If you’re a genre fan in your 20s or 30s you no doubt grew up watching Joe Bob Briggs, the salt of the earth Texan film critic alter ego of John Bloom, who loves nothing more than the three B’s (blood, breasts, and beasts) and watching horror films with a cold Lone Star in hand. Beginning his run in the late ‘80s on late night cable, Joe Bob introduced several generations to exploitation cinema thanks to hosting gigs on various cable networks that ran until 2000, when MonsterVision on TNT sadly ended its run due to changing channel format.
Earlier this week, in anticipation for his appearance at Cinepocalypse Film Fest in Chicago, I got a few moments to chat with Joe Bob. Fresh off the first season of his successful run on Shudder with his new show The Last Drive-In, Joe Bob will be doing his one-man show How Rednecks Saved Hollywood, June 18th at the Music Box Theater. Joe Bob and I got to discuss not only the origin of his live show, but how he got into genre film, and for The Last Drive-In fans, what is in the works for season two! Here’s a hint: it’s pretty cool and shows not only Joe Bob’s love for genre, but also the great community that has rallied behind the show.
First off, congrats on getting renewed for a second season on Shudder. I’m loving the diversity of the selections this season between the foreign films and some of the fan favorites. How much thought has gone into mixing it up a bit? And is this something we can look forward in season two?
Yes, I mean it’s an extremely complicated thing, the decisions and arguments about what to show. Because you know, there’s an audience for the cult films. There’s an audience for the “it’s so bad, it’s good” films. There’s an audience for the foreign films. Then there’s the hardcore fans that want you to show some film that’s so obscure that nobody’s ever seen it before. You know, and then there’s the casual fan, that just wants to see Hellraiser or Evil Dead 2. So, we do try to show a mix of everything and always have some eighties, because you piss people off if you don’t show ‘80s. (Laughs) I don’t really understand the glamorization of the ‘80s. But, you know, I know it exists, and so, we make people happy. We feed it.
So that actually leads me to my next question. Where are you in this whole over-intellectualizing of genre these days? I know you’ve spoken out, very truthfully so, about that nostalgic lens that fans tend to color the stuff from the ‘80s.
Well, the intellectualization of horror is just a small group of people that talk to each other. I mean, the tens of millions of people who went to see the Halloween sequel or who went to see the IT remake, they could care less about the intellectualization of horror (laughs), they could care less about elevated horror, and they could care less about the political subtext of various movies. So, I’m not too worried about it. I mean horror has to be entertaining or it’s not going to survive. I was not aware until recently that so much of the horror conversation is now conducted at universities. I get sent these monographs and books; you know, somebody sent me a book length discussion of I Spit on Your Grave that was published by Columbia University Press and I was like, what the fuck? (Laughs)
It’s like they, they stopped studying Shakespeare and started studying, I Spit on Your Grave, you know. What’s wrong with this picture?
I felt really bad. I was at the New York Comic Con last fall, and I made some jokes about the professors and academics who make fools of themselves talking about horror, and two women came up to me after the show who were, I guess, professors, and they were virtually in tears. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to stop doing this, it’s too easy a target and I don’t know enough about it to be doing this.” So I stopped bashing the professors so much. But I do think that they sometimes find things that aren’t there and they talk about things that don’t matter. From that standpoint, I’m not a fan of intellectualizing horror movies. Horror movies are emotional. They’re raw, the good ones are, and so it’s not about the mind, it’s about the body and about the heart.
So, what’s it like to be back now? I mean, I’ve always been a fan, but it’s great to see the show trending now, and the fan community and Twitter presence around the show is just amazing.
That’s so true. And that’s the most satisfying thing about my comeback, I guess, is the community that has formed around the show and around Shudder. It’s just incredible and just amazing, and it goes against the gospel of streaming that says it’s all about one person watching one movie at a time on the one device. We’ve sort of proven otherwise, that there’s a hunger for a communal experience. That’s actually been the most amazing and satisfying thing about it. I love to go to the conventions, because people come up to my table and they tell me their stories. They have stories associated with Monster Vision or The Last Drive-In or some of them are so old that they remember Joe Bob’s Drive-In on the Movie Channel and they all have stories associated with it.
