Episode 21: Horror Movie Harvest Episode (That Coincidentally Falls On October 31st)
In the twenty-first episode of The Babylon Bee podcast, editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle are joined by Brian Godawa to talk about horror movies. Are they evil? Does God hate horror? Brian, often called "The Horror Apologist," weighs in. While some may think the timing is a little strange—it being the Devil's holiday and all—rest assured this is our fall harvest episode that only happens to fall on the same day as pagan-pumpkin-demon day. Brian Godawa is an award-winning Hollywood screenwriter (To End All Wars), a movie and culture blogger specializing in God, Movies, and Worldviews (www.Godawa.com), author of a textbook, Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment as well as an Amazon best-selling author of Biblical fiction (Chronicles of the Nephilim/Chronicles of the Apocalypse). Follow Brian on Twitter. Movies/Horror genres discussed The Rules of Horror Scream The Wicker Man Zombie 28 Days Later franchise Shaun of the Dead The Walking Dead Vampires The Addiction I am Legend Twilight Serial killers (the modern vampires) Seven Brian Godawa's Short Film Cruel Logic Dexter Subscriber-Only Portion Midsommar It Deliver Us From Evil The Exorcism Of Emily Rose The Exorcist The Blair Witch Project Paranormal [Rec] The Last Exorcism Also Mentioned: Third Eagle Of The Apocalypse Doom And Gloom Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
In a world where fake news rules over all, 1D arises.
Wielding the stinger of satire.
Driving into the unsmokable heart of people.
While eating the chefola single.
The summer season is about to get home.
Big time.
Starring Kirk Cameron as Joel OC.
Living large, hanging out with beautiful people, making lots of money.
Kevin Solo as Bernie Sanders.
Hey, Dave Fitz.
John McCarter as himself.
Wicked people.
And Kyle Mann as Ethan Nicole.
From Hellman, I'm EC Colt with a special guest of events by Brian Ganela.
Amadeus.
The blockbuster event of the new millennium.
The Babylon Dream Movies.
Podcast episode.
Yeah, it's just a podcast episode nowadays.
Amadeus.
Amadeus.
He's here in the house.
We got Brian Gadawa.
He's back from the dead.
My favorite part is John MacArthur playing himself.
He's just there.
All I found is him saying, wicked people.
You guys are funny.
I was trying to find Brian Gadawa saying something very Brian Godaw and Amadeus is perfect.
Amadeus.
I keep thinking of that old song.
If you get the hang of Brian Gadawa, he's always talking about Amadeus.
He probably says world views along the way.
Yeah, I do.
Oh, Transcendence.
That's what we need to do.
That's my dream thing.
Transcendence.
That'd be good, too.
It's Transcendence.
So I'm the straight man here today.
So the fool.
I'm straight.
The straight fool.
This is our autumn harvest episode.
That happens to land on or near October 31st.
So imagine lots of orange decorations, pumpkins, but without faces.
Yeah, every church I've ever been to has had a harvest festival.
Harvest festival.
And or a hallelujah festival on October 31st.
Because they don't celebrate Halloween.
Huh.
Because that's bad.
So we're just going to talk about horror movies.
Yeah.
Coincidentally, very close to Halloween.
How many of that?
Because everyone knows horror movies are evil.
That's right.
Amen.
Especially for Christianity.
So this episode's main thrust will be how evil horror movies are.
We'll go down the list.
I do like watching horror movies in October, like that lead up to Christmas movies.
Like you get excited to watch you want to watch Die Hard during Christmas season.
Yeah.
Exactly.
A classic Christmas movie like Die Hard.
Yeah.
And then October you want to watch the perfect setup right now with Midsummer just coming out on DVD.
That's the movie you want to watch this.
What's a DVD?
You're supposed to say that in like a mid-somar.
Yeah, I was.
Sorry.
I kept saying, I'm going to go see Midsummer.
Is that what you say?
No, you don't do that.
Should we say ahead of time, are we recommending this movie?
Or at least with a qualified way.
In a qualified way.
I found it very disturbing.
Heads beat it.
I would not watch it again.
Crazy person.
Cult orgy.
Yeah.
So just if you're into that.
But a very profound moral.
I'm curious to hear you have to say about it because I just watched it last night for research purposes for today.
So Brian, why don't you tell us, why don't you defend your watching this sinful movie?
Midsummer.
Well, let's talk about horror in general first.
Is it okay?
Set down some things.
What's horror?
What's the point of horror?
And a lot of people, I think, have a misunderstanding of it.
I think a lot of people just see it as this.
Oh, that's just exploitation of gore and killing people.
And, you know, that's, oh, and another one is, you know, though, that just feeds on fear.
And, you know, particularly religious people or Christians would say, you know, our God is not a God of fear.
And so you're promoting fear.
Is that how they talk?
Is that how they talk about it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's our fundamentalist talk.
They talk kind of like a tiny W.C. Fields.
Yeah.
Sure.
Horror movies.
You watch horror.
But seriously, because I have to keep bringing us back to seriousness.
So, you know, that's the negative reaction from, you know, conservatives and religious people and Christians, stuff like that, you know.
But I think that if you look at the history of horror, you look at horror in context of culture and, you know, like I say, the history and what it does, I think there's some very profound good elements to it.
I think one of the purposes, you know, in fact, I wrote, now here's my shameless act of sources of promotions.
What time are we at four minutes in?
Barely in a row here.
Yeah, yeah.
So one of my great chapters is God Loves Horror.
And it's actually an article I wrote.
You can go to my website and find a free version of the article somewhere.
Or it's in my book, which is God Against the Gods.
And I write a whole chapter that, and I explain my arguments for why God loves horror.
And just in general, like not biblical, that's a whole nother area to address.
But I think the moral elements of horror are, number one, it reinforces and affirms original sin or affirms the sinfulness and evil of mankind.
Now, that doesn't set, doesn't sound very profound, does it?
But it really is.
If you consider we're in a postmodern world or a secular world that denies that man is basically evil, they say man is basically good.
Well, then what horror does is when you watch a horror film, you are reinforcing that human nature is basically evil.
Evil is real, right?
You know, this whole relativism about one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
And that's the world we live in.
And so you can't judge another culture.
All that stuff is just destroyed when you watch horror because it's clear that this is evil and this evil son of a bee has to die, right?
