"There's Nothing New": SPECIAL HALLOWEEN JUST PRESS RECORD, Frazer Rice and CT Reese, pt. II

Horror movies are so… weird.

They can be low budget, they can have a cast full of totally unknowns, they can have mediocre plots, and yet, they can still be amazing.

You don’t really see that with political thrillers, or musical biopics, or hell, even indie comedies.

There’s something special about horror movies.

The sub-genres, the tropes, the risk taking, the audience expectations, the subversions, the “pirate like ethos” of it all.

When CT Reese (of Watch with CT) and Frazer Rice (of Wealth Actually) came onto Just Press Record earlier this year, we initially scratched the surface on these topics.

CT talked about where his love for the genre comes from (including a cool story about his real life brush working in a mall with Ti West before Ti West was Ti West).

Frazer talked about how he’s applied analogies learned from the space in both his legal practice and his creative habits (including his published non-fiction AND fiction!).

We had a great hour+ long conversation we recorded, and then, they just kept sending emails and messages. The conversations got deeper. They started to pitch favorites of this and that and the other, until I finally capitulated.

“Hey, do you guys want to do a Halloween episode, kind of a part II, where we dive deeper into more of what makes horror movies so special to each of you?”

And here we are.

It’s not about the guts and the gore. Ok, it sort of is, but you won’t get much of that in this conversation. What you will get is why stories, narrative, and genre-tropes rule everything around you.

Listen to CT Reese and Frazer Rice on Just Press Record on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel, or wherever you get your podcasts: