SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hello, my fellow Dreadites. Welcome back to the Dread Alert Podcast. I'm Vince, and today I'm joined by Michael Weehunt, the author of the fantastic The October Film Hunt. Michael is also the author of a series of short stories called Greener Pastures, and we're gonna dive in to this unique, found footage-esque novel that I absolutely loved, and it's currently on my top five list of best novels for 2025. Michael, thank you so much for joining us this evening.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Thank you for having me, Vince. Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

So your book, The October Film Hunt, recently hit shelves. I read it, I loved it. As I mentioned, it's currently on my top five books of 2025 list. And I I want to know for people who haven't read it yet, tell me a little bit about what it's about.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Well, the book revolves around a supposedly cursed film called Proop of Demons that came out around the year 2009. And there's a bit of backstory that takes place in 2013, where this group of three friends called the October Film Hunt would visit the filming locations of their favorite horror movies, kind of tap into the vibe, get inspiration from them, try to find the magic that might have been left behind in the soil, so to speak. And one of the three friends who were the October film haunt actually died as well. And this is all revealed in little chunks throughout the book as you go, so you really understand how devastating it was to the main character, Jory, who a decade later has retreated to northern Vermont with and she has an eight-year-old son now. She's trying to live a very quiet life, and she's cut horror out of her world entirely, and you know, which has left a hole in her. And it soon starts to become apparent to her that there might be somebody out there making a sequel to Proof of Demons, and they want her to be involved in it, whether or not she's interested. And she is definitely not interested, and soon learns that that doesn't matter to these people, and there are some other characters who start to intersect with her world, a few different POBs going on, and you're reading the book is kind of a mystery. Like, who are these people? What do they want? Is the director of the original film involved? Who is that director? No one knows. Everyone assumes it's a pseudonym. And then it just, you know, kind of branches out into this meta horror sort of kind of found footage sort of vibe. And yeah, things, things get pretty crazy and scary.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

I'll say that first of all, yes, entirely scary. And it really did capture found footage in a novel fashion, which I didn't I never thought that would be something that I would encounter, uh a found footage style novel. It really it really worked for me as someone who loves the genre. I'll also say that it really hit close to home as someone who was recently at Monroville Mall doing a behind-the-scenes tour of Dawn of the Dead filming locations. A lot of our content revolves around going to these locations. So you you hit me right in my horror sweet spot with this one, I have to say. Um tell me a little bit about how you got started writing. I know that you had written some short fiction in the past, and here you are with a novel. What was your process like? How did you how did you get started?

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Well, I'd always wanted to be a writer, but for various personal life reasons that I won't go into. I just got delayed and delayed, but I never let it leave my mind. And finally, I was just realizing that before too long, I felt like I was gonna get too old to do it. So I just did it. And you know, it seemed to me, not really knowing how the that world worked, that the way you do it is you write short stories, you find your voice, you hone your craft, and you know, it's it's a lot of fun to start out small and discover yourself and get to know yourself. So I just had fun writing all these different types of stories, and it's a path so many different writers take, and I think it's a pretty dependable path if you have patience. Um it can be a very long road because what I wanted to do was write stories, gain some sort of name recognition, put out a collection of stories, hopefully, it would do well. And I was one of the lucky ones because you know, Greener Pastures, my first collection, was you know very successful for a tiny press book, and it kind of put me on the map, and you know, kept writing short stories. You could even say I was putting off writing a novel because it's this big scary thing. Eventually published a second collection of short stories called The Inconsolables, and then I was like, Well, I can't write a third collection of stories, I need to write this novel. And there were it at this point, it was really building up in me, and the reluctance was gone. It was starting to become a hunger. So there's a story in Greener Pastures, that first collection, which I wrote 10 years ago now, which is crazy to think about, but it's called October Film Haunt Under the House, and that's kind of obviously the genesis of this novel. And it always been a favorite of readers. I had always seen comments on social media and Reddit and places like that, talking about how they how much people like the story, and then this idea kind of started clicking in a place where, like, okay, well, I don't want to just expand a story into a novel. I want I want to do something, you know, a lot more and a lot deeper than that. So, like, well, I'll have a different film at the heart of the novel than was at the heart of the short story. And then I was like, well, it's gonna be an entirely different group calling themselves the October Film Hunt that actually predated the one in the story, and then ideas were ping-ponging around, and you know, the easy short answer to how I got to the novel was it was time to write a novel. You know, there's there's a logical trajectory that an author sees before them, and everybody knows that way more people read novels than short stories. So if you want to expand your world and expand your readership, um the the novel is the logical place to go. So, and here I am.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Well, I'm certainly glad that you're here uh with us today, and I I have to ask, is um the October film haunt under the house? Would you consider that canon to the sort of universe of the October film haunt the novel?