And so that, and that's, like I say, that's a sort of a simple approach, but I think that it's profound and needed because especially in today's world, you know, like I say, it reinforces that evil is a real thing and it must be fought to the death.
That's one element.
Secondly, I think is it exposes the seriousness of sin and consequences.
And there's lots of examples of this, but like in horror movies, it's really common that characters who die almost always commit a sin, right?
Yeah, no, not always, but a lot of them do.
As a matter of fact, if you go back to the old slasher ones, you know, with the kids, Friday the 13th and all that stuff.
They go off to sleep around or whatever.
Exactly.
It's always the promiscuous kids who get killed and the virgin always lived, right?
Now, we know Scream as a series, when that came, that turned it upside down.
And for a few years after that, everyone was doing the opposite of the typical.
But I'll tell you what, I think a lot of them have come back to that tradition.
It's actually quite traditional.
I actually have morality.
I have the clip from Scream.
Here's the rule.
There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie.
For instance, number one, you can never have sex.
Big lumbo!
Big lumbo!
Dagman!
Sex equals death!
Okay, number two, you can never drink or do drugs.
No, the sin factor.
It's a sin.
It's an extension of number one.
And number three, never, ever, ever under any circumstances say, I'll be right back.
Because you won't be back.
I'm getting another beer.
You want one?
Yeah, sure.
I'll be right back.
Absolutely.
And that's, you know, like I say, for a while there, it turned those upside down.
But now the traditional moral, there's actually a traditional moral compass behind a lot of those.
Now, I'm not going to say that justifies the fact that there's a lot of them that do exploit sexuality and sin.
In other words, some of them become, you know, titillating scenes of kids having sex before they come up with creative ways of just killing them.
And look, I admit that that takes it too far.
And so this is not a black and white world and there's a lot of debates, but I can argue for specific movies being valuable in that level.
But in that world of like exposing sin and consequences, this is more common than you realize.
If you look closely at a lot of horror movies, you'll see this pattern, even if it's not killing the kids, it's wrestling with your own sin and overcoming, like Flatliners, okay?
Flatliners is kind of a horror film where the kids are experimenting with death experiences and coming back.
And then basically they start getting haunted by these apparitions and trying to kill them or destroy them.
And the way that they have to overcome it is they realize they have to face their own flaws and sins and evil in who they are and change and repent.
Now, of course, I'm referring to the original Flatliners because who would want to watch the new one?
Because the new one?
I thought the remakes were always better than the original.
Yeah, always.
It's always the case, right?
I've never seen either.
I don't know what he's talking about.
But it's really phenomenal.
So you've got these kids and they have these near-death experiences and then they come back and it's like, oh, wow, I saw this and that.
But then what happens is all these ghost-like people from their past or whatever start haunting them and then they start beating them up.
And like one kid was a bully and so he gets bullied by the kid that he bullied.
Man, they turn out to be these like spiritual realities that are haunting them.
And the kids learn that they realize they have to actually go and undo the wrong they did, like go and apologize to the mother of the kid from the past or whatever, you know.
And by doing so, that's how they free themselves from that haunting evil that's going after them.
Another one example of this is my favorite movie, which is my personal favorite horror film of all time is The Addiction.
And this movie embodies this notion of using the horror medium as a metaphor for sin and consequences.
Literally the Calvinistic concept, but it's Augustinian, actually.
The Augustinian concept that we are all have a sinful nature and that that sinful nature affects everything of who we are.
And therefore, we justify the evil we do using rationality and philosophy and etc.
So it's the story of this New York NYU student played by Lily.
No.
I should know it because I've had my tongue too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, Bill Murray.
No.
Well, whatever.
So it's a New York NYU student who goes and studies philosophy and she encounters a vampire who bites her.
And the premise is, you know, you heard that earlier in the clip, you know, tell me to go away.
What's going on there?
Well, basically, the vampire is challenging the individual human to stand up to them and they don't because they're always full of fear.
And when they get bit, they become a vampire as well, of course.
And then what this woman does is she goes and gets her victims as a philosophy student.
Then they have this big climactic event where they invite a bunch of professors over and they feast on them, right?
And the whole point of the movie is that she's talking to these people who she's about to eat or drink their blood.
And she's like, you know, your philosophy justifies this.
And she quotes Feuerbach.
Quotes, you know um, all the famous philosophers of history saying, look, your relativism, your scientism, your materialism, none of it has any moral value, and what i'm doing to you is just an expression of what your own philosophy says it and justifies.
And so it's a godless universe.
And at the end of the movie, near the end, a vampire actually quotes Rc Sproll, which is very interesting.
You may have mentioned that one, though.
Yeah, he says she says something like you know.
Rc Sproul says, uh, we don't, We're not sinners because we sin.
We sin because we're sinners.
And that's the human nature thing, right?
And it's a very clear Christian metaphor in the movie.
Now, it's not always like that in vampire movies, but the origin of it with Dracula going all the way back to Dracula, the origin of vampirism has always been an expression of this notion of the blood as an expression of human nature and the bloodlust we have for evil and for controlling others or what have you, you know?
And I think 30 Days a Night was another more recent, great example of that very metaphor.
And so The Addiction, it's an art house movie.
It's, it, you know, it made like $100,000.
So like not a lot of people, it's not recommended for a lot of people.
It's very artsy, but Christopher Watkin shows up as the head vampire and he's awesome.
So anyway, that's my example of one of my favorites.
But 30 Days a Night is also a powerful one because the whole theme of the blood as life and also as the vampires suck off that life from the humans, there's a moment in that movie where I think we do have that clip, but you don't have to.
Oh, I don't know.
Because I don't have it queued up, though.
It's too short anyway.
But there's this moment where these vampires, they're godless beings and they face down these people and the people go, oh, God, help us.
And they look around and say, there's no God.
And then they eat them, right?
And so vampires in that movie are like literally atheists.
They are the villains and they are atheists.
Get it?
And in that movie, the hero has to, like Christ, he kind of has to sacrifice himself, get bit so that he can fight the vampires and dies protecting everybody, that kind of a thing.
And so it's like a Christ story using the vampire myth.
So there's a very powerful way of reinforcing these traditional, I would even argue, Judeo-Christian worldview.
