Director Seth A. Smith joins Mike for a Special Report from the Fantasia International Film Festival on Permanent Damage (2026), his fairy-tale crime comedy about escaped convict Tommy Gods (Calem MacDonald), who holes up in a condemned Halifax housing complex and falls for Joe (Olivia Scriven), niece of the brutal landlord (Stephen Dorff) whose "golden goose" the two of them plan to steal.

Smith talks about the spray-foam insulation that sparked the idea, shooting in a townhouse complex already vacated and slated for demolition, casting Stephen McHattie as an eccentric pet-shop owner who spends most of the film in a bathtub, writing with longtime collaborator Darcy Spidle, the drug that stiffens the tongue and mangles the voice, and scoring, editing, and sound-designing his own pictures. Plus the stolen $3,000 music video that turned him into a filmmaker in the first place.


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Writer-director Tim Riedel joins Mike for Ancestral Beasts (2026), a Red River Métis horror feature in which Elyse (Morgan Holmstrom) retreats to a remote family cabin after her mother's death and finds something in the woods that feeds on everything she won't face.

Riedel traces the film back to his mother's Sixties Scoop childhood and her later borderline personality disorder diagnosis — the creature he grew up sensing in the shadows — then through a documentary career, a shoestring proof of concept that landed at Frontières during Cannes, and a 20-day Manitoba shoot with a largely Indigenous cast and crew that a blizzard couldn't stop. He also talks about making horror in the woods as a kid with DP Joey Forte, telling 70% of a story so the audience can author the rest, and bracing for Fantasia's meowing crowd. Is the monster ancestral, or inherited?

Find out more at https://www.michifkoonteur.com/ 


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Rob St. Mary and Josh Hadley join Mike for The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah's blood-soaked western about Pike Bishop (William Holden) and his aging outlaws chasing one last job against Robert Ryan's bounty hunter, a former member of the gang. When Angel is captured by the Mexican warlord Mapache, the Bunch has to decide whether to ride away or ride back for him.

We have a plethora of interviews for this one with actress Lilia Castillo, actor Alfonso Arau (Herrera), screenwriter Walon Green, Kathryn Jones, author of Tall in the Saddle: The Life of Ben Johnson, Hollywood's Real Cowboy, and Bill Mesce, author of The Wild Bunch: The American Classic That Changed Westerns Forever.

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Spider-Man: Brand New Day argues a hero can be both the mask and the man, no universe reset required. Mike welcomes Chris Stachiw of The Kulturecast for a crossover dissecting Destin Daniel Cretton's grounded, detective-flavored entry in the Tom Holland era, one that ditches multiverse noise for a genuine emotional throughline between Peter Parker and a scene-stealing Sadie Sink.

Mike and Chris unpack why this might be the best Holland Spider-Man yet, how Marisa Tomei's Aunt May keeps the franchise grounded, the Man-Spider mutation plot pulled from The Other, Jon Bernthal's Punisher partnership, and what a psychic rampage signals for the MCU's slow-building X-Men rollout. Spoilers arrive after the setup, alongside a debate over secret-identity fatigue and whether Marvel finally made a superhero movie about being a person rather than a franchise cog.

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How do you make a documentary about an artist so iconic she's practically wallpaper — flowers, bones, desert light, done to death? Filmmakers Paul Wagner and Ellen Casey Wagner set out to demythologize Georgia O'Keeffe instead, and Mike sits down with the married directing team to talk about it. They trace the project from a small University of Virginia exhibit revealing O'Keeffe's forgotten Charlottesville summers to a full-scale feature, built around the intimate Stieglitz letters released decades after her death and voiced in the film by Claire Danes. Paul and Ellen discuss securing cooperation from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, filming across her many homes from Wisconsin to New Mexico, the crises of confidence that once had her burning her own paintings, and getting Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy on board. They also talk COVID-era production chaos, the film's long festival-to-theatrical rollout, and why an artist this famous can still surprise her biggest fans.

Find out more at: https://www.georgiaokeeffefilm.com/

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A gold-plated chain gang, a snowbound death march, and a father hunting a killer who's already survived the trip: Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent closed out his western career with Cut-Throats Nine (1972), still cited as the goriest Spanish western ever made. Mike White talks with Nick Schlegel and Heather Drain about how Sergeant Brown (Robert Hundar) and daughter Cathy (Emma Cohen) end up stranded with seven condemned convicts after a botched bandit ambush, and how gold hidden in their chains curdles cooperation into betrayal, torture, and a murder mystery Brown never gets to solve. They trace Romero Marchent's late-career demolition of heroic western conventions, the film's kinship with (and possible one-upping of) The Great Silence, Luis Cuadrado's snowbound cinematography, and whether the film's notorious gore implicates the audience or just splatters it. Masterpiece, curiosity, or endurance test: is this the most nihilistic western ever made?

