In Film We Trust

Our pal Rolo Tony is back as we continue our dive into the works of Larry Fessenden, and for today's episode we're taking a look at easily Fessenden's most divisive film to date - the direct-to-Chiller, creature feature Beneath. Taking a relative battering by the critics of the time, and an equally poor audience reception, does Beneath deserve another look at? Does it retain Fessenden...

The Bigfoot journey continues here at In Film We Trust as we welcome back Scott West, Phil DeGlass and Matt Rotman. Last week we travelled to upstate New York in search of a Yeti, now we’re in Northern California in search of the big hairy one himself: Bigfoot. Night Of The Demon impressed very few people back in the day, so we’re here to see whether or not its worthy of reappraisal. Is it cheap,...

You may not know it, but here at In Film We Trust we’ve long been planning something special, something incredible, something truly extraordinary: A Bigfoot double bill with some of our previous guests! Ok it might not be earthshattering, but it’s fertile ground for some laughs, some fun analysis and a lot of behind-the-scenes factoids. So on that note we’re inviting our good friends Matt Rotman,...

We welcome underground filmmaker Charles Pinion back to the show for part 2 of our dive into his transgressive, shot on video works. In part 1 we discussed the punk-splatter of Twisted Issues, and today we are discussing Red Spirit Lake - his second feature, and arguable his most narrative driven of his early work. In this episode we contextualise his the film within the period - his work at the c...

After a brief hiatus, we’ve returned to our rightful place in front of the mics. Some months ago, with Liam off saying hello to Dennis Hopper on a psychedelic tour of the stratosphere. Wayne welcomed our good friend Rolo Tony on to discuss Larry Fessenden’s 1997 Vampire film Habit. That was the first episode in a miniseries that continues today with Wendigo, a film set in the snow-covered wilderne...

This week Wayne is on the lam from Interpol, so Phil Deglass, CEO, COO, and whatever other acronyms he gave himself during the episode, of Flixology 101 is sitting in the co-host chair with Liam, as he brings the podcast Dario Argento's giallo Opera to discuss - a film many believe is Argento's last outright classic. But is that true? Well, stick around to find out, because we've got o...

We're dipping our toes into the world of Jim Van Bebber - the controversial filmmaker of works such as My Sweet Satan and The Manson Family. But for this episode we're going back to his feature length debut Deadbeat at Dawn, a gangland tale of revenge, the occult and murder, that showed the same shoe-string ingenuity as contemporary Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead. And for this episode we&#3...

While Liam is off on a wild psychedelic adventure, Wayne is here to kick off a mini-series on New York filmmaker Larry Fessenden with our friend and previous collaborator Rolo Tony. Fessenden’s name may not be as recognisable as the likes of Carpenter, Hitchcock, Cronenberg and others, but Tony is here to explain why he still deserves to be mentioned among these all-time greats. So we’re starting...

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is one of the most acclaimed horror films of all time, a chilling window into the mind of a twisted, voyeuristic killer with serious parental issues. Sadly, it’s huge success overshadowed a lesser known but strikingly similar film called Peeing Tom. Now hailed as a masterpiece, it dealt irreparable damage to its director Michale Powell’s career and spent years in shame an...

IFWT is riding solo this week to dive into a almost quasi lost New Hollywood film The Hired Hand, directed by and starring Easy Rider's Peter Fonda. The Hired Hand came about due to Universal jumping on the Easy Rider trend and giving new directors 1 millions dollars and final cut (so they say), in an attempt to capture the indie success of Easy Rider. Did it work? Did it succeed? Were all par...

Alexandra Hay might not be a name that means much to you, but for todays guest, Dylan Dean Staley, it’s been the focus of his creative endeavours for the better part of a decade. So today he’s on the show to tell us all about this enigmatic figure, with special focus on one of her most highly regarded movies: Model Shop. A clear influence on Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, its f...

We welcome punk filmmaker Charles Pinion onto the show for the first part of a mini-series diving into the shot-on-video works of Charles. Pinion made his mark on the shot-on-video scene of the 1980s with his debut feature Twisted Issues in 1988 - an experimental psychotronic story of a bullied skater who is killed and resurrected, attached to his skateboard(!!!), to enact bloody revenge on his pe...

