EPISODE BONUS: Joe Bob Briggs Halfway to Halloween
TRT 33:18
(Please note this is an automated transcription.)
BETH ACCOMANDO
Joe Bob Briggs is on a crusade.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
This losing crusade to bring Walpurgisnacht to America. Walpurgisnacht is the other pagan holiday, the second most important pagan holiday after Halloween.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And he doesn’t understand why everyone’s not celebrating it.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
And so it's a great holiday because it's all about witches. It's about lots of horror themes, and it's about alcohol. There are so many alcohols associated with this holiday.
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BETH ACCOMANDO Welcome back to listener supported KPBS Cinema Junkie, I'm Beth Accomando.
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BETH ACCOMANDO
It is Walpurgisnacht tonight! So no better time than now to speak with Joe Bob Briggs, the host of Shudder’s The Last Drive In, about his crusade to get Walpurignacht declared and celebrated as a national holiday so we can drink all those Witches’ night brews. We’ll also discuss how he ended up as a guru of Grindhouse on three networks and why he champions these drive in movies. After listening you can decide if you too want to join his mutant family. (:38)
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BETH ACCOMANDO I need to take one quick break and then I will be back with Joe Bob Briggs.
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BETH ACCOMANDO Welcome back to Cinema Junkie. I’m Beth Accomando. I’m not sure how many public radio listeners are also fans of Joe Bob Briggs so I asked him to describe his show for those who might be completely unfamiliar with it.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Well, I have a history with public radio. I have shocked the listeners of a couple of times. Not recently. Not recently. But the show that I do now, the Last Drive in, a movie hosting show in which we break into the movie and we do deep analysis of the movie in what we hope is a fun way. We are basically dealing with what used to be called exploitation films. They're now called genre films, I still call them exploitation films and almost, almost exclusively horror films on the Shutter network. So in the course of talking about these films, we develop a family of like minded people who tune in every time we're on. And of course, since it's a streaming network, they rewatch the shows a lot. But I mean, that's the best I can describe it. It's really, it's a show that's developed over a period of. I mean, I've done the same show three times. I did the show on the Movie Channel starting in the 80s, I did it on TNT starting in the 90s, show called Monster Vision. And I'm doing it a third time. When they came to me and said, hey, we'd like you to do a show on Shudder. I was like, okay, what kind of show we gonna do? They go, we want that same show. And I'm like, what? You can't repeat tv? You know you're not supposed to repeat tv. And I said, no, no, we want that exact same shot. Okay. And so these elements that we have on the show have been built up over decades and I've been fortunate. I've never had a time limit on the show. When I was on the Movie Channel that was a premium network. And so it didn't matter when the movie started and when it was over. And so I was on at the beginning of the movie, at the end of the movie when I was on tnt, I was on in the middle of the night. And so they said, they said to me, as long as you're done by 6am we don't care when you finish. And I could finish at three, I could finish at five, they didn't care. So my segments were as long or as short as I wanted them to be. And we would interrupt the movie at every commercial break, we would, we would talk. So there was no time limit there. And then now I'm on a streaming Network where they don't care either, you know. And so in fact, I was shocked. I said, what do you want me to do? Just introduce the movie? And they were like, oh no, we want to have those breaks like you had at TNT. And I was like, but you have no commercials. And they said, well, no, but we still want the breaks. I said, you want commercial breaks on a non commercial network? And they said, yeah. And I said, that's going to make people angry. And they said, no, we think this will work. And so lo and behold, it worked. People tune in for they mind the breaks. We have an average of 5 in each movie besides the introduction of the movie and the wrap up of the movie.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yeah, but you're not exactly a commercial, you know, you pack those breaks with all sorts of information and fun stuff and even interviews with filmmakers.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
That's true, that's true. Sometimes we bring the filmmaker on, sometimes we bring some of the actors on. A lot of times we're dealing with the background of movies that nobody else cares about. I mean, these are not exactly the movies that are getting nominated for the Academy Award, you know, Although occasionally we do what they call the elevated horror movies. I don't particularly like that term, but there is a subgenre called elevated horror. I don't even exactly know what it means, but we sort of become the Criterion Collection of horror occasionally when we're doing a certain type of movie. Usually the ones that are, that have some kind of like super intellectual backstory, like Exorcist 3 is one example, just simply because it has so much Catholic eschatology and symbolism and all this stuff in it.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Yeah, well, Catholicism as a lapsed Catholic is like one of the best foundations for horror ever. I think it is.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
