheesecake factory menu. It's a local diner menu. Now that's the kind of distinction I appreciate. Let's hear Hannah's case here.

Hannah says,

Plus local stuff, parentheses grits in the South, scrapple in Pennsylvania, hyperlocal river god perhaps, and whatever stuff from the culture of the diner owners who maybe came from elsewhere. You've probably been to a Greek diner or an Italian flavored diner. Maybe these are the deities brought to a region by migration, trade, or conquest.

Anyway, thank you, as always, for sharing the joy in light of learning and exploring ideas. Y'all are lifesavers. And now I really want to milkshake. Cheers, Hannah. Well, Hannah, bravo. I thoroughly approve this analogy. I think it's great. Yes, our original analogy was was imperfect, as sometimes our real time analogies tend to be. This is a perfection of the analogy. So greatly appreciate it.

All right. Let's see. Rob, you want to do this next one from Jamie? Yeah. Let's see a bit of context. This one brings up a couple of things in the episode. One is the comparisons between ancient Greco-Roman mystery cults and Christianity.

It's long been a question in historical and religious scholarship to what extent Christianity should or should not be thought of as one of the mystery cults or influenced by one of the mystery cults. And then the other thing is just about our use of the word cult in the context of ancient Greek and Roman religion, where it has none of the negative connotations it has today. All right, then. Here is the email from Jamie. Dear Robert and Joe, I'm enjoying the pod as always, and especially the recent episode on the mystery cults of the ancient world.

I would have liked to hear even more, not just about how Christianity may have been a kind of mystery cult to begin with, but about how this tradition has continued even to this day. At least in Catholicism, mysteries such as the Trinity, for example, are a central part of faith, and one is encouraged to contemplate the mysteries, such as the resurrection and annunciation, while praying the rosary.

On another cult point, I liked how you pointed out the Call of Cthulhu version of the cultist as a hooded fiend. But if you are interested in reading a story that does an excellent job, in my opinion, presenting Cthulhu worship as if it were a mystery cult in the ancient sense, I recommend Copping Squid by Michael Shea. Keep up the good work. Jane.

Oh, thanks, Jamie. Uh, well, maybe we should go in reverse order here. Uh, I've only read one story ever by Michael Shea called the autopsy, but that story was fantastic. Uh, so I'm interested to read more. Michael Shea is a horror, horror and fantasy writer.

Yeah, horror, fantasy, some science fiction thrown in there as well. He lived 1946 through 2014. One of my favorite weird fiction authors. I actually got to exchange a couple of fan emails with him once. Yeah, a highlight of my fan emailing career. But his Nif the Lean fantasy tales are absolutely amazing, well worth seeking out.

He also wrote a number of great weird fiction tales, including several that take place in the Cthulhu mythos. Coughing Squid is a good one. I haven't read that one in years, though, so the mystery cult aspects of it have kind of faded from my recollection. But this one is collected in a collection that I have, Demiurge, the complete Cthulhu mythos tales. That one also includes Fat Face, which is one of his better known stories.

And yeah, the autopsy, as you mentioned, yeah, that is another really well-known Shea story. That one was adapted into an episode of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosity. That one directed by David Pryor. Now, I wonder in what sense Jamie means Copping Squid is about

Cthulhu worship as an actual mystery cult in the historical sense. Does that mean that it relies on secret knowledge? I mean, I guess the secret knowledge is sort of already there in the original story. Maybe that it's more about the experience of the initiate, like that core part. I think so. There are two different Michael Shea

mythos stories that are kind of combined in my memory, and I really need to revisit them to tease them apart. But I have a vague recollection of a story that is very much from the cultist or would-be cultist point of view, you know, beginning to have this initiation into the sacred rites of Cthulhu.

That's actually a great idea for a story, given the historical knowledge we have now about what the initiation process was probably like. I'm thinking specifically of the Eleusinian Mysteries, where there's this idea that everyone would have been told that it's a really powerful experience, it'll change your life, it'll let you go without a burden into the...

to the underworld at the time of death. And so you've heard all this good stuff about it, but people can't tell you what it is. And so like, what if you get there and the truth of what the experience is, is quite horrifying. But then for some reason you have to keep go telling people like, yeah, it's great. You got to go.

Yeah, I really need to read these stories again, because, again, Michael Shea is terrific. He is one of those authors that I will I keep coming back to and I'll just figure out what is well, what's a story of his that I am very fond of, but I've also forgotten most stuff. And then it's time to dive back in.

