The Projection Booth

Dave Boyle built Never After Dark (2026) around a lifelong passion for ghost stories and a desire to find something new in a "well-worn genre." He tells Mike White and co-star Moeka Hoshi about the sound design holding the film together: Japanese sound designer Natsuko Inoue (Godzilla Minus One, House of Ninjas), who handled all sound design and foley in Tokyo before flying to Los Angeles to mix at Warner Bros. with longtime American mixer Carlos, plus composer Jonathan Snipes — a deliberate pairing of Japanese and Western collaborators Boyle says rarely happens across either country's insular film industries.

Hoshi, who plays wandering medium Airi, talks about the unusual challenge of acting opposite co-star Kurumi Inagaki's dead-sister character Miku, who appears only as a reflection — meaning entire scenes were performed without ever actually making eye contact with her scene partner, down to taping marks on walls to hit precise mirror angles. Boyle also details the funnier-than-scripted performance castmate Mutsuo Yoshioka brought to the film's mysterious man, and a hint of what's next: his in-development remake of the J-horror classic Pulse, based on what he calls his favorite script he's ever been handed.

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

First-time feature director Matt Sukkar cold-approached William H. Macy with a letter to land his Sheriff Krueger, then built The Deputy's tone around Scorsese's After Hours: "one bad decision leading you on the course of a night where the protagonist is trying to get things back to normal, and reality is becoming increasingly absurd the whole time." Adapted from Victor Gischler's novel — relocated from Oklahoma to Natchez, Mississippi, where Sukkar did a full dialect-and-reference pass on Carlo Bernard's long-dormant script — the film follows rookie deputy Toby Sawyer (Duke Nicholson) through one disastrous overnight shift, flanked by an ensemble Sukkar calls "eccentric, weird, but real": Macy, Tiffany Haddish, Stephen Dorff, Billie Lourd, and Julia Fox among them.

Sukkar tells Mike White about matching Natchez's genuinely low-budget sheriff's station — a converted mechanic shop dressed by production designer Julie Tosh with taxidermy and desk-drawer trinkets — to the film's own scrappiness, shooting nights capped by hours limits for underage cast, and editing across four cities (Mississippi, New York, Mexico City, and LA) with editor Javier Velasco, chasing a different room each time to keep the same footage feeling fresh. He also talks about living with his real-life close friend and star, Duke Nicholson, for the length of the shoot, and the nationwide theater tour and Q&A run following the film's September 25 release.

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

After getting killed off in John Carpenter's 2018 Halloween and walking that film's red carpet, musician-actor Kurt Deimer called his friend Kevin Wayne with a pitch: let's start our own horror franchise, the way Halloween launched Michael Myers. Wayne had already heard about a haunted attraction in Vincent, Alabama — Hellbilly Hollow — and the two built their new killers, hulking Bull (Deimer) and childlike, disfigured Tickles (Wayne, who also directs), around the real attraction's actual layout, shooting the whole film on-site and living in campers on the property.

Wayne and Deimer tell Mike White about the three-week shoot, the freedom Wayne gave his co-star to improvise Bull's "deep inner soul of craziness," the pandemic slowdown that gave Deimer time to finish producing the original songs (mixed with mentor Chris Lord-Alge) that score the carnage, and the slate of horror-franchise sequels and other genre roles already lined up behind Hellbilly Hollow, including a new killer for producer Andy Gould (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects).

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 and The Kulturecast cross the streams to dig into Digger, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's bombastic, heavily spoiled satire starring Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon racing to convince the world he can fix the Arctic disaster he caused. Mike White and Chris Stachiw land on opposite sides of the "is it a $125 million folly or a willfully strange swing worth defending" debate, but agree the film's biggest surprise is its structural twist.

They dig into the cast firing on all cylinders (Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller as Emma Rockwell, John Goodman's increasingly unhinged dictator-president, and Jesse Plemons as Kenny, whose late reveal recontextualizes the whole film), the production's garish, Lanthimos-adjacent art direction, and why the movie's box-office failure and its placement as Warner Bros.' swan-song release before the Paramount merger became as much a talking point as the film itself. They also get into Cruise's career-long pattern of go-for-broke choices, from Tropic Thunder to Vanilla Sky, and whether this one eventually finds its audience the way The Bride likely never will.

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

Alicia Malone has spent years watching screwball comedies and noir thrillers for Turner Classic Movies — now she's put herself inside one. The TCM host talks with Mike White about Murder at the Movies: A Movie Palace Mystery, her first novel and the first fiction title TCM and Running Press have ever published.

Malone traces the book back to an accidental pitch over coffee with her editor, Cindy Sipala, and to her own fantasy of running a theater — the inspiration behind Audrey Sullivan, the Los Angeles transplant who inherits her grandmother's movie palace on a fictional Maine island only to find a body in the aisle after a Hitchcock screening goes wrong. Malone talks about disciplining herself to a deadline and a word count, getting early notes from noir historian Eddie Muller, and loading the book with classic-film Easter eggs for TCM viewers to spot.

She and Mike also cover her favorite cozy-mystery writers, from Lorna Barrett's Book Town series to Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club, the already-underway sequel (A Killer in the Credits), and how she splits her time between the novels and her TCM, The Gilded Age, and Reel Destinations work. Murder at the Movies is out October 6th from Running Press.

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