Cultish Creative Weekly Recap (10/26/2024)

Just in time for Halloween, I sat down with CT Reese and Frazer Rice to talk about why horror movies are such incredible story-telling templates for the rest of life. CT gets into movie reviews and analyzing story structure, Frazer reframes it through a marketing and then a legal lens.

The bottom line? Stories that inspire an emotional response are gripping. We all have something to learn from a sometimes terrifying genre.

My review of Depeche Mode’s classic album, Songs of Faith and Devotion, apparently struck a nerve. I love this record, and I got a bit deeper than I normally get into explaining why. There’s a little music theory and a lot of post-90s experience fandom to unpack here, make sure you watch:

Posts you might have missed:

Don’t you love how ideas from old books stick to you? This Vonnegut-ism on the value of “off” buttons is a personal favorite of mine.

What is the role of the end of a melody? What is it goal? Nietzsche was such a music nerd, it’s wonderful.

Rob Arnott may not be a household name (unless you’re also in a finance household), but his point about how we make assumptions about industry disruptors is good advice. Life isn’t static, and all the new-new things are later-old things eventually. And, this idea came from a breakdown of some of Arnott’s biggest ideas I did with Jack Forehand on Excess Returns, if’n you’re interested!

For my US soccer fans, I’ll just keep retelling the Poch story about his basket of lemons until we win the World Cup (or he gets sacked, but either way, I’m smiling).

ps. Anybody else watching a lot of horror movies like we are in our house this fall? Anybody hanging out with their friends and discussing Stephen King’s approach to death, memory, and fatherhood in Gunslinger vs. Pet Sematary? Let me know if you are.

Some tunes for the season (and I’m pretty proud of this building run of Misfits posts from the archive too):