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SMC Pod #221: Internal vs. External Horror: Monsters Without and Within · Secret Movie Club Podcast

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Hello, Secret Movie Clubbers, and welcome to Secret Movie Club Podcast 221,
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Internal vs. External Horror.
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My name is Craig Hamill. I am the founder, programmer of Secret Movie Club.
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It is wonderful to have you guys.
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Today I wanted to talk about different movies that fall into these two categories.
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And of course, I'll give away the lead. I won't bury the lead.
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Most horror movies are actually a combination of both, even if they don't think they are.
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Internal horror tends to be the horror of ourselves, and external horror tends
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to be the horror of truly terrifying things in the dark, like Predators.
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I will get into that. John Carpenter even had a better way of describing it.
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Secret Movie Club Podcast 222 will be Movies from 2025 Part 2.
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I knew that I recorded that Movies from 2025 podcast, which is a few pods ago, way too early.
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I saw four movies after I recorded that podcast.
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Marty Supreme, The Secret Agent, amazing German film called Sound of Falling, and Surat.
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And they were four of the most interesting movies of last year.
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That will be next week. And also, hopefully next week, I will be announcing
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our July. It'll either be late July or early August, it's looking like.
1:34
We've zeroed in on one of two weekends.
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And I don't want to say more. I just need to lock it in. But if we make it happen,
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I think it's going to be a lot of fun and pretty exciting. So stay tuned for our next event. Okay.
1:48
Right now, though, let's focus on the event that's right ahead of us.
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This Sunday, Father's Day, June 21st, we are doing the Indiana Jones trilogy on 35mm.
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I have got the prints. I picked them up from Paramount.
2:02
And 11 a.m., Raiders of the Lost Ark. 2 p.m., Indiana Jones and the Temple of
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Doom. 5 p.m., Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
2:11
All on incredible prints at the Million Dollar Theater, L.A.'s first movie palace
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in downtown Los Angeles, right at the corner of Broadway and Third,
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just two buildings down from the historic Grand Central Market that now has
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something like 20 to 30 delicious stalls of food, every kind of food you could imagine.
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I will say that our ticket prices are going to hold through this Saturday.
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So you're going to hear this on Friday. So if you're thinking about coming,
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you're going to want to get tickets Friday, the 19th or Saturday,
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the 20th, if you want to save a little money, because the day of prices do go up by about 20%.
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So right now, an all day pass is $36, $12 a movie.
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And then the individual movies are $14.
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On the day of if you walk up it will be 16 a movie and 40 for the all-day pass
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so just heads up you go to secretmovieclub.com go to events get our tickets
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We always want criticism suggestions ideas we're here to help the next chapter
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come and be a part come see indiana jones on 35 millimeter okay let's get to the topic today.
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So there are many pods in our catalog you can go back to where we talk about
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horror in some variation or some form.
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And I am going to be mentioning a number of the movies that we've talked about before.
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But I tried to write a list of movies that I haven't talked as much about,
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but there will be overlap because it's just hard not to talk about this subject
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without talking about The Shining, Cat People, and other movies that we've touched on before.
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But I hope to present it in a new and interesting way.
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Internal versus external horror is a really helpful way to think about horror.
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The way that John Carpenter explained it is external horror,
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you can see it in the same almost context.
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Imagine you're sitting with a priest or a shaman or your tribe's storyteller,
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and your tribe is all around the campfire in the dark outside.
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And the storyteller, the shaman, says, There are two types of horror.
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External horror is when the shaman or the storyteller points into the dark,
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beyond the fire, out in that forest, out in the woods, out in the darkness where
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you can't see anymore, and says the horror is out there.
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Could be an alien, could be a monster, could be a predator. Now imagine the
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exact same context. This is John Carpenter, by the way, which is why he's a
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great storyteller. I wish I could tell you this was my metaphor.
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But then imagine that same storyteller, shaman, a priest, and he says, the horror is in here.
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And he points to the heart, points to the head, points to us. The horror is us.
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And that's internal horror. And I think what's interesting is that story,
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it so crystallizes it. I think we get it right away.
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Now, there are movies that are basically pure external horror.
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A great example would be Jaws.
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And we will talk about that in a moment. There's a shark in the water.
