===TRANSCRIPT START===

Hey, quick note from the editor here. For all you audio files out there, audio heads, Chris' mic has... I don't even know what it is. It's like a hum, it's a pop, it's a crack, it's a fizz. There are occasions, sometimes for long stretches, where Chris' mic gets a little gross sounding. But I think someone once said, you should really try and finish your season with as many weird hums, fizzes, cracks, pops that you can kind of fit into one episode. And if that's the rules, I'm just following the rules. So anyway, without further ado, Chris, take it away.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week for our last episode of season one, in the last hours before the new year, we thought it would be nice to celebrate our shared humanity. And in classic Scared All The Time fashion, we're gonna have to do that by talking about something that can kill you. In this case, your neighbors. Now, some of you are probably thinking, I love my neighbors, they'd never do anything to hurt me. And to that I say, are you sure? Because even if your current neighbor is lovely, almost everyone has had a neighbor from hell in the past or will in the future. And what happens when they snap? What happens when that pounding on the wall turns into pounding on your head with a hammer? What happens when Ed and I move in next door to each other and discover one of us is a serial killer? And let's just say it isn't me. Then what, Ed?

I'm not a serial killer, and even if it was a serial killer, you would never know because I'm super smart and I never open my blinds. I'm a blinds closed man. What are we?

Join us.

Now it is time for Time Farts. And what is that time?

Well, before we call the police on the neighbor peering in through our blinds, a little bit of housekeeping so they don't see how messy this place is. First, I think we should talk UFOs because I have had a strange couple of weeks.

Yeah, and here's the best part about that. I didn't even know.

Yeah, I didn't tell anyone what was happening because I didn't realize how strange it was gonna be. So basically, and some of you might have seen this on the Facebook page or somewhere on the internet, or if you're like Scott and Forrest, you just stumbled across it and then slacked us to be like, what the fuck is going on?

Yeah, that was weird. That was a weird text again because I didn't know either.

So a few weeks ago, there was a dark beer celebration in downtown Los Angeles. And I wanted to go. So I did what I always do when I go downtown. I was walking to the Palms train station to take the train downtown. And as I was walking, I looked up in the sky and there was this white orb floating over, not my neighborhood, it seemed further away than that, but I could definitely make it out, like make out the shape. And as someone who loves UFOs and aliens and everything, I see lots of things in the sky that I go, hey, what's that? And then I'll watch it and it clearly rotates and it becomes a plane or I see a blinking light or whatever. So I'm watching this thing while I'm walking for a good five, 10 minutes and it's just hovering. It's not getting bigger, it's not getting smaller, it doesn't seem to be rotating. There's no visible string to the ground, even though it seems way too high to be a balloon. And then an LAPD helicopter starts circling around it or appears to be circling around it because from where I was walking, I couldn't tell exactly what the helicopter was looking at, but it certainly seemed to be near this orb. So at that point I was like, this is pretty weird, I should take a picture. So I took a picture on my phone and watched it for a little bit longer to see, I was like, oh, will it like zip away like a UFO and all that stuff and it didn't move. So I was running late already, so I went the rest of the way to the train and didn't really think much of it until a few hours later while I was at this beer fest, I was on Reddit and someone had posted on Reddit that Air Force One had just taken off from LAX because Biden was in town and that someone had videotaped these two white orbs following Air Force One. So when I saw that, I was like, oh shit, I just saw a white orb like an hour before that. And so I posted it on Reddit. And then like a week later, a reporter from the Daily Mail reached out to me and was like, hey, we're investigating the Air Force One UFO sightings. We saw on Reddit that you were a witness and have pictures. So I did an interview over text and the guy was like, thank you very much. And then he asked for my name and where I live. And I asked him if he could please credit me as Chris Cullari, the cohost of Scared All The Time.

Oh great, so people look at the article and be like, who's this lunatic? They're like, oh, he's let me know exactly where to find him and he seems like a non-credible source.

