We’re in Spooktober mode, and we’re planting our flag. For our continuing October Halloween exploration we bring you an often overlooked Horror movie series: Warlock. It's one of those franchises we keep waiting for people to rediscover, because the first film has everything genre fans claim they want: a confident supernatural villain, strange old-world witchcraft rules, and a time-travel chase that never stops pushing forward. Julian Sands brings a “posh evil” presence that feels genuinely dangerous, sexy, and unpredictable, the kind of performance that should have made him a bigger horror household name.

We dig into what makes Warlock feel different from the slasher giants and even from its supernatural peers. The magic has texture: pennies in mouths, toes bound to thumbs, cold iron, nails in footprints, boiled fat for flight, and a Grand Grimoire that can literally unmake creation if the Warlock speaks the name of God backwards. Along the way, we talk about the film’s underappreciated craft, its VHS-fueled cult life, and how studio chaos and release timing helped keep it from getting the recognition it deserved.

Then we take the full franchise tour. Warlock 2 The Armageddon goes bigger, louder, and more 90s, with druid stones, eclipse stakes, and set pieces that flirt with comic book logic before that became the norm. Warlock 3 The End of Innocence, though, is where we draw a hard line, and yes, we explain why. We also hit the spin-off legacy, including a novelization, comics, and the 90s video game, plus a sober note on real-world media panic and why blaming horror movies is a shortcut.

If you enjoy smart horror deep dives and cult franchise autopsies, subscribe, share the show with a fellow monster nerd, and leave us a review. What’s your Warlock ranking: 1, 2, or refuse to acknowledge 3?

In this classic Halloween episode we look back upon a near-forgotten Horror anthology TV series - Tales from the Darkside. We trace how Creepshow and the EC Comics tradition (Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror) set the blueprint, then get into the messy rights reality that forced Romero’s team to build something adjacent rather than literal. From there, we spotlight the October 1983 premiere “Trick or Treat,” a nasty little morality play about debt, greed, and a Halloween-night reckoning that feels like the purest form of anthology justice.

Then we jump into one of the most fun conversations of the night: “Inside the Closet,” directed by Tom Savini, complete with our beat-by-beat reaction to the tension, the synthy creep factor, and the moment the “closet monster” earns a nickname and an unexpected kind of charm. We also nerd out over how stacked the bench is, from major horror authors and short-story adaptations to an absurdly deep guest star list that makes the show feel like a secret casting time capsule.

In a scattered discussion, we break down the cult vampire film Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat. We talk through the movie’s best hook: a hidden vampire community that’s trying to go legit with sunscreen, public-facing small-town life, and a factory producing a synthetic blood substitute so vampires can stop feeding on humans. From there, the story splinters into factions and a quiet coup against David Carradine’s Mardulak, a human family dragged into vampire politics, and a rival vampire’s nasty, sexually charged scheme that drives the ugliest tension in the plot. Along the way, we call out the moments that feel weirdly ahead of their time, especially if you like True Blood style vampire society storytelling.