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It has nothing to do with you.
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Or your sort of psychological shortcomings or apparatus or whatever.
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There's a shark in the water. You fall in the water, you're going to get eaten by the shark.
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That is a great example of pure external horror.
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On the other side of that spectrum, an example of almost pure internal horror
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would be a movie like Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan with Natalie Portman and
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Mila Kunis, which comes from a long line of internal horror movies.
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Really, Black Swan, in some ways, feels very influenced by Roman Polanski's
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Repulsion with Catherine Deneuve from 1965.
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And we are going to tell you, it's almost a subgenre, but Black Swan finds a
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very tightly wound ballerina played by Natalie Portman, finally getting the premier role
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in Swan Lake in this very,
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psychologically toxic ballet troupe where Natalie Portman is rivals with Mila
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Kunis, but there's sexual tension.
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They both maybe or maybe not want to sleep with the director.
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But almost all the horror in that movie, really you begin to realize comes from
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Natalie Portman, comes from how she's seeing things and how she's psychologically breaking down.
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It's not, there is external horror to the extent that the pressures of the job,
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the pressures of that milieu certainly are contributing or aiding to her nervous breakdown.
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But it's really, you're with her and it's really her.
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Delusional view of what's going on and how she ascribes people's motivations,
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how she sees things. She sees things horrifically.
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We realize immediately this is in her head. This is not externally what's going on.
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And that would be a pretty solid, I think, example of internal horror.
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So those two examples I just gave you would be the extreme examples of external internal horror.
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Now, most movies are combinations of this.
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Let's though start with external horror. I actually find that more fun to start
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with because I actually think once you start thinking of external horror,
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all of these not so obvious things start to pop up and become interesting.
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And it does lead us to internal horror. So here we go. So some very interesting.
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Classic example of vegetable horror, maybe Jaws, Ridley Scott's alien.
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There's an alien on the spaceship. Had nothing to do with you.
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Has nothing to do with Ripley. Ripley's fine.
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That's why Ripley survives. Oh, by the way, I'm almost certainly going to be spoiling things.
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So you may want to be careful on this podcast because I'm letting her rip and
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I'm going to be bouncing around like a pinball machine played by an over-caffeinated spider monkey.
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I don't know. We're going to be So just be careful. There may be spoilers here.
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But Jaws, Alien, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
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These are all examples where Jaws, shark in the water. Got it.
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I don't want to go in the water. Birds. Birds start attacking people in the
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movie. We don't understand why.
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Alien. They get a signal. They go to check out the signal. They bring an alien back onto their ship.
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Then the alien's on the ship and they're trying to kill the alien.
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So in each of these examples, it's clearly,
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I think you can almost see if you go back far enough that this must be,
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horror that's based on our fear of things bigger than us, predators,
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things that attack us, things that we cannot control, really the things out there in the dark.
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And I think that external horror can extend to disaster movies would probably
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be a form of external horror. It really is not any kind of reflection or result
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of or consequence of your own behaviors.
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Earthquake happens. That has nothing to do with you.
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External horror. What's interesting about that is then it tests you.
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It really becomes a test.
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Do you stay calm? Do you keep your cool? Do you start problem solving?
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And what I think is interesting is it does ultimately, it's not that it becomes
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internal horror, but almost everything then becomes a mirror or a conduit to
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understanding yourself.
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And in external horror, the threat from outside really then is a litmus test for how you react.
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And whenever you see these movies, usually there is some kind of ensemble dealing
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with the external horror, and they all respond in different ways.
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Jaws is really interesting because ultimately it becomes Sheriff Brody,
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the Richard Dreyfuss character, and the Quint character.
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They all get on the boat. They all have their own talents. And they all basically are fairly brave.
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They're all going to, like, take the shark on. And you see they do have different reactions.
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But what's interesting is that Brody, Sheriff Brody, the Roy Scheider character,
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has come to this quiet Martha's Vineyard type town because Amity, because he wanted.
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To get away from his demons from being a cop in the city, I believe, if I remember.
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And he's forced to confront his fear of the water. He's forced to confront his
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fear of guns. He's forced to confront his shortcomings when he was in the city.
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And the shark forces him to do that. That's just good screenwriting. And you often see that.