Screenwriter and host of coincidentally, a supernatural podcast, Scared All The Time.

They're gonna think you set the orbs up. They're gonna think this is some big marketing campaign like the clowns.

Well, yeah, in hindsight as a UFO, I want to believer, I was like, man, if I was reading an article and the witnesses were like a screenwriter, the other guy was a director.

Oh, for real? In the article?

Yeah, one of the other guys they quoted, I forget his name, but it was a film director. No, no, I don't think it was David Fincher.

I didn't know that they publish it, but they did.

And they put a giant picture of me in the article.

That's the weirdest part about it. So if anyone hasn't seen this, I don't even know what you would look up on the Daily Mail. It'll be in the show notes. It's crazy. You scroll through the Daily Mail, so you have a gazillion shit ads anyway, but you scroll through and it's like picture of an orb with like a red circle around it, picture of Air Force One, picture of whatever, like all stuff that's relevant to the article, and then just a picture of you in your apartment looking like a goofy idiot, just like smiling like, hey, what's up? And it's like, why is there a picture of the witness? There's no other witness photos. It doesn't make any sense.

No, and they didn't even ask me. They just must have pulled that off my Instagram or my LinkedIn or something.

Oh, you didn't mail them that.

No, they just found it. I mean, it's a picture I use on like professional stuff.

That's the picture you use on professional stuff?

Well, yeah, I mean, look, man, I don't have a headshot. I'm not, you know.

I mean, I think the only known photo of me, like for Scared All The Time, I think currently is me brushing my teeth. And until like a day ago, my personal Instagram profile picture was the Hooters owl driving a Camaro. So I wouldn't say I have anything kind of reputable.

I don't know. Anyway, I don't know how they found it, but they did run it. They did link the podcast.

Mention the show.

The coolest thing about it, honestly, is just that because this happened in stages and because when I first saw the thing, I didn't think of it as like a noteworthy UFO, now I have achieved one of my life's dreams of being a notable UFO witness, which is crazy. I was psyched. So I will say though, it was very weird. And that's why I took the picture. I had some people ask why I didn't take video because honestly it was weird, but it wasn't that weird and it wasn't moving. So there wasn't anything to really take video of. It was just sitting there at such a distance that you couldn't make anything out other than it was a white or a silver orb reflecting white light. So it was like, I didn't even think to take video because you could barely see it in the photo. It was high enough.

I have, I don't know if you know this story. I saw a white, it almost looked like a box kite. It was like two squares connected with like short lines. It was like floating faster than a balloon would be, but also perfectly straight. Like there's not like, oh, it's carried by the wind here. It's being like propelled and it's going across the sky. It was sort of far from me, but like just everything about like the speed it's going, the non-movement, it was all so weird. And I was having a dart in the back of my house and I looked up and I looked at it and I was like, oh, it's really, really weird. And I went to take my phone out, physically went to take my phone out. And then for whatever reason, I just was like, what am I taking a photo of?

Oh yeah, you've told me this story.

Yeah, my mind was like, who's this for? Like, whatever. And it was so weird, because I take a million pictures of everything that I don't care about like how much space is on my phone. Like why I decided to not do it there, whatever. Then a day later, an aviation Instagram account I follow about like jets and planes and stuff, they posted more or less exactly what I saw.

Was it like, what is this?

Yes, they don't know what it was. And it was many states from here, like within a day. And I never comment or like DM anyone else. And I reached out to be like, listen, I saw the exact same thing in Los Angeles yesterday. I'm sorry, I don't have a picture. I was so mad I didn't have a picture. Because if I had a picture, then you would see that those are two identical things. But it's so weird that like I had like an overwhelming urge to just not take a photo of it.

I didn't have an overwhelming urge to not take the picture, but there was like, I don't know if it's an internal stigma or just a like, oh, whatever. It's just another weird thing in the sky. But yeah, I felt a similar, I almost didn't, I would have been kicking myself when I saw the Air Force One stuff.