The Vanishing stands as one of the most highly regarded European films ever made films, and on this episode we’re inviting on a guest who, quite literally, wrote the book on it. Writer and film critic Christina Brennan, author of The Vanishing (Spoorloos), is going to guide us through the production history, behind the scenes dramas and all the fascinating ins and outs that revolve around what som...

We welcome back to the show, author, filmmaker and musician Nikolas Schreck, who has dropped by to discuss the 2024 revised and updated edition of his 2001 book The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide To The Devil In Cinema. Nikolas has a first hand vantage of the material, as in a former life, he was a practicing black magician, steeped in the occult and was associated with The Church of Satan....

It’s time for us to travel forward in time to the futuristic world of … 2000!? Death Race 2000 is one of the most famous films to come from the world of B-movie legend Roger Corman, and with an illustrious cast including David Carradine, Mary Woronov and a pre-super stardom Sylvester Stallone, it’s also one of the most well-regarded. There’s lots for us to pick apart here, including the dystopian...

Wayne is off gallivanting round Poland, so Liam, has recruited good friend of the podcast, Phil, of Flixology 101, to fill the co-host seat, and Liam introduces Phil to Scottish filmmaker Donald Cammell's completely bonkers movie White of the Eye. Starring a returning Cathy Moriarty, who after suffering a horrific car crash, was out of movies for 5 years, and also starring a magnetic David Keith ....

The French Connection was a departure for director William Friedkin. After the BO failure of The Boys in the Band, he pivoted, and put his learned skills to the emerging zeitgeist grabbing action and car chase film. But this film, is more than its infamous chase scene, it's a terrifically gritty tale of urban decay, set amongst the backdrop of the NYPD and the drug underworld. And lucky for us...

We're joined by friend of the show Carmelita McKoy, who brings us John Huston's 1964 adaptation of Tennessee Williams's play The Night of the Iguana, and we here at IFWT are spoiled, as Carmelita is a wealth of Tennessee Williams knowledge, so it's only fitting she join us for the dive into a film that bridges that old and new Hollywood.

It’s time for us to return to the delightfully sordid world of Giallo with Death Walks On High Heels. Luciano Ercoli might not be the biggest name ever to grace the genre, but as we’ll prove today, he earned a distinctive position in the world of Italian murder mystery. Alongside long time friend of the podcast, author Marek Z. Turner aka Polizio T Turner, we’ll give this little gem our customary...

We're taking our first trip into the world of short films on this podcast, and could think of no better way than to dive into the works of Kenneth Anger - a filmmaker of 'cine-poems' who has not only influenced cinema in general, but has arguably produced the first aeon of music video with his film Scorpio Rising. We discuss potentially his magnum opus in Lucifer Rising - a magick ritu...

It’s Baseball Opening Day, and what better what to celebrate this most American of occasions than by bring back a good friend of ours from across the pond to discuss what he considers to be the finest Baseball film of all time: The Bad News Bears. Released in 1976 (and boy you can tell!), it’s a simple yet powerful tale of friendship, camaraderie, wasted potential and the harm that comes from the...

IFWT is finally diving into the world of Spanish cult filmmaker Jose Ramon Larraz. 1974 was an important one for the filmmaker, releasing two seminal horror movies, Vampyres, and the psych-horror slow burn Symptoms, starring daughter of horror icon Donald Pleasence, Angele Pleasence. And it is Symptoms we'll be giving the deep dive, but with two films sharing many similarities, we'll be su...

Before he had multimillion dollar budgets, before he had IMAX cameras, before he had some of the biggest names in Hollywood beating down his door, Christopher Nolan was just a plucky young student who dreamed of being a director. So in 1998 he gathered a bunch of friends, scraped a few thousand quid together and made Following, a neo-noir crime thriller that announced him as a talent to watch out...

Yes, yes. David Fincher's film Zodiac may be the definitive film covering the Zodiac killer, but what it cannot boast is the title of the only film made with the sole intention of capturing an active serial killer, which Tom Hanson's 1971 thriller The Zodiac Killer can.

In October 2023 we invited Scottish indie filmmaker David Wilde on to the show to talk about his influences, his background in film and, most tantalisingly, the next project he was working on. On this week’s episode, we’re talking about that very film: Psycho Sex Dolls. We’ll ask David all manner of questions regarding the films plot, its characters, themes and all the fascinating background infor...