The Projection Booth

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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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 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.

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).

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.

What does it cost to help a friend make his movie? For James Claeys, the answer was his house. Sell Your House (2026), co-directed by Eric Foss and Brandon Pickering, follows the making of The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023), Francis Galluppi's debut feature, and the years of debt, freak storms and distribution dead ends that came after. It had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Foss and Pickering join Mike to talk about how a behind-the-scenes shoot titled Hire Your Friends became a feature (it took Richard Brake telling Foss to do it), how two filmmakers who have worked together for years edited it with no money and no editor, why Pickering lost a bunch of money for four years, the scene where James walks out of an interview, and why the story cannot end until they find out whether he gets his house back. No spoilers.

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 gravedigger shoots the dead a second time, his assistant answers every question with a single syllable, and the woman he loves keeps coming back as someone new: Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), released in the US as Cemetery Man, is a horror comedy that refuses to explain itself, and that refusal is the point. To close Shocktober 2026, Mike White and guest co-hosts Heather Drain and Rob Spencer take on Michele Soavi's dream-logic zombie romance, starring Rupert Everett. Is it a coma dream, a killer's solipsistic breakdown, or a joke about the death of love? They track how Anna Falchi's returns speed up, how Tiziano Sclavi's Dylan Dog world seeps in, what Soavi's Stage Fright (1987) and The Sect (1991) promise, and the Psychomania (1973) motorcycle that roars out of a grave. They also meet François Hadji-Lazaro, the actor behind Gnaghi, and his band Les Garçons Bouchers.

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.