Yeah, because I was kicking myself when I saw that other people talking about it and I didn't have an ability to like jump into that conversation other than like, hey guys, you don't know me, I promise I saw it too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I wish I had a photo, but hey, if this article gets us one new listener, if you're here because you saw this dude for some reason in all of his glory in his apartment on Daily Mail, if you're here now, welcome. That's amazing.

Welcome, thank you. What Kismet, what an astonishing way to have discovered our podcast.

It's a weird housekeeping, because if anything, we made the whole situation messier because now we're just talking about UFOs, which has nothing to do with-

Yeah, well, look, housekeeping, fellas and ladies, it's a grab bag. You never know what you're gonna get in housekeeping.

I could probably tie it in. If it's aliens, they're Earth's neighbors. They're Earth's potentially bad neighbors.

Italians?

No.

Oh, if it's aliens, I thought you said Italians.

No, I mean, it also might be, I don't know, depending on like where you are in the country.

Fair enough. Yeah, they would be our neighbors.

Yeah, we'll tie that in with that. There you go.

Well, here's another neighbor in my heart. We have our first official sponsor.

Oh yeah. Well, this episode is brought to you in part by, yeah.

Yeah, this episode is brought to you in part by Wright Bloody Publishing, one of the country's most prolific and important poetry publishing houses.

And they have given us a few of their titles to give away.

So we decided we'd run an end of the year contest. Given the subject matter of today's episode and the fact that it's terrible neighbors and almost everyone has had one, I think it's appropriate to make this all work together. So here's what we're thinking. If you want one of these Wright Bloody books.

All you gotta do is shoot us an email over at Scared All The Time podcast at gmail.com and put in the subject, neighbor from hell. What should they be putting in the body, Chris?

A poem, a poem about the worst neighbor you've ever had. And we don't care if this is a limerick or a haiku or a stunning work of art. We just want to read poems about your worst neighbors and then we will choose the best ones and we will hook you up with a Wright Bloody book.

Yeah, we'll be picking winners by the end of the first week of January, 2024. In case you're listening to this in the year 2050, you missed your opportunity. So we'll pick some winners. We'll let you know what books you can choose from and then we'll send them out to you. And Ed Voccola, co-host of this show, will make you a handmade Scared All The Time bookmark to go with your book.

Well, all right. I will say also, just as an aside, I love when someone publishes an oral history of a random contest from the 90s. One of those ones that's like, if you collect enough box tops and mail in, you can be like an extra in Nightmare on Elm Street 4 or some kid won something on Doubledare on Nickelodeon and they'll go back and find out like, did they actually receive the prize that they were told they were gonna get and was it worth it and all that stuff? Someday, someone's gonna ask you, where'd you get that right bloody book?

Yeah.

You can say Scared All The Time.

Did I ever tell you my very real history with Nickelodeon takes over your school contest?

I don't know. I don't think you have.

It's pretty simple. It's a pretty short story. It's just that I remember those commercials would be like, Nickelodeon takes over your school, whatever, write into this, say why your school should be chosen, what have you. And the commercial was like, oh, people skateboarding through the fucking class or whatever.

You're like, that's me, that's me.

I remember more than once sitting down at like some fresh loose leaf with a pencil as a child and like starting the process. Then like at a certain point, like a paragraph in, half a paragraph in, I would literally stop and just be like, you know what, I don't need the attention. And I crumpled it up and threw it away. Like, I don't want to win. Like, I wanted it, but if I won, I didn't want whatever attention came with it. I had like anxiety about that. And I crumpled it up and I threw it away.

Can you imagine the monster you would have become if you had received that attention?

Oh my God, I would have been, I mean, I might have become president, I don't know. But the other more realistic thing is like, I'd be at a bar being like, the half pipe at our high school was rad. Like, I'm still looking for thanks and stuff.

Well, yeah, here in this timeline, you get to tell this story to 50,000 listeners instead of three guys at the bar. So things are going well, and it's good that you did not send that message.