Now, coming back to the first half of Jamie's email about the comparisons between Christianity and mystery cults, for one thing, extending into the comparisons of modern Christianity to mystery cults, there's actually a significant part of the book. One of the main sources we talked about in that series, the book by Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults in the Ancient World.

Uh, but yeah, so a Bowdoin toward the end of the book has a long section in which he makes some pretty strong comparisons between what we know about the experience of, of being in an ancient mystery cult and, uh, not so much with Catholicism, but with, uh, with certain Pentecostal forms of Christianity, specifically like the ecstatic snake handling cults of Appalachia. But as to the broader question of Christianity and, uh, mystery cults, it is interesting. Like,

There have long been these questions like, to what extent does the Christian practice of baptism constitute an initiation ritual? Is the Eucharist, like the ritual taking of bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ, is that a mystery practice?

Also questions about whether Christianity began as something more like the other mystery religions or was influenced by them and then maybe drifted away to become a more doctrinal cult. But I think a lot of scholars now.

kind of disagree with that interpretive lens because specifically the idea that Christianity like was strongly influenced by the mystery cults or began as a mystery cult. And I think one of the main reasons a lot of historians have turned against that is that that kind of undersells the particular features of Judaism as a foundational influence on Christianity.

And it's fair to point out that there is a lot we don't know about the early years of Christianity and its origins. But, of course, that cuts both ways against all interpretations. But based on what we do know, I think the best interpretation of the origin of Christianity is that it began as an apocalyptic movement within Judaism, which was focused on the idea that the Jewish God would soon come down to destroy wickedness,

invert existing power relationships like overthrow Roman control and so forth, and establish a good, just kingdom on earth, sort of right all wrongs. And then as early Christians tried to make sense of the death and then their belief in the resurrection of their leader, Jesus of Nazareth,

And then also as the story of Jesus began to spread among Greek and Roman polytheists rather than only among Jews, it morphed into a religion of individual salvation, being not about the fact that God would soon come to earth and set things right, but about the idea that you need to set yourself right with God by accepting the saving sacrifice of Christ.

But again, there's a lot we don't know about the early years of Christianity with great confidence, so it's hard to be too sure about any particular story of how it evolved.

However, there is an interesting vocabulary fact that I don't think we talked about in the episode. Rob, let me know if we did get into this and I'm forgetting. But it's the idea of the early Christian use of the Greek word mysterion, which is often used to refer to the initiation rites, the secret initiation rites of cults like the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The word mysterion does appear in early Christian texts, such as the Gospels and in some of the epistles in the New Testament.

where it seems in this context it's used not to refer to initiation rites. Instead, mysterion here is always used to refer to secret knowledge, generally hidden knowledge that has been revealed in secret to a privileged group. So an example is like when Jesus is telling the parable of the sower in the Gospel of Mark,

Apparently in the Greek, there is invocation of the word mysterion there, referring to the secret interpretation of the parable that Jesus gives only to his inner circle of disciples. So the masses only sort of hear the parable and puzzle what to make of it, but then there is a secret knowledge, a sort of secret reading of the parable that is given to his inner circle.

So that's how the word mysterion is used in early Christian writings from the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. But then a few centuries later, I think it's by the 4th century CE, Bowdoin says this is happening. The word mysterion is now just commonly used to refer to Christian rituals like the Eucharist or baptism.

And there has been scholarly debate about why. Like, why is the word mysterion used here? Some think that it's like the influence of Greek and Roman polytheism, basically. It's like taking a word from one religious context and applying it to the new dominant religion where it once referred to these rituals. But Bowdoin actually makes an argument that this application of the word mysterion to something like the Eucharist

is it reflects in his view a an understanding that the christians had at the time that the rituals were forms of secret knowledge so it's more uh in keeping with the way the word is used in the early christian texts like forms of secret knowledge that are now revealed so

So, you know, the secret of baptism in the Eucharist that was previously known only to God and perhaps to some of the prophets, but now these rituals are known to all Christians having been revealed by Jesus. It is a secret that you have been brought in on. And of course, there is the long-running question of comparisons between baptism and various forms of cultic initiation, including initiation to the mystery cults,

This could well be a legitimate sort of common growth or a legitimate comparison here. But of course, it's worth pointing out that baptism predates Christianity, and that's not even a controversial fact even among Christians. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. It was a pre-existing practice. Right, right. I can see, basing it in part just on my own experience, baptism as a child is

There are mysteries involved. It's kind of frightful. You have to go in the back of the church and go through secret chambers. They're not really secret, but they felt kind of secret. You have to wear a gown over your swimsuit and then go into a walk-in bathtub with the pastor. And then you're dunked. It was a weird, memorable experience.

