Eerie Earfuls is a show that I hosted with my brother back in 2018. We both love horror movies, and we were both listening to horror podcasts. Honestly, the whole decision to do a podcast in the first place was that we listened to all of the episodes of Faculty of Horror and we both wanted more.

I actually got the idea because I would often come up with weird double features for movies. It was fun to think about how those movies might play off of each other. For example, an amazing movie triple feature: Ready or Not, Knives Out, and Parasite — or as I like to call it, the “Eat the Rich” Trilogy.

When I finally got the honestly stupid idea to start a podcast, my brother was apprehensive about the idea, but after recording our test pilot episode, we had so much fun that we were stoked to do it again. It gave us a reason to talk more often, it gave us a reason to watch a wider range of movies, and it pushed us to think about the movies we watched on a deeper level.

The idea behind the show is to pick two movies that have something in common. Maybe a similarity between two characters. Maybe a similar plot device. Maybe they both explore a similar theme. Then, we would watch the movies, jotting down notes, and sync up to talk about what we noticed. We’d bounce topic ideas off of each other, narrow our list down a bit, and then start researching things. We liked to be aware of what the other was going to talk about, but not necessarily go over it all beforehand because it kept it a discussion and not a scripted recitation of a research paper. Our goal was to use each movie to better understand the other.

When we first started, our show was very kindly hosted by Brennan Klein, from the Scream 101 and Attack of the Queerwolf podcasts. He was incredibly generous to post and host the show for us, and it was a great start to get things moving. However, both of us had big life things start to intrude, and the episodes got spaced further and further apart. Most of the editing was falling on me, which is not meant as shade at my brother. He tried to edit episodes for me to help. It was my fault because I couldn’t give up control. I had a very particular idea of how the show should sound, and I was convinced that only I could achieve that sound.

It ended up taking me a solid week for each episode, cannibalizing all of my down time to edit the show together, clean things up the way I wanted, do the final mix and level adjustments, and put in all of the music and sound effects. It was fucking exhausting, and I finally just…couldn’t keep going. Eventually, we agreed to put the show on an indefinite hiatus. We both loved doing it, but we were both worn to the bone trying to juggle it and our personal responsibilities.

Brennan very kindly removed our show — he was super understanding of why we couldn’t keep going. I refused to call it over, so I put the Twitter account and WordPress site in Private mode and hoped that we’d come back to it someday. Every now and then, one of us would bring it up — talking about a great movie pairing idea or something. We really enjoyed it, and we missed it like crazy, but we didn’t think we could devote the time to it.

What changed? For one thing, life circumstances cleared up for both of us. For another, we had a frank conversation about how to reduce editing responsibilities, keeping recordings shorter, and also release the show less often so that it wasn’t quite so stressful. We also decided to set up a hosting platform ourselves. Brennan is amazing, but I always felt like if I wasn’t delivering an episode regularly, I was wasting his time. To be clear: he never said anything like that, but it’s how I thought about it. With our own hosting, though, if we miss an episode or something is delayed…who gives a shit? It’s just the two of us.

Our current plan is to re-release our old episodes every two weeks, starting on March 23rd. Once we’ve completely caught up, we’ll start releasing new episodes monthly going forward. Beyond the editing processes that we’ve worked out, we’re also getting some better equipment that should result in a better, more consistent sound — and that’s saying something because I thought we sounded fucking great before.

Here’s what the next few months will look like:

3/23	Pilot — Short Films: Oculus Chapter 3: The Man with the Plan (2005) and Don’t Look Away (2017)
4/6	Urban Legend & Theatre of Blood
4/20	Silver Bullet & Late Phases
5/4	Texas Chainsaw 2 & Gremlins 2
5/18	Carrie & Frankenstein
6/1	The Babadook & Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
6/15	Something Wicked This Way Comes & Needful Things
6/29	American Mary & Repo: The Genetic Opera
7/13	Tremors & Jaws

I’ve also decided that, although we plan to give the podcast it’s own site and Twitter and all that, I really want to post about it here, too. It seems silly that I tried to keep them entirely separate back then, so you’ll excuse me if periodically there’s a podcast update alongside the D&D campaign diaries and whatever other random nonsense I’m writing about.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to do this again. We had so much fun doing it before, and I know it’ll be more of the same. If you like horror movies, or even if you’re just curious, I hope you’ll check out an episode or two as they come out. Admittedly, it is yet another podcast hosted by two white dudes, but I hope that you’ll excuse that and appreciate it as two guys geeking out about something they love.