Yeah, starting the podcast was a lot easier. I didn't think about it the way I was worried about Nickelodeon.

You didn't let it eat you up.

Didn't let it eat me up, guys. So anyway, Ripe Bloody Publishing, poetry so good, it's scary. That's pretty good, right?

That's the quality content that people have come to expect from this podcast.

Do you think when they asked us to do something for Ripe Bloody that they thought we would do something better? But here we are, guys. This is Showbiz in not a professional podcast studio.

All we really have to say beyond that is Happy New Year, everybody. Ed and I hope your holidays have been peaceful and that life is good. If you wanted time to see friends and family, we hope you got that. If you just needed some time to be by yourself and rest your body and mind, we hope that you got that too. We're about to take some time off to work on season two, and we're going to come back next year with a whole bunch of new topics that scare us. We have some really great guests lined up to talk about some of the most requested fears on our social media, as well as some that you won't see coming.

But we're not going to fall out of existence. We're still going to be on all the socials and we'll probably be making some fun stuff to hold you over. You'll still hear it from us.

Yeah.

Also don't drink and drive. Don't drink and drive this New Year's. 2024.

2024, here we go, baby. It's going to be better than the last. Or if your lease is up in 2023, it could be worse. You could end up moving next door to one of the subjects of today's topic, neighbors from hell. And I like to think there's at least one person out there who is stuck listening to this with their neighbor. Maybe they're driving somewhere together and this episode came on. And even though they're pretending to be friends most of the time, they're now stuck thinking about all the times they told their families, I fucking hate that guy or whatever they said about the person they're sitting next to. So, to that one person, keep smiling and laughing like nothing's wrong. Don't turn this episode off or you'll seem like you have something to hide. To everybody else, welcome. This week, we're gonna talk about our own experiences with lunatic neighbors, take a look at some of the worst neighbors in history and learn about a disturbing trend known as frogging. And last but not least, we're gonna wrap out this year with an exclusive interview with Charlie Pieper, writer of Shudder's upcoming film, Destroy All Neighbors. Charlie had a neighbor so bad, he wrote a movie about it. And that screenplay was so nuts, it caught the attention of Bill and Ted's Alex Windsor and Mystery Science Theater 3000's Jonah Ray Rodriguez. The resulting movie is debuting on Shudder in January and we'll learn all about it from Charlie a little bit later on. But first, neighbors. What's so scary about them?

One second, Chris, Mr. Disclaimer's calling here. Just let me grab this.

Hello. Hey, I got the list you sent over. Are you serious with this?

It's not as bad as it sounds.

Really? This episode includes discussions of domestic abuse, murder, child harm, sexual abuse, animal cruelty, general assault, whatever that means, and overall meanness from mean people.

I mean, it does, but barely. Like we drive by a lot of that stuff. Like we don't spend a lot of time with it. Like we're not living in it. We're not living in that space.

Fair enough.

Oh, while I got you, can you tell people to not frog?

Not to, what is that?

It's something people shouldn't do.

Disclaimer, do not frog.

All right, awesome. Thanks so much. Talk to you next year, bud.

Yep, see ya.

Sorry Chris, go ahead. We were talking neighbors. I think you were gonna say, what's so scary about them?

Well, it depends how paranoid you are and where you live and how much space you have between yourself and your neighbors. Because ever since humans started settling land and building little huts next to each other, we've been suspicious of what really is going on next door. There's a whole sub genre of movies about it, most notably Rear Window, but also Fright Night, Disturbia, The Burbs, Summer of 84. You could probably program an entire film festival out of bad neighbor movies. And I think that our fears around neighbors comes from the tension between our competing desires for safety and community. We can't have society without neighbors, but trusting the wrong person can come at a high cost. Think how many times you've given your house key to a neighbor, trusting that they won't come in at night and watch you sleep. Think about how many times you've asked to borrow some sugar or milk and trusted that your neighbor hasn't poisoned it. And I'm not saying we shouldn't trust our neighbors. Having strong communal bonds is important. It's the social contract that Ed is always talking about.

