Fandom talk with a mental health backbone.
Victims and Villains treats pop culture as a place to talk honestly about fear, hope, identity, and craft. Recent episodes move from 80s slashers and Queer Screams filmmaker interviews to a Mission: Impossible run with loose, fan-first debate.
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Victims and Villains is a pop-culture conversation show with a mental health mission running through it. Its home turf is film, horror, comics, conventions, festivals, and the kind of franchise run where sequels get weighed against the others. The recent feed shows that range clearly. An April Fools Day episode turns an 80s slasher into a funny, specific debate about pranks, performances, bedroom gags, and what works when a movie is judged against its genre. The Queer Screams Film Festival coverage shifts the frame. There, the show talks with filmmakers and performers about queer horror, body insecurity, internet lore, color symbolism, surrealism, and the feeling of being trapped inside disturbing material as a viewer. Then the Mission: Impossible run changes gears again, with Josh and Dan comparing Tom Cruise eras, practical action, franchise gaps, Letterboxd jokes, Ethan Hunt mythology, and the simple appeal of choosing the safe role in the truck during a heist. It moves fast. It also wanders productively. A point about a stunt can become a memory about moviegoing, then a career tangent, then a firmer take on why a director changed the series. The show does not feel overproduced or distant. It sounds like people thinking in real time, correcting themselves, laughing, and still trying to land on something honest. The interviews are warmer and more spacious, especially when guests describe why they made a hard story or how a performance felt after the fact. The reviews are more argumentative, with rankings, comparisons, and scene-by-scene pleasures carrying the energy. Across both modes, Victims and Villains keeps returning to hope, survival, and the value of talking plainly about mental health. That can make the feed unusually direct for a film podcast. It can also make the genre conversations feel less disposable, because the show treats horror and fandom as places where people process real fear, shame, grief, identity, and endurance.
Made for: Best for film and horror fans who like conversational reviews, franchise runs, festival discoveries, and creator interviews. It especially suits listeners who want pop culture talk that can handle heavy emotional subjects without losing its fan energy.
What sets it apart: Victims and Villains stands out by tying casual genre conversation to the work of a multimedia nonprofit focused on mental health and suicide awareness. It can joke about Mission: Impossible trivia or 80s slasher acting, then turn seriously toward suicide awareness, queer insecurity, and why difficult art matters.
The home of Victims and Villains Podcast, That's High Price: A Nicolas Cage Podcast and Abyss Gazing: A Horror Podcast. Each crafted with the intent to break the stigma of mental health and suicide awareness to bring real conversations through a multiverse of fandoms.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Victims and Villains connects lively film discussion with craft-focused interviews and thoughtful questions about the mental health within creative work.
Josh moves easily between movie-club conversation and filmmaker interviews, giving Victims and Villains a useful double view of screen culture.
The Mission: Impossible ceiling drop raises a question: would you take the harness or the van?
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A loose, funny slasher discussion finds critical value in the movie's strangest comic beats.
This Victims and Villains episode turns an 80s slasher into a brisk, joke-forward close reading, with the movie's prank setup supplying plenty of comic evidence.
A remote Queer Screams conversation finds its sharpest unease in internet videos that refuse to explain themselves.
Queer Screams lands as a remote festival dispatch, shaped by Josh's Portland coverage and Victims and Villains' habit of looking at mental health through pop culture.
A festival conversation that finds its strongest footing in color, symbolism, and queer horror.
Josh’s stop at the Queer Screams Film Festival in Portland, Oregon, gives the discussion a clear entry point: festival reviews are live on the website, and the conversation with Jordan Gustafson turns to Prom Party Massacre, a slasher musical that blends theater and horror with…
A loose franchise conversation that ties Ethan Hunt to Cruise's wider mid-2000s run.
Victims and Villains uses Mission Impossible 3 and Ghost Protocol to trace how Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt run keeps circling back on itself. Josh and Dan move from the six-year gap between 2 and 3 to the shorter five-year stretch between 3 and 4, and they connect that span to…
A focused rewatch of Mission: Impossible's room break-in, from sweat and harness tension to character roles.
Mission: Impossible (One & Two) gives PlayNext a sharp, contained reason to stay with the film's mechanics: the room break-in, the divided responsibilities around it, and the small physical details that make the sequence hold its tension.
A friendly horror discussion finds sharp comic detail in April Fools Day's prank-heavy slasher setup.
April Fools Day gives Victims and Villains a playful reason to weigh an 80s slasher by how well its jokes sharpen the threat. Josh, founder of the Victims and Villains nonprofit, joins Mr.
A delayed interview traces how Poe fandom, satire, creativity, and mental health can meet in one conversation.
Victims and Villains gathers previously unreleased conversations from 2023 conventions and film festivals, with Josh positioning the episode as a belated return to interviews that had been waiting in the archive.
My Hero Academia, with the detours left in.
Messy media talk with political bite.
Dragon Ball history, sorted by obsessive fans.
Cartoon criticism with dry fandom timing.
English-dubbed anime, discussed at length by people who care
Host Josh interviews Richmond band Catharsis about their albums 'Chasing Echoes' and 'Died in Bloom', exploring their creative process and how music serves as mental health catharsis.
Host Josh presents a compilation of lost interviews from 2023 conventions, focusing on independent creators.
This episode reviews Kevin Smith's new film 'The 4:30 Movie', discussing its autobiographical elements and the hosts' mixed reactions.
This episode discusses the 2016 Doctor Strange film, the new Thor Love and Thunder trailer, and Marvel Cinematic Universe updates on Disney+.
This episode discusses the 1989 film 'Jason Takes Manhattan' as part of a series on Friday the 13th movies, exploring its polarizing nature and cult following while tying it to mental health awareness through pop culture.
This episode is part one of a Christmas crossover discussing the 2022 film 'Violent Night' while exploring mental health themes through pop culture analysis.
Victims and Villains opens with Josh interviewing Catharsis members Christopher and Zach about the Richmond band's start, their live show history, and the shift from Chasing Echoes to Died in Bloom.
["Victims and Villains' Queer Screams coverage centers on Anna Celio's short Cold Feet and a later feature conversation built around Fish Tooth, both framed through horror and online anxiety.", "Celio says Cold Feet came from her introversion, the fear of sleeping with her feet outside the blankets, and a script that forced her crew to build a three-wall bedroom set with movable walls.", "Annette Pagnano and Raquel Liebich describe a feature that blends mid-2000s internet rabbit holes with present-day feeds, including unexplained videos, Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch, and Lung Leg.", "The second interview also gets into practical choices like outsourcing videos to TikTokers and YouTubers, then degrading them through CRT playback and compression to mimic VHS footage."]
Josh opens with the Queer Screams Film Festival in Portland, Oregon.
Dan and Josh discuss their re-watch of Mission: Impossible films, including Rogue Nation and Dead Reckoning, as part of a series leading up to the final installment.
This episode is a re-release of a podcast review of Mission: Impossible - Fallout, featuring host Captain Nostalgia and guest Ryan Silverscene from The Shame Files Podcast, discussing the film and addressing technical issues.
Josh and Dan start with Mission Impossible 3 and Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol.
The show takes on the Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible films as part of a four-episode run through every Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movie.
This episode revisits lost interviews from 2023 with comic writers, artists, podcasters, and others, discussing mental health through pop culture as part of the Victims and Villains non-profit.