SPEAKER_01 8:06

It is um for a very big reason that I don't want to get into because it kind of would be a spoiler. You kind of have to read the novel to know the answer to that question. Um but I also did some, you know, if you've read Stephen King's The Dark Tower, when you get toward the end of that series, and you know, King brings himself in as a character, and therefore a lot of his books enter the story, like books we as readers know. Like, oh, why is he talking about insomnia? I I read that, you know. Um, there is a point in the Dark Tower where Stephen King kind of retroactively made some of his Dark Tower connected books canon and made some of them almost like tricks and like removed the canon status from them. And I thought that was really interesting. So in a much smaller scale way, there is one way in which the novel, the October Film Hot, kind of unravels the short story a little bit and takes something away from it, but I also think it it gives something to it, so it was kind of like an even push-pull sort of thing. So, but again, I'm sorry to be so vague, but I don't want to give anything away.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

I don't want any spoilers in this podcast either because some of the reveals in this novel were just truly breathtaking. And um playing detective was a lot of the fun of of reading this for me personally. So yeah, I think spoiler-free is the way to go. Uh, did you find a difference in process when you're writing the novel versus writing short stories? Was your actual like day-to-day grind and on your keyboard kind of was it different?

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Very different. Um, I knew it would be, and I wasn't wrong. When I write short stories, I don't plan them at all. I I love to just wander in. I kind of think of it as like walking into the woods or into an abandoned building with a flashlight whose batteries are about to die, and you can only see a tiny few feet in front of you. And so I'm I love that sense of discovery, not knowing what's going to happen. And then I light up a few more feet, and then I start to see the shape of where the story needs to go. And in a short story, it's easy to get away with that because if you do make a wrong turn, you don't have to backtrack very far. Um, at most, you're giving yourself a few extra days of editing and rewriting or you know, whatever. But you know, I'm talking like 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 words total. There's just it's just really not that much work. So you can take that risk and you can go off in this direction and just see what happens. But in a novel, you know, you could be 40,000 words in, 60,000, 70,000 words in, make a wrong turn, break everything, and then you have months or weeks of work ahead of you. And that's just not really doable. You know, I have a day job, I'm very busy, I only have a certain little segment of writing time available to me in a day, and I so I have to make the most of that time. So the biggest the biggest difference in process was I had to plan ahead. I had to I won't call it a full-fledged outline. I would like to try writing a novel fully on an outline one day, but I did have a map. I knew all the major plot points, and at the very least, I would plan ahead like a hundred pages or so, like pretty like substantial stretches of the future of the novel. So I always knew where I was going, I always knew what my goals were, what my connecting points were, because it's a lot to hold in your head. That's another reason you really have to plan because you have multiple characters, all these extra pages, all these extra events, and you just can't hold that intricate skeleton inside of your mind. It just maybe if I, you know, if I had a more mathematical mind, but it's just something that I had to have on paper somewhere, you know, so I I knew where I was going. And it's also very different to write a novel because again, in a short story, another luxury you have is you can be as experimental as you want. Um, you can you can make an ending super ambiguous where like the reader's just like, what? You know, as long as this is the ending that's earned, as long as you earn it, you can do anything you want. You can experiment with form, structure, voice, tense. Uh there really are no rules. It's the way I look at it. You know, I write short stories about just whatever. And they can even be like they're short stories that almost have no plot, they're more like tone poems or impressionistic, you know, scenes or whatever. Can't do things like that in a novel. You're entering a wider, broader marketplace, and a readership that expects you know high stakes, character arcs, um, certain plot beats to hit abruptly at certain points along the way. Uh even yeah, I'm including myself in this group as a reader, too. Like we're kind of programmed to expect certain things at certain times. You know, the tables have turned against the protagonist. Now things are looking up again. Oh no, the the antagonist has the upper hand, you know, that kind of thing. So I also kind of felt like I had to, I already knew the rules because I've read so many novels in my life, but I had to learn the rules as they pertain to me personally. And so when I set forward on this journey, I would have that I thought of it as like a guide, a guide with me holding up the rule book, saying, remember to do this, remember to do that, you know, having post-it notes everywhere. Uh so that was that was very, very different. And probably the yeah, maybe the biggest thing of all was just feeling like I was working within a traditional frame, and I wanted to break it where I could get away with it, and I wanted to experiment where I could, I wanted to do things that aren't normally done because that's really interesting to me. I didn't want to do anything that was paint by numbers, but I also had to like loosely stay within the lines, you know. I couldn't just to use a ridiculous example, I couldn't write a 10-page scene describing um a forest with no with nobody in it, you know, like people would get be bored out of their minds, but in a short story, I could wander up and just do whatever I wanted. So I think those are the two big things.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

