“My legs are whiter than the Oscars.” “I saw a butthole in that car back there.” These are some of the moments you missed if you did not tune into The Movie Crypt’s 48 hour marathon to benefit Save a Yorkie Rescue. Adam Green and Joe Lynch—hosts of the podcast, horror directors, and co-stars of Green’s sitcom Holliston—stayed awake for that entire chunk of time, bringing on guest after guest, doing live commentaries for films like Fright Night, Candyman, The Thing and The Devil’s Rejects, reading short stories by Joe Hill and Clive Barker, and even doing live script readings for Green’s unproduced script for Cabin Fever II and an early draft of The Goonies.
It was an amazing weekend. And I’m not writing this to rub your nose in everything you missed if you didn’t listen, far from it. If anything, I’m writing this to show everyone that the amount of work they put into this event and the strength it required to pull off did not go unnoticed or under-appreciated. I’m sure other people will write things too. But this is my experience, this was what I went through staying up for nearly two whole days over a three day period for the sake of a worthy cause, cyber bonding with two men I don’t even know but could not have more respect for.
I also think it’s only fair to admit that I didn’t catch everything. Due to a delayed flight, I missed the opening interview with Seth Green and Clare Grant. There was a point, I’d estimate around the 18 hour mark, that I crashed without even realizing or planning on it. So I’m going to take you through the things I experienced without speaking to the brief couple of bits I did not get to hear for myself.
They also sang a song about the Yorkies, which clearly worked because that was when I actually went to the YouCaring page and made a donation. After they passed $3,500 Green did something amazing for longtime fans of his work and the podcast, playing something that his fans had been hearing about for years but had never heard before: he dug back into the archives and played a song by his band, Haddonfield.
As a fan, it was honestly amazing to hear, and not just because the song was good. It was, but that wasn’t what fascinated me above it. This was the voice of a different Adam Green than the one I was used to hearing every week. It’s the same guy, obviously, and I’m sure all of those experiences brought him to this point and turned him into the person he is now, but nonetheless the voice I heard in those two Haddonfield songs surprised me. This Adam Green sounded angrier, yet at the same time was bursting with excitement.
During the reading of Green’s script for Cabin Fever II—which I would have absolutely preferred to the movie we got, but to be fair, it wasn’t like Ti West got to make the movie he actually wanted to make, either—I started to think we were in a little bit of trouble. The guys were starting to sound tired and it was still pretty damn early on. If they were getting tired at 2am Saturday, how were they going to sound at the end of it all on Sunday night? I still had my faith in Green and Lynch, I knew they’d pull it off no matter what, but this was the point where I briefly thought that this event, while exciting, might beat the hell out of them nonetheless.
But something kind of amazing happened as the broadcast went on. Yes, you could hear how tired they were getting and hear how hard it was for them to stay awake through all of this… but each guest that came in completely re-energized them. They’d started to mumble a bit, but then Rob Pendegraft came in to demonstrate makeup effects and they immediately turned into the eleven-year-old kids in a candy store that I think all horror fans really are at heart.
ArieScope intern Casey Hempel brought a literal new voice to the proceedings by reading a story by horror author Joe Hill titled “Last Breath.” The gimmick here is that the stories she read sounded as though they were horror stories read by a Disney princess, but the truth is that Hempel simply proved to be an excellent reader. I’ve read short stories of that length live before and I know how hard it can be and she completely and totally nailed it.
Brendon Small, creator of Metalocalypse and many other hit animated shows, came in and talked about that side of the business and like many of the interviews, that felt like a fully realized episode of The Movie Crypt on its own. It was fun, funny, but he also seriously talked about some of the major problems of the business and the hardships he faced.
Following him was Jesse Snider, son of Dee Snider, excellent musician and friend of the podcast. He was amazing as always and I can’t imagine that any longtime listeners of the podcast didn’t tear up at least a little bit when Snider performed the podcast’s opening theme “Juggernaut” live on the air. I know I did.
At 1pm on Saturday, they brought in a clairvoyant named Marilyn Kapp. I think one of the best bits of praise I’ve heard for the marathon so far is how meticulously well organized it was. Kapp was a perfect example of this. She offered a total change of pace from everything people had heard up to that point, and was also different from everything that followed her. When I interviewed Green and Lynch leading up to the broadcast, they said that she would be the most controversial guest and I think they were probably right.
Ultimately, though, their discussion with Kapp proved to be emotional no matter what you believe. Whether you believe she was truly channeling spirits of lost loved ones or not, you were still hearing Green and Lynch open up about the deaths of some of the people they’d loved most and how much they missed them. The fact that they did this on the air in front of thousands of listeners is insane. The openness and bravery it took to do that cannot be understated.