Oh, there it is again.
Worldview.
Worldviews.
It only took five minutes.
All the atheists that I know are vampires.
Yeah.
Yeah, they are.
I know.
I got all these atheist bite marks all over me.
Yeah.
I wake up in the morning.
I'm like, oh my gosh, they started bite me again.
It was sad.
Yeah, I thought it was a little on the nose in that movie when they were wearing like the fedoras.
They had the neckbeards, all the vampires.
They were carrying around copies of The God Delusion.
Yeah, right.
That was just too much.
Yeah.
Richard Dawkins is the Lord vampire.
It's on the nose.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, the modern day version of the vampire, or really, yeah, I would say vampire, but more generally.
They sparkle now.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
Twilight.
Yeah, Twilight.
Twilight.
I like Twilight.
Is that ruining?
Did you say you liked ruining?
I know I'm not supposed to, but I liked it.
Oh, my gosh.
Isolate that clip.
I like Twilight.
I didn't say I loved it.
I liked it.
Particularly the second one was a strong abstinence message about sex.
That's true.
Abstinence for teens.
I mean, that's shocking.
We're talking Hollywood, and it's got this, and the whole point in that story, in that whole relationship, he's the vampire.
She's the human, and he doesn't want to bite her because he doesn't want to, you know, whatever.
He doesn't want her to experience the misery that he's experienced of being this eternal life vampire, whatever.
And they try to keep it separate.
And that comes out in them also as teens struggling with the sexuality because the sexuality is going to lead them down that path.
So he holds back from it.
And he's holding back his, you know, animal nature, whatever you want to call it, right?
Blood sucking.
Yeah, blood second, but it's like, but it's a very powerful metaphor for abstinence.
And I was shocked that it was in a Hollywood movie.
I'm not laughing at you.
I promise.
What are you laughing at?
Are you Team Edward or Team Jacob?
Team Jacob.
Team Jacob?
Really?
Yeah, because he's earthly, earthy.
And I just don't.
I don't like metrosexual.
That's the only thing I didn't like about it.
Metrosexual vampires.
Well, of course, vampire can be metrosexual.
And Jacob had the pecs.
yeah but earthy wolfen you know it's like what was written by a mormon Yeah.
Original Mormons.
I'm sorry.
Was it written by a member of Kellen Erskine?
Yes.
I don't know.
He's the only Mormon we know.
A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Yeah, and so that's why you're going to get that absent.
But it made into a Hollywood movie, man.
That's what she's doing.
Well, I think the IY 50 Shades of Gray, because that's like fan fiction of that, right?
So they're like, we just need a bunch of SNM in here.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
That's the non-Mormon version.
Take all the Mormonism now.
You just get crazy.
I don't know.
Hey, get a little of this.
I Am Legend, the one with Will Smith, right?
I mean, those are kind of like- With crazy future vampires.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're vampire zombies.
I don't know.
They're a combination.
But great movie.
I loved it.
That whole movie was another Christ story where his blood, in his blood, he's the one guy that won't turn into one of those vampire monsters who are after everybody.
He's the last one alive type of thing.
And so he is through his blood is how they can save other people.
And again, he ends up having to sacrifice himself in some way to save people.
And the life is in his blood.
And the sacrifice of his blood leads to the freedom of people.
And, you know, it's just, it's a, I think it's, it's powerful and it's moral.
And again, also the qualification for the, you know, Christians and the religious folk watching doesn't mean all of it is legitimate.
And, you know, there's obviously a lot of vampire movies.
You know, you can find, like, I like more the mainstream ones because they're more restrained.
But if you go into the genre, the horror genre, you know, where you've got those really gross movies and stuff, vampires are very sexual, of course.
And, you know, it's all about the sexuality.
And while it's the metaphor for that, promiscuity is bad.
You know, when Dracula first came out, there was a lot about, you know, diseases and stuff that they were struggling with in society, as well as sexual diseases.
But of course, in some of these movies, yeah, they'll exploit it and just have sexuality as part of the exploitation of it.
I think we need more vampire movies with Keanu Reeves.
Which one was he?
He was in Constantine.
Bill and Ted's vampire journey.
Vampire excellent vampire adventure.
He was in.
He was in Dracula.
He was in Bram Stoker's Dracula.
He was.
Oh, he was like, he was like the young guy that goes.
I forgot that.
I forgot that.
He wasn't Van Helsing.
That was Anthony Hopkins.
Was he Jonathan Harker?
I don't know.
He was the guy that goes and gets trapped there.
Well, okay, so I was going down the path before I was back to the path.
No, no, no.
Now we're on the side trail about Keanu Reeves.
Yeah, right.
We've got to follow this to its logic.
I liked him in Constantine, though.
Okay.
He killed demons and vampires.
Sorry, you can go back to the path.
That's a good movie I recommend it.
Because, you know, it's amazing.
Also, I want to say something here, too.
Horror is the one place where you can really pull in the religious image and symbolism where you can't.
It's really black and white about exactly.
And it's like Christ that can destroy.
Then we'll talk about demon movies and stuff later.
Let's quickly connect the dots for people that haven't really thought down this road before.
Like, why is black and white evil?
Why does that point to God?
And it seems really basic if you think about that a lot.
But maybe some of our listeners never really thought about that.
That's a very good point.
And that's a point that C.S. Lewis made in his conversion, right?
Like he thought about, he realized there's all this injustice in the world.
I think that was where he in his mere Christianity, right?
He says he realized that that only pointed to the idea that real justice exists.
Yes.
And it has to exist outside of him.
So the more unjust and the more evil things are, the more it points to a perfect good, a perfect something that we long for that's not really we're looking for.
And yet we don't have, we may not even have physical evidence that it's there, but the absence of it tells us it must exist, right?
Yes.
And there's also the aspect of, well, if you believe that there's absolute evil, which is what horror movies really show, right?
Then there has to be absolute good or it's absurd, right?
And a lot of horror movies actually do consciously do this.
One movie that does it is Devil by M. Night Shyamalan.
Or I think Shyamalan produced it.
And the very point is, they even put it up in the very beginning of the movie.
It's like, you know, the grandmother told me that, you know, I know there's a God because there's a devil.
And so if you face this real supernatural spiritual evil, then there has to be a supernatural good or you're not being logical, right?