Yeah, and you have a number of characters to manage, so I think keeping track of that must have been a challenge. Planning forward and also probably planning back, because a lot of these characters have a very interconnected backstory that gets revealed throughout the novel, too. Um I was I was very much so attached to a few characters, much to my dismay, of course. And I was very much so uh along for this ride. Like I like I mentioned at the start of our conversation, the the setup of the novel hits very close to home for me as a horror fan. And I think what you do really well with these folks is you give them horror credentials and they they've earned them on the page. So these people know their horror. Uh it makes me think that you must be a horror fan as well at the end of the day. And I wonder what has drawn you to the horror genre.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

I mean, my ultimate answer is I don't know, but it goes back to when I was seven and I somehow was allowed to watch The Exorcist. Um, which is weird. I kind of I kind of feel like people don't believe me when I say that, and I think it's because I kind of don't believe myself when I say that, but it is true. I've had you know conversations with my parents about it, but my mom doesn't remember why I was allowed to watch it or who let me watch it, she just remembers that I did, and she kept a close eye on me to make sure I didn't have nightmares and I didn't have trouble going to sleep and things like that. And she said I was perfectly fine, and I was already asking her to watch another horror movie, so it it was a pretty strong love right from the beginning, and when I was also really little, I would actually have a story based on this story. But um, when I was a little kid, I would lie in bed at night and I would kind of peek through the curtains, and there was a street lamp down on the street, a little a little off to the side, and I would pretend there was a vampire standing under it, under the light. And he was watching me, I was watching him, and then I would say, You can come in, and then I would close the curtains and lie down on the bed in the dark, just close my eyes, and I would imagine the vampire coming into the house, coming down the hallway, coming into my bedroom, and just standing by the bed watching me. And it was I was basically just trying to scare myself, and you know, looking back, I was like, okay, I wanted to be scared. I for some reason from a very young age, I had I had such a thrill from this visceral feeling that you can feel on your skin, that tingle. And I've never been one to be scared during movies or books, but there's this there's that visceral feeling that I've been chasing my whole life, and so I keep coming back to the genre over and over and over again. I've always been a big horror movie person, and I actually went many years without reading horror in my from like my mid-teen years into my 20s. But I always knew I was gonna come back and I did, and when I did come back, I really, really immersed myself in it and kind of filled in all the gaps. But um, you know, it's a very versatile genre, it's a very useful genre, it can be used for social commentary in a way that nothing else really can. It can be a way to look at ourselves and to to examine ourselves and question ourselves. It can be a way to examine society, of course. But I think in in the end, it's really just about that that chill that just you know races up my arm and goes up my spine and makes me twist in my seat, you know. That's probably the most I'll ever get while I'm watching a horror movie, but it's so precious. And you know, the horror community is a really great community. All the like-minded people, they tend to be really nice people. And it's just, I just wanted to write a book that was kind of a love letter to all that.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

