The Projection Booth

Chinese hopping vampires have invaded Dublin. Kung Fu Deadly (2026), a martial arts horror comedy that had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest and plays Sitges next, sends two inept exterminators, Danny (Steven He) and Frank (Michael Tient), after a swarm of jiangshi, with Lian (Gemma Chua-Tran) as their reluctant ally. Writer-producer Paddy McDonald, who produced Predestination (2014), needed 12 and a half years and roughly 30 drafts to get it made; BAFTA-winning director Fergal Costello finally cracked it.

Mike talks with both about the Mr. Vampire (1985) and Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980) obsessions behind the monsters, a Zoom chemistry read that made two leads click instantly, iPhone previs for the fight scenes, John Carpenter widescreen framing from Big Trouble in Little China (1986), and Costello's next film, a vampire movie shooting in November.

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

At a Westwood preview, a teenage girl turned to her friend: "Oh, my God." Paul Schrader turned to Jerry Bruckheimer: "I think maybe we went a little far." Schrader took Cat People (1982) as a for-hire genre job, and it turned out as personal as anything he ever made. For Shocktober 2026, Mike White and guest co-hosts Josh Hadley and Heather Drain follow Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell into a New Orleans thick with humidity, incest and a Giorgio Moroder score. They set Alan Ormsby's very different script against what reached the screen, dig into Ferdinando Scarfiotti's Italian look, the dubbed dialogue and the mountain lions dyed black, and measure it all against Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton's Cat People (1942). Then Schrader himself explains the burning-house ending he threw out, why Bowie's song waits for the end credits, why he wishes he had changed the title, and how falling for his star ended his studio days.

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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.

What happens when your online avatar starts living a life of its own? Welcome to Dolly's House (2026), a Taiwanese animated feature chosen to open Annecy's Contrechamp section, drops a YouTuber into the home of Madame Dolly, a sorceress who has lived for two millennia, and a house full of dolls. Seven YCH directs with Rady Fu and Tree Muta, blending live-action motion capture with 2D animation.

Mike talks with Seven about the ancient Chinese anthology Taiping Guangji that inspired the sorceress, an idea 25 years in the making that moved from live action to animation when costs soared, how rotoscoping cut time by half and expenses by 30 percent, actors performing every role twice, once on a bare warehouse stage and again in the dubbing booth, Taipei landmarks that became Dolly's house, and a sequel following the mysterious Catherine.

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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.

Barbarians lose their heads, monsters lose their guts, and not one actor ever set foot on the set: Kylgor in the Grisly Abyss (2026) is a blood-soaked sword-and-sorcery quest performed entirely by puppets, built in a family garage in Belleville, Ontario. Director Mason Newton DeRushie's feature debut had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest before heading to Australia's Monster Fest. Mason and his father, production designer Jason Derushie, join Mike to tell how a family raised on special makeup effects set out to bring back the '80s barbarian movie. They explain why a pandemic and a crowdfunding campaign pointed them toward puppets, how a list of ten creatures they wanted to see wrote the story, and how couch foam, chicken wire, old bedsheets and about $6,000 in spray foam became the caves. The puppet cast runs past 60 characters, from tiny insects to huge beasts, and the voice cast, led by Timothy Paul McCarthy and Ry Barrett of In a Violent Nature (2024), never saw one of them: the puppets were shot first and the voices recorded in two days afterward. Their touchstones run from Meet the Feebles (1989) to The Dark Crystal (1982). And the surviving puppets? Wet mattress foam is hard to dry, so they live in an airtight container, where nobody has to smell them.

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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.

Why would a 1977 revenge movie vanish for decades while cult-film obsessives begged to see it? Best Served Cold (2026), the new documentary from writer-director Eric Zaldivar and producers Mike Malloy and John Joseph Dunn, chases The Farmer (1977) from a Columbia release nobody could find to a gray-market YouTube upload that finally forced Code Red's hand. It had its world premiere at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival in Fort Lauderdale. The filmmakers join Mike to talk about a 40-minute YouTube short that grew into a feature, star and producer Gary Conway's stories, George Memmoli's on-set accident, Johnny Popwell's run-in with the law, Paul Schrader's interview after a year of agent runaround, and a cut chapter on the returning-veteran films that ties The Farmer to Rolling Thunder (1977). A bonus conversation recorded years ago adds the hunters' side: John Schuster and John Santo on how a trailer on a Hell's Ground (2007) DVD sent them searching collectors, archives and Columbia's lawyers, down a rights tangle that runs to Sylvester Stallone's Over the Top (1987).

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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.