There is a subgenre called Catholic horror. You know, started. Started with the Exorcist, continued with the Omen, and then disintegrated from there. But, but it's like, especially in Italy, there's, there's a whole lot of Catholic horror.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Well, and I mean, I just think so many directors were raised Catholic or have Catholicism in their background that even if it's not overtly in their films, like having the Bible read to you or seeing Christ on the cross in the church and sometimes very gruesome manner will haunt you.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
That's true. I mean, when people complain about the blood and gore in some of the movies that we show, I always point out that none of them compare the Passion of the Christ.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Exactly. Well, what I love about your show is that you do mix really entertaining breaks. But you also pack it with so much information sometimes. And sometimes you send us that information in like, in a massively rapid fire approach. That is very impressive.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Well, I get carried away. I mean, one of the shows I'm very proud of is the show we did, Nosferatu. On the 100th anniversary of the original silent classic Nosferatu. We broke all the rules of tv, which is never show silent films, never show subtitled films, never show black and white films, never show foreign films. And so we not only showed black and white, subtitled and foreign, we showed the exact same film twice because we showed the 1979 remake, German remake, and in the course of it, well, we dressed in the, in the costumes of 1820s Germany, Biedermeyer costume. And there are massive backstories to both of those movies. And so we had a lot of fun with that. But the main thing was I wanted to see if it was possible to do that programming and still have the audience stay with us. And man, did they stay with us. They still talk to me about that show. They love that show. And these are people who, who also love, you know, Nightmare on Elm street and Friday the 13th. And so you don't really expect them to become huge Nosferatu fans, but they did.
BETH ACCOMANDO
But it is a great film.
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JOE BOB BRIGGS
Oh, it is. It's an amazing film. Yes. So is the remake. So is the 1979 remake. Just in a different way, but also an incredible film. The most gratifying thing I hear from people is my wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, never liked horror until I introduced him to your show. And now he's a. Now he's a horror fanatic. He wants to see everything. So I like being the gateway drug and I like being the one that converts people into wanting. Horror fans are different. They don't want to just see this year's horror film. They want to see every horror film from every decade. And so, so once, once you get the bug, you, you, you know, I've got you for life.
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BETH ACCOMANDO
Now, you do have something special coming up for Walpurgisnacht this year. You do this quite often. Is there anything you can reveal about it? Sometimes you don't reveal the titles in.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Advance, but, yeah, we don't reveal the titles in advance. I kind of wish we did this year, but we can't. But I've been on this crusade, this losing crusade to bring Walpurgisnacht to America. Walpurgisnacht is the other pagan holiday, the second most important pagan holiday after Halloween, which is based. Halloween is based on Samhain. It is immensely popular in Germany and other parts of Europe. And it is all about witches. It's about burning the witches before they get to the Hexentansplatz, the witches dance floor where they cavort with Satan. Cavort meaning debauchery, you know. And so it's a great holiday because it's all about witches. It's about lots of horror themes, and it's about alcohol. There are so many alcohols associated with this holiday. There are beers and drinks that are only made for this holiday. It's always the night, night of April 30 and the morning of May 1, dusk to dawn, when the creatures of hell and the creatures of the present get very close together and can cross over the line. And so it's a huge holiday in Europe. Not so much here. And yet people have these Halfway to Halloween parties. Well, you don't have to have a Halfway to Halloween party. You've got a pagan holiday right here that you can celebrate. And I think it's partly the name Walpurgisnacht. It's hard to say. It's hard to remember. We should just change it to Witches Night and either be a witch or burn the witches. Take the team witch or team. What do they call them? The witch finders. Witch Finder Generals. But it's a. It's a great, fun, spooky holiday and I've been trying to, like, get people to embrace it and start celebrating it and make it as big as Halloween, but so far I'm shouting into the wilderness and I think it's the name no one can get across. Get around that German name.
