Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

And this is Joe McCormick.

This week, we're discussing a film that's really been on the Weird House Cinema list,

pretty much from the get-go, and that is Blue Sunshine, a weird, independent thriller, and

kind of secret Christmas movie from 1977 that melds sensationalized media ideas about

psychedelics with chilling horror and a biting critique of post-60s anxiety and hippie disillusionment.

It's also, in my opinion, just as cutting today. I mean, it has its goofy moments, to be clear.

We'll get into those, which are quite enjoyable. But the terror and the anxiety in the picture absolutely holds up,

as does, I think, its vision of a world in which to invoke Hunter S. Thompson, the wave of optimism and progress has seemingly crashed and fallen back, given way to a world that seems to be spinning on, untethered from our will, enraptured by commercialism, and at the time, we find ourselves taking in more con man dreams of a better tomorrow.

Perhaps delusions not that dissimilar to the same things that we saw as revelations a mere decade ago.

And at the same time, I think it's also a film about the journey out of youth into middle age, out of hope into, well, maybe uncertainty.

I would say that this is the paranoid horror spin on the big chill.

Yeah.

But I totally agree with what you said about the duality of this movie.

I would put it in the Susperia zone, comparing it to the Dario Argento film Susperia, in that it is both extremely effective as intended as horror.

Like there is, some of the scary stuff in this movie is terrifying. It is so, so strong. but it is also extremely unintentionally funny in the same way that

you have both of these things in Susperia. So in Suspira, you have great, you know, the witch

looming out the window in the darkness and, uh, in those great scenes of, uh, of terror creeping down

the hall as the music swells.

You know, it's great stuff.

But then you've also got the bat that looks like a pair of rolled up socks

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