Ghouls Next Door

SGJ has a knack for transforming folkloric monsters we’ve grown accustomed to, twisting them into a new, sympathetic, and terrifying creature; something entirely of his own making. He did this in Mongrels, the sometimes funny, most often dark, familial story about werewolves and ancestry (and one of my favorite SGJ novels). He’s done it again in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, now with vampires.

28 Years Later is a wild, emotional ride exploring the complications of growing up in the midst of an apocalypse. Garland and Boyle return to the series, offering a vibrant and creative story where even amongst decades of death, the loss of a loved one still hits hard.Ghouls are joined by fellow podcaster, Erick Barragan of Cinepamina to discuss the highs, lows and very many choices made in this film.

They Live is a timeless science fiction, dystopian piece of media criticism. Director John Carpenter argues the film is a documentary, and he says what we’re all thinking, using alien overlords to reveal the real-world villains of Mass Media, Big Corporations, and the Surveillance state. All of Carpenter’s nightmares have only increased since the 1988 release, with the rise of Flock cameras, media conglomerates taking over the communication world, and the advertising business infiltrating every waking minute of our lives.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a triumphant and heartbreaking tale of human resilience. Against the backdrop of the end of the world, Carl and his fellow crawlers fight for their lives against a system hell bent on minimizing them to tools of entertainment. Turns out aliens are real and they’ve got intergalactic reality shows of Hunger Games-proportions.

Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, Blink Twice, cautions us against the horrors of forgiving, forgetting, and relinquishing control. A tale told before its time, watching it merely two years after its release, the film feels disturbingly prescient in a post Epstein Files ‘release’ world.