Hey, it's Christopher Kimball from Mill Street Radio. Sounds like I'm bragging, and I am,

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Mill Street Radio. This is Love Letters. I'm Meredith Goldstein. In our last episode, we heard Rory Uphold talk about how she realized in a literal haunted house that she might be on a date with someone behaving like a monster. If you haven't listened to that episode, please do. It's very funny. Rory recently published a book called A Final Girl's Guide to the

Horrors of Dating. She explained the trope of The Final Girl in horror films,

Final Girl being the name for the woman who survives at the end. Rory wants to be the final

girl in her love life to survive all of the messy dating experiences until she finds someone

great. It's fascinating to me how easily horror films and their tropes seem to dovetail so

nicely with the way we talk about romance and love in general. After talking to Rory, I realized

I wanted to get deeper into this with someone who has written horror.

I wanted to find out why the scariest, scary movies actually seem to be about vulnerability.

I'm thrilled to tell you that for a very spooky Halloween episode, our guest today is Akela Cooper.

She's a screenwriter and producer.

You might know her work from American Horror Story, or the movie Malignant about a woman who starts having visions of murders.

Or my favorite, Megan, from 2022, about a very preppy AI doll who's programmed to take care of a child

and will kill a bunch of people to do it.

Megan was scary in a slasher way

and also hilarious and silly.

But in some moments,

the movie gets emotional and deep.

...