And so a lot of movies actually use that as an element.
And I, and, and the notion is that, look, if, if the world is relative, and of course we are dominated by relativism, moral relativism as well as, you know, factual relativism, but moral relativism is obviously very, very akin to a lot of secular people.
They don't like the idea of being told their sexual lives are wrong or what have you.
But the truth is, and so they justify it more by making morality relative.
And we've got a culture that's, of course, driven by that.
Well, here's the problem: is that, well, then if you believe that, then you can't say things like Hitler are evil or genocide is evil because it's really just atoms colliding with one another, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah.
And so the absurdity of that lends you to go, yeah, you know what?
My feelings about genocide have nothing to do with the reality.
You know, the reality.
I don't prefer it personally.
Yes, exactly.
No, it's not.
It's unfortunate.
Well, or you know, the universal accepted, you know, you use the universal accepted norms, like, okay, racial was Hitler living his truth.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
But, you know, you do you, Hitler.
But racism is the absolute evil that no one can say is just, oh, that's just relevant.
Can you imagine a culture where it'd be okay to be racist?
Exactly.
And so, okay, well, if you believe.
Yes, as long as it's against white people, right?
Yes.
Yeah, that's true.
But if you can acknowledge that there's something that's truly evil, not dependent upon your personal feelings, well, then there has to be a transcendent.
There is, again, my other keyword, transcendence.
Can you just say that?
Transcendence.
There you go.
I talked over you.
I need you to do it again so we can isolate it.
Transcendence.
No, wait, that wasn't good enough.
Just say it in your mind.
Transcendence.
Yeah, just say normal.
Transcendence.
There you go.
Now we're going to have that.
Yeah.
Transcendence.
Can you mark that on your audio?
Yeah.
I can't.
So the point is that it points to a transcendent value.
And so if you're saying there's something that doesn't depend right or wrong that doesn't depend upon my feelings, well, then you're just acknowledged that there are absolute standards of good and evil, black and white, good and evil type of thing.
And so, yeah, so that's what the horror does.
It points to that.
Now, let's go down a new path here.
If I can, keep this thing accurate.
Yeah, is this the Keanu Reeves path?
No.
Now, of course, we still have vampires and zombies, but there's a but their origins are.
By the way, there's this great book, if you want to look about the history and the influence of horror.
It's called Monsters from the Id.
I can't remember the guy's name, but monster.
It was from the Brian Godawa.
Unfortunately, I don't have a book for a book.
You pitched somebody else's book.
I did.
Very nice of you.
Okay, you're right.
Very Christ-like.
Very Christ-list-like.
So anyway, he describes how a lot of the origins of modern horror is in Victorian worldview.
And that's actually disparaged by modern day people.
But the truth is, is Victorian, you know, the horror was this rejection or revulsion of evil from the propriety of the Judeo-Christian heritage.
Now, obviously, there's abuses.
But the point is, is that Frankenstein, Dracula, all that stuff, you know, okay, maybe not Frankenstein, but a lot of it had origins or at least has a supernatural edge to it, right?
Or this, like I say, transcendent edge, right?
Or something that it's fictional.
We know it doesn't exist, but it's a metaphor.
Well, the modern day version of the vampire, I would argue, is the serial killer.
And the serial killer, which, of course, we know that there's many, many movies of serial killers and TV series and everything.
He's one of the biggest genres in America, actually.
But I would argue that the serial killer is sort of like a naturalization of the vampire, meaning he is everything a vampire is, but it's real and it's real beings in our world, which makes it, in a sense, I think it makes it come closer to us.
And that realism has more moral weight at times, right?
Look, I love fantasy.
You know, lots of people love fantasy, but a lot of times something being more real can be a very powerful cultural influence.
I think the serial killer genre is that bringing home of the ultimate human nature as being evil.
And very few of them are insane, if you notice, in the serial killer movies.
Because if you make them insane, then...
They're usually very intelligent, right?
Yeah, they're very intelligent, very rational.
And if you make them insane and irrational, then you don't have an interesting story.
And you're also not going to be very realistic.
So here we get to some of my other favorites, which I'd love to talk about.
Dexter, the series Dexter, which was a serial killer.
He's very logical.
Yes, he's very logical.
He was a blood spatter analyst in the police department in Florida.
But he happened to be a serial killer.
He had that impulse inside of him, which is a very naturalistic thing.
It was, you know, he didn't know where it came from and his father felt it as well.
Born this way.
Born this way.
Lady Gaga style.
Exactly.
But he didn't sing Lady Gaga, I don't think.
Did he in that series?
Well, there was seven.
Anyway.
So Dexter, what's so fascinating him was, but because his father was a cop, his father saw it in him and taught him a moral code to try to channel that desire towards something moral.
So the premise of the show was he's a serial killer who kills other serial killers or other evil murdering people.
It's just misunderstood.
Yes.
Now there's a danger to that, I think, you know, because, you know, when I watched this series at first, I stopped for a while because I thought, you know, I don't want to be rooting for a serial killer.
You know what I mean?
And look, there's plenty of moral arguments to be had about that.
But my point was, was it was still nonetheless, it was an attempt to struggle with this moral essence of who I am and what human nature really is.
And is it in all of us?
And there's even in one of the seasons, he struggles with meeting a guy who was a prisoner and is out now cleaning up his life and he became a Christian.
He's this black guy in the city and stuff.
And Dexter befriends him and he's fascinated by him because Dexter knows he's like him, but this guy truly became a Christian and Dexter has to wrestle with that reality.
Is there a God and should I be accountable to him?
Of course, he doesn't, which I would argue would have been a better story.
But along the serial killer genre is also the classic seven.
Seven.
I got a clip or seven.
Want me to play this clip?
Wait, let me set it up.
Set it up.
Set it up for us.
7 is, of course, everybody should know it by now, but maybe not.
It was a turning point in these kind of movies because it was truly, it was a mainstream movie, Kevin Spacey's, this serial killer.
And he's killing people according to the seven deadly sins.
So someone who was a glutton, he kills them.
Someone who was a vain, he kills her.
And he's making this moral statement about society.
And when they finally catch him, I guess that's what this scene is, Brad Pitt's discussing with him and listen to his justification.
It was a very profound movie that influenced me for a lot of my writing after the point when I saw it.