BETH ACCOMANDO
I work with a group that programs films here and we just screened Mark of the Devil when. And we gave out the replicas of the vomit bags that were from the 70s. And I made Walpurgis, not Soup, to go with it.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Oh, that's perfect.
BETH ACCOMANDO
We had a professor come and she teaches about witches in history and specifically looking to, like, who the victims were and in these, like, witch hunts and stuff. But what was interesting was even though Mark of the Devil was obviously mining that material for the most, like, sensational and kind of gruesome stuff, there was a lot of actual, like, real tidbits of history in there that like, that had some real resonance to it, surprisingly. To some.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Yeah. I mean, I liked. I like the movies that start with the premise that there were no witch hunts. The witches were real. We have one of those coming up this Friday night on our. On our Walpurgisnach show. It would not be on anybody's top 10 list, but it's actually one of my favorite movies.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Oh, all right. I'll look forward to finding out out what that is then. And another thing that you do that's a lot of fun with the films is you do your Drive in Totals. So are those. Do you personally do all those counts every time?
JOE BOB BRIGGS
I hope you're not implying I would falsify a breast count or let.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Let someone else do it, I guess.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
No, I do. I do the drive in Totals. Yes. I take extensive notes. Sometimes it requires freeze frames to know if something qualifies for a drive in the count on the. On the drive in totals.
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BETH ACCOMANDO
You know, what do you think it is about these films that kind of give them their staying power? Because we were doing a show and we were talking about. We. We picked a black actress to highlight for Black History Month, and my co host and I decided we wanted to talk about Pam Grier. And now granted, you know, someone like Cicely Tyson or Ruby Dee probably has more aw is considered to have amassed more respected work. But the thing is, is like, they're not on T shirts and their movies aren't being screened in movie theaters today. So what is it, do you think about these, like, exploitation films or these genre films that really have more kind of impact and staying power sometimes than the. More, like, mainstream or.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Yeah, I mean, I think it's. I think it's the rebel element. It's the spitting in the eye of the establishment element, which is what all those exploitation directors were doing partly as marketing. You know, Pam Grier wasn't just. Or she is a great actress. Yes, but she's not just a great actress. She was a marketing tool in a way that Cicely Tyson would not be. And so having the sexy Pam Grier in your. In your movie was something that made it an exploitation film. There were a few actors like Richard Roundtree, Fred Williamson, that were marquee names in the blaxploitation era. They consistently delivered audience, and that's what exploitation films are all about. Exploitation is a marketing term that means the film has something exploitable that other films don't have. But I think the reason that people watch them 20 years later, 30 years later, 40 years later, is that, hey, I can't believe they were doing this. They're raw and they are. They're primal. They're primal. They're just. They're they get. They go to the basics in what we care about. I mean, most of them are full of sex and violence. Now, if you don't like something, you say, yeah, it's full of sex and violence. If you like it, you say, it was so full of romance and adventure. And so, you know, if it's mainstream, it's romance and adventure, but, you know, if it's exploitation, it's sex and violence. But there, there are good versions of that and there are bad versions of that, but a lot of these films were overlooked or neglected because they were made on a low budget for the Drive in Circuit or the grindhouse circuit.
