Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast

Our Haloween celebration of the work of John Carpenter continues for a third week with a look at John in the 90s. Arguably his rockiest period, a decade that saw a significant decline, John Carpenter in the 90s produced one movie that wasn't a fucking debacle and we think that it's In The Mouth of Madness. In The Mouth of Madness finds John Trent (Sam Neill), a private investigator hired by a publ...

Our October marathon of John Carpenter continues as we find John returning to the world of independent film and total creative control. Perhaps John smoked a little too much weed and flew too close to the sun with this one. For all it's theoretical physics and spiritual nonsense it's still a fun little movie. Prince of Darkness finds a Catholic priest discovering a hidden order of priests protecti...

This week Halle Kiefer of the fantastic horror podcast, Ruined, joins us for a three-peat as we kick off our Halloween 2026 series, a month-log exploration of the films of John Carpenter. We're starting strong with John's critically maligned The Thing, a movie that reviewed so badly that he lost an entire contract with Universal. Thankfully, in the fullness of time viewers have come back around an...

This week we're wrapping up our round-up of Latin American movies with maybe the deepest cut we've done yet. We're watching Muerte En La Playa from director Enrique Gomez Vadillo. In this movie we find young David returning home from school on break following the temporary closing of the school after the murder of one of the professors. David's mom, hyper-glam Sonia Infante, and her boyfriend make...

This week we're joined by our good friend and Laughing in the Dark co-host, Aileen Clark to talk about Brazil and Coffin Joe as we look at Brazil's first-ever horror movie, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul.  In this movie Coffin Joe is the local undertaker, a nightmare man in black with a top hat and cape to match. He's also an atheist who is on the hunt for the perfect woman who will bear him a so...

We're getting real weird with it this week with a look at the life and work of a very troubling director: Alejandro Jodorowsky. Few directors are as storied and mythical as he is. El Topo finds a mysterious black-clad gunfighter stumbling through the desert on his search for four master gunfighters and a path to spiritual enlightenment. In theory, defeating each master will bring him closer to God...

This week we look at Phillip Kaufman's remake of Don Siegel's unimpeachable specimen of McCarthy era paranoia, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In this movie Elizabeth, an employee of the city health office becomes convinced that her boyfriend has been switched with someone else. All over the city of San Francisco people are waking up to find that loved ones have somehow changed. They express no em...

Come with us to a land down under this week as we head back to Australia for a look at Peter Weir's first feature film, The Cars That Ate Paris. Paris is a small town with a terrible secret. Cars roll off the road at an alarming rate. The drivers are often killed in the crashes or rendered brain damaged. What's going on there? Poor mild-mannered Arthur finds out the hard way when his brother crash...

This week we reach the terminal point for giallo in Italy. This is it, the bottom of the barrel, the definitive end, a bloated vanity project by director Al Festa to showcase his wife, Stefania Stella who ostensibly plays herself in this murder mystery in the style of old gialli. In Fatal Frames we find music video director Alex Ritt, haunted by the recent murder of his wife, drawn to Rome to dire...

This week we're diving in (get it?) to one of the most successful and well-known of the disaster epics of the 1970s, Irwin Allen's first disaster feature: the Poseidon Adventure. Taking place on New Year's Eve, an old cruise ship is on its last voyage to port in Athens when a sudden rogue wave hits the ship and capsizes it, sending most of the passengers and crew to their deaths. A ballroom full o...

This week we're back in Roger Corman territory with an early Joe Dante feature for New World Pictures, Piranha from 1978. When a pair of teenage hikers go missing in the Texas wilds, a bounty hunter will have to team up with a reclusive alcoholic weirdo to find them. Their search takes them to a secret research facility where they accidentally release a large number of genetically modified piranha...

If you're not listening to our sister podcast, Laughing in the Dark, an Are You Afraid of the Dark rewatch podcast here's your chance to check it out with Season 3, Episode 4: The Tale of the Dollmaker. This week it's Aileen's turn to tell the 9:30 Society all about the fifth episode of the third season of Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Dollmaker. This episode hits us with some AYAOTD...

This very podcast was predicated upon one of our favorite movies from one of our favorite directors, 1990: Bronx Warriors from director Enzo G. Castellari. The following year we covered its sequel, Escape From The Bronx but there's a secret sequel and we felt incomplete leaving it out. Until now! The New Barbarians is a sequel in the loosest possible sense. It takes place in 2019 and steals libera...