It's very important to me. That is, I'm glad you recognize that.

And I kind of wish I knew some of my neighbors better. If I think about it, I might have been the weird neighbor to some people. I'm pretty quiet. I don't love making small talk. I keep to myself. So maybe people have looked at me and wondered. Maybe they thought I had something to hide. And I didn't, but sometimes that weird looking motherfucker next door is filling his walls up with bodies. And what's so scary is that it can be impossible to tell the difference until it's too late. So Ed, have you ever had an awful neighbor or someone that you wondered what they were up to?

I don't think I've ever had a place I've lived where I haven't had a fucking weird neighbor. I have, for real, I've always like, they built this building across from me where everyone is fucking suspect and weird. It got extra weird when Airbnb became a thing. So now I've got people who just show up for a day or two and they're like rolling, rolly suitcases behind them. That could be bodies in and out. Who knows? I never see that person again. You know what I mean? Like there's a lot of strangers in our neighborhood now because of Airbnb. I had a neighbor, not where I'm currently living, who would constantly, constantly, constantly fight with their significant other. And that was always like put me in a weird position because it was loud as shit and I didn't want to like, it was pretty heated. So it's like, do you call the cops? Do you fucking bang on the wall? If you bang on the wall, are they gonna fucking, you know, come after you? But it did give birth to my favorite thing I've ever heard through a wall. And it's so funny because of exactly how I'm gonna perform it. Now, let me preface it by saying domestic abuse in all forms is nothing to laugh at. And I've had multiple people in my life who have dealt with it. I've been to court with them. I've helped get restraining orders. It is not great, but this is a very funny thing I heard through the wall. And as far as I can tell, it was just a yelling match. So let's leave it at that. But this guy, I can hear their conversation and he yells, what happened? Now I'm doing this to how it happened. What happened to the woman that I love? It got super high in the second part. It was like, what happened to the woman that I love? And it makes me laugh so hard that he goes super high over the second part of that sentence. He's like, what happened to the woman that I love? And honestly, I don't know what happened. I'm not sure they knew what happened to the woman that he loved. It might not even been about the person he was with.

That's true.

But the fact that he went super high at that point made me laugh.

It sounds like a Backstreet Boys hook.

Yeah, exactly. Or it could have been a Yolad song for our hardcore fans would know that it could have been a Yolad song. But again, domestic violence, not great. At this time, it seems to be like a screaming match between them, emotional violence, but very funny the way that came out. And I think about it regularly.

One of my neighbors was a similar story that it was borderline abusive, but the things I heard through the walls were often very funny. And mine is this couple that I live next door to. At first, they seemed really great. They had a cute kid. I was living with my girlfriend at the time and we met them and everything was cool. And then after living there a few weeks, we realized these two hated each other, hated each other. And they would have these screaming matches through the walls that were so loud. And I'm sure you kind of dealt with this, but like you kind of start to get depressed.

Oh yeah.

Cause it's like living with screaming parents or something. Like it almost doesn't matter that they're not fighting about you. You feel like you're trapped in a fight. And it was miserable. But the funniest thing was they would have these fights and the woman would storm out and the guy would stay behind. And a couple of minutes later, he would play a mix of covers of that Joe Jackson song, I'm Steppin Out.

Oh my God, what?

The one that's like, I'm stepping out.

He would play the original song and then this mix of like jazzy covers of it, just as loud as he possibly could. And I never heard him singing along or anything. It was just his like medicine after a fight was he'd play these covers and then it would go quiet.

It also sounds like the world's worst hype song. Like, because he never stepped out, he never left.

Right.

It's like, he's like, you know what? One day I am gonna step out. If I can just channel enough of this, like if this song could just get me going.

I honestly think that that might have kind of been what was going on. It was like he would fight and then dream about like I'm out of here, baby. Like I think that was his.