BETH ACCOMANDO
You do show a lot of these quote unquote exploitation films or horror films, and they're films that are very easily accessible. I mean, horror is something everybody can enjoy and, you know, get into because it's like so primal. But then you do give them all this other, like, context and information. So, yeah, I mean, I can see easily how this can be a gateway to more films or all great horror.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Is, is in the subtext. And so we end up talking about the subtext because it's easy with all the technical Tricks of cinema to scare somebody to make them jump. That's, that's the easy part. The hard part is, is getting down into the primal fears. And, and the great filmmakers do that. And it's always about the subtext, the horror. Horror films are never about good. Horror films are never about what they seem to be about.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Right. Which is why I love zombies so much. They're like the, the prime example of that.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
We've had how many years of zombies now? For the first 50 years of sound film, there were maybe six zombie films.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And most of those were like voodoo zombies.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Exactly, the voodoo zombies. Right. And then since 1968, we have had gazillions of them. I mean, and there's some like, major cultural change that created that interest in zombies. And it's scary to think about what that cultural change is. And so there's lots to talk about when you get to zombies.
BETH ACCOMANDO
So what kind of research do you do? I mean, is this just knowledge you've been building up over decades, or do you actually, like, dive into a film and say, like, I need to even find out more?
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Oh, I always want to find out more. But I, I have developed a lot of friendships in the movie industry over the years, but. But I always read and watch pretty much 100% of everything written and said about a movie before I present it on the air. So I kind of know. I even read the user reviews, you know, on IMDb have those user reviews, and a lot of them are insanely idiotic, but I sort of read those as a way to assess the, the public's view of the film. You know, just the general public, just the average guy's view of the film. And. But, you know, yeah, I do, I do extensive deep background research on all of the films, and sometimes that's hard to do. I'm currently looking at one called Crocodile that was made in highland in the 80s. Not a whole lot of information on Crocodile, but what there is is very interesting.
BETH ACCOMANDO
What got you initially interested in film and heading down this path? Because, like, I know for me it's. My dad got me into film and, you know, that was the start of all my craziness. But what was it that, like, really hooked you on pursuing this?
JOE BOB BRIGGS
I was an investigative reporter at the Dallas Times Herald, and the film critic job came open and my friend was the entertainment editor. And I said to her, I said, yeah, I said, you know, I'm exhausted. I'm doing all these investigative stories and could I be the film critic for a while just to rest and she said, yeah. And so, you know, until you get a real one. And so. And she says, you know, you have to review all the movies, right? I said, yeah, okay. And so by the second week, I said, I'm not seeing the screenings for some of these movies that are at the Drive in. And she says, oh, we don't review those. I said, you don't review those. Those look really interesting to me. Plus, some of those are what I would go to anyway, even if I wasn't film critic. And she's like, no, we don't review those. And so I said, well, I'm gonna start reviewing them. And so I was really the first guy to review movies for mainstream newspaper and not consider them disposable trash. And the first guy who befriended my column, well, one of the first guys was Stephen King.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
He had a family member who lived in Dallas and was sending the column every. Every week. And he wrote me a fan letter. And then Roger Corman, the legendary B movie producer, became a fan of the column, and other people became fans of the column. And so it just grew from there. But my tastes were populist tastes. They were not art film tastes. Although when I was the film critic, that was the two. The two kinds of films I liked. I didn't like the Hollywood mainstream films, but I did like the Drive in premieres. We usually play for one week and you never see them again. And I like the foreign films. So I became a fan of foreign and what I call drive in films or exploitation films.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Did you ever think that job was going to lead you to where you are today?