This week we're taking on one of the weirdest horror movie misfires of the 80s. It's an explicable mess of a movie that statistically shouldn't have been a loser ad yet here we are. A series of brutal murders and rapes rocks a small New England town. The medical examiner, the chief of police, and a local newspaper reporter team up to solve the crimes but the evidence doesn't make any sense. Is thi...

This week we're heading to Mexico by way of Italy in the recently recovered Sharksploitation adventure film, The Shark Hunter from director Enzo G. Castellari. In 1979 Enzo Doria got his hands on a script that he was so excited to produce that he called up Italian superstar, Franco Nero and asked him what he was doing right this minute and if he'd like to drop literally everything and make a movie...

We're joined by our friend, drag legend Love Connie for a look deep into the abyss. We watched Giulio Paradisi's unhinged 1979 shit show, The Visitor, and found that the abyss stares back. This is not an easy movie to explain. It is stacked with some of Hollywood's heaviest hitters in the cast: John Huston, Shelley Winters, Mel Ferrer, Sam Peckinpah, and Glenn Ford and no one can explain why that...

You'll have the time of your life when you listen to our latest episode, a look at the 1987 mega-hit Dirty Dancing. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze were both watching their own careers grow and advance as the 80's lurched forward but it was this singular moment in the history of film when everything took flight. Swayze, among the sexiest men to ever live set up shop in everyone's head and heart a...

We round out our 2026 Pride series with a title that isn't typically included in the queer film history milieu but Dave is going to make a pretty solid case for how it absolutely fits with its themes of alienation and ennui. Carnival of Souls is a significant picture in the cult movie world and it's spooky as hell. In the tradition of directors who made one great movie and nothing else (e.g. Charl...

This week we're doing things a little differently. We're taking a look at two crucial queer short films and a feature from the time before the Stonewall Riots forced the gay liberation struggle to the fore. We're looking at Fireworks, a 1947 avant garde short from one of LA's weirdest guys, Kenneth Anger. Next up is Picnic, a 1948 silent short from Curt Harrington, director of What's The Matter Wi...

We continue our Pride 2026 examination of queer horror with a look at a truly unique film, a movie that challenged us in every conceivable way. If you, the listener, can make it to the end of this one without being totally alienated, consider yourself a true Bring Me The Axe fan. Thundercrack! is the collision of underground filmmakers Curt McDowell and George Kuchar. McDowell, a truly horny under...

Pride 2026 continues with one of this year's most unexpected episodes. At a glance, Making Love is not the sort of thing you would expect to hear on 99 Cent Rental. It's a Hollywood drama. It's a "very important movie". It's from the director of Love Story (and a bunch of other really great movies). But our friend Sean Abley dropped by for what turned into a giant-sized episode of 99 Cent Rental a...

This week we kick off Pride 2026 with a look at the sapphic doom of Dracula's Daughter, the sequel to the landmark horror movie, 1931's Dracula. The 30's was rough on everyone being that we were smack dab in the middle of The Great Depression so taking wild chances on vanity projects was bad for business. Not to be outdone in the realm of bad business decisions, Universal Studios took on two ill-a...

Last week we took on the landmark Ridley Scott movie, Alien, a movie that closed out the 1970's with a bang. This week we're taking on James Cameron and his follow-up to the explosive 1985 smash hit, The Terminator, Aliens. Cameron knew he wanted to make an Alien sequel the moment he first saw the original movie and when the opportunity arose he had to fight tooth and nail, struggling against 20th...

On the podcast no one can hear you scream. This week we're taking a look at the horror movie hingepoint in 1979, Alien. Before Star Wars there wasn't a studio on earth that wanted to make an expensive science fiction movie and after Star Wars they couldn't find enough scripts to get expensive science fiction movies into production. Alien was one of the first ones to come out of the gate that wasn'...

This week we're taking a look at David Lynch's fourth feature, Blue Velvet. It is the first movie of his career that feels truly Lynchian in the way that we recognize the best of his movies. Blue Velvet comes hot on the heels of Lynch's disastrous failure, Dune, a movie experience that was terrible for everyone involved an led to a career low point for Lynch. But thankfully, Lynch found himself pa...