The Projection Booth

Kier-La Janisse wanted to be a film programmer. Instead she became a publisher and a filmmaker, because the festival that gave her a website in 2011 handed it over when it stopped reaching Quebec audiences. She turned that domain into Spectacular Optical, a book imprint that started in 2014 with Kid Power, partly because Canadian grants were easier to win for books than for magazines. Janisse joins Mike for a freewheeling walk through the catalogue: the anthology model that lets a book come together fast, Satanic Panic and the care it took not to hurt real people, why Kid Power sat unsold until everyone rediscovered weird kids' movies, the 2017 pair The Yuletide Terror and The Lost Girls, the Jean Rollin book that sold out, and Truth & Soul: A Robert Downey Sr. Reader, the book she co-edited with Clint Enns because a hole needed filling. She also previews Sharp Edges, a book for Severin Films' 20th anniversary, and explains how a woman who never wanted to make movies keeps making them for Severin. Her work lives at spectacularoptical.com.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

A world drawn in cross-hatched lines: water, ships and faces all look like Victorian engravings come to life. Czechtember 2026 opens with Karel Zeman's Invention for Destruction (1958), released in America as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, as Mike welcomes back Jonathan Owen and Professor Earl Jackson.

Freely adapted from Verne's Facing the Fat, the film follows young engineer Simon Hart and Professor Roch, whose world-changing explosive lures the genteel pirate Count Artigas to a hollow volcano. Mike, Jonathan and Earl unpack Zeman's trickery: matte paintings, forced perspective, puppets, glass rippled frame by frame. They trace how Zeman strips out Verne's colonialism, the Cold War hunt for scientists humming underneath, and the real inventor who sued Verne. Along the way: Méliès, Guy Maddin and Hundreds of Beavers (2022).

Can spectacle this dense leave room for criticism, or is “wow” the most honest response?

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

A birthday party, a rented house and a person you only thought you knew: I See the Demon (2025) turns a breach of trust into sci-fi horror.

This is a Special Report on a new voice and a festival film. First-time feature director Jacob Lees Johnson joins Mike White to talk about the movie that premiered at Cinequest in San Jose, then played Grimmfest in the UK and FilmQuest in Utah. It stars Jon Heder and Alex Zollicoffer, and it is now on VOD.

Lees Johnson explains where the sci-fi ideas came from, why the relationships are the real heart of the film, and how a first AD's blunt note sent the script back for a rewrite. He talks about shooting in ten days in a real house in Provo, cutting the film himself in Premiere, and living with one round of early test screenings. He also names the folk horror he wants to make next, and a dream take on the Sleepy Hollow legend.

Follow Lees Johnson on Instagram at @sir_lees.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

A naked man walks out of the sea and into São Paulo, and nobody can agree whether he's the Messiah or a naughty boy with a beard. José Mojica Marins, best known as Coffin Joe, kicks off Shocktober 2026 with The End of Man (1971), a strange, scrappy sermon.

Mike White, Rob St. Mary and Ben Buckingham dig into Finis Hominis: the head-in, tail-away walks that carry Mojica from scene to scene, an ending that jabs Catholic society in the eye, echoes of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, and the follow-up, When the Gods Fall Asleep (1972). They also talk about Mojica's death in 2020.

Then Mike talks with André Barcinski, co-director of Coffin Joe: The Strange World of Jose Mojica Marins (2001), about visiting Mojica in São Paulo, the dictatorship years, Cinema Novo, and a man who was never allowed to stop being his character.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.

Joe R. Lansdale writes like everybody he knows is dead, and Hollywood has been trying to catch up with him ever since. The Texas storyteller joins Mike for a Projection Booth Special Report that runs from Batman comics to the movies he hopes to make next.

Lansdale, the author behind Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), argues the film needs no sequel: Bruce Campbell is that part. He explains why The Drive-In has been optioned again and again and never filmed, why he calls Hollywood a sack of weasels while happily cashing the checks, and how a screenplay for Ridley Scott paid for his house.

There is more: a four-year-old's love of Batman and the story "Subway Jack"; why he ended Hap and Leonard after 15 novels; his friendship with Bill Paxton, who sent him Frailty (2001) and optioned The Bottoms; Howard Waldrop adaptations, one starring and directed by Vincent D'Onofrio; and The Projectionist, the film he hopes to direct next year. He also talks Texas, genre, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a daily three-hour writing habit.

Visit Joe Lansdale's official website at https://www.joerlansdale.com/

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.

Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth 

The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.