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I think for screenwriters who write a lot, that becomes...
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Almost, well, this is this makes it more interesting. This gives it more flavor.
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If this character is dealing with this phobia and then they have to they're
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forced to confront the phobia in the external horror, that becomes just a richer script.
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But I think what's interesting is that these then become sort of these invisible
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stories that we often stumble upon again and again and again and again,
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like ancient ruins just underneath the ground that have been there for thousands of years.
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I think so to these story models and tropes, and there must be a reason for that.
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So it is interesting how external horror does lead us back to some kind of examination
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of the psyche or of the self just in sort of a negative way.
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And but what I mean by that is positive space, negative space.
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You might not even realize that it's now commenting on us, but it often does.
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And I think the birds, Hitchcock's the birds, yes, the birds attack.
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Yes, you have no idea exactly why the birds attack. But by the end of that film,
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it feels like the birds are punishing humanity for humanity's sins and crimes
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against the natural world.
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And the Tippi Hedren character, in a very strange way, seems to be punished.
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For some of her transgressions.
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And so oftentimes in external horror, there's something mysteriously connective to the protagonist.
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And again, that just may be something that screenwriters stumble upon or that
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in the best horror movies come out.
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Another example of external horror that we've all seen is the kid like the slasher movie.
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One of the best examples of it, I think, is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre by Tobe
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Hooper, the original from 1974.
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I love this film. I've said this many times. I avoided watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre until my 30s.
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I've never been a huge fan of movies where it's just like, OK,
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here are a bunch of teenagers and a killer kills them, and then there's a final girl.
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They're weird to me. They're odd to me. They often punish people who are sexually active.
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They often actually tend to be very reactionary films.
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The characters who do drugs or have sex or would be coded as having troubles
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or whatever, they're often the ones that get killed.
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And then it's often the virginal, religious, good girl, whatever you would have,
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like final girl, final boy who lives.
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And again, I'm religious. I'm spiritual. I go to church every Sunday. But I find that.
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There's something reactionary in those kinds of films. Not so,
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I would argue, in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I actually find Texas Chainsaw Massacre
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to be wildly transgressive.
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And, you know, the movie title gives you enough for you to know what it's about.
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But a group of teenagers are in a van in Texas.
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They discover this house. They kind of wander around this abandoned house.
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Then they discover a house behind the house, which I think is almost the most
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brilliant thing in the whole movie.
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And one or two of the teenagers walk to the house behind the house and they
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knock on the door and Leatherface, this horrible guy who wears a mask of human
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skin, comes out in a butcher's apron,
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brains them, drags them in, puts them on hooks.
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And finally the there's one girl left again spoiler and uh the last third of
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the movie becomes one of the.
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Darkest comedic hilarious satires on family that i've ever seen which is why
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i think it's so transgressive and she's screaming it's nuts that movie is nuts
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uh which is why i think A lot of people love it, but it's so wildly well-made and so well-directed.
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Now, I actually think oddly in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's harder to make
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the argument that there's anything psychologically rhyming with our final girl. She is amazing.
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And ultimately, the movie's a movie of survival, and she's forever changed.
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And I think what's interesting is that in some ways you get the uncomfortable
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feeling that she gets out of this situation, but she's so,
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traumatized by it that she's almost become a monster herself,
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at the very least someone who will never be able to fit into society again with what she's seen.
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So there is something of when you stare that there's that great saying that
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when you stare into the void, you have to remember that the void staring into
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you and it kind of changes you. And that's probably.
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What Texas Chainsaw Massacre is to a certain extent. It's a incredibly great
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metaphor for surviving trauma and survival. You're just never the same.
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And it's just something you have to accept. The blob is great because like blob
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has nothing to do with people in the town.
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It's just some alien thing that crashes in a meteorite and starts taking over people.
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And, but again, And what's funny about The Blob is it's just the unknown.
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It's just like Lovecraftian. What is this thing? And it's beyond our canon.
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We have nothing that can combat it. And we shouldn't even get near it.
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And we have to discover how to fight it. But that's, I think,
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in some ways, just talking it out.
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The Blob then becomes about who are the people that can be quick,
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be frosty, adapt, see what's going on, and troubleshoot and problem solve.
