In Film We Trust

Spooky Season 2026 is kicking off here at IFWT with Jorge Grau's eco-zombie 1974 masterpiece The Living Dead of Manchester Morgue a.k.a Let Sleeping Corpses Lie a.k.a Don't Open The Window a.k.a.....okay. We'd be hear all day if we named each alternative title. But joining me for this episode is the very special guests, and friends of the podcast, Scott West of Tall Toad, Phil DeGlass...

Documentarian Bruce Brown may have coined the term the 'Endless Summer', but here at IFWT, summer is officially ending for 2026, and we're ending it in style, with Katheryn Bigelow's action masterpiece Point Break - a film of bank heists, surfing, philosophy and the kind of propulsive pacing that very few action directors manage to achieve. And it's my pleasure to host for the...

Photographer, visual artist and friend of the show Michelle MacBride, makes her debut appearance on In Film We Trust. We landed on Peter Bogdanovich's Mask to discuss. A true to life tale of Rocky Dennis, a young man afflicted by Lionitis - a disease that condemned him to an early death. But Bogdanovich's film - starrign Eric Stoltz, Cher and Sam Elliott - isn't some morbid tale. Instead it's a st...

1971 was a pivotal year for megastar Clint Eastwood. Not only did it mark the first entry into the Dirty Harry franchise, and also the transgressive The Beguiled. It was also the year he would step behind the camera for the first time and direct Play Misty For Me - a story of obsession, frailty, mental illness and the then little explored notion of a 'stalker'. But where does his directori...

Author Eddie mcNamara joins the show this week. Eddie has just released via Feral House, his new non-fiction book on the Zodiac case, Zodiactually: The Real Story of a Fake Serial Killer, that challenges the mainstream narrative of the infamous Zodiac killings that took place in the late 60s-70s. Which makes him the perfect guest to join me in a discussion of David Fincher's 2007 masterpiece Z...

Writer Andrew Rihn, In Film We trust's go-to historian on all things boxing is back on the show. And this week he brings the podcast John Huston's 1972 existentialist boxing drama Fat City. Based on Leonard Gardner's novel, Fat City is an exploration of failed dreams, new beginnings, addiction and the cost of a life lived on the edge. But in the pantheon of Hollywood, Fat City, feature...

There's maybe no more maligned genre in horror - or even cinema itself - than the cannibal film that rose to prominence in 1970s Italy, most popularly exemplified by Ruggero Deodato's infamous Cannibal Holocaust. But right there in the mix, and arguably the genre's founder, was Umberto Lenzi with 1972's The Man From Deep River. Lenzi would have a contentious relationship with the g...

Film historian and writer Suzanne Boleyn joins the show this week to discuss Belgian director Harry Kumel's 1971 vampire film Daughters of Darkness. Suzanne is not only a fan of this film that explores sexuality, gender politics and possibly even fascism, she also contributed an essay for Radiance's brilliant set where she dived into the symbolism that exists in this work and what it actua...

Dan Franklin is a music writer and author of the, thus far, definitive biography of UK doom band Electric Wizard, 'Come My Fanatics: A Journey Into The World of Electric Wizard', which contextualises the band, and their artistic realm, with the influences that informed who they are. And one of those films that made a huge impact on the band was Don Sharp's 1973 British occult biker pic...

Richard Baylor joins the show! Richard is an underground filmmaker who made his name, an American émigré in the United Kingdom, within the British punk scene of the 1980s that would lead him to picking up the camera and making his 1990 debut Our Own Personal Hell. Working exclusively in the short film format, we touch on many of Richard's films, all the way to arguably his most astute, and sub...

Author of The Satanic Screen and leader of gothic band Radio Werewolf, Nikolas Schreck returns to the show! And lucky for us, he's here to discuss the feature length debut of his late friend, and collaborator, Curtis Harrington - the terrific and surreal Night Tide! Night Tide is a noir-ish nightmare that stars Dennis Hopper in his first lead role, as a sailor who meets the mysterious sideshow...

This week I'm joined by Chris Babalis, frontman of Greek doom metal band Acid Mammoth, so it's only appropriate that we discuss one of cinema's most doom-laden and oppressive sword and sorcery epics, Conan The Barbarian! Written by John Milius and Oliver Stone, with Milius behind the camera, Conan The Barbarian stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as an orphaned Cimmerian boy, who rises from sl...

