The Introverted Obelisk

Send us Fan Mail This month, The Introverted Obelisk kicks off Heatwave Horror Month with the 1964 drive-in cult classic The Horror of Party Beach . What starts as a carefree day of sun, surf, and dancing quickly turns into chaos when a radioactive monster rises from the ocean, leaving a trail of destruction along the shoreline. Equal parts beach party musical and creature feature, this film has e...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk, we travel back to 1954 and descend into the radioactive nightmare of Godzilla — the film that didn’t just create a monster, but transformed grief, fear, and national trauma into one of the most enduring icons in cinema history. Far removed from the heroic pop culture figure he would later become, the original Godzilla emerges here as som...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk, we wander into the moonlit nightmare world of Kuroneko, Kaneto Shindō’s hypnotic ghost story about war, grief, vengeance, and the terrible persistence of love. Released just a few years after his masterpiece Onibaba, Kuroneko trades sweat and mud for mist and silence, creating one of the most beautiful and emotionally devastating horror...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk, we descend into the sweltering nightmare world of Onibaba, Kaneto Shindō’s haunting masterpiece of war, hunger, jealousy, and survival. Set during the chaos of civil war in medieval Japan, the film follows two women — an older mother and her younger daughter-in-law — struggling to survive by murdering lost samurai and selling their armor...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk, we step into the fog-covered streets of Paris and unravel the eerie mystery of So Long at the Fair, a psychological thriller that turns one missing person into a waking nightmare. Set during the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, the film follows Vicky Barton, a young English woman visiting the city with her brother Johnny. After an evening out, s...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk , Obie descends into the quiet, suffocating paranoia of My Name Is Julia Ross, a Gothic psychological thriller where the greatest danger isn’t violence, but the terrifying realization that everyone around you has collectively agreed to rewrite your identity. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis and starring Nina Foch, the film follows Julia Ross,...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk , Obie heads deep into the collapsing world of Southern Gothic horror with Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, a film where the hallways are long, the family grudges are longer, and absolutely nobody in the mansion seems emotionally qualified to be around other human beings. Directed by Robert Aldrich and starring the legendary Bette Davis, the...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk , Obie descends into the painted nightmare world of Kwaidan — a haunting anthology film directed by Masaki Kobayashi that transforms traditional Japanese ghost stories into one of the most visually stunning horror films ever made. Across four separate tales, the film explores vanity, betrayal, greed, memory, and the terrible price of igno...

Send us Fan Mail Tonight on The Introverted Obelisk , we confront a familiar fantasy: the belief that science can fix grief if we just push it hard enough. The Colossus of New York begins with tragedy — a brilliant scientist dies far too young, leaving behind a grieving family desperate to undo the unfixable. Their solution? Ignore the laws of nature, ignore the warnings, and rebuild the man piece...

Send us Fan Mail Tonight on The Introverted Obelisk , science puts on a lab coat, sharpens its scalpel, and decides that ethics are optional. In Atomic Age Vampire , a brilliant but broken scientist sets out to save the woman he loves from disfigurement — not with compassion or restraint, but with radiation, stolen youth, and an alarming lack of follow-up questions. What begins as devotion quickly...

Send us Fan Mail Tonight on The Introverted Obelisk , love refuses to let go, science refuses to listen, and a severed head develops opinions. This episode dives into The Brain That Wouldn’t Die — a film that asks the eternal question: what if grief had a medical degree and absolutely no boundaries? After a tragic accident, a brilliant surgeon decides the best way to save his fiancée is to keep he...

Send us Fan Mail Tonight on The Introverted Obelisk , science takes a long, thoughtful look at ethics… and then feeds them to a plant. This episode tackles The Woman Eater , a British oddity where love, desperation, and very bad research habits collide inside a greenhouse that absolutely should have been burned down in the first act. A brilliant but doomed scientist discovers that a rare plant can...

Send us Fan Mail Tonight on The Introverted Obelisk , science proves once again that it does not understand the meaning of the word “enough.” This episode dives into The Return of Doctor X — a late-1930s cocktail of mad science, newspaper intrigue, and the unsettling realization that death is more of a suggestion than a rule. Bodies pile up, alibis unravel, and a reporter starts asking the kind of...