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And be creative, because ultimately that's what they have to do to retard the.
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Ever-expanding nature of the blob in the blob.
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All right, let's now move to movies that are pretty clearly internal horror.
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There are so many internal horror movies, and many of them we've talked about
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before, but just to name a few...
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One of the most, you know, often some of the horror genres we love are the clearest
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examples of internal horror.
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Robert Lois Stevenson short story that's been made
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countless times and countless variations.
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A scientist is experimenting with a chemical or a drug that essentially allows
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him to become a completely different person.
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If the Dr. Jekyll is all superego, that is repressed, scientific, buttoned down.
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Mr. Hyde is all id, violent, libidinous, amoral, unethical.
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Great short story. And there have been a number of great adaptations of it.
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My favorite that I've seen, I've certainly not seen them all,
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but the one that I really loved is the 1931 Frederick March starring Ruben Mamoulian
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directed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It's great because it's pre-code.
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It's great because it's right when sound came in. But Ruben Mamoulian was one
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of those early sound directors who just refused to be locked down with the camera
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because now there was a microphone.
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So it's just great to watch him move that camera in 1930, 1931.
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And the effects and how Frederick March becomes Mr. Hyde. It's all great.
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But that's, in some ways, such a great example of, there is external horror.
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I mean, in the movie and in the reality of the film, this scientist does become
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this almost primitive, horrible, ape-like.
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Troglodyte man. That's true. But it's almost impossible not to see that what it's really about
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is when you don't reconcile the fact that you have these two conflicting aspects
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of your nature, and we all do, then you're going to get torn apart.
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And it is not healthy to pretend that you're all Dr.
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Jekyll when you clearly are also Mr. Hyde. It's better to acknowledge that you
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have Jekyll and Hyde, you have Shadow and Light, and try to reconcile them rather
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than to pretend that you're all one or all the other.
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And many other subgenres are kind of variations of checkle and hide.
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Not exactly, but vampire movies, to some extent, you get bitten and then you're undead.
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Now, vampire movies are really, I think, to some extent, the horror of plague,
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the horror of infection. Same with zombie movies, both are dealing with bites.
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But nevertheless, you change and you don't change in a vampire movie. You're still you.
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But now it's almost like you've become the external horror that you didn't want to become.
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Now you are the predator. Now you are the thing in the dark,
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and yet you're still you.
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And that's pretty horrific when people get that right. So movies like Dracula,
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others would be examples of that kind of variation of internal horror.
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The werewolf movie, again, dealing with a bite, but the werewolf movie where
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every full moon you become this this thing and you have no memory of it.
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You can't stop it. You can't control it.
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That is a kind of internal horror. The Invisible Man, the great James Whale
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movie with Claude Rains, which is actually one of my favorite of the original
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cycle of horror, universal horror movies.
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I love The Invisible Man as a movie.
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And that's, again, kind of a variation of Jekyll and Hyde because he's a scientist
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and he's developing an invisibility serum, and then he takes it himself and it drives him crazy.
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Other pretty clear examples of internal horror that we probably haven't talked
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about as much, an amazing movie from 1961,
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directed by Jack Clayton, starring Deborah Carr, The Innocents,
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which is an adaptation of Henry James's Turn of the Screw. It is a ghost story.
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There are ghosts in it. It's about a governess played by Deborah Carr,
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who is very, very repressed, very, very uptight.
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And she's taking care of two kids who swear that they're seeing these two lustful,
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people who have died that worked on the grounds.
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And Debra Carr is sort of undone by these kids seeing these ghosts and the libidinous
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nature, the lustful nature of the ghosts.
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But first, it's a great movie, and it's one of those movies everybody who's
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seen it remembers because it actually has horror and sunlight, horror and daylight.
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Debra Carr thinks that she sees these ghosts in broad daylight just staring
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at her, and the way that they shoot it is incredible.
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But really the movie I think is about Debra Carr's.
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Sexual repression. And what's interesting is Deborah Carr is in another movie.
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It's not really a horror movie, but it's almost the same themes.
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In my top 10 of all time, the Michael Powell and Embrick Pressburger movie, Black Narcissus,
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about a group of nuns that take over what was a Himalayan like Bordello or Brothel
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or Seraglio, basically where the sultan or whoever, the,
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Pashta, the leader up in the Himalayas were all of his women,
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mistresses, harem, whatever you want to call it.