Yeah, though, as you know, we talked about, I think a little bit in the episode, the idea that there may have been some ways rituals were done earlier in Christianity that tended to be more in the imagistic religious fashion that became more doctrinal as time went on. That might not be always true in every case, but in certain cases it is. And I think baptism might be a good point there because.

It could well be that baptism was something that was initially meant as a much more overwhelming, powerful emotional experience. And then it transitioned into something that people did with infants where you're not even really going to have an experiential memory of it. So there's less emphasis on the overwhelming emotional experience and encounter with the power of God. Yeah. And of course, walk-in bathtubs came later as well. Right. Yes. Yeah.

But as your story points out, of course, I mean, even later Christians and modern Christians still do adult baptism, not just infant baptism. There are different theological points of view on that. Clearly, we could come back at some later date and do an entire episode on baptism and baptism-related rites. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

All right. I'm going to read the next one since you had a long response to that last one. I'll give you a break. This one comes to us from Josh. Also a response to the mystery cults, specifically to part three. I don't remember which part three really was, but I'm sure the email will get into it.

So Josh says,

As far as the mysteries themselves are concerned, the totality of the descriptions led me to wonder if they were what would now be considered a magic show. Obviously, if viewers did partake in an hallucinogenic substance, it would certainly have heightened the experience. If the rites were magic tricks, you wouldn't want outsiders copying them because of competition, but also a poor reenactment would possibly ruin the magic by exposing the trick.

I think that's a good point. And I don't. Yeah, a lot. Clearly, a lot of theatricality was involved. It could well extend to like sleight of hand or other types of tricks. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we got into this a little bit with Glycon, too. Like the the the criticism of Glycon, the serpent god, was that it was a like an obvious puppet.

And, you know, they might have had an ax to grind, as we discussed, but we might read into that like, yeah, whatever your tricks are, they need to be convincing. But then again, are your tricks going to be convincing to someone who doesn't like willingly want to believe and be wowed?

I can imagine some folks just coming into the mystery cults and like, do you not want to be converted? Do you not want to have a revelation about the nature of the universe? You just want to point at things and accuse them of being puppets. You know, I still think we never got an answer on the question I had about like, what was the spirit of the criticism of the puppet? Right.

Like, was it a problem that it's a puppet? Because in the religious context here, you've got cult statues for most cults. So it's not like it's a problem to have a physical representation of the God that's not literally the God's body. So what's the, was it an issue of taste?

Did they not like that the puppet was animated? I don't know. Like, I think we never quite got to the bottom of like, what was it about the fact that it's a puppet that is that is so bad? Yeah, I mean, there are lots of puppets and churches, Protestant churches today and have been for decades, like Christian puppetry. That's the whole whole realm unto itself.

But yet then you had the other side where you had like the Christian writers just trying to spoil it for people saying like, yeah, what really happens in the secret temple is that they have sex in there. Yeah.

All right. Well, Josh continues here and says, in terms of the idea that it may just be copulation or some other such mundanity, if they had managed to make a non-lethal hallucinogen, and if that was not available to the masses, anything they showed the initiants would have been impressive. Maybe it was just the first blacklight art accompanied by Rosalius Floyd's Dark Side of Luna. That's cute. Nice. Absolutely.

As for Christmas, in the Netherlands, we have Sinterklaas, which is the saint's birthday, not Jesus's. Families do a sort of secret Santa where they give gifts, which are accompanied by a poem written by the giver about the receiver from the point of view of the saint.

So even while believing in the authenticity of the living saint, children still pretend to be him and use their knowledge of the recipient to further the illusion of the saint's omniscience. They are simultaneously on both sides of the farce. That's interesting. I didn't know that. I like that. Like I say, I think I talked a little bit about Santa Claus in these episodes as well. And I feel my own take is like that's the comfortable space to be in with some sort of a

a right like this, you know, to acknowledge the illusion, but also embrace the illusion and have that middle space for a kind of like the mythic. Yeah. Anyway, Josh says, thanks for the intellectual stimulation. Cheers, Josh.

By the way, speaking of gods and goddesses and cults and mystery cults and so forth, I want to give a quick shout out to a product that I've really been enjoying recently. This is not a sponsor. This is just something I like that it looks like not enough people have heard about. It only came out a few months back. It's called Deify, a mythical solo role-playing game by Alison D'Antonio. Oh, yeah.