Send us Fan Mail Tonight on The Introverted Obelisk , we slip into a laboratory where the lights are low, the morals are flexible, and science has absolutely lost the plot. This is a pre-Code nightmare where mad doctors wear tuxedos, murder investigations are interrupted by flirtation, and every solution somehow involves more experiments on human beings. A string of grisly killings leads to a secr...

Send us Fan Mail Tonight, The Introverted Obelisk invites you to dim the lights, quiet your doubts, and listen closely — because the dead have something to sell. This is a story about love, loss, and the fine art of pretending you can hear the other side. A grieving widow meets a charming spiritualist who seems to know more about her late husband than any stranger should. The candles flicker, the...

Send us Fan Mail This is a story about ambition — the kind that starts with applause and ends in a bottle.  We follow a drifter who learns the carny trade, masters the con, and mistakes deceit for destiny. He climbs the ladder of showmanship one lie at a time, only to find the rungs greased with regret. Behind the banners and the fortune-telling, it’s all just desperation in makeup. The marks want...

Send us Fan Mail Tonight on The Introverted Obelisk , we step into a house that’s both a home and a trap — where love whispers, doubt grows, and every flickering lamp feels like an accusation. In this story, sanity isn’t lost — it’s stolen , piece by piece, by the one person who swore to protect it. It’s a world of locked drawers, missing brooches, and footsteps in the attic that no one else seems...

Send us Fan Mail Tonight, The Introverted Obelisk rings in the New Year with a hangover, a curse, and a carriage that never misses a pickup. We’re heading back to 1921 for Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage — a Swedish morality tale that looks like a ghost story, drinks like a tragedy, and hits like a confession. According to legend, the last person to die before midnight on New Year’s Eve bec...

Send us Fan Mail Tonight, The Introverted Obelisk trades the crypt for the catwalks of the Paris Opera House — where chandeliers fall, music swells, and romance dies screaming in the wings. Lon Chaney — the man of a thousand faces — delivers his most unforgettable one here: Erik, the Phantom. He’s a genius, a murderer, and an unlicensed interior decorator with a serious candle budget. We’ll drift...

Send us Fan Mail Tonight on The Introverted Obelisk , we sail back to 1922 for a film that gave vampires their cinematic passport — Nosferatu . It’s the story of Count Orlok, a man who looks like a plague rat in formalwear, and poor Hutter, the real estate agent who thought closing a deal with the undead was a good career move. What follows is a slow, creeping nightmare of shadows, rats, and real-...

Send us Fan Mail This week on The Introverted Obelisk , we scale the heights of tragedy and stone with The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)—the film that gave Lon Chaney the keys to cinematic immortality and taught audiences that monsters aren’t always born, sometimes they’re sculpted by cruelty. Beneath the shadow of Notre Dame’s great cathedral, Quasimodo rings his bells, worships from afar, and d...

Send us Fan Mail Stranded on an isolated island with nothing to eat except a suspicious buffet of oversized mushrooms, a group of wealthy socialites slowly discovers that hunger isn’t the only thing gnawing at them. In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk , host Obie Knox dives into Matango , Ishirō Honda’s eerie, slow-burn descent into fungal madness. We follow a pleasure cruise gone catastrop...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk , your host Obie Knox takes you on a rain-soaked detour into James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932), the pre-code classic that accidentally invented an entire horror subgenre by asking the bold cinematic question: What if a house was both haunted… and also just full of horrible people? Stranded travelers Philip, Margaret, and Roger stumb...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk , Obe slips on his funereal gloves and dives headfirst into the wonderfully bizarre world of bride-snatching, botany, and Bela Lugosi’s increasingly questionable skincare routine . Our story begins with brides dropping dead at the altar—romantic, I know—and disappearing before anyone can even say “refund the caterer.” Obe guides listeners...

Send us Fan Mail  In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk , we swoop into The Vampire Bat (1933), a film that asks the daring question: what if the vampire menace terrorizing a small European village wasn’t supernatural at all—just the work of an overzealous mad scientist with a blood fetish and questionable ethics? Set in the eternally torch-lit town of Kleinschloss, the movie mixes gothic par...