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And the nuns are determined to turn it into a school for the kids and a pharmacy
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and try to bring health and Western religion to these people in the Himalayas.
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But it ends up undoing them. And each of them has to deal with things being
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awakened in them that maybe they went into the service or the nunnery,
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the convent, because they were trying to run away from it.
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And it's an incredible film, and it's not a horror film at all.
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It's a kind of an unclassifiable movie based on a Rumor Godin novel.
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And she also wrote Jean Renoir's Incredible, The River. They're both adapted
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from her novels, and she lived in India. But.
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Nevertheless, I think Black Narcissists like The Innocents, both star Deborah
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Carr as somebody dealing with feelings of love and sexuality and trying to repress them.
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There are, I think, often in internal horror movies, people trying to repress,
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something in them that they're uncomfortable acknowledging is a part of them,
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which I think is all of us.
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I mean, that's the story of life in a lot of ways.
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Two of the greatest practitioners of internal horror who then find a way to
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make it external horror enough to make it horror as well and not cute. This is the thing.
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I think the problem you could have, the challenge with internal horror,
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external horror, even if you do it in a clunky way,
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you can often get away with it because as long as you sort of understand the
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broad strokes of it, if I leave this room,
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Tiger is going to attack me, whatever that is. Predator is going to attack me.
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You can build up some pretty decent suspense and pretty decent horror, even in a clunky way.
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Internal horror, especially when people try, I feel, to be too profound with it or too deep with it.
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It's just like, you know, the subtext becomes the text and it's a bit of a groaner.
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And you're like, I get it. We're the killer kind of thing.
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And, you know, that's a great point. And it can never be overmade because we
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are the killer. Humanity is the killer. We're the worst killers on the planet.
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We're the biggest predators on the planet.
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So, you know, that point needs to be made again and again and again,
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generation after generation.
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But I think when it's too on the nose, even when someone doesn't think they're
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being on the nose, you can get the audience kind of like, oh,
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one of these things, one of these intellectual horror movies.
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I didn't come for an intellectual horror movie.
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But two of the greatest practitioners I think of internal horror are probably
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David Cronenberg and David Lynch.
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You know, David Cronenberg really had a series of internal horror movies that
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probably reached their apotheosis with his adaptation of The Fly.
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So starting from the very beginning or near the beginning for Cronenberg,
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they came from Within, Shivers, then Rabid, then really The Brood,
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which became Next Level.
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And then finally, even Videodrome, but finally The Fly.
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In the fly starring jeff goldblum probably his best or one of his best performances uh also one,
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the movie where practical effects the fly and like john carpenter's the thing
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two movies where the practical monster effects are are,
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almost have never been rivaled really uh they're they're really pinnacles of
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that kind of art but in the fly which was itself a remake of a 1950s horror.
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Jeff Goldblum is a scientist. He's built a machine, like a molecular transporter.
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He decides to test himself, doesn't realize a fly has gotten in there.
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The molecules get combined when he comes out. He doesn't initially realize it,
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but now he's got like fly DNA.
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And initially he thinks it's a great thing because it gives him great strength.
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He can make love constantly to Geena Davis.
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He's doing crazy things like running up the walls.
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But slowly he starts to decay and it becomes body horror as he becomes more
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and more a fly and he loses control of his emotions.
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He loses control of his body. Now, I think what's interesting as I talk it out
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is that actually is external horror to some extent.
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The decay of our bodies, it's just something we have no control over.
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That's just time. That's going to happen to all of us.
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And to some extent, the fly is about that. It's about body decay and the body turning against us.
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And that's external horror. That's not a result of our karma or our moral or
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ethical decisions or our emotional or psychological or psyche, any of those things.
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It's just the body breaking down, and that's horrific because we can't control it.
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But at the same time, it is also the fly, Cronenberg's fly specifically,
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is an incredible chamber drama really between three characters,
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Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, and then a publisher who.
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Loves Geena Davis. So it's kind of like a love triangle.
27:49
And she gets pregnant with Jeff Goldblum's baby and she wants to get an abortion. It's crazy.