Yeah, as he quietly sweeps up broken glass and stuff from the ground.

Well, my first apartment was even worse and there was no abuse involved at my first apartment. It was a bungalow in a decent area of LA, like nothing, it wasn't Beverly Hills, but it was fine. And it was one of those little bungalow house style apartments. So it was like two units, you know, separated by a wall, but each unit was its own little like bungalow house a couple feet up off the ground. And it was pretty safe. There was some sketchy people out and about. There was a park right on the other side of the fence. And every once in a while, someone would, you know, wander over from the park, ranting and raving. I actually didn't even know that I had a creepy neighbor until I moved out, because I ran into the gardener when I was moving out or getting ready to move out. And we chatted a little bit and he asked, he goes, so are you, are you moving because of the guy living under your apartment?

Oh, I know this story. I know that I was wondering, like what neighbor are you talking about? But yes, this is, this was more than a neighbor. This is insane.

Yeah. And so I didn't know what he was talking about. And it turns out these little bungalows, you know, they're up a few feet off the ground. So there wasn't a ton of room, like you couldn't stand up or probably even sit up.

No, it was like, they have crawl spaces.

There's crawl spaces. And this person had dragged a mattress under there. And according to the gardener, they had somehow like hooked a coffee machine up to our electricity, which is why the issue had gotten raised with the landlord and the gardener had heard about it because they discovered this like fire safety issue or whatever.

But you and your girlfriend at the time had heard noises and stuff.

Yes, there was already, we'd had this one guy coming. We'd never heard noises that I think were associated with this guy. We had heard this guy, the dick dangler, who would come around the neighborhood and he would stick his dick through the bungalow mail slots. And we'd heard about him from our neighbors and we heard our mail slot open and close one night. And so I'm pretty sure the dick dangler came around.

You got dangled. You got dangled. And you don't think it's the same guy. You don't think dick dangler also was, you know, making folders underneath your floorboards.

The best part of waking up is a dangler in your cup.

Oh, I thought you were gonna say a dick in your mail slot.

Dick in your mail slot.

To each their own, to each their own.

Yeah, we had a couple other unfortunate incidents. Maybe I'll tell them some other time, but this is the most relevant to having a neighbor that I didn't know was my neighbor.

So this person living underneath your house, now we've had issues at our place with unhoused people, hobos, whatever you want to call them these days. In our yard, staying behind our garage, what have you, and I'm not trying to ruin anyone's day, whatever, if you need a place to crash, just don't be screaming all the time. Sometimes you get real mentally ill ones that they do scream and shout and go crazy. That said, do you think the person living underneath your house, when you and your girlfriend talked about it, was there any weirdness thinking back to, oh, do you think they hurt us? Fuck, do you think they hurt us? Do you think they hurt us? Talk about weird stuff.

Was I worried that the person living under my house heard me fuck?

I'm not saying you're worried about it. I'm just saying like, man, what do you think? How present were they? Like, could they hear you beneath your room? They might have. That's what I'm saying. I just meant like, you know, just not realizing that there was a true, like, eavesdropper potentially. Like someone, a fly on your wall is weird to think about.

For sure. I mean, we talked about it a little bit. I mean, we were so fucking broke and struggling at that point that like, you would have entered an indecent proposal with them. Yeah, I mean, we were, we were just kind of like, well, whatever, I guess that's living in Los Angeles. We'd already had other shit happen with some mentally ill people. And so it was just kind of like one more, we were on our way out.

I didn't think back and go, I feel like I have a couple other, like I want to shout out suggestions for my favorite stories. But then I realized that the episode's no longer about bad neighbors. It just becomes about mentally ill people we've experienced.

I know, which we will tell stories about all day.

Yeah, which is like, we think these people should be able to get help. Obviously, it's a crumbling infrastructure is not there to help a lot of these people who are very objectively mentally ill. So we're not, I don't want to like rag on that. And then it's like, oh, we're making fun of mentally ill people, but holy shit, have we both experienced some lunatic shit over the years.

