Castle of Horror Podcast

Recently the Castle of Horror asked listeners what kinds of films they'd like us to discuss, and the winner far and away was "more anthologies." That's probably because horror anthologies are always fun and rarely wear out their welcome—generally, if you're not crazy about the segment you're watching, if you hang around a few minutes, […]

In this episode, the Castle of Horror team looks at the first film in the Bloodthirsty Trilogy, a tryptic of supernatural horror films from Japanese director Michio Yamamoto. This week: The Vampire Doll (1970), about a girl who goes looking for her missing brother at a spooky mansion haunted by a murderous vampire ghost. Yamamoto's […]

I watched the Star Wars Holiday Special for the first time on November 17, 1978, the one and only time it broadcast, when it bumped that week's episodes of The Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman on CBS. I was seven years old and I remember three things about it: I remember Bea Arthur singing in […]

This week for a "hangout" episode (between more structured panel reviews) the podcast looked at a couple of films, one of them being the 1969 Spanish film The House That Screamed, or La Residencia. We chose it as an excellent example of Eurotrash horror. Eurotrash horror is a slightly unfortunate term for mid-century horror films […]

In our final Castle of Horror movie panel discussion of the year, we focused on a Christmas movie: Saint (2010) also known as Sint in its native Netherlands. We could have chosen any of a number of films in which the "hat on head/suit that's red" brought cinematic mayhem, but what made Saint special was […]

  This week we continue our Stephen King retrospective with a look at the 1987 film A Return to Salem's Lot directed by Larry Cohen. This is a film made by one fascinating, iconoclastic director—Larry Cohen, who would give us movies like the 1985 commercial-culture horror satire The Stuff and the bizarre 1982 giant-monster film […]

This week we continue our Stephen King Retrospective with a look at the 2004 miniseries Salem's Lot, starring Rob Lowe and Andre Braugher and Rutger Hauer. Directed by Mikael Salomon for TNT, Salem's Lot had to fight an uphill battle, to begin with. Tobe Hoober of Poltergeist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre had delivered a scary, […]

This week we talk with Roger Corman, who with wife and filmmaker Julie Corman are the focus of the new Shout Factory series Cult-tastic: Tales From The Trenches with Roger and Julie Corman. An extraordinarily prolific director and producer, Corman occupies a unique place in Hollywood history, because as much as he was responsible for […]

[SPOILERS FOR THE SHINING] This week we continue our Stephen King retrospective with Doctor Sleep, directed by Mike Flanagan and starring Ewan MacGregor as Danny Torrance, the boy who escaped the Overlook Hotel at the end of The Shining. Which The Shining, you might ask? There are so many: from the Stephen King book came […]

In the lobby of the lovely Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado sits a gift shop, right next to the wide, wooden central stair. The gift shop long ago embraced the one thing that the Stanley is most famous for above all else: its place as the inspiration, so the legend goes, for Stephen King's […]

Bridget Jones Nelson is a writer and comedian known for her work on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and for the past several years as half of the RiffTrax audio commentary team Bridget & Mary Jo, where she and comedian Mary Jo Pehl riff on features, industrial shorts, often with an eye on the social lives […]

3 From Hell is Rob Zombie's long-awaited followup to the crime film The Devil's Rejects, itself a sequel to the nightmarishly bloody and phosphorescent House of 1000 Corpses. 3 From Hell follows the remaining members of the Firefly family as they run from the law and try to make sense of their future. The film debuts […]

We continue our series of 1970s vampire horror with Lake of Dracula (1971), which continues Michio Yamamoto's Bloodthirsy trilogy of Western-infused horror. This one is less arty and dreamy than the first film, The Vampire Doll. Instead, Lake of Dracula tells a Dracula story that is straight Hammer: a vampire arrives and begins to separate and destroy the […]

This week, we wrap up our retrospective of movies featuring Jules Verne's immortal creation Captain Nemo with the 2003 steampunk literary mashup The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Boy was this movie controversial– taking the source material and bending it in ways that enraged fans of the book, the film itself starts out strong enough and, […]

This week, we continue our retrospective on movies featuring Jules Verne's immortal Captain Nemo (tying in with the release of Young Captain Nemo in March) with Irwin Allen's 1978 science fiction film (really a packaged release of three episodes of a TV series) The Amazing Captain Nemo, AKA The Return of Captain Nemo. This is a film that all of […]

This week, we continue our retrospective on movies featuring Jules Verne's immortal Captain Nemo (tying in with the release of Young Captain Nemo in March) with the UK 1969 film Captain Nemo and the Underwater City.  This film gives us a strange, alternate Captain Nemo played by the slightly surly American Robert Ryan, who has this […]

This week, we kick off a new retrospective on movies featuring Jules Verne's immortal Captain Nemo (tying in with the release of Young Captain Nemo in March) with the 1961 film Mysterious Island, featuring the amazing special effects of Ray Harryhausen. This movie is a gee-whiz adventure-lover's dream, about a team of escaped Civil War prisoners […]

This week we continue our Hellraiser series, with the  1988 film Hellbound: Hellraiser II, produced by Clive Barker and directed by Tony Randel. This film followed quickly on the heels of the first film, so it's interesting to see where the producers thought the series was going to go as opposed to where they found […]

This week, we continue our 2019 retrospective on evil children with the 1993 film The Good Son, about a child very like the one seen in The Bad Seed—in this case Henry, played by Macaulay Culkin. Culkin's manager/father lobbied hard for Culkin to get this film, which the actor shot at roughly the same time as Home […]

At Fantastic Fest 2018, Castle of Horror Co-host Tony Salvaggio sat down to discuss director Nicolas Pesce's new dark genre adaptation of Ryû Murakami's cat and mouse psycho-thriller Piercing. Pesce shares his ideas on adapting the book, evoking a mood in a minimalistic story and his influences both film and musically to Italian giallo movies. […]