Welcome to Horror

Welcome to Horror is a conversation about horror films with the same three people each time and, most of the time, a different film. Lee, Chris and Adam open with the same greeting, name the film and its year, and usually warn that there will be spoilers and swearing. Then they go through the whole plot, the scenes that stayed with them and any tangent that comes up. The first thing to notice is how varied the films are. The episode titles include The Menu from 2022, The House of the Devil from 2009, Wolfcop from 2014 and Tucker and Dale vs Evil from 2010, next to a 2005 version of The Call of Cthulhu. That last one is a silent film made by the HP Lovecraft Historical Society. In the discussion it comes across as a labour of love that gets closer to the source than most adaptations. They also talk about other Lovecraft adaptations, with Dagon named as a favourite, and end with a dry warning to read the stories without looking too closely at the author's politics. Period craft comes up more than once. The House of the Devil is admired for how completely it passes as an 80s film. The first rewatch in roughly 12 years turned a slow burn they had doubted could fill an episode into plenty to talk about. One brief cut gets special praise: it shows a murdered family, then the film drops straight back into quiet. The Menu is taken as a hostage story set on one island in one restaurant, and they enjoy how realistically badly the trapped guests fight back. Wolfcop gets a fond look back from someone who could not wait for its release. The part they enjoy most is a small-town conspiracy that turns out to be shape-shifting aliens running the place. Some episodes cover more than one title. In the roundups of what they have been watching, the three swap recommendations and warnings, and the verdicts can be blunt. The Suspiria remake got two out of ten: the gore was praised, but the interpretive dance was blamed for ruining it. The roundups can lead to later picks, and one of them had kept The Menu in mind after it came up in one. Life outside the films comes in too, from Olympic ice hockey to another trip to Horrific, the Romford horror film festival, which they praise as well run and held in a proper cinema complex. The humour is self-deprecating, and one cold open admits nobody asked for another episode. Sign-offs usually point to what comes next. That can be the next film, or a lesser-known Hammer title like Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, which one of them has never managed to see. What a listener gets is less a formal review than a lively argument full of spoilers between three people who watch a lot of horror. It helps to see the film first.