The Projection Booth

What if the Ouija board were an app, and the app were hungry? Do You Want to Play (2026), a new horror film fresh from its world premiere at Tubi FrightFest, turns the spirit board into an algorithm and lets a serial killer's demon climb inside a teenager through her phone.

Writer-director Nicholas Lyon joins Mike White with Ricco Ross, the Aliens (1986) veteran who plays Scary Gary, a priest turned YouTuber. Lyon traces the film to a Ouija script he wrote years ago, before the Ouija movies beat him to the board, and to the invented Demon Board at its center. Ross explains how he built Gary from the outside in: darker eyes, an island-tinged accent, and a reverence for the priest in The Exorcist (1973). The two recall an improvised exorcism, Latin lines and no stunt rigs, and why Ross trusts a director who lets him fail. Lyon also explains how casting Quinn Aune made him rewrite the script around her, why a small-budget horror film takes years to fund, and why he is weighing self-distribution against a big distributor.

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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.

Is Moontide (1942) film noir, or a dockside melodrama with a hangover? Mike White, Heidi Honeycutt and Jedidiah Ayres take on Noirvember's strangest Hollywood experiment: 20th Century Fox's bid to turn French star Jean Gabin into a leading man.

Archie Mayo directed after Fritz Lang shot three weeks and quit. Gabin wakes from a blackout unsure whether he killed a man, Ida Lupino walks into the surf, and Claude Rains and Thomas Mitchell circle them. The panel weighs Lupino's performance, Salvador Dalí's mostly vanished dream sequence, the film's kinship with Out of the Fog (1941) and Port of Shadows (1938), and Willard Robertson's novel. Plus: why Bobo?

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.

Before E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) there was Night Skies, a rural alien-horror movie that Steven Spielberg developed, spent roughly $700,000 on, and walked away from.

Max Evry, author of A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch's Dune, returns to The Projection Booth to talk about his new book, Stranded on Earth: How Night Skies Became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, out October 27 from 1984 Publishing. A new book, a new look at old Spielberg.

Mike White and Evry dig into:

Why Spielberg traded a sinister project for a personal story about a lonely kid and an alien, and how the friendship at the heart of Night Skies became the whole of E.T.

The Rick Baker saga: his working aliens, the blowup that sent Spielberg to Carlo Rambaldi, and how much of the creature came from Baker.

Ron Cobb, John Sayles, Tobe Hooper and the myths the book corrects.

After School, the R-rated middle-school comedy from Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis.

How ideas migrated into Poltergeist (1982) and Gremlins (1984), and whether Night Skies could work after Disclosure Day (2026).

If Spielberg never lets a good idea die, what happens when someone writes down where they went?

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.

For five seconds of live television, Sammy Petrillo popped out of a crib beside Jerry Lewis on The Colgate Comedy Hour, the two pulling the same moronic face, and those five seconds shaped the rest of his life. WFMU's Dave "the Spazz" Abramson spent nearly two decades chasing the man behind the face for Your Time Is Now: The Sammy Petrillo Story, his new biography from Feral House. He tells Mike how it started: an 11-year-old reading one paragraph about Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), with Petrillo and Duke Mitchell as a knockoff Martin and Lewis; a punk single by his band The Sea Monkeys; a 1992 radio interview; and a blog comment war between Sammy and the son who says his father went out for cigarettes and never came back. Abramson worked it like a cold case, racing to reach sources in their 90s, and with help from cover artist Drew Friedman and foreword writer Scott Alexander got Jerry Lewis himself on the record. They dig into a Rashomon life: Doris Wishman's Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972), cable TV shows years before anyone had cable, film reels lost to unpaid storage bills, Barbara Loden's anonymous turn on the record All About Cleopatra, and why imitating Lewis, of all people, was a blessing and a curse. Plus: the original negative of Brooklyn Gorilla has resurfaced, and the 4K restoration screens at Nitehawk Prospect Park on November 12 and at the American Cinematheque's Los Feliz 3 on November 15.

Get the book, and sign up for news of the screenings, at Feral House.

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.

She has already buried her husband. Then a charming stranger comes to her aid during a robbery, and she lets him in. That's when the con begins. Cruel Love (2026), Nick Lyon's new thriller, now streaming, turns real marriage fraud into what star Elisabeth Harnois calls "a cautionary tale with an element of emotional horror." Lyon tells Mike how he and the late Christian Oliver made it their first co-production, how Ron Peer's twist-and-turn script grew out of real cons that exploit fiancé visas and even the Violence Against Women Act, and why he added a rainy Los Angeles opening in post to set a modern noir mood. Detroit-born Harnois builds Julia from grief: a woman who lost the love of her life before the movie starts and decides to trust again. Bai Ling, who tells reporters she landed from the moon, plays Mei Li, a role first written as a Russian named Lyudmila; Lyon's only job, he says, was pulling her back a little. A friendly argument breaks out over half a shot that didn't make the cut, and Lyon explains why even a favorite moment sometimes has to go. Oliver died in January 2024, before the film's release, and Harnois hopes it brings new eyes to his work. Plus: Lyon's FrightFest horror film Do You Want to Play? (2026), his next, about Arctic ice cores hiding insects you don't want on your spine, and Bai Ling's directing debut, My Quarantine Romance with Toilet Paper, in which she plays Charlie Chaplin.

Follow Cruel Love on Instagram and rent or buy it from the film's official website.

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.