I think it captures it perfectly. And as highbrow as we pretend to be here at Dread Alert Media, talking about horror being the projector screen on which we throw our fears to externalize them and safely deal with them, and you know, uh the community of outcasts sitting alone together in the dark of the cinema that is the horror community uh and how we band together as outsiders. I think you hit the nail on the head in a way that no other guest yet has talked about on our podcast, and that I probably haven't touched on in any of my editorial content, and it's that that chasing the thrill. Uh the thrill of maybe, you know, for me it was peeking behind the corner and watching the opening scenes of Halloween 2 or seeing Pumpkin Head at way too young an age. Um I came across The Exorcist a little later, but yeah, it's that we we are all we're all chasing the dragon on that. I think you nailed it. Do you have a favorite subgenre of horror? Do you is there anything that you gravitate towards?

SPEAKER_01 21:40

I mean, over the course of my life, I would definitely have to say bound footage would probably be my favorite subgenre, but I also have a real soft spot for slashers. Um I think slashers are a kind of movie that you can watch with a group of friends, even if they don't like horror. It's easier to get people to gather around and watch a slasher movie. And you know, horror can be more fun when you're watching it with other people. It's not a prerequisite, but um, and you know, like the mystery element of slashers, the the methodical one by one nature of it is just so comforting. But I think I think ultimately I would still have to go with found footage. It's just probably it was um not my first love because they weren't quite around yet, but I just they can they can do something to me that nothing else can. I'm I'm a little more likely to get that shiver. So I would have to go with that.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

I think those are probably my two choices as well. There's an immediacy to found footage that makes it believably scary in a lot of cases. Although I've seen some pretty fantastic found fantastic goal found footage films lately. Um, but I, you know, even something as recent as Strange Harvest made my skin crawl. So yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in that subgenre. So I I tell me a little bit more about the this story and how it plays with found footage because it really hits an interesting crossroad between sort of metafiction and analog horror and digital horror and found footage. Um what what kind of broke this open for you? How did you kind of decide where you were heading with this story and how how all these elements came together?

