Hey J. Crew, producer Josh Cross here with a little Halloween treat for you. If there's

one thing besides the Mets that Leel and I agree on, it's horror movies. Actually, come

to think of it, those are kind of the same thing anyway. I mean, was the end of this baseball

season that much different than turning the corner to see Freddy Kruger staring you down?

Nah. Anyway, as Halloween and the spooky season approach this year, Leel wound up with

a proverbial killer clown in his bonnet. About figuring out how to reconcile his love

of these movies and Halloween in general with his deepening practice of Judaism, so with

a little help from a friend he dove in. I think you'll all get a delightful shock where

he wound up.

Hi, my name is Leel and I am a scary movie junkie. Is the music freaking you out a little

bit? Fine, let's try something a bit more cosy, shall we? Better? Good. Now, let me tell

you a little bit about horror movies and why I love them and why I think they're actually

just about the best sources we have left if we want to have a serious conversation about

what it means to be a good person. Yeah, really. Listen, I didn't always see horror movies

as maybe our last morally serious source of entertainment. When I was young, I spent

every afternoon at Video Nucket, my neighborhood's local videos. If you were born after 1990,

please pause here for a minute and go Google Blockbuster or VHS or, you know, history. The best

thing about Video Nucket wasn't the selection which was to your average American blockbuster what

my Israeli hometown, Herzlia, was to say Chicago. The best thing about Video Nucket was that its

employees didn't give a hoot about you, which meant that you could just walk in and rent whatever

video you wanted. And that, or an 11 year old, is the very definition of freedom. I don't remember

exactly how I ended up at the horror shelf. Maybe it was the pizza textured face of Freddie Kruger,

...