And it's really good. Like it is essentially it's a game you play by yourself, but it's also heavily based in like creative writing prompts and you use a tarot deck to decide like what's happening as you follow the path of a god or goddess from their emergence, you know,

through their prime years into their decline along the way, sort of like navigating what's happening between the gods and also what's happening with the earthly following below. Oh, interesting. So check that out. If that sounds interesting to you, check it out. You can buy this book anywhere you get books. I'm just personally enjoying it a lot right now.

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Visit iBrands.com or call 1-844-9-iBrands for more information. All right. Maybe let's move on to this email from Jeff about an episode you did, Rob, that was an interview with an author about Douglas Adams. Yeah. The episode in question was 2023's The Mind of Douglas Adams with Kevin John Davies. Davies wrote a book titled The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams.

detailing, you know, a lot about the mind and the life of the author who gave us The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was a fun little chat talking about Adams, talking about Doctor Who, as well as some other related classic science fiction. And as is essential here, some video games that were related to The Hitchhiker's World and some of the other worlds of Douglas Adams and his involvement in those games.

That's right. So Jeff says, Hey guys, I found this unsent in my drafts folder. Uh-oh.

Oh, man. That's where the angry emails usually end up, right? They're like, oh, I wisely decided not to send this one. How dare you? So Jeff goes on to say, maybe not so useful for the show, given the delayed response to a vault episode and even more digression than normal. But I thought you two might be personally interested anyway. Jeff, much to your surprise, here we are. Here we are. Now, Jeff did have responses to a few other episodes, but we're skipping ahead to the response to Douglas Adams here.

Jeff says regarding the vault episode about Douglas Adams, I played the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy interactive fiction game back in the day. And it was indeed maddening. It would lie to you. Uh, at one point, spoiler alert for a 40 year old game, you needed to impress an AI screening device before it considered you worthy to access a specific area. You had to show it something intellectually challenging, uh,

The solution was to show it that you simultaneously possessed both tea and no tea. The only way to achieve this was to go into your own mind and remove your common sense, after which you could easily pick up no tea while you had some tea in your inventory.

And Jeff, I sympathize. Part of the reason I wanted to respond to this email, despite your warnings, was that I also, when I was younger, played the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, which was a if you never played a game of this sort, it was kind of like the Zork game. It was like text based adventure game where you would type commands. So like, you know, open mailbox, pick up letter, use key, things like that.

And, oh boy, this one, I never made it to whatever situation you're talking about here. I got killed just over and over and over again, much earlier in the game. I would always get destroyed, like right in the initial invasion. The Martians would come in, or I don't know if they were Martians. The aliens would come in and bulldoze my house. It took me forever to figure out how to get out of the house. Oh yeah, that happens like right away in Hitchhiker's. Yes.

I mean, I think I was in middle school. Maybe I'd figure it out better now. I don't know. Maybe having a little bit of a better sense of the Douglas Adams sense of humor. Oh, because also when I played this game, I had no idea what Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was. This was just installed on a computer at school. Oh, and I didn't know what it was or why. Yeah. Anyway, coming back to Jeff's message while playing a different interactive fiction game.

I was completely baffled by a problem. I couldn't just Google for cheats back then. So in desperation, I wrote directly to the author of the game. Whoa. Store-bought games could be created entirely by one person then. And he sent back a hand-typed postcard I kept for many years that just said, Dear Jeff, throw the tape recorder through the window. I wonder what the postman thought. Yeah.

You know, I think if you're a postal worker, you see so much of other people's mail, you just get bored with other people's secrets. Does it even matter to read it anymore? Yeah, nowadays they probably stop posting it on their Instagram after a couple of weeks of being a mail person. Jeff continues, the Hitchhiker's Game was released by Infocom, probably the most famous interactive fiction game in the company. Infocom's solution to easing the addled brains of stuck players was the invention of Invisicules books.

The books would include hints without ruining the whole game for you. The questions were printed in regular ink, but the solutions were in invisible ink that would only be revealed when you ran the included magic marker over them. So if the question is, how do I open the locked door? The first clue might be something like, did you notice the keyhole? The next, have

Have you encountered anyone holding a set of keys? And the third, wait until the guard is sleeping and steal his key.

The books had a good sense of humor and would also mess with you. Since all the questions were immediately visible and therefore potential spoilers, they peppered the hints with red herrings like, don't reveal the next clue until the magic bird gives you the shovel, followed by, there is no magic bird in this game. Don't ruin your experience by revealing clues before you are absolutely stuck.