Right.
And all your murders you did later?
Yep.
You enjoyed torturing those people.
I won't deny my own personal desire to turn each sin against the sinner.
Wait a minute.
I thought all you did was kill innocent people.
Innocent?
Is that supposed to be funny?
An obese man?
A disgusting man who could barely stand up?
A man who, if you saw him on the street, you'd point him out to your friends so that they could join you in mocking him.
A man who, if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn't be able to finish your meal.
And after him, I picked the lawyer, and you both must have secretly been thanking me for that one.
This is a man who dedicated his life to making money by lying with every breath that he could muster to keeping murderers and rapists on the streets.
Murderers.
A woman.
Murderers, John.
A woman.
So ugly on the inside that she couldn't bear to go on living if she couldn't be beautiful on the outside.
A drug dealer, a drug-dealing pederast, actually.
And let's not forget the disease-spreading horror.
Only in a world this could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face.
But that's the point.
We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it.
We tolerate it because it's common.
It's trivial.
We tolerate it morning, noon, and night.
Yeah, that was the rationale of the villain near the end of the movie.
Who are we rooting for there?
Yeah.
The serial killer kind of sounds like you, Brian.
Yeah.
He's got the sense.
Well, now here's the thing.
The guy that wrote that is certainly no Christian and he hates Christianity.
And of course, this is a common thing now, too, is serial killers are often religious nuts.
They're Christians, right?
Because if you make him insane, of course, it's not interesting and everything.
But if you make him a Christian, ah, now he's got reason and he's driven by his hatred of sin and God.
And that, you know, that's a common thing, I think, in a lot of serial killer stories, unfortunately.
And in this case, though, I would argue that he kind of works against itself in a way because, yeah, he's this religious guy, but a lot of what he's saying is actually true.
And in a world that has rejected morality and rejected God and religion, how can you say anything's evil?
And the truth is that we know these things, whether it's pederasty or murder or what have you, we know these things are evil.
And so it confronts us with that rejection of morality or moral relativism.
And so even though he's this religious nut, in a sense, what he's saying is actually true.
So my point is, the movie unwittingly makes an argument for the existence of God and the truth of Judeo-Christian morality by showing this is what you get when you take it away, you know, when you reject it.
And so that inspired me so much so that I actually, and it wasn't just that movie.
There were other things that inspired me, but I wrote a short called Cruel Logic, which now another shameless act of self-promotion.
Put a link.
We met through cruel logic.
That's how he meant.
Yes, that's right.
I did artwork for you on that.
I wrote a script years ago.
I have not been able to get it made, so it's probably going to become a novel soon.
And it's basically a philosophical killer on Hollywood on a campus, on a university campus.
And he's killing university professors and he's debating them before he kills them.
And that was my premise I was driven by.
What if this serial killer is actually completely rational?
Most of them are, right?
And he wins a logical argument, so you can't say he's insane.
But then his arguments are, well, if there is no God, then why is killing you wrong?
And of course, you can't.
You can't disprove it, right?
And that's kind of the premise of it.
So I made a short, which is about seven minutes long.
Put the link on your podcast.
Yeah, I'll link it on there.
And check that out.
It's going to be a novel soon.
So serial killers are a genre that I've also really enjoyed as well.
I am kind of a psycho.
Yeah, you are kind of crazy.
I'm scooting away from you right now.
All right, let's bring up something else now.
Am I taking control?
Kyle was going to say something.
I'm still waiting to hear about Midsummer.
Yeah, we're going to get into that.
It's a big build-up.
I want to jump back to that because I brought it up like a half hour ago.
And you just threw me aside like a bag of multiple people.
It's like a little tangerines.
Sad.
Okay, before we get to Midsummer, though, I want to make this point that a lot of Christians will bring up things like, let's say, oh, you know, you're talking about all this gross stuff, serial killers and blood and cuts and murder and stuff.
And they'll bring up a classic example.
They'll bring up the verse in, I think it's Philippians.
Let's see if we even.
That's good.
Sorry.
I appreciated it.
I think the Christians would appreciate it if you'd stop putting scare quotes up.
Every time you say Christians.
Christians.
These Christians.
All right, here's the classic thing they say.
Ephesians 5 says, do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness.
But expose them.
No, I'm sorry.
Ephesians 5 says, it is disgraceful to even speak of the things which are done by the sons of sin in secret, right?
And it's this idea that, see, it's wrong for us to even speak of these things, let alone show them in movies and talk about them.
It's a violation of this moral principle of God.
But actually, if you go back and you read that verse in context, it's in Ephesians 5, 11 through 13.
That verse that they quote, it's disgraceful to even speak of these things.
It's in the middle of two other verses.
And here's what they say.
Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead expose them.
And then the verse after says, but all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything that becomes visible is light.
And that's my point is the power of horror, again, a qualified, you know, you've got to be a balance here, but it's exposing and revealing the evil is what horror does.
And that reinforces the moral truth.
And at the end of the day, I would argue God loves horror because he uses it as a genre so many times that it's ridiculous.
For example, book of Daniel, right?
We all know the book of Daniel and all those prophecies.
And they're clearly fictional or symbolic metaphors.
They're not real historical events, but you've got these beasts with multiple heads and coming out of the world.
So he could have done talking cucumbers and tomatoes if he wanted to.
Yeah, that's true.
Why did he do that?
Daniel's veggie prophecies.
Veggie prophecies.
And of course, my personal favorite is the book of Revelation, right?
Okay, no matter how you interpret it, everybody pretty much acknowledges that there's a heck of a lot of symbolism in there.
You've got the seven-headed dragon, and it's symbolic of Satan and whatever powers you think it is, earthly, Rome, whatever.
But it's a symbol, which means it's like a Godzilla monster, right?
Coming around, destroying, eating people.
You've got all these destructive, you know, massive, symbolic images that are very much like any grand gugginal horror film that you want to watch, right?
And my point is that God himself is using horror as a means to, like I said earlier, where it sort of turns you away from sin.
It frightens you.
It shows you the consequences of sin.
And then here's one other example, if I can.
While we're on Revelation, can I just, I just want to do something for Kyle here.
What for me?
Just something for Kyle here.
Have you ever heard this song?
Brian?
No.
This is a song about Revelation by a guy named Third Eagle.