27:56
So it's also about relationships and the person you thought you were with not
28:00
being the person you were with. And Cronenberg is brilliant at that.
28:04
Now, the only person who really rivals, I think, Cronenberg,
28:07
at least in terms of their full body of work for internal horror is David Lynch.
28:12
And from Eraserhead, I mean, almost all Lynch movies, to some extent,
28:16
are internal horror movies.
28:18
You know, the really the cycle of Blue Velvet, Lost Highway,
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Mulholland Drive, all different movies, but they're,
28:29
really the horror is ourselves and our capacity for darkness.
28:34
And really the apotheosis of this with David Lynch is almost certainly Twin Peaks.
28:40
Again, I'm gonna have to spoil this here. So don't listen to this pod if you
28:44
haven't seen these things, but.
28:47
In Twin Peaks, the whole mystery of who killed Laura Palmer,
28:50
we ultimately discovered our horror was her father because her father was having
28:55
an incestuous relationship with her and habitually raping her.
29:00
But he and she couldn't deal with that truth.
29:03
And so there's this also external evil. It's a truly external evil, Bob.
29:09
And there's a whole transcendent external evil aspect to Twin Peaks,
29:14
which is, I think, what makes it great.
29:15
And it's actually a good segue to the final part of what we're going to talk
29:18
about today, which is that most great horror movies are, whether they realize
29:22
it or not at the time, a combination of both.
29:25
And I think we're going to talk about that. I know we're going to talk about
29:29
that, and it's interesting to think why that is.
29:31
And Twin Peaks is a combination. But because it is such a.
29:37
Painful, powerful metaphor for the evil within us and the evil that people do,
29:44
and yet they're still OK, decent, good people on one level and then on another
29:48
level, absolute monsters.
29:50
Twin Peaks absolutely gets at that. Mulholland Drive, we have Naomi Watts, who
29:55
really envisions herself as a kind of Nancy Drew do-gooder in Hollywood,
30:01
solving mysteries, only for us to discover that she's a burned-out,
30:05
unsuccessful actress who,
30:07
has chased away her own lovers and ultimately ends her life in suicide because
30:13
the Hollywood story is just so curdled on her.
30:16
That is true internal horror. and David Lynch is brilliant at it.
30:21
And Lost Highway, where Bill Pullman can't reconcile that he's killed his wife,
30:26
and he becomes a completely different person, and yet in both instances he can't
30:30
possess his wife. He is the same person, and he's stuck in a kind of fugue.
30:35
David Lynch is just the master of these things. Let's move on to the final chapter,
30:40
which is that most great horror movies are a combination of the two.
30:46
So wrapping this up today, really, when you look at not all,
30:51
but many of the canonically great horror movies, you realize that they're a
30:58
combination of internal and external horror.
31:00
Jacques Tourneur's The Cat People, Cat People, Val Luton produced from RKO in the 1940s.
31:08
This is another one where there's some kind of curse. It's kind of a werewolf
31:12
movie, except the women turn into cats instead of werewolves.
31:15
And it's because they can't deal with their repressed sexuality.
31:20
So clearly we've got these resonances of internal horror, but they're also really
31:25
turning into cats that are leopards, really panthers, wild, wild felines.
31:32
And they're attacking the people that they can't have sex with.
31:36
But Cat People is a great example of a combination of the two is actually Alfred
31:42
Hitchcock's Psycho, which I have talked about so many times and I'll never start
31:45
to stop talking about it.
31:47
It's like talking about Stanley Kubrick's 2001. I've said this a thousand times,
31:52
but I think two of the most revolutionary movies ever made for horror.
31:56
It was Psycho for science fiction. It was 2001.
31:59
Now in Psycho, again, spoiler alert. So here we go.
32:03
We think our main character is marion crane the janet lee character but a third
32:08
of the way through the movie she gets killed by.
32:11
Who we think is the mother of norman bates at the bates motel and ultimately
32:16
turns out to be norman himself pretending to be his mother because he's he's
32:21
got issues now in this movie,
32:23
what's what's so amazing is that and probably why i think it's one of the greatest
32:28
horror movies of all time, why it's so revolutionary is that it is just next
32:33
level with internal and external horror and.
