SHRINK CHAT: Mindhunter, Green Room, Blue Ruin & Jack in the Box

Why did Mindhunter stall before it ever reached BTK, and what happens when you accidentally watch three Jeremy Saulnier films in one October?

Content note: neo-Nazi violence in Green Room, a brief mention of a young actor’s accidental death, and a passing reference to the BTK killer and to our American Murder episode.

It’s Shrink Chat, our weekly horror roundup, from early December 2020. We run through the horror we were most hoping to see in 2021, Cathy’s Horror Facts land on Cronenberg’s The Fly, and we react to David Fincher putting Mindhunter on hold just before its story would have reached Dennis Rader. Our buddy watch is Jack in the Box. Then one of us discovers Jeremy Saulnier by accident, through Green Room, Blue Ruin and Hold the Dark, while the other sits through 30 Miles from Nowhere so you don’t have to.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy talk about why movies and TV worked as a mental health palate cleanser in a hard year, why a slow burn has to earn its payoff, why one-dimensional characters make it hard to care who survives, and why a body horror transformation can stay with you for decades.

Covered in this episode:

• The horror we were waiting for in 2021: Antlers, Last Night in Soho, Spiral, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and Halloween Kills, plus a nod to Dark Skies
• The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, in Horror Facts with Cath
• Mindhunter on hold: Fincher’s comments to Vulture and Variety, and the BTK storyline it would have reached
• Jack in the Box (2019), our buddy watch
• Green Room (2015), Patrick Stewart, and remembering Anton Yelchin
• 30 Miles from Nowhere (2018): a hard pass
• Blue Ruin (2013) and Hold the Dark (2018), plus Murder Party
• Listener requests, and how one became our American Murder episode

Clinical themes: media as coping and normalcy, isolation horror, tropes versus intentional camp, patience and payoff, disgust and body horror.

Corrections and updates: Recorded in late 2020. Antlers and Last Night in Soho both ended up opening in October 2021, not February and April. In the 1958 original of The Fly, the “Help me!” belongs to the tiny fly with the scientist’s head; Vincent Price plays his brother, who finds him. Jack in the Box is a British film, written and directed by Lawrence Fowler. Sonny Valicenti plays Dennis Rader in Mindhunter. As of our last check, Mindhunter has not returned for a third season, and Fincher has since said it is unlikely. And the awards film about a pianist touring the South is Green Book, not Green Room.

Related episodes:

• TRUE CRIME DOCUMENTARY: Chris Watts, Shanann & American Murder
• SHRINK CHAT: All Hallows’ Eve, Art the Clown, Baby Jane & Housebound
• Our Mindhunter Season 2 episode

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Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴
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