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Never. Never. I mean, even after I started doing it for the Movie Channel, I thought it was kind of a sideline. I had done a article for Rolling Stone on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. I went down to where they were filming it, and the only reason they wanted me to do it is because Dennis Hopper was in it, and Dennis Hopper was coming out of rehab, and they wanted me to interview Dennis Hopper. And so that article was seen by a lot of people. And among those people were the programmers at the Movie Channel. And they said, what? Would you come and host these sort of crappy movies that we show on Friday night? And they would go over to the film markets in Europe and buy all these crappy movies. And so I said, sure. What they didn't realize is I liked them. I liked those movies. Did a month's worth. It was just me sitting in a Lazy Boy recliner with steer horns on the back. And so I did every Friday Night for a month. And I said, hey, that was fun. And they invited me back for the next month and then the next month and then the next month and then the next month and it became a job and the set got bigger and bigger and I was there 11 years. It was really just a guest thing. I was there 11 years. I don't think we ever had a contract. I was just like, hey, you're coming back again, aren't you? I was like, yeah. And so even though it was an 11 year job, it was never very formal. And then they changed formats and they weren't going to show that they were going to have that kind of programming anymore. I was off the air only about two months because programmers at TNT said, hey, we have this show called Monstervision.
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JOE BOB BRIGGS
We're looking for a host for it. You want to come over here and give it a shot? And I was like, well, sure. I said, actually I have these sets. I said, oh, you do? And I said, yeah. And so we actually use the same sets. I went over to the, to TNT and they didn't have any late night programming, so they didn't really care what I did. I would just do the, the exploitation films that were in their library. And it was an extensive library because Ted Turner had bought all everything MGM owns and, and then they license a lot of stuff beyond that. And so it was a good library to choose from.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Well, what I love about the way you approach all this is that no matter how low the budget might be or how bad some people may think the films are, you always treat them with respect. And there's not like we run a program here with a friend of mine, runs something called Bonkers Ass Cinema and it's half assed midnights and he's real big about like, no, I don't want you to watch these ironically or from this place of superiority. It's like these films, like people are really trying to make these movies and there's a passion in them that you sometimes don't find in like Hollywood movies or Hollywood products.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
That's true. There are exceptions. There are cases. And you, and you can always spot them where capitalists of one sort or another, you know, financiers have said very cynically, let's make a movie about this. And they're not true believers in horror. They're not horror fans, they're not exploitation movie fans. They're just like, hey, if we put these elements together, we could probably get these rubes to watch the movie. And so they feel, they feel superior to the audience and that. That always comes through. It always comes through. And those are the kind of the only ones that I don't like. But for the most part, I agree. I don't like that so bad it's good. There have been other hosted shows on some networks that are all about so bad it's good. And I don't believe in so bad it's good. I believe in so flawed, but it's fascinating.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Well, also, I don't like the term, like, guilty pleasure. Like, no, if I enjoy it, I'm not gonna feel bad about it.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
That's another one. Yeah, I agree with you.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And I. Sometimes it's. I find it annoying that, you know, Rift Tracks will make fun of the films I like when they should be making fun of Forrest Gump and Barbie.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Well, that's true. I mean, sometimes MST3K makes fun of films that I've actually given four stars to. So, you know, that brings me up short.
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BETH ACCOMANDO
Well, I want to thank you very much for speaking with me and I'm really looking forward to Walpurgisnacht and finding out which films you will be showing.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
All right, I appreciate that. I always try to. I always try to beat the drum for Walpurgisnacht night. And it is next Friday, May 2nd. We're actually doing it one day late. We should have done it. We should have done on May 1, but we come on Friday night. So if you are celebrating Walpurgisnacht please join us.
BETH ACCOMANDO
I'm doing the best to help promote that as well, you know.
JOE BOB BRIGGS
Okay.
BETH ACCOMANDO
That was Joe Bob Briggs of The Last Drive-In on Shudder. His Walpurgisnacht show is this Friday and you can stream his past shows on Shudder any time.
That wraps up another edition of KPBS listener supported Cinema Junkie. If you enjoy the podcast, then please share it with a friend because your recommendation is the best way to build an addicted audience. You can also help by leaving a review. And check out Cinema Junkie presents Middays Movies video podcast on the KPBS YouTube Channel.
Till our next film fix, I’m Beth Accomando your resident Cinema Junkie.