32:37
But Marion Janet Leigh, she's stolen money.
32:40
And when she gets to the hotel, she finally decides she's going to go back and return the money.
32:46
And what's horrible about this movie is that in most movies.
32:50
Somebody who makes the right decision would get some kind of grace.
32:55
But not in this movie. She makes the right decision. She's going to go back
32:58
the next day and return the money.
33:00
She gets in a shower. She's cleaning herself off. The shower itself almost represents
33:04
a cleansing, an absolution, a forgiveness after reconciliation.
33:09
And then she just gets butchered.
33:10
Someone comes in and kills her with a knife.
33:13
And that's Hitchcock pulling the rug out. But what's interesting is that the
33:18
internal horror, external horror, it's almost an inversion right there.
33:22
None of it goes the way we think it will go. And yet, Janet Leigh did transgress.
33:28
She made a crime. She stole from her boss.
33:30
She is not given another chance. There's some kind of weird contrapuntal interplay
33:36
between the external and the internal horror there, but in a way that's unsettling
33:40
for us to try to deal with.
33:42
Now, that's not the only time that happens in the movie, because later Marion
33:47
Crane's sister, played by Vera Miles, comes, wants to figure out what happened to her sister.
33:52
And with the help of Marion Crane's lover, John Gavin, they go to the house, they talk to Norman.
33:58
And then Vera Miles goes into the house, wants to talk to Mrs. Bates.
34:03
And Norman shows up and he's dressed as his mom and he's going to try to kill
34:06
her. And Marion Crane's lover gets him just in time. Now, then the movie really,
34:11
we realize really who the movie is about is Norman Bates.
34:14
But here again, we have this weird interplay of external and internal horror
34:20
because Norman is a monster, but he was made a monster by a monstrous mother.
34:27
And Norman himself is this fugue state embodiment of the trauma that was done to him.
34:34
And now he's sort of reliving that trauma over and over again by pretending
34:39
to be his mom and killing women because his mom was overprotective and mentally
34:43
unsound and mentally unhealthy herself.
34:46
And so much so is this movie about internal and external horror that the last
34:50
five minutes of it are a monologue delivered by a psychiatrist explaining to
34:55
us what's going on in Norman's head.
34:58
And then the final scene of the movie is Norman, but it's the mother's voice and he's sitting there.
35:03
And I mean, that movie is just brilliant. That movie, I should have probably
35:06
ended this whole pod on Psycho because Psycho is, I don't know many other movies
35:13
that do internal and external coming together in ways that you just,
35:18
you can't believe everything that's going on, how next level it is.
35:22
Psycho is the apotheosis of it.
35:25
Other movies that are clear combinations, The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's The
35:29
Shining, and then Stephen King's source novel, The Shining.
35:33
Jack Torrance goes up to caretake a hotel in the snow. There are ghosts.
35:38
The last caretaker killed his family.
35:41
And Jack Torrance slowly goes crazy over the winter. And then his son,
35:45
Danny, and his wife, Wendy, have to extricate themselves before Jack kills them.
35:50
But when you read the book, Jack is an alcoholic.
35:54
The hotel in some ways, it preys on the psychologically weak.
35:59
And it really becomes to some extent about any of us who can't successfully
36:05
battle our demons and the demons ultimately win.
36:09
That's what The Shining feels like. And yet it's also external horror because
36:13
clearly the house, the hotel is haunted.
36:15
It's not meant to be that it's all in Jack's head because Danny experiences
36:19
the ghosts of the hotel. Wendy experiences the evil of the hotel.
36:24
So the hotel is externally evil.
36:28
And yet in preying on the psychologically conflicted and weak,
36:33
it's also, again, this musical contrapuntal symphonic interplay between melody, harmony,
36:42
countermelody, contrapuntal.
36:46
So the external horror, the internal horror coming together.
36:50
A few more movies like this. A great one, just because we're showing the Indiana
36:54
Jones movies in two days.
36:56
The Indiana Jones movies are not horror movies. They're action-adventure movies,
36:59
but specifically in Raiders and then in Last Crusade, the first and the third.
37:05
And I love Temple, but it's a little clearer in Raiders and Last Crusade.