Following Kapp, we had the Candyman commentary, which they brought in director Bernard Rose to do. Rose had been on the podcast before in what was probably one of my top five favorite episodes. He’s amazing insightful and Candyman is, in my mind, one of the best horror films of all time. But here’s the amazing thing: this was the first Candyman commentary ever recorded.
It sounds nuts, but it’s true. Amazing film though it is, it hasn’t always gotten the treatment it deserved. Hell, Candyman still isn’t even available on Blu-ray in the US. So this commentary, which was insightful and spectacular, was greatly appreciated.
Following that, though, we had the main event. As much great content as they put together, they even knew it would be the main event from the onset. Green and Lynch pulled together an amazing group of comedians—including Joel David Moore, Felicia Day, Parry Shen, Deon Richmond, Michael Gladis and more—for a live reading of the 4th draft of The Goonies. This was an early draft, very different from the movie we all grew up with.
Amazingly, while everyone did a great job, it was horror icon Felissa Rose—of Sleepaway Camp—who completely stole the show as Mama Fratelli. She killed it. I think it’s appropriate that she shined as well as she did, because it showcased something Holliston proved on a regular basis, which is that horror icons can be absolutely hilarious when you let them. Rose showed an amazing gift for comedy that, watching her in so many horror movies, I hadn’t really gotten to hear before.
And it was doubly worth it for Joel David Moore flubbing Chunk’s line of “I saw a bullethole in that car back there” by accidentally saying “butthole.” It wasn’t even that funny until he aggressively tried to correct himself.
There’s so much that happened that it’s impossible to write it all down, even though I made pages and pages of notes as it was happening, mostly of moments I just did not want to forget. And even though this was a one-time broadcast, don’t worry, many of the events sounded like they will be repurposed for eventual episodes of the podcast.
The Thing commentary with Drew McWeeny was awesome, mostly because it was three guys just gushing over one of the best horror films of all time. Casey Hempel topped herself by reading Clive Barker’s “Scape Goats,” a Fulci-esque story from what is probably my favorite story collection, The Books of Blood. Todd Farmer and Darren Bousman both crushed it as last minute guests. Mostly, it was great to hear Farmer, Lynch and Green geek-out over the Friday the 13th series as a whole.
Then they gave me something I’d always wanted to hear: a commentary track for Fright Night with director Tom Holland. Once again, there’s no official DVD or Blu-ray of this classic horror that actually includes a commentary. While it wasn’t necessarily scene specific, it was an amazing treat in the middle of the marathon for as huge a fan as I am of that movie. Major things I learned: Jill Schoelen auditioned for Amy and the classic Amy vampire mouth was conceived and created in a single day.
They also brought in Bill Moseley and Sid Haig for a commentary for The Devil’s Rejects which was great because those guys are always great, and topped the weekend off with a live reading of a script for a season three episode of Holliston, coming at some ill-defined point in the eventual future. But when the whole cast is together like that, it somehow manages to feel like season three is just over the horizon.
By the end of it, the guys couldn’t mask how exhausted they were and they didn’t need to. They’d earned the right to sound tired. They stayed awake for an ungodly amount of time and some of us stayed up with them, just to show our support. Of course, the best way to show support for this cause was through donations. Happily, the live marathon was a success and they wound up raising $13,380.00 for Save a Yorkie Rescue. I donated what I could, got my fiancée to donate and—coincidentally—she became a fan of the podcast at the same time.
I was tweeting the entire time for no reason other than to remind the guys as often as I could that people were out there and listening to everything they were doing. That some of us didn’t drift off to sleep even though we really should have. Green and Lynch went through the ringer staying up just to entertain us. They were doing it for a worthy cause, but they were providing us with amazing stuff we couldn’t hear anywhere else, most of which will never be heard again.
What they put together this weekend has been likened to an audio horror convention, but I think it’s more than that. It was a gauntlet. A trial. An amazingly fun, funny and emotional one, but not one that could have been even remotely easy. These guys suffered for their art and for the Yorkies of the world. They sounded like zombies by the end of it, but zombies who still were amazed and excited by everything they’d done. I don’t know of any other filmmakers or podcasters who could have pulled this off. Even when they’d been drained of energy, they were energized by what they had accomplished. Adam Green and Joe Lynch went through the ringer for their fans and for dogs around the world. They spent a lot of time during the broadcast wondering if there were any modern horror icons without even realizing that that’s what they are.
They might be sappy, non-threatening guys who confuse their hardcore horror loving fans with commentaries for Love Actually, but they just spent 48 hours proving beyond a shadow of a doubt what they really are: they’re legends. They’re juggernauts.
