Baz To The Bone

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Episode 14: Monster Kids: David J. Skal, Dracula and Me. Baz pays tribute to his friend, the horror historian David J. Skal, from the man on the Universal DVD extras to coffee in Burbank and a last lunch at Descanso Gardens. Then it's David's story of Dracula (1931): Florence Stoker's fight with Nosferatu, Lugosi working for a pittance, armadillos in T...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Before there was Netherworld, there was a maze of bedsheets in the back of a National Guard armoury. Baz goes home to Allendale, South Carolina, for the cheap stuff that made Halloween feel like Halloween: a school carnival with a cake walk and a cardboard jail, a bedsheet haunted house run by the parents, plastic masks and smocks in cellophane boxes,...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Episode 12: Nether Gonna Give You Up — My Decade at Netherworld. For ten years, Baz was a monster at Netherworld Haunted House in Atlanta, one of America's most famous haunted attractions, now in its 30th season. Gut Putt, Gator's secret door, monster makeup with Roy Wooley and Sabrina Wagner, a busload from the Shepherd Center, Universal's "scare the...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Episode 11: Night of the Lepus — Some Bunny's Gonna Regret It. Runtime: 23:48. A real Australian rabbit catastrophe, a POW-memoirist-turned-satirist, and the giant killer rabbit movie Hollywood built on top of both — starring Janet Leigh and Star Trek's DeForest Kelley, shot completely straight. Plus a personal detour into Baz's own failed rabbit-breed...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Episode 10: The Old Dark House — Have A Potato. Four hours in a makeup chair, a family named Femm, and a director who put his queerness on screen in 1932 without flinching. James Whale's pre-Code haunted-house classic gets the deep-dive treatment — plus the tragic parallel lives of Whale and makeup legend Jack Pierce, and Baz's own decades in the makeu...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Episode 09: Phantom of the Paradise — Dealing With My Devils. A stolen song, a blood contract, and the one Canadian city that refused to let a Halloween-night bomb die. Brian De Palma's 1974 rock-opera horror-comedy built the modern horror-musical family tree — and carried a coded queer charge decades before Baz had the words for what he was watching....

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Episode 08: Nightbreed — My Own Private Midian. Clive Barker built monsters a whole civilization, a studio got scared of it, and fans spent twenty years refusing to let a butchered cut be the final word. Concept artist Ralph McQuarrie closed out his career painting Nightbreed's history. And underneath the monster makeup, a personal story about finding...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Episode 07: Horror of Party Beach — A Love Letter to a Terrible Film. Picture it: a public beach in Stamford, Connecticut, and something dragging itself out of the water with a face like it lost a fight with a barbecue. A drive-in double feature commissioned on a shoestring. Monster suits built in Gutzon Borglum's old sculpting studio. A real rock band...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Episode 06: The Exorcist — The Summer I Hit Puberty and Puberty Hit Back. I was ten years old the first time something possessed me. It wasn't a demon. It was my own body, and it had opinions. A paperback novel found Baz at ten, six years before he ever saw the film. A censored 1980 CBS broadcast turned fear into craft appreciation. Dick Smith's makeup...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop.   Episode 05: Night of the Living Dead and the Hero Nobody Expected.   Fall 1982. University of South Carolina. Halloween night. A free film in the Russell House Student Union. A bag of popcorn. And a Black man boarding up a farmhouse in Pennsylvania, calmly and unapologetically taking charge — changing, quietly and permanently, something in a white ki...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop.   Episode 04: He Made Me Gay — The Horror Icons Who Did Something To Us. The argument: classic horror was one of the few places in mid-twentieth century culture that was accidentally, systematically, and sometimes deliberately doing something queer. Not inclusive — queer. There’s a difference.   Vincent Price. Christopher Lee. Paul Naschy. The Hays Cod...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Episode 03: Bride of Frankenstein — James Whale's Perfect Film. Baz makes the argument: Dr. Pretorius is the real Bride of Frankenstein. The film's outsiders are its moral centre. The Bride is the only Universal monster who never harmed a soul. A close reading of the 1935 Universal horror film as a queer text. James Whale. Ernest Thesiger's grave in Br...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Episode 02: Attack of the Mole People. The origin story — starting from the other end. A decade inside one of America's premier haunted attractions, a chainsaw clown at Universal Studios, and a union card earned by chasing people in the dark. How a five-year-old who was afraid of the ground became, eventually, the thing under it. Timestamps: [00:00] Co...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Episode 01: Baz To The Bone — An Introduction. The argument Baz has been building for years: queer people and horror have always understood each other. The monster is always the outsider — and some of us recognised that earlier than others. Growing up in the American South as a Monster Kid. Becoming a scareactor. Playing a chainsaw clown at Universal S...

Horror and cult film podcast with Baz Bishop. Coming May 5, 2026.