There's a guy on YouTube named the Third Eagle of the Apocalypse.
And he wrote this.
He's playing this right now.
You can see him if you look at my screen.
We'll put it in the show notes.
He wrote a song called Doom and Gloom about how Obama's the Antichrist.
Oh, that's about Obama.
Yeah, he says something about Obama.
He's got a little lyrics here.
He does a big build-up.
He has a lot of cool effects with his text.
It's a catchy song, though.
Hurry up.
Get to the lyrics.
Yeah, get to it.
Doom and gloom coming soon.
Listen to Third Eagles Tune.
Doom and gloom.
God is telling us the end is coming soon.
That is precious.
Isn't it great?
You guys, you got to see this guy.
He's great.
My favorite part.
This little.
Oh, that's fantastic.
My favorite part is he says, Antichrist, he's not nice.
No way.
I'm like, well, that's kind of an understatement.
You should have him on your show.
We were trying to get the third eagle.
Anybody knows third eagle?
We want to get him on.
He refers to himself in the third person.
Third eagle.
Sorry for a joke breaker.
All right, back to serious.
So one more thing.
This will be a transition.
I won't quite get to mid-sommar.
Maybe we'll end with mid-sommar, but this is.
We're not going to get to mid-summer until we're going to break it to the driver portion too.
Yeah, yeah.
We're at like 40 minutes now.
Okay.
So one other Bible passage that I love to use as an example.
And by the way, there's tons of this stuff.
And I write about it in my book.
You know, even Jesus, a couple of his parables, because I had been accused of that.
You know, you never use violence to convey something important because violence is bad and we should never dwell on the bad stuff.
So I was reading, look, Jesus has parables where people are completely murdered.
He could have used any story he wanted to.
And it's like mobster-like Godfather tactics.
It's just like, what?
Absolutely.
Here's a metaphor.
Now, this is obviously a symbolic fiction that God himself to the prophet Micah.
And so, you know, the context is the Israelites are not honoring God.
They're falling away, right?
They're being faithless.
This is during the time near the exile or something.
Actually, I don't remember where, but they've been unfaithful to God and Israel.
So God is attacking them.
And he says, here now, heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel, is it not for you to know justice?
All right.
So God's saying you're not justice-oriented.
You who ate good and love evil, who tear off their skin from them and their flesh from their bones, and who eat the flesh of my people, strip off their skin from them, break their bones, and chop them up as for the pot, as meat in a kettle.
What is that?
What is that?
What is it?
Not the beast.
Sorry, this spell right.
That was very heavy metal.
That sounded like a lunar active song.
That's Micah 3, 1 through 3.
The flesh from the bones.
So God's using zombies, literally zombies in the Bible as a metaphor for how spiritually evil Israel had become in her rejection of God.
And so there's a lot more of these examples throughout the Bible where God uses these metaphors, these horror metaphors.
Why?
In order to describe the seriousness of this spiritual evil that people are engaging in.
Again, we're kind of back to that first principle of, you know, there really is real evil.
order to be impressed with how how human nature is truly evil you really have to see that so there's so you're basically saying that zombie land is the gospel Yeah.
I haven't seen the new one, but I love the first one.
It was great.
What do you think of the first one?
Have you seen the new one?
The new one was great.
And it had no PC nonsense.
It was fantastic.
It was like it was made 10 years ago.
I saw everybody talking.
I was like, wait, there's a new one?
Yeah, yeah.
Double tap, yeah.
With all the original.
What do you think of everybody saying, you know, Jesus is the best zombie?
Yeah.
Oh, actually, there's a really interesting.
I didn't mean that seriously.
I know.
I feel like I really meant that.
But any joke you make, Brian, will take you to the next one.
Take it seriously and interpret it.
Actually, I wrote a bailout out there.
I'll say Twilight.
He's like, I love Twilight.
Oh, yeah.
I love Twilight.
But I was serious.
There is a Christian who made a little short movie.
I can't remember the name of it.
It's on YouTube somewhere.
And it's this person gets bit by a vampire and they become a vampire and Christ comes.
But it's not cheesy.
It's actually kind of interesting.
It's kind of cool.
Now we're onto that zombies, which is one of my favorite genres.
I used to hate it when I was younger.
We talked some about zombies in a previous episode.
We did.
Yeah, we can do a light zombie thing.
Okay, light zombie.
But here's the thing.
That's an example of, okay, that's a lot of gory stuff.
And look, even the good zombie stuff, like I like The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later and stuff like that, even those are pretty excessive.
And so that's definitely pushing the envelope.
I acknowledge that.
But the essence of zombie stories is to explore what it is that makes us human.
And what that is that makes us human is the moral essence of who we are.
Because in most all zombie stories, the zombies are, of course, living dead, which means they don't have the souls or however you want to interpret it.
They're just eating chomping monsters.
So they don't have humanity to them.
So it's okay to kill them.
But all these stories, and Walking Dead was classic for this, they all struggle with what I call the two competing values, moral values, which is the evolutionary ethic of self-survival, self-preservation, or the Judeo-Christian ethic of self-sacrifice.
So in zombie stories, it's usually, you know, if you're selfish and try to protect yourself and whatever and live and all that, you end up, you know, killing other people or you get killed or whatever.
But the people who sacrifice themselves, who make other people try to protect them, those are the heroes of those stories.
And that's what defines humanity and civilization.
Because if you think about zombies are without civilization, what makes us a society that has not devolved into the anarchic chaos of Antifa?
Well, it's basically when you treat people with humanity and you sacrifice yourself for them in some way, or some manner.
So that's where I think 28 days later, literally 28 weeks later, the story was precisely that issue where a guy protects himself instead of his wife and he wrestles with that moral choice throughout the whole movie.
And I won't tell you where it goes, but it's really, really fantastic.
And of course, then you have Sean of the Dead.
Oh, I love Sean of the Dead.
Oh, I have a clip from Night of the Living Dead.
Oh, this is a classic?
Classic.
All right.
Well, we're on zombies.
All right.
Night of the Living Dead.
I don't know what it's going to be.
Well, you used to really be scared here.
Johnny.
You're still afraid.
Stop it now.
I mean it.
They're coming to get you, Barbara.
Classic.
Stop it.
You're ignorant.
They're coming for you, Barbara.