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Yeah, well, the the original short story I mentioned earlier actually is fully found footage. It it is it involves exclusively found materials, most of which were in a journal. Um this is various journal entries, the this group of friends like trading the journal off. Like they write their entry, they give it to the next person. Then there's some interstitial things kind of stitched in there. So when I started conceptualizing the novel, I had the first question, obviously, was like, do I want to write a novel that's fully found footage? And you know, um, there's actually a a novel called Widow's Point by Richard Chishmar and his son Billy, or I think he goes by W. H. Chismar. Came out the same day the October film hot did. And it is, I have it, but I haven't read it yet. But it's fully found footage. Every I think every single word of the book is found footage. When I was starting off to write mine, I knew that I didn't want to do that. Um, I want to do it one day because it sounds really fun, and it would it would be a really big challenge, but the one big limitation of found footage, when you take away the visual, you no longer have much opportunity for emotional resonance, um, character development. Um you can't jump distances as easily as you could. So if you have a character in Vermont and a character in Toronto, you can't just switch to a camera in Toronto or unless you want to change the whole way you're doing the bound footage, you know. But but the main reason was I wanted to I wanted to have a lot of traditional narrative because I wanted to explore someone's in interior monologue, so to speak, with a lot more freedom. And I wanted the readers to get to know my protagonist, Jory, more intimately. I would I wanted them to become attached to her and also to Beth and Coleman and uh Roger when they come into the story. I wanted them to connect with them emotionally. And with found footage, you you really can only do that through dialogue, and I just didn't want to write a book that was just a bunch of dialogue, and because everything outside of the dialogue is going to be through a detached perspective, and I just didn't want to do it that way, so you know I could, but I wanted it to you in spite of all that, I wanted the book to uh feel a little bit like found footage, and so I started visualizing basically uh some people making a fountain footage movie in in my novel, you know, and what would that be like? And I I've always thought it was an interesting twist to imagine a fountain footage movie where the antagonist have the camera because you know it's what could be more invasive than having someone film you that's really really scary. So you know, I had a good scary chunk to work with just based on that alone. So if a found footage movie is being made and I'm writing about it with a traditional narrative, I can kind of have the best of both worlds. So I started thinking about that and looking at it from that angle, and then some more pieces clicked into place, and then I have you know little interstitial Reddit post and magazine articles, Wikipedia entries, you know, just uh a piece of an old zine that was you know torn out. Um so then I was able to add the found materials angle to it, provide some backstory without requiring my characters to just kind of stop what they're doing and explain something, you know. So I thought it was a more fluid and more unique and more fun way to do that, and that kind of upped the found footage feel a little bit. So, and I and I also really wanted to work in a bit of a slasher feel because I love slasher movies too. There are you know, most diehard horror fans love slashers, so you know, got some guys with knives, and then you know, also wanted to kind of put in some demonic possession elements, you know. The the movie that the book revolves around is called Proof of Demons, after all, so there's gonna be the chance for some demon possession. So I kind of wanted to kind of mash up these elements that aren't put together very often and just have fun with it and see what would happen if you have it's almost like three different horror story uh subgenres kind of melding into one, just to see what madness would happen.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Oftentimes things like that aren't super effective, but this works, and I feel like there's something in this book for everyone, be it you know the the style of the writing and the narrative structure, and where you deviate from expected plot points to the actual, I don't know, antagonists, the villains, the creatures uh in some cases that that were approaching. And and I really enjoyed the themes of this book. For me personally, I have my daughter uh at the time of this recording is gonna be two in two days. So parenting horror is something that's very interesting to me. So a lot of Jory's horror, I mean, there's Jory goes through the ringer in this book. You put her through a lot, but a lot of the horror that resonated with me was the fears, the parental fears that she experiences, and um it's central to the narrative in a lot of ways. Uh, I also saw a lot of themes of guilt, and what also jumped out to me as a content creator are the themes of integrity and responsibility with your online presence and with what you do with your platform. Um, those themes being noted, is there something you'd like the reader to leave with when they close the page on that fantastic ending?