The story is about the family members they watched it with or the girlfriend that they watched it with and now they’re married to. Or they had a bad family atmosphere, so the show was an escape, but they all have some kind of emotional, human story associated with the shows that I’ve done. I can’t really take credit for it. I was just trying to do an entertaining show. There’s something about movies that when they’re enjoyed together as a community, it draws people together. You know, one thing you may notice about those social media communities that have formed around the show: there’s red state people in them and blue state people in them, there’s old people in them and young people in them.
There’s no defining a demographic, and it draws people together who might tend to demonize one another if they were talking to them in any other context. So in that sense, it’s a very positive thing for America. I don’t want to claim too much for it, but horror is a very positive thing. Horror fans are the kindest people in the world, ironically, you know, they may like blood and guts and murder. But in their personal lives, they are the peace lovers. So yes, that’s a remarkable and wonderful thing.
You know, I was in a whole different career when the show started.
I had to decide you know, do I really wanna pitch into this full time? And it was like turning around an aircraft carrier to a sort of get to where I could devote the time that it takes. But I don’t regret doing it because of the interaction with the public and it’s so wonderful. In fact, I am constantly telling the mail girl to find some hate mail. We never get any hate mail. I always thrived on hate mails at TNT and The Movie Channel, and we’re not getting the hate mail; the conflict is good for the show. We’re getting these love letters all the time. Stop bringing me love letters.
It’s remarkable that we have such support. It’s a very good thing.
Speaking of stories, what was your sort of introduction to horror and drive-in movies?
I didn’t really get into horror till I was in my early twenties. I mean, I had seen a handful of horror films as a kid. The first one I remember was Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It was a big budget horror movie with Bette Davis, but it didn’t like inspire some great love of horror. People tell me, “Oh, my love of horror started at eight years old when I saw this.” It was a slow thing, and I think what I liked about horror was it was an outlaw genre. It was something that would be considered disposable trash by the mainstream media. It was something that your mother didn’t really want you to watch it, the church didn’t really want you to see it. It was a forbidden fruit. So I was always attracted the forbidden fruit.
When I started seriously reviewing films, I reviewed mostly exploitation films, not just horror, but every genre of exploitation. So I think it was that aspect of it that drew me to it. You know, the first film that I ever reviewed was The Grim Reaper, an Italian cannibal film in Europe, it’s known as Antropophagus, Joe D’ Amato. I think that’s his real name. He has about 15 names. But, at the time there was no way for me to know that it was Italian. It was filmed in Greece, I think, they would disguise those movies. I mean, if you watch closely at the end, you know, the entire crew would have Italian names. And so you would kind of get it, but no one watched the credits. This was before the era of the VCR, so you could fake the origins of movies and that’s what they did.
They faked the origins in Italian movies and made them American. So, I’m watching all these horror movies. I don’t know where they came from. I don’t know who made them. I don’t think I’ll ever see him again. I have to sort of remember what’s in them because I don’t have any device at home that can replay them, so that’s the world of where I grew up in. You have a memory of the movie and you can’t check it. That’s it. That memory is it, you know, and in a way that’s good, because the powerful movies stay with you and you don’t sort of watch it 30 times and then decide it’s good, which some people do now.
That’s very true.
I’m always surprised by movies that become cult films 20 years later, and it’ll be because of some social media campaign. People can actually be convinced to like a movie, something kind of distorted about that.
I’ve noticed that. Like all of a sudden someone will release a film and they will call it a forgotten cult classic. Everybody then rushes out to watch it and then promptly forgets about it a month later.
Right. Or, a movie is a forgotten gem from the ‘80s. You know, it’s usually not a forgotten gem, its just some movie that was on the shelves that nobody can get distribution for whatever. Years later somebody sold it to Arrow Video and they went and found the people that were involved in it and interviewed them and released it as a forgotten gem. (Laughs) But that’s how much people love the eighties. Anything made there. They want to see it.
You started out as a film critic in print. How do you think film criticism has changed and evolved thanks to the Internet and social media? Do you think immediacy is necessarily a bad thing?
No, immediacy for a critic as a good thing. I did several commentary tracks on various movies and various DVDs, and the commentary track was the best thing ever invented for a film critic. It’s not used that way. They don’t really do a lot with it as far as having a film critic actually analyze the film as it’s playing. But I love those things because they’re like, you can be talking about the film at the exact moment that someone is watching it develop. That’s something that’s never been a tool in the film critic’s arsenal. Everything digital has just enhanced the role of the film critic. Now, it’s ruined all the good jobs; there’s so many film critics, but nobody wants to pay for a film critic anymore. People look at it as a bad thing. Where did all the great film critics go? Well, they didn’t go anywhere. There’s still there, they just can’t get those great paying newspaper jobs that used to exist. Newspapers don’t really look to that as an important thing anymore.
You know, Roger Ebert’s probably the last film critic that’ll ever win the Pulitzer prize and he won it in 1969 or something. (Laughs) But, as far as being able to get your opinion out there, there’s never been a better time. Unfortunately, you have to wade through 80% crap in order to find the gems.
One of the things we’re going to do in the second season of The Last Drive-In is we’re going to give weekly awards to blogs and podcasts that are not the big ones, not the ones you know, ones that are sponsored by Fangoria and Blumhouse. But the sort of underappreciated blogs and podcasts where they’re doing really fine quality work, but maybe people don’t know about that. We’re going to start giving our seal of approval every week to one of those, because I think so many people get lost, they get thrown under the bus, they’re putting out really high-quality material every week, and it’s just kind of getting swept away with all the crap. So we’re going to try to bring some of these blogs and podcasts out of the darkness, into the light, and tell the fans about them.
So, on to the rednecks, what was the genesis of your show How Rednecks Saved Hollywood?
About ten years ago, I was invited to speak at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. Millsaps College is a very sort of hoity toity private school where the privileged elite of a Mississippi go to school. So they wanted me to speak about southern films. So I did a thing called The South in Film, but I picked all the wrong movies. I did the Gone with the Wind type movies, the Bette Davis movies, you know, the big musicals; after it was over, I realized I picked the most boring stuff. I should have done the hillbilly movies and the swamp girl movies. There’s a much richer vein of material in the redneck side of the south.
Southerners come from two places. They come from England and they come from Scotland. Rednecks come from Scotland, and the planter class that owned the slaves, they came from England. So, I say I’m going to go pure Scotland on this, go pure redneck with this. I started looking into all the redneck genres and took out all the Bette Davis stuff, I had some stuff that stayed in there. Like I have a movie called The Klansmen. One of the worst movies ever made that was shot in North Alabama, directed by Terence Young, who did a lot of the James Bond movies. It stars Richard Burton, and is one of the worst movies ever made. But it’s funny ‘cause it has O.J. Simpson in it.
I left stuff like that in. I left these oddities in. I basically revamped the whole show and did it as a history of the redneck. So it is a true 400 year history of the redneck, starting with the first redneck in history as told through film. It has about 200 clips and stills in a two-hour show. So, it moves really fast, but it’s comedy, it’s history, it’s film history, it’s redneck history. It’s a show I put together about why we need rednecks in film. I’ve refined it over the years and done it all over the country.
I originally thought it would just play in the south, cities that love their confederate monuments. (Laughs) And then, the Coolidge Corner Theatre asked me to take it up there, and I thought, well, if people don’t kill me in Boston they won’t kill me anywhere. I’m doing it in Chicago next Tuesday, as part of Cinepocalypse Film Festival, and the movie before me is a subtitled Polish art film, and this movie after me is a subtitled Mexican film about dead children. (Laughs)
So I’m a big fan of regional cinema; I’m originally from Tennessee so I can really appreciate some of these these films. Was there anything that really surprised you when you began that deep dive?
Oh yeah. Well, I was familiar with a lot of the stuff, but for example, you’re from Tennessee, which part?
I’m from Johnson City.
Johnson City. Okay. Well there’s a dearth of movies from East Tennessee. There’s a wealth of movies from Middle Tennessee. They’re all bad. They’re horrible. The only place where good movies come from is West Tennessee. There’s a sub-genre, for example, called the Nashville movie, horrible. Never watch one. They’re all bad. They all suck.
So yeah, I do get into the regionalisms of movies. I’d get into why all the big Hollywood movies about the south are set in Mississippi. I have a theory about that, and it’s that they never repair anything in Mississippi. So, when the art director goes to Mississippi, you know, to look for a 1932 drug store, somebody just picks up the phone and says, “Hey, Stu open up the old drug store in Clarksdale!” Cause it’s still there! It’s abandoned, but it’s still there from 1932. So, I think that’s why they always shoot in Mississippi in Hollywood, because it’s a cheap set.
I don’t know, my money’s on Kentucky for some of the best regional stuff.
Yeah or North Carolina, because for years Earl Owensby had his own studio in Shelby, North Carolina, and he would make this stuff that just played at the drive-in. So, there’s a huge wealth of North Carolina regional only movies. You’re right about Kentucky. There were quite a few there. Southern Ohio, which most people don’t think of as a southern state, the extreme southern part of Ohio is pure Appalachia, so quite a few movies that were made in the Cincinnati area are southern regional films.
What are some Joe Bob comfort food films? What’s kind of your guilty pleasure that you know, maybe nobody would ever guess?
Well, Spinal Tap, I can watch that as many times as it’s on. I like any kind of film noir. I haven’t hosted much of it in my career, but like it. The original The Hustler with Paul Newman and George C. Scott, I could just watch that movie 50 times and I still like it. It’s got that noir thing. It’s got the great performance by Jackie Gleason. It’s got the whole gritty New York underworld feel to it. I have quite a few, but you know, I would say Spinal Tap for comedy, The Hustler for drama, Texas Chainsaw Massacre for horror; Hellraiser also. You know, once a year I need to watch Hellraiser.
Those are solid choices. Finally, of course I have to ask this: any date on season two yet?
No, we’re arguing about it. I think it should be sooner. Shudder thinks it should be later. So we don’t know exactly when it’s going to start yet. Also arguing about marathons or mini marathons or holidays and all this stuff. You’d think with such a small service it would be a fairly simple thing, but it’s very complicated. The complicated thing is getting the rights for the movies on the dates you want the rights. These movies get sold into multiple marketplaces and some of these movies are sold on a one month license.
Wow.
Every month you can renew the license, but you don’t know when they’re going to take it away from you. So, Darcy really wants us to show Halloween 3, it’s on a one month license. We don’t know. We might be able to do it and then, you know, lose it a couple months later. So, we’re going to try to talk to them and get it on a longer license and maybe have that one. But, it’s stupid problems like that.
Some of these movies, we don’t know who owns them. We are trying to find who owns Howling 7. I want to show Howling 7 and we can’t find who owns it. So things like that are just weird, quirky things about the rights situations with these movies.
When we showed The Hills Have Eyes, we nailed down the rights to that movie two days before we showed it. Two days. We were going to have to substitute another movie, and the only way we were able to nail down the rights is Darcy went over to the producer’s house and rang his doorbell and begged him to accept cash from us so we could show the movie.
So that’s how weird the rights situation can be.
Darcy is great! I love her interaction with a fan community. I love the balance between your old man yelling at the sky and her fanboy optimism.
Yeah. That is exactly what it is. She is passionate about the movies that she cares for and sort of forces me to consider them, you know, movies that I normally wouldn’t consider. Then it’s like okay, suddenly there’s a Howling 3 conversation. Suddenly there’s a Phantom of the Paradise conversation.
OOOH.
So, I have to check on the rights and Shudder has to say yes or no, and we have to go through this process. We’re trying to get everything that the fans want. I’m trying to make everybody happy.
This interview was edited for clarity.