Stop it.
You're acting like a child.
They're coming for you.
Look, he's coming.
There's one of them now.
That movie's still cute.
Here he comes now.
They're so simple.
I'm getting out of here.
Johnny.
Johnny, Johnny.
Yes, Bob.
That movie single-handedly defined the genre, I think, even till today.
I know a guy that was a zombie in that.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Still alive?
Yeah.
How about Sean of the Dead?
It's comedy.
You guys like jokes.
Sean of the Dead.
Don't try to relate to us now.
It's one of the big inspirations for my comedy horror that I write called Bear Mageddon.
Cool.
Which is about bears taking over the world instead of zombies.
That's cute.
Hey.
How dare you?
No, that's cute in a grizzly man way.
I think they're cute, but they'd eat me.
But, you know, so Sean of the Dead, what I love about that, it's hilarious.
It's hilarious.
But, you know, that movie also has a very powerful moral message.
And the message is these young people, young guys or whatever you're playing their video games and stuff, they had no lives, no passion, no purpose.
No, I'm taking responsibility.
Exactly.
They were lifeless zombies, metaphorically speaking.
And it's by facing the and so by facing the zombies, they're facing, well, this is kind of who you are, at least spiritually, right?
And that's the whole point of that.
And that's what makes it so powerful and rich to me.
I mean, I love, you know, I love the whole chase element.
And, you know, but if you've got something richer about the relationships of the people and how not to become spiritual zombies, if we can say that.
But anyway, again, our gamer fans probably don't like the scare quotes you put around vidya games.
Vidya games.
These kids playing their vidya games and he put up the air quotes.
Maybe the sound effect for the air quotes.
Yeah.
Chesterton has this, you know, he talks about how he wanted to write a story about a character who rides off to find a new land, you know, from England and he goes off into the ocean and he gets lost in a storm and then he comes, crashes on some shoreline and it's misty and he forms a spear and like he's like sneaking through the fog and he sees some strange being and he's discovered a new land and he's all excited about it and he realizes just an Englishman and he's on the shores of London again.
And then he describes his faith that he went out to find faith, like find the real philosophy to find it.
And he's going to start, he's going to pave his own way.
And he came back and he's, you know, wielding that spear.
And you realize he's just looking at orthodox Christianity.
Like he's just going back to the basics of what it all is.
I think a lot of these horror people, you know, like we're talking about Sean of the Dead, I think these guys would say we're atheists.
You know, I know Simon Pagan.
Yeah.
Nick, what's his name?
They're super Nick Frost.
They're super atheist.
Yeah.
They don't know that they're back on the shore of London finding that worldview.
Excellent.
When they do this, I think that happens a lot in these movies.
They don't realize that they're finding, they're pointing out absolute evil, black and white evil.
Thank you for that because in all my I haven't gotten an excellent point from Brian yet.
You got to quote Chesterton.
He's the teacher's pet over there.
Goodness gracious.
No, I mean, in all my defense of trying to show the value of it, you're right.
Are you saying that these people are intentional?
And most of the time I'd say no, they're not.
But I think that is another example of how Judeo-Christianity is the foundation upon which our society runs and people are using it whether they know it or not, even especially in a lot of the morals they draw from, even in their stories.
And specifically the genre.
Now, do you want to say, what do we want to save for the extra special?
Let's throw a few movies that what about Midsommer?
We haven't talked about Midsommer and the subscriber.
And the subscriber in the scripture.
Is that too dirty?
That was very like every I've been building up to this the whole time.
But I guess that's what I'm saying.
Fun footage.
We got to talk about fun footage.
Fun footage ones like what are more, what are the most recent ones we got with people?
You mean it?
Oh, yeah, do it.
Yeah, yeah.
So, so I would like to get just while we're still on this, as a broad idea, because you've been kind of getting to it.
I would love to just get into the overall idea that is there a bad side of softening our fiction.
Like, I know that we should be careful about the gore and about this stuff, but I also wonder if because old, like if you read the old fairy tales, I read old fairy tales to my kids all the time.
They are, they don't hold back.
Evil is very evil.
Consequences are bad.
Eating, you know, eating the children, eating children.
Yeah, it's, and we've, you know, evil was the thing that they were trying to warn you against back then, but we've become what we're trying to warn you against good and evil, that whole idea of good and evil.
So we've actually softened the edges on both, I think.
And I think that Christianity may have adopted this idea that showing the darkness is bad.
And so I, yeah.
I'm curious about what your take on that.
That is, is like, is there, are we headed down a bad path when we're softening the edges too much on all of our fiction?
That's another good point.
My hand is raised.
He's not calling on me.
But you haven't said a good joke yet.
He's preoccupied because he's probably trying to come with the next story.
No, we're good for the day.
Checking the internet.
No, yeah, I would agree that I think that's one of my common complaints about a lot of Christian storytelling, whether it's Christian movies or what have you, is like, if I watch a Christian movie, a lot of times it reminds me of the 1970s television, you know, bad guys and stuff where, you know, oh, yeah, there's a bad guy, but there's so much that they can't show.
They can't have whether it's, you can't have cussing, you can't have sexuality, you can't, there's so many things that they, so many elements that they all add up to the point where when you're trying to depict an evil person, you never believe it.
Yeah, I never believe they're evil or they're villain or they're campy or whatever, you know?
So you want more nudity?
More.
Ryan wants to do blood.
He wants to do porn with a Christian message.
The gospel.
Christian porn.
Finding the gospel and pornography.
Well, you know, drying a dab.
I do have a chapter in my book, Hollywood Worldviews.
Oh, yeah.
Sorry.
No, I'm known for this chapter.
It's the first chapter in Hollywood Worldviews, and I talk about sex and violence in the movies, particularly, and R-rated movies and stuff, because this is a very, very common thing.
In fact, when I go and speak to churches and Christians around the country, I always have to address this thing.
And I'm not against it.
I think it's a legitimate concern, and that is their concern of too much sex and violence and showing too much of it, et cetera.
And so the question is, well, how much of this is acceptable?
Because the bottom line is the Bible deals with every sin known to man from cannibalism to gang rape to genocide, all right?
And some of it it even details.
So the question is, it's not the biblically, you have every sin depicted in some way, but the question is to what degree and what's acceptable, what's exploitative, and what is more exposing of sin, right?