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You don't usually think about the editor when a comedy lands its jokes, but editor Whit Conway is exactly why Never Change! moves the way it does. Mike talks with Conway about a career built on doing a little bit of everything — Chicago advertising work, Second City, SNL's pre-tape department, DP'ing for The Late Show, directing for Jimmy Kimmel Live! — and how that generalist grounding prepared him for this movie's absurd production math: shooting wrapped in late October 2025, and the finished film hit Hulu on June 17, 2026. Conway breaks down his years-long shorthand with director Marty Schousboe from three seasons of Joe Pera Talks With You, working alongside writer-star John Reynolds in the edit bay, the line-by-line organizational system that saved the cut, and the friends-and-family screening that reshaped the back half of the movie. He also gets into the one joke that made him nervous — the one where he says his own name out loud on camera.

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What if America's most famous uncaught serial killer was never one man at all? Eddie McNamara — former NYPD officer, 9/11 first responder, and author of Zodiactually: The Real Story of a Fake Serial Killer — joins Mike to argue the Zodiac wasn't a criminal mastermind but a myth stitched together from unrelated crimes, media hunger, and one compromised homicide detective. Drawing on police files, FBI records, court transcripts, and years of cold-calling witnesses, McNamara explains why Vallejo's own investigators never believed the first two murders were Zodiac's, digs into Dave Toschi's documented history of planting fan letters about himself in San Francisco papers, and reassesses Arthur Leigh Allen, the case's most famous suspect. He and Mike also cover the gulf between David Fincher's film and the real record, the glut of self-published theories clogging the true-crime shelf, and what it's like realizing you've stumbled onto an actual overlooked killer while debunking a fake one.

Find more at https://feralhouse.com/zodiactually/

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Donald Westlake — writing as Richard Stark — said only one movie made from a Parker novel "got the feeling right." That's John Flynn's The Outfit (1973), starring Robert Duvall as Earl Macklin, out of prison to find his brother murdered by the mob over a bank job. Rather than run, Macklin runs at them, hitting every vulnerable Outfit operation until they pay. Joe Don Baker and Karen Black co-star alongside a murderer's row of noir faces: Robert Ryan, Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, Timothy Carey, and Elisha Cook Jr.

Jedidiah Ayres and Gary Phillips join Mike to dig into Westlake's dual-track career, the Parker adaptations from Point Blank to Play Dirty, Flynn's flat-and-mean style, and the film's year-long crawl across America courtesy of MGM's "smiling cobra" James Aubrey. Released in celebration of Arrow Video's new Limited Edition Blu-ray — featuring a commentary track by Mike and Jedidiah.

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Alfred Hitchcock remains cinema's Master of Suspense a century after directing his first film, but decades of biography have blurred the line between the man and the myth. Mike talks with author Tony Lee Moral about his sixth Hitchcock book, A Century of Hitchcock, and the archival discovery that reshaped it: a 36-page 1980 transcript of biographer Donald Spoto's own interview with Tippi Hedren.

Moral traces how Spoto's personal grievances against Hitchcock — including being routinely ignored by name and bitten by the director's West Highland terrier — colored The Darkside of Genius and shaped decades of tabloid narrative. Drawing on new interviews with secretaries, screenwriters, and script supervisors who worked alongside Hitchcock, Moral makes the case for reexamining the record on Hitchcock's treatment of women, from Tippi Hedren's shifting accounts to the making of The Birds and Marnie.

The conversation also revisits The Pleasure Garden on its hundredth anniversary, Hitchcock's collaboration with Salvador Dalí on Spellbound, and what a possible sixth Hitchcock book might hold. Find Tony Lee Moral's book and more of his work at tonyleemoralbooks.com.

Buy the book at: https://amzn.to/4fvEBKG 


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Nick Taylor built The Nick Taylor Horror Show by asking filmmakers how they actually got their movies made — an unofficial film school he later put to use directing his own feature. Mike talks with Taylor about turning that same curiosity on Steve Johnson, the special makeup effects legend behind Slimer, the Fright Night vampires, and the Howling werewolves, and a childhood hero whose success validated Taylor's own outsider love of monsters.

Taylor traces the six-year odyssey of Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson, from meeting Johnson at Monsterpalooza through the funding struggles of an unapologetically niche passion project. He discusses narrowing the film's circle of interview subjects to people who truly knew Johnson — including John Landis and Linnea Quigley — over chasing bigger names, and how editor Joe Krings kept the project's fan enthusiasm in check.

The conversation closes with Rubberhead's Fantasia Festival world premiere and where to catch it. Follow Taylor on Instagram at @iamnicktaylor or visit americannightmare.co for updates.
 



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