And then finally, Jeff says, while buying and running these lost games is difficult to do these days, there are sites that allow you to play them now. Infocom's games are true classics, but new interactive fiction games are still being written today. Worth checking out. Yeah, I should check some of these out because this is a whole genre of games, early games and contemporary games that I really don't know much about and don't have any really any direct experience playing them.

I can't believe I didn't think about this until now, but I not only played a few of these text-based adventure games, I actually created some when I was in middle school. Once again, I guess I was exposed to these things and I was learning QBasic and I started programming little text-based adventures that I thought were hilarious at the time. I don't know what I'd think now. I don't remember what I thought was so funny, but I was really yucking it up there on my IBM 386. Yeah.

Okay, should we do some Weird House Cinema responses? Sure, sure. This next one comes to us from Scott. Subject line, the telephone box. Comments from an old.

Hi guys, I enjoyed listening to your recent Weird House episode on the telephone box. Being a person who grew up in the long-ago days when telephone booths ranged the landscape in their thousands, I was amused by the two of you trying to remember if you'd ever actually used one and questioning the apparent incongruity of seeking privacy to make a phone call while standing in a glass box in full view. As an official old guy, I believe I can enlighten you.

Privacy is certainly an aspect of the enclosed phone booths of yore, but not in the way you surmised. Since phone booths were commonly located in busy public spaces, environmental noise was a problem. The enclosure was to keep external noises out rather than keeping your conversation in. Since you generally had to have coins in hand to use one, it was extremely frustrating to pay for the call only to have a loud bus roll past obliterating what you or the other person said.

I really should have thought of this. Yes, obviously the enclosure is to it so you can hear your call despite being right on the street corner.

Yeah, because nowadays we all on our cell phones, we inevitably have that situation. I have like a train that runs by my house. So sometimes I'll be outside. I'll be on the phone. Here comes a train so I can walk inside and get out of the noise. And you can do that kind of thing, obviously, in various urban environments as well. You know, walk around the corner, walk inside a restaurant, maybe if they'll allow that. But yeah, I should have thought about this as well.

Anyway, they continue. Making it out in public was a safety feature, too. By being fully exposed to view, thieves couldn't use one to lie in ambush undetected, nor could a victim be pulled into an opaque box to be roughed up away from witnesses. The full enclosure also protected the user from the elements, keeping you dry in the rain and snow, protected from wind, and helping to mitigate the cold.

Some had small ventilation fans to alleviate the greenhouse effect of all that glass in summer. Although one has to wonder if the protection was for the benefit of the user or the telephone equipment.

I enjoy being entertained and enlightened by your work. Thank you, Scott. Excellent point, Scott. Thank you very much. For some reason, the telephone booth scene that kept going through my head while reading this is actually the one in Scanners where he hacks the computer with his brain from the telephone. Yes. Great scene. Yeah, we talked about that in our Weird House episode.

on scanners. I also, after we did the episode, I kept thinking about Clark Kent, of course, always goes into or used to always go into a phone booth to transform into Superman. Or maybe he didn't even do it all that many times, but it became the cliche. It became like the iconic thing. Like it's a place where you can go and

Change all your clothes and change your identity and come out as a superhuman. Come out as your real identity. Take off your human disguise. All right. This next message is from Ken. Ken says, I love the recent reviews of short films, and I have a recommendation if you haven't heard of it before. There is a short film called The Cube by Jim Henson of The Muppets, etc.,

I think you can find it on YouTube. I saw it on television when I was seven years old and it really freaked me out. I also didn't understand it at all. I had no recollection of what the film was called. And years later, I had to do numerous online searches with vague descriptions until I finally found it. Hope you find it interesting. Thanks again for the podcast. Sincerely, Ken.

Well, Ken, weird minds think alike. This is already on my list. It's on my running list for the show. I've been thinking about it for months now. Oh, I'm all for it. This is a film that I'm very familiar with from some of the Jim Henson documentaries I've seen over the years and exhibits at Atlanta's Center for Puppetry Arts, that sort of thing. But I've never seen it in full, or at least I don't think I have. So yeah, the next time we're feeling the

the, the poll for some, uh, short cinema. Let's, uh, let's do it.

By the way, for those who may be confused about this right now, this is a different film than Cube, the one where people awaken in a giant maze of cubes, many of which are like full of saws and stuff that murder them. But I'm up for that one as well. And I don't think I've ever seen that one in full. I've just seen like chunks of it, bloody chunks of it on TV back in the day. I think that one's Canadian, isn't it? It is, in fact, Canadian. Yes. So they're both on the list. Yeah, both.