And I explain all that in my book, Hollywood Worldviews, but I've kind of become known as the R-rated apologist.
But again, I want to qualify it by saying that.
He has his clothes on.
Yeah.
For now.
I certainly do not recommend a lot of these movies that might be exploitative of sexuality and all this kind of stuff.
I'm just arguing for the principle of we need to be able to be more open to showing sin in a more realistic slash explicit way than what a lot of Christian storytelling is.
Because here's my number one thing that I've say all the time is if you don't.
Well, I always say always.
Wait, it was never.
Transcendence.
I said.
Transcendence.
I would say.
No, seriously, I always say if you don't accurately depict the sin that your character is being redeemed from, then your redemption has no impact.
Yeah, the redemption only has as much impact as the accuracy of the sin that you're depicting they're being redeemed from.
So if you don't show it realistically, you don't show it within all of its horrible impact, you know.
And of course, you know, I'm not saying you have to show everything.
So I'm not arguing that.
I'm just arguing for the principle of we need to be able to deal with this or our stories will have no impact or have little impact.
Because in fiction, because I think that's when we're talking about this because me and you both write.
And Kyle's a writer too.
We all try to write, trying to write fiction.
What do you write?
You're a writer, too.
Well, I mean, hey, guys, can I join the writer's room?
Ah, but you have not written horror.
Yeah, Kyle, would you get us?
Shut up.
Would you get us a coffee with a couple creamers?
Yeah, you can shut up.
I'll be right back.
Just shut up and joke.
When you write to make a point, you generally heighten things.
Like, if you're trying to make a point, like for fiction, you need to kind of heighten it to kind of make the point, right?
But like the Christian cultural way of doing things is to cut off all the rough edges and soften it and bring it down to make a reality that doesn't exist to people.
And so you're trying to tell a story within this fake reality that doesn't really exist.
Like a person gets like stabbed and they never swear, even if they get a demon.
Darn it, a knife.
Now would a demon bit my leg.
Or remember, you know, even just a flesh wound.
Even in the 70s when they would shoot someone, they just shoot them and there's no blood.
There's no nothing.
They just go, you know, it's just like, no, that's not being shot is really horrible.
So do you think there, I mean, is there a difference between the Bible that's describing a historical event accurately?
I assume that you believe the Bible is true.
Yeah.
Okay.
Because you're talking about metaphor a lot.
So it's not a good idea.
This is another argument that ignorant Christians often bring up to me.
Go ahead and make that argument.
Ignorant Christians begin with the quote.
And he actually pointed at me when he said that, which is just.
By the way, I am being sarcastic.
I believe this is a legitimate challenge in that.
Okay, well, we run into this at the Babylon B because we'll do something that's edgy.
People say, oh, well, you know, you shouldn't make a joke about that for entertainment value.
But for us, it's not entertainment value.
We're trying to make a point, you know.
And so, but obviously some of our articles are just entertainment value.
So some people don't get that divide or understand that balance.
So what's the talk about worldviews and transcendentalism?
And to clarify, too, I think that the concern is, well, the Bible, when it's talking about sins, like the genocide or the war, whatever, that's historical things that really happened.
And so that's acceptable.
But the problem with that is, and we've already mentioned some of this already, is that that's not true.
Yeah, there is fictional.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, there is historical.
Did you just say the Bible's fictional?
There is historical sin, but there is a lot of fiction in the Bible.
We've already mentioned we've got Jesus' parables that have violence.
We've got Daniel and we've got revelation that are symbolic.
Imagery, visions that are, they're not history.
They point to history, but in and of themselves, they aren't.
They point to future history.
Yeah.
A lot of prophecy.
Yeah.
A lot of prophecy.
Boy, I love you.
Okay.
Sounded like a preteris there for a second.
So I just had to.
Shit.
So a lot of prophecy.
Like my favorite passage I like to challenge people with is Ezekiel 16 or Ezekiel 23.
And I said, I dare you.
I defy you to read that in the church service.
How dare you quote Ezekiel 16 and 1723.
So in this, God is again describing the seriousness of the sin of Israel and Judah, the two kingdoms falling away from him.
And he uses imagery that is loaded with sexuality, like having literally having the sexual member of a donkey, right?
And donkey's semen.
And he talks about gang rape.
Flowerbed.
That's our word for someone says a bad word, but you just need to say a bad word.
It's our TV edit.
Yeah, just throw a random word over.
I'm just quoting the Bible.
Donkey flowerbed.
So donkeys with flowerbed.
I love that.
The size of donkey.
Flowerbed.
But my point is, these are not historical things.
God himself uses extreme graphic imagery to describe spiritual depravity or spiritual sin.
And to describe sins, he uses, like Micah uses, the zombie eating flesh.
What?
That's not good.
That's not acceptable, God.
You can't use that.
So my point is that if God uses it, and he clearly does use fictional imagery to point out spiritual truth, particularly point out the seriousness of evil, right?
Yeah.
So yeah, so it's good enough for God, then it's good enough for me.
Now, again, that doesn't justify everything.
It doesn't justify doing pornography or anything like that.
It is a dangerous area.
And I will admit that it's not black and white easy answers.
You have to find a place where you're showing enough to make the point, but not showing too much.
I agree.
But that's something that just worked out in each of the individual stories.
All right.
Well, we're going to.
Subscribers are going to be in our mid-somar.
We're going to do it.
We're going to do who knows what else.
Found footage.
Claire wish.
Favorite genre.
And so you're going to all miss out on that if you don't dive in.
And the rest of us, we're going to our luxury subscriber lounge on the Babylon B yacht.
That's right.
So join us.
And if you want to join us, go to BabylonB.com slash plans and subscribe.
It's real cheap.
And also, Gadawa, where can our listeners?
Gadawa.com.
My name, G-O-D-A-W-A.com, has everything, all my novels, all my books I talked about, Hollywood Worldviews, and, you know, all my stuff's on Amazon.
So if you want, if you're just looking my name, I'm the only Brian Gadawa on Amazon.
So you type out my name, you'll see about 30 books.
He has a gazillion books.
Guy writes.
So anyway.
And if you want to give us some feedback, email us at podcast at babylonb.com.
Leave us a review on iTunes.
And thanks for listening.
Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.