Introducing Well Adjusted, a new podcast about horror movies and culture

I can’t remember the first horror movie that I saw. I started young — too young for today’s ninny standards — by dragging my babysitter to the local video rental store during my parents’ weekly outing and insisting I was allowed to watch whatever. Whenever she balked at a particularly gory or salacious cover, my little brother and I would shrug casually and say, don’t worry, we’ve seen a lot worse.

It was the 80s in Arkansas. Kids could still buy cigarettes without too much trouble, so a handful of R rated VHS tapes weren’t a hard sell.

Fast forward to adulthood, and I’ve continued watching those old films, as well as many contemporary horror releases, and I still get the same giddy thrill when the camera switches to the monster’s POV or the formerly meek heroine drops the whimpering veneer of socialization and goes at the killer with a fireplace poker.

When you love something, you can’t help but want to share it. For the longest time now I’ve wanted to find a forum where I could talk about these films and the horror genre in general. Well, yesterday my friend Levi Horne and I finally made it a reality.

Well Adjusted is a weekly podcast about horror movies and books and their relationship to our larger culture. In the first episode, we discuss Larry Cohen’s 1974 B movie masterpiece It’s Alive. It’s the perfect movie to watch for expecting parents, or anyone contemplating starting a family.

Give it a listen, and subscribe in your favorite podcast platform if you are so inclined. This plague season has been a dry well creatively — for obvious reasons — and making this little project a reality felt like the sun came out for the first time all year.