37:10
The object that Indiana Jones is going for In the first movie,
37:13
The Ark of the Covenant, and in the third movie, The Holy Grail,
37:18
they really become correlatives for human relationships.
37:21
And Indy loses the objects in both movies. He loses the objects in all the movies, I think.
37:28
Kind of the worst archaeologist ever. I guess he does bring the Ark back and
37:33
then the U.S. government takes it.
37:35
The Ark is essentially a correlative for Marian and Indy.
37:40
And they had a relationship. It didn't work out.
37:44
But when they get together and they go through Raiders, really what Indy learns
37:48
is that God transcendent, all that stuff finds its home in this corporeal existence
37:55
in our relationships with others and the families and the bonds that we form.
37:59
And you see that in Last Crusade. Again, the search for the grail is clearly the search for God.
38:05
And in many ways, the search for God is the search for our parents.
38:08
And Indy is searching for his dad.
38:11
And we see that play out with Harrison Ford and Sean Connery and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
38:17
And yet again, he loses the object, but he gains his father.
38:20
And that is just a wonderful way to tell these stories in a combination of,
38:28
in some ways, internal and external horror.
38:31
A few more movies that are combos.
38:34
Todd Browning, the amazing silent to early sound horror film director,
38:40
made countless movies with Lon Chaney where, to some extent,
38:44
they're combinations of internal and external horror.
38:49
Most clearly in two movies I think of they collaborated on, one called The Unknown,
38:54
where Lon Chaney plays a supposedly armless circus performer, but he really has arms.
39:00
And he pretends to be armless so he can commit crimes, but he's in love with
39:04
Joan Crawford who can't stand to be touched by men.
39:08
And ultimately, Lon Chaney has his arms amputated only to discover that Joan
39:13
Crawford's gotten over her phobia and has fallen in love with someone else.
39:17
But that is an incredible example of internal-external horror.
39:20
And with Todd Browning, you probably get no better.
39:24
Again, one of the greatest horror movies ever made, one of my favorite movies
39:28
of all time, and I would say one of the most unsettling movies of all time, 1932's Freaks,
39:34
where it's about people with abnormalities who are in a circus or a carnival,
39:40
but they form a family, and then seemingly normal people, beautiful people, a,
39:45
strong man and a beautiful woman in the circus who basically exploit a little
39:51
person, Hans, I believe his name is.
39:53
Because they want to get to his inheritance, his money.
39:56
And that movie is just all kinds of crazy internal and external horror because
40:01
the beautiful people really turn out to be the monsters.
40:04
The supposed marginalized abnormal people are really the warm,
40:09
kind people, but they don't take to one of their own being exploited.
40:14
And so the movie is very complicated. It's a Mobius strip.
40:17
It doesn't really resolve of itself easily one way or the other.
40:20
And the final image is horrific, horrific. You'll never get it out of your head.
40:26
And and I'm not going to tell you what it is. You should just see freaks.
40:30
But again, this incredible synthesis of external and internal horror.
40:35
And I am going to leave it there for today.
40:39
Okay, Secret Movie Clubbers, thank you.
40:42
Two days, June 21st, come watch the three Indiana Jones movies on 35mm film.
40:48
We would love to have you.
40:51
That's going to be at the Million Dollar Theater, downtown LA,
40:54
Broadway and 3rd, Grand Central Market right next door.
40:57
Go to secretmovieclub.com and events to get tickets, or you can go to Eventbrite to get tickets.
41:01
And then I hope by the next podcast next week, Secret Movie Club 222,
41:08
movies from 2025 part two, I am going to talk about four other movies,
41:12
Marty Supreme, The Secret Agent, Sound of Falling, and Surat.
41:16
And I hope I'm telling you what our July slash August 1st, it's either going
41:21
to be the 25th or the 1st. So basically the event that's going to happen in
41:24
about five weeks, five to six weeks, I will let you know what that is. I hope, knock wood.
41:30
Watch good movies. I want to hear about them. We want you to join Secret Movie Club.
41:35
We'll be back next week for Secret Movie Club 222.
41:39
And this Father's Day, we're going to watch three of the greatest action adventures,
41:42
movies of all time on 35mm film. We'd love to have you. All right, guys.
41:47
Fight that fight. Run that race. Keep the faith. Get through another week. I love you.