SPEAKER_01 30:24

Yeah, I I think for me the the biggest central question is just what is belief in today's world and what you're saying about being online and responsibility and integrity, that all plays into this central question. Um because I was, you know, not to get off on too much of a tangent here, but I I'm pretty fascinated with the fact that you know people throw around the term, oh, we're living in a post-truth era. And you know, that's been you see that term a lot in newspaper articles and you know, the news and political discourse, but it really is true, and it's not just about politics anymore. It's really infected us to the point where you see something and you a lot of people don't even go through the thought process of deciding whether or not it's real, going and fact checking it, and you're going through the logic journey to come to a conclusion about it. They just see something and they say, Oh, that that's true. Wow. And with AI coming in, it's gonna, you know, it's gonna get even harder and more chaotic. And I have a lot of fears and concerns about that. I'm just glad that I wrote this novel before AI really started to sink its claws into us, because I would have had no choice but to make the novel a little bit different. This novel can talk about its themes and be the last one to do so pre-AI, you know, because you know, other I'm sure a lot of horror books are gonna be coming out that deal with AI and they're gonna be terrifying. I'm just glad I don't have to be one of them, because you know, things were already bad enough before AI got into the mix. But going back to what is belief, if if someone wants something to be true, they'll just believe it's true. And if the facts don't fit, they'll bend them to fit, or they'll just ignore them entirely. So I was wondering how that would pertain to uh an urban legend or a modern folklore kind of situation, because nowadays that would all be online. You know, the internet is the modern campfire, it's the modern like gossip corner, water cooler, you know, it's everything. So anything like that would that that was going to happen would happen online today, and therefore it could spread so much more, so much more widely, so much more deeply. And I just became really curious if something occult was to gain enough popularity to start kind of dipping into the public consciousness on a on a wider level, would it have the opportunity to spread and become viral or become a meme, whatever you want, however you want to look at it? And if enough people started to believe in it that it was true, what would be the possibilities there? Because when you live in a world where something that is not true can be believed in so hard that it might as well be true and it has more power than the truth, then that starts to feel occult to me, you know? Because if you go back a few hundred years and kind of try to define the word occult, it's not too different than our reality today. So that is that that really fascinated me. And so I just wanted to look at what is belief? Does belief matter? Do facts matter? What is the power of belief? And if you believe in something strongly enough, can it change the reality of that thing? And then obviously, as you pointed out, the responsibility of someone on the internet, especially someone who has a lot of influence and a large platform, they need to be mindful of these things and careful with how they word things and careful of if they're gonna tell a white lie, they need to make sure it's really, really small and that it can't do anybody any harm. Um, so when the reader finishes the book and closes it, first of all, they would think about belief. Like, what do I want to believe about what I just read, which is kind of an acting out of that theme, which you know kind of interested me. And maybe the takeaway would be just to be a little more mindful when you're online and when you're coming coming across information that might not be true, like just take a minute to try to find out whether or not it's true. I think it's something we can all do better of do better about.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Absolutely. And it's not it's not going to get any easier. It's interesting that you mention the belief becoming reality. That's the very crux of chaos magic uh from the 70s or 60s, 70s. Uh it's an actual occult practice that that's an interesting, um interesting to watch it play out in in in novelization form. But the uh when I closed the book, first of all, belief was on my mind. But really what was anchoring me is I'm uh we were doing coverage of a giant convention that weekend, and I was like, you know, I I don't have a large platform at the moment, but I have a large enough platform that my words matter, and it matters to the people I interview, and it matters to the people whose films I review, whose books I review, and it was just a nice reminder that words have power. Uh and sometimes your words are taken in ways that you don't intend. You have to be very careful. Our goal here is to empower horror fans and horror filmmakers, horror authors to express their love of horror. And we have to be very good shepherds of how we how we do that, uh, who who we help, and and you know, hopefully who we hurt, or hopefully not who we hurt. Um I wonder, do you have a these are questions that we ask everybody who comes on the show? We're gonna change gears a bit. I wonder, do you have a favorite found footage or analog horror story, book or film? You can give me one of each of those categories. You can give me just a film, just a story, just a book, but analog or found footage, what what gets you excited?