Filmmaker Kansas Bowling exploded onto the scene as a mid-teen, directing the first ever pre-historic slasher B.C Butcher for Troma. Since then she has acted in everything from Murdercise, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and being cast in Neil Breen's upcoming film Dire Duplicity. But today Kansas drops by to discuss her film Cuddly Toys, a genuine mondo film, influenced by the likes of Mondo Ho...

IFWT is taking a trip to Mexico with Satanic witch and burlesque performer Szandora LaVey - a surname synonymous with counter-cultural diabolism since Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966 - as we attempt to decipher Juan Lopez Moctezuma's 1977 vampire oddity Alucarda. Alucarda, a loose adaptation of Le Fanu's novel Carmilla (that predated Stoker's Dracula by 25 years!) tells the story o...

IFWT is back after a short hiatus, and we're back in style. We're joined by "The Rock 'n' Roll Champion With Curly Hair", THE PHANTOM A.D., this generations answer to the iconoclastic Mojo Nixon. The Phantom A.D's music is a monstrous conglomerate of horrorr movies, pop-culture, trash and everything else us groovy hepcats dig, all backdropped by Chuck Berry rhythms an...

On this episode I'm joined by musician and writer Tony O'Neill. Tony rose from working class Blackburn to playing keyboards with Marc Almond, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Kenickie. But that's only the beginning of his story. After falling into serious drug addiction, he pivoted and became a respected man of letters, writing underground classics such as Digging The Vain and Sick Cit...

If you're a regular listener to this podcast you will know we (alongside Rolo Tony) dived into each of the directorial works of Larry Fessenden - from No Telling all the way to Blackout. We discussed the polemics, the recurring themes, his use of, and subverting, classic monster movie tropes. But now the time has come to talk with the man himself. How did the environment of his youth form his...

Author of Psychedelic Cults and Outlaw Churches, Mike Marinacci joins the show this week to discuss Pierre Sogol's, unfinished, and officially unreleased documentary, Aquarius Rising. Aquarius Rising charted the counterculture scene - communes, psychedelics - of California circa 1967, filmed very much in a home video style, with the director often inserting himself into the documentary. But wh...

IFWT is finally covering The Sultan of Sexploitation, Russ Meyer! And if that wasn't groovy enough, writer and connoisseur of all things cult, Heather Drain is here to discuss Meyer's bodacious, buxom and badass movie from 1975, SUPERVIXENS. Supervixen's concerns the accidental sexploits of gas station worker Clint, who after being falsely accused of killing his girlfriend, hits the tw...

This week I'm joined by author Scott West and Rif of the upcoming podcast Rocket Ships, Ray Guns & Rock n Roll, to discuss Alex Cox's incendiary debut, and truly punk film Repo Man. One part conspiracy thriller, one part Sci-Fi mystery and 100% cult classic, Repo Man would catapult Emelio Estevez in leading man territory alongside certified greats such as Harry Dean Stanton. With a sou...

It's a pleasure to welcome director Joshua Erkman onto the podcast, who, after a lifetime toiling away in the industry, has finally released his feature-length debut, A Desert - a film that exists somewhere between Hitchcock's Psycho and the abstract nightmares of David Lynch. When a middle-aged photographer heads to the desert, sans mobile phone, to attempt to recapture a sense of the wil...

Punk icon Harley Flanagan has persevered through hell to tell his story of addiction, madness and redemption. As founder of hardcore band the Cro-Mags, he's toured the world and entertained the masses. But behind the mayhem, lies a human story of abuse, neglect and kicking against the pricks. As a child born into a world of counterculture legends as Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol, Harley was d...

This week I'm joined by Welsh filmmaker and guest film programmer at London's only grindhouse-exclusive picturehouse, The Nickel Cinema, Craig Williams, to discuss Paul Morrissey's near-lost punk artifact Madame Wang's. Centered on a story of of an East German agent who is sent to the United States, not only to search for Jane Fonda, but to wait for the Communist takeover. Along th...

Gentry Austin, co-host of the sexploitation podcast The Sin Syndicate podcast is joining the podcast to discuss the Annie Belle starring Laure a.k.a Forever Emmanuelle Forever. Laure, is a 'Emmanuelle-adjacent' softcore film that waxes on liberation, religion and emancipation from life's shackles - so it is no mere T&A film, which makes it ripe for the IFWT deepdive. And much of th...

Writer and contributor to TheFightCity.com, Andrew Rihn joins the podcast for the first time, as he brings IFWT Humphrey Bogart's last ever film 'The Harder They Fall'. Adapted from a novel by controversial writer Budd Shulberg - controversial for reasons we definitely discuss in this episode, as we dive into the real life scenes behind this fictional film. A film about a down-on-his-l...