Get everything you want, Ken. All right. This next one comes to us from Lawrence. Lawrence says, Hi, Robert, Joe and JJ. Thank you for covering The Hunger. I never realized it was poorly received. Its resurgence in the 90s where all things vampire reigned culturally supreme was not nearly as surprising. I always thought of The Hunger as one of those non-vampire vampire stories. Movies that sort of lie somewhere between sci-fi blood drinkers and people who only think they're vampires. Do you know what I mean?

I do know what you mean. The only movie I can think of at the moment where it's ambiguous, where the vampire is actually a vampire is, uh, is, uh, George Romero's Martin. That's a big one. Yeah.

You also see this, if we think of this as like a soft vampire film, we do also have examples of soft werewolf films. And as I recently discussed on The Monster Fact, this is kind of an interesting category because you can get into the history of the terminology for like lycanthropy and werewolf, but especially lycanthropy is early usage being like a catch-all description for different conditions that we're

were probably mental illnesses. And so there's this whole realm of usage for the term lycanthropy that is just tied to actual observations and attempts to classify some forms of mental illness or disease.

So, yeah, in fact, one of the big ones, the Lon Chaney Jr. Wolfman movie, originally in the script, that one was going to leave it ambiguous whether he was turning into a wolf or not. Like it was going to be a soft werewolf movie. And then at some point in the production, they were like, no, no, no, we want a real wolfman. People want to see a wolfman. And so it took the form that we all know and love. It's hard to argue with that.

Absolutely. Anyway, the email continues here from Lawrence. Lawrence says, as for Weird House Pics, 1982's Cat People and Donkey Skin are both touch-the-fur movies. I can recommend both because Criterion has a beautiful transfer of donkey skin and Cat People spares showing us any Malcolm McDowell sex. Thanks for all you do, Lawrence. Indeed, Lawrence, that is all essential to know. Moving forward.

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All right. This next message is from Jesse. Jesse says, Hey guys, um, I'll have to not gush here. I love you both. And I'm so grateful for your shows. Uh, and then Jesse goes on to say some, some very nice things about the podcast. We'll skip a bit here, but thank you, Jesse. Uh, very kind of you. Uh, Jesse says, I do have some suggestions that I have not seen on weird house cinema yet.

The first suggestion is an afterthought and not why I originally wanted to write in. However, I was watching this movie with my kids tonight and realized with surprise that I hadn't yet seen it come into your purview flight of the navigator. It is so obvious. I am forced to conclude that you had already considered it and decided it just doesn't fit, which I understand, uh, with protest, if the case, uh, no, I, I don't think we've ruled it out yet, or I don't know if you have, I haven't looked into it. I haven't seen this movie.

I saw it as a kid and I have to say Flight of the Navigator was 1986. This one really unsettled me in a way I don't think I ever quite recovered from. Like it has some...

minor spoilers, but it has some plot elements and including, uh, that involve like time dilation and, um, uh, and, uh, it, uh, it just gets, it gets a lot heavier, uh, than perhaps I expected to the degree to which I had any expectations going into movies as a kid. But, um, uh, yeah, this one, this one troubled me and I think it troubled me enough that I've kind of

stayed away from it, like not to the extent where I'm turning down opportunities to watch it, but I've maybe just have like subconscious barriers up to rewatching Flight of the Navigator. Therefore, I would obviously love to go back and watch it and reevaluate it as a grown up and as a parent and all of that. So, yeah, I'd love to put it on the list. I know it's one that

A lot of folks saw his kids and I wonder how many other viewers had a similar reaction to the one I had. Sorry, I was laughing during your answer because I realized I was mixing up two movies. Oh, really? Until you started talking about, I was not thinking of Flight of the Navigator. I was thinking of Night Flyers from 1987, which is the George R.R. Martin-pinned vampire movie with Miguel Ferrer.

Wait, oh my God. No, this is, I double mixed it up. I was mixing up George R. R. Martin's Night Flyers, the sci-fi horror movie with Flight of the Navigator. But what I really had in my mind was not Night Flyers. It was The Night Flyer, a film with Miguel Ferrer about a vampire that is based on a story by Stephen King, which I was confusing with the

The Martin sci-fi, this is all a jumble now. But either way, I was thinking about like an R-rated horror movie, not like a made-for-kids adventure. Well, I haven't seen The Night Flyer, nor did I ever read the short story that it's based upon. But I do remember seeing the video box with that hideous-looking vampire and the airplane on it.