SPEAKER_01 37:30

Well, my favorite found footage movie is also my favorite horror movie, period. So I might eat up your next question. I'm not sure where you're gonna, but um my favorite bound footage movie and favorite horror movie is The Blair Witch Project. I just I've seen it 30 times. I I really I don't know how many times I've seen it. I watch it every couple years, and it's just I love it every time. It never loses any of its power. I've defended it a hundred times online. I will pick up my flag and my torch, and I will march forth into a defense of that movie. I just love it so much, and there's the the historical significance of it. There's the unique marketing plan that was lightning in a bottle and couldn't ever be replicated. It's like everybody would be on to the trick at that point once that movie came out. But even all that aside, like I just think it's a great, great, great movie. I think it it plays with temporal space and time in a in a Lovecraftian cosmic horror sort of way that people really don't acknowledge that often. And when you really step back and think about those woods they were in, like something was the woods were changing around them. That's the only thing that really makes sense, you know. And they definitely hint at it, and it's there to pick up on. I'm not trying to say I'm some scholar, but um, it's just such a brilliant movie, and it's so effective and it's so minimal, and I'll always love that movie. Um, my favorite found footage book, like book links, would probably be, and I'm trying to think of things that are purely found footage where there's no no first person long form narrative, just just found just found materials. I would probably do The Last Days of Jack Sparks by uh Jason Jason Arnop, I think is his name. Um have to add that to my list. I don't I don't think I've read this. It's it's really good. Either that or last days by Adam Neville. I like both of those a lot. Last Days is fantastic as well. And if I remember Last Days, I'm pretty sure that that's 100% found footage. I kind of want to be a purist for this question. Um, either one of those, they're just really fantastic. And I'll throw in a short story too. Uh Gemma Files wrote a story with her husband, Stephen Beringer, years ago called Each Thing I Show You is a Piece of My Death. And it's only about 7,000 words. It's it's pretty short, but it is an absolutely phenomenal found footage story. It is just, I cannot speak highly enough of that story. I will cherish it for the rest of my life. It's uh very briefly, it's about um these two people trying to make an experimental film. They're you know, wannabe filmmakers, and they kind of stumble across this phenomenon where I don't want to give too much away, but um basically someone records themselves committing suicide, and they just the camera keeps running and their body starts to break down and decay, and somehow the the camera is just continuing to film this and film this, and it kind of goes into like a time lapse sort of thing, and then after that, the man who killed himself is starts showing up in other people's movies, like say the new this isn't an example from the story, but just say like the new Mission Impossible movie. This dead man would be in that movie, and no one no one knows how he got there. The editor is like he wasn't in this movie, you know. It's just I don't want to say anything else, but it's an incredible story. And you can Google it and you can find it. It's free to read online.

SPEAKER_00 42:10

So that's such a selfish question for me to ask because every time I ask it, I either get a new film or a new book or a new short story to add to my list. And uh, I don't know. I'm better for having spoken with you and with all of the people who come on this show. Um, and and a wonderful bow to put on this conversation would be the Blair Witch Project, which is probably my number two or number three favorite film of all time as well. I have the behind me, uh without going and showing you, I have all the old like um young adult novelizations and the dossiers, and like I I'm I've I've met the cast. I just I'm I'm a Blair Witch super fan. And it may you may hate me after this, but I just did a a short video in defense of Book of Shadows, Blair Witch 2, because I think that viewed from the right angle and with the right mindset, there's a lot to love in that film as well. Um, just the whole series. It's the world building for me, the the marketing campaign, the the the what's happening between the frames, so to speak. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 43:08

This is kind of this is a little rude, but I'm gonna find this photograph that I want to show you real quick.

SPEAKER_00 43:13

Oh, please. It's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 43:16

It's definitely on point to what we are talking about. Here it is. I'm gonna hold it up to the camera.

SPEAKER_00 43:25

Oh, I love I saw that on Instagram and I said to my wife, I said, Sarah, Heather is endorsing uh the October film hunt. I you I was like, this is fantastic. We actually, uh speaking of the October film hunt as a a group of people, one of our videos that is pinned on our on our TikTok page and is going pretty good right now uh is us exploring the filming locations in Seneca Creek State Park for the Blair Witch Project. Um where we with the the the shack and the shanty. We we didn't make it to Coffin Rock on this trip, but we showed some previous footage of when we went to Coffin Rock. So uh man, what a nice bow. On this conversation. Us uh in in in Seneca Creek and your favorite film. Um, yeah, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you online if they want to stay involved with what you have going on or if they want to find out more about the October film haunt?

SPEAKER_01 44:17

Um, well, you can find me at michaelwehunt.com. I wish I were more active on there, but I do keep my bibliography page updated. Um, like I have a press podcast page where you can find links to read stuff and interviews and such. Um social media, I'm probably most active on Instagram. Just Michael Wehunt author, but I'm on most of most of the major platforms. But Instagram seems to be the one platform today where you can kind of sort of unplug from the world. You know, you can just watch videos of cute dogs if you want, if you just need to decompress, where if you go on, you know, Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you're just not gonna you're not gonna get that sort of decompression. You're just gonna be bombarded with terrible, depressing things all day. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 45:18

Uh, is there anything you're working on next that you want to give a plug to or that people should keep an eye out for that you can talk about? You don't have to talk about anything you're not ready to.

SPEAKER_01 45:27

Not much in the immediate future, but I my second novel will be coming out. We're hope we're hoping exactly one year after the October film hunt. So just September 2026, keep an eye out on that. Um I'll be talking about it on social media before I even know it. But um, I did write my first short story in four and a half years, which felt really nice. And that's going to be coming out in an anthology, but I don't know when, or it could be after the next novel for all I know. We don't have an an uh publication date on that. So, but right now it's just you know the October film haunt and then my back catalog. But I am excited about this next novel. It's gonna be leaner and darker. I know the October film haunt's dark, but it's in a way this new one's gonna be even darker and just it's gonna bite harder.

SPEAKER_00 46:34

Well, I will be a reader of that novel for sure, and I will be working my way through your back catalog. I you have earned, uh, and I want to say stress earned a new fan in me. This novel was well written, it was masterfully done. The descriptions of those VHS tapes were visceral and scary, and I had an absolute blast, as much as you can have a blast as a blast with a novel that dark, um, with this. It was fantastic. I'm so grateful that you took some time to speak with us today. And uh yeah, thanks for being on the show.

SPEAKER_01 47:07

It was an absolute honor, but I do have to ask, what's your number one favorite horror movie?

SPEAKER_00 47:12

Oh, my number one favorite horror movie is going to be Halloween, and I know that's an easy answer, but after I saw Scream in theaters when I was 13, Scream gave me like a roadmap for horror, and uh Halloween is the number one stop on that roadmap, and it did something to me. I I just wanted to know more about Michael. He was such an enigma, and I've probably spent nearly 30 years tracking down what makes Michael tick, and I've come up probably the same as whenever I turned off Halloween for the first time. That's the that's one of the ones that gave me the shivers. I I like I mentioned Halloween 2 early on, but uh I first time I sat through Halloween, it it did something to me.

SPEAKER_01 47:51

It's I mean it's definitely in my top five, but I think the enduring power of Michael Myers, the proof is in the credits of the first movie when it when he's credited as the shape. I've always been so fascinated by that. Yeah, they use they use the name Michael Myers in the movie multiple times, and then at the end in the credits, he's just the shape. Yeah, and that is just that really just kind of sums up why he's so fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 48:24

Yeah, it's and it it's you just can never pin him down into anything. He he's he's man, he's more than man. He's yeah, he's vacant. He's vacant he's the absence of personhood, he's just evil. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention Reanimator. There's a portrait of Herbert West right over my shoulder. Uh, that rounds out my top three for sure. Reanimator is just an epic piece of cinema. All very different films.

SPEAKER_01 48:46

Yeah, that's it's a good, it's a good trio because they're very unlike each other. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:52

That just goes to show uh, as you mentioned earlier in our conversation, how vast horror is and all the different functions it serves uh for us in society, uh, and all the different reflections back of ourselves at us and all the different reflections of society back at itself in a broader scale. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:12

Totally true.

SPEAKER_00 49:14

Michael, this has been a true pleasure. I hope you come back next year when your next novel comes out. We would love to have you. Oh, I would be happy to. All right. Well, as always, stay spooky, my friends.