It would be hilarious if Jesse wrote in like, yeah, the other day I was watching The Night Flyer with my kids. All right, well, we'll put them all on the consideration list.

Next, Jesse says,

Whether or not you ever take the leap and do it for the show, given your proclivities, I highly recommend you at least check it out for yourselves as it is unmatched as far as zany 80s fare goes. Also, the rendition of the Jabberwocky in that movie gave me nightmares for years as a kid. It is great. You can watch it free on YouTube. And then Jesse shares a link.

Jesse says, all my best, deepest thanks to you guys. Jesse, well, thank you so much, Jesse. Really, really appreciate the email and the suggestions. I've not seen either of these movies, but I'm going to look up The Alice in Wonderland. I looked at it briefly on IMDb, and I did notice that Jason Lives director Tom McLaughlin plays the Jabberwocky, is in the Jabberwocky suit. So there you go. Oh, my God. I just looked it up. It looks like...

What does it remind me of? It's like...

that Russian rendition of Lord of the Rings, but with much brighter colors. The Jabberwocky costume in question does look horrifying. Like, not super Jabberwocky-y, you know? It doesn't look like that iconic illustration so much. It looks a little weirdly fleshy. Man, it says Bo Bridges and Carol Channing. Oh, wow. Yeah, I glanced at the cast. It's a crazy, crazy costume.

collection of actors. Lloyd Bridges is the White Knight. John Stamos. Wow. All right. As we begin to close out here, I'm just going to turn to Discord here. I have a few just random short thoughts from folks here about various things. Beginning here with Thorquill.

Thorkell writes in and says, I just finished listening to part three of Hunters of the Deep and had mentioned it to my significant other. And she pointed out a fact I may have missed if it was mentioned. I never realized the black sea devil angler was only six inches or 15 centimeters or so long. I, too, had similar posters of fish growing up like Rob and perhaps the various illustrations not drawn to scale threw off my perspective. I'm glad it's not just me.

So it's often hard to get scale with, uh, with sea creatures, you know, you don't have like a tree in the background to, to. Or tape measure, uh, or tape dispenser. That's what you put next to things. Right.

All right. And then Shadow Rat writes in and says, I just watched and loved La Cabina. It really reminded me of the 90s movie Cube. Oh, with this sense that some unchecked industry is just producing this horrifying death trap for no reason. It has to have been an inspiration for Cube.

Seems quite possible, yeah. All right. Then HotNapalmDeath writes in and says, Finally listening to the Dune episodes, one factor that you missed when discussing the failed Jodorowsky Dune project was that if it had succeeded, we probably wouldn't have Alien or the Alien franchise. That's a great, great point as well. I think we did allude to the fact that

That project not coming together did lead to a number of different projects, things that Jodorowsky himself did, like, say, the Meta Barons graphic novel series. That's great. And his work with Mobius there. But yeah, so many other things kind of sprang out of that. It was very much like a...

we can almost think of it as a whale fall, a cinematic whale fall. Like it did not come to fruition. It sank to the bottom and it was consumed by all of these other creatures and therefore fed a rich ecosystem. All right. Taylor writes in and says, just finished the hunger episode. And it reminded me of another eternal vampire goth romance movie that the hunger must have inspired and would make its own excellent weird house episode. Only lovers left alive.

Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are our listless immortal lovers in that one, which tackles a lot of the same us-against-the-world themes that Joe referenced and has a great shoegaze score. Also, my wife and I watched The Love Witch for our Valentine's Day after a few of y'all here in the Discord turned me on to it. And may I say thank you. It was a darkly hilarious treat. All real-world reds are dull now.

The Love Witch is fantastic. I think often about the way that movie looks, which is so interesting. It feels both

reminiscent of a time gone by like a looks like a a way that it seems movies used to look but don't look anymore but also feels like a totally different uh visual aesthetic has been created as well yeah i recently re-watched the love witch uh on an airplane and uh and fell in love with it all over again i feel like in its own way it's it's a perfect film uh it

In that it clearly knew exactly what it wanted to convey and what it wanted to capture and seemingly pulled all of that off. So I can't recommend The Love Witch enough. It's maybe not for everyone, but if it is for you, then it's perfect.

All right. And finally, there was some discussion on the discord about what sort of film we should be considering for the 200th Weird House Cinema Selection, which is coming up. Let's see a week from tomorrow. So, Joe, you can give me some feedback. I'm just going to run through the list of the movies that were mentioned.

First of all, 1975's The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Classic, of course. Yeah. 74's Phantom of the Paradise. Ooh, I mean, we talk about that at least every couple weeks anyway. Yeah, yeah. Midsommar from 2019. I haven't seen that one. I can't comment. Oh.

I liked it. It's a great feel bad movie, but no, I mean, it really is good, but it's the vibes are bad and it's a good film. And it I don't know if I want to talk about that on Weird House. It seems like it'd be a bummer of a time. Was that an A24 film? Yes. Okay.

I recently was served some ads, or maybe I followed the account, for an A24 film-themed burlesque show. And my initial thought was like, I think they pulled it off. I think they pulled it off. I saw later some images. It looked fun. But I was like, wow, that is a challenging theme for your burlesque show to go with A24.

I respect that, though. That's funny. And I can see how you could make it work. But yeah, Midsommar is great, but I kind of doubt we'll do it on Weird House. Okay. How about the next one? 1999's Beowulf starring Christophe Lambert. I don't know. That's more possible. It's been a long time since I've seen it. That's the one that's like,

Sci-fi Beowulf. It takes place in a castle in the future, maybe with lasers. Yeah, it's all fun and games until the worst CGI thing of all time emerges. It's like beyond the rock scorpion monster. The Grendel, I recall, looks like it's made out of CGI link sausages. Yeah, that's the one.

All right. So that one's a maybe. 1999's Bicentennial Man. Never seen it, but is that the one that's got Robin Williams as a robot of some kind? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we might do a Robin Williams film eventually. He was such a great and weird performer in his own right. But I think there's some other Robin Williams films that are going to be a little higher up the list. Flubber. Sure. Yeah.

All right. 1999's Wild Zero, the Japanese comedy horror film. Weirdly enough, I was just recently looking at revisiting that on the show. I saw that when I was in high school. My friend Ben showed it to me and that was a great time. I recall it's been for a long I barely remember it, but I recall it was absolutely nuts, but in a great, great way.

All right. The next one is the Romanian sci-fi animated film Delta Space Mission. This is one I haven't seen it. I don't think you've seen it either. But this one has been on my radar because it looks super weird. I actually I watched part of it on an airplane, but then switched to something else because I just not because there was anything wrong with it. But it just wasn't the vibe I was going for at the moment. But it was on Criterion Channel for a bit. And I believe Death Crocodile put it out on Blu-ray. A really nice package. It looks amazing.

I don't know if it's right for the 200th Weird House Cinema selection, but it is one we might come back to. And then finally, it was also mentioned that we might consider 1983's Videodrome, given that we often reference the Atlanta Videodrome rental store.

Plus, Videodrome is a movie that does come up in our conversations a lot, both on Weird House Cinema and on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. You know, I think of it almost more like a reference text for us than something we would feature, if that makes any sense. That's...

I have similar feelings about I'm very much on the fence when it comes to Rocky Horror Picture Show because it's Rocky Horror Picture Show feels like kind of a foundational text, at least for me personally. And like, so I don't know. It's like sometimes I'm like, yes, we absolutely should do Rocky Horror Picture Show. And then other times I'm like, no, it's like Rocky Horror Picture Show is what you refer back to to make sense of everything else. So I know I know exactly what you're talking about. That's sort of what I mean about video. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Seems more like the thing that we compare and contrast the movie we're talking about to rather than the movie we talk about. Yeah. So ultimately, maybe we're more likely to do like shock treatment at some point or do some sort of a obviously a bad video drone ripoff, that sort of thing. At any rate, I really enjoyed reading through everyone's suggestions in the Discord server. That's the sort of back and forth you can get if you join the Stuff to Blow Your Mind Discord server.

I'm not promising either one, but for some reason I would say it's more likely that we do existence than that we do Videodrome. Oh, yeah. Oh, that. Yeah, that would be that would be a choice for sure. I haven't seen that one in a while. All right. Well, we're going to keep thinking about it. You'll find out one way or another in about a week.

In the meantime, uh, we thank everyone for writing in and we just encourage you to keep writing. Uh, we remind you that stuff to blow your mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on weird house cinema. Um, again, uh, write in if you want to join the discord server, look, look, find us online. We're on various social media accounts as well. Get the podcast wherever you get your podcast. And if you're on letterboxd, uh,

You can go there and find us on Letterboxd. Our username is Weird House. Follow us there and you can find a nice list of all the Weird House movies we've ever done. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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