That'll be some bonus content.

Yeah, or we're going to get a letter being like, you guys are tremendous assholes to this community.

Yeah, I mean, look, like Ed said, we want them to get help. We wish our societies were better at this, but sometimes a weird story is a weird story. So speaking of weird stories, this isn't my experience, but I do have to share one other insane neighbor story.

Well, before you do that, should I mention at all that I've had neighbors that suck, but they're not screaming to the walls, which is to say like, I've had neighbors who let their dog shit directly on my front steps. I've had neighbors who fucking just play music upstairs for me fucking so goddamn loud. I guess a part of being a bad neighbor, even beyond will they kill me is just like, especially me, as you mentioned earlier, with my obsession with the social contract. It's like the people who refuse to sign it, the people who crumple it up and throw in a garbage can and are like, you know what, whatever makes me feel good. And what me feel good is listening to Chumbawamba super goddamn loud at two in the morning or just fucking revving my car's engine in the driveway for no reason, like, I don't know, just people who are loud or they let their dog shit in your yard or anything else. Like anyone who denies the social contract and is a selfish piece of shit could also be a bad neighbor. And they could be a neighbor from hell. Like if you're not getting sleep, so they keep parking behind your garage or they keep having friends over which block the driveways, which as you know, I deal with all the goddamn time. Like that shit, I don't know if any of that's relevant to our story, but that is another version of a neighbor from hell I think about. But yeah, sorry, you were gonna say?

No, I think that's relatable for a lot of people. That's why I love this topic because everyone has experienced this on some level. What I was gonna say is this isn't my experience, but I do have to share one last terrible neighbor story. One of my friends has a neighbor I truly think might snap one day and it makes me really nervous, but he's also very funny. He's an artist. I think he's a rich kid because he lives in a very nice apartment by himself and makes just the worst art. It's like these mixed media dog shit canvases with like newspaper clippings and paint and stuff. And it's just like-

Do I know them?

You know my friend. You don't know the neighbor, I don't think. But the fact that this guy makes the worst art in the world doesn't stop him from constantly bringing home the hottest chicks I have ever seen. And every time I'm there, I want to tell these girls to run because from being at my friend's place, I know how this guy acts. He lives upstairs, he runs around his apartment, knocking things over and shouting like Rick Flair, like, woo, woo, at all hours of the day. And according to my friend at night, he's not only given my friend a book of his rambling, weird ass poetry.

Wait, when you say a book, it's not like right bloody publishing. Is it like a composition notebook of weird scribbling?

Yeah, it's like when you were a kid and you'd like get your book laminated at school and put like a ring binder through it or whatever. It was just-

Oh my gosh.

His rambling poetry. He has five devices sited to her wireless at like all times because one time he asked her if he gave her $20 if he could have her wireless password because his had gone down or something.

That is how you end up with the fucking FBI door, dude. Like don't give someone else your wifi password.

But the craziest thing is he cornered my friend in the laundry room once. And was like, hey, so what's up with that lady whose voice is always coming out of the refrigerator? Do you hear that?

And my friend was like, no.

And he's like, yeah, I think it's got something to do with the electricity. Like I'm always hearing this lady talking to me. And I think it's the electricity. They need to fix the electricity. And she was like, what the fuck? She was like, no, I've never, yeah, I've never heard her. So I'm waiting, I'm counting down the days.

And he has his fridge hooked up to her Wi-Fi too. It's also connected to her Wi-Fi.

Probably.

Is there anything he won't connect to her Wi-Fi?

I don't want to arm share diagnose, but that's pretty standard schizophrenia, right?

I don't know.

Hearing voices and thinking they're being beamed into your head or into your home.

I don't know. I mean, this guy probably has got something going on. I do think your friend should maybe, if he sees a girl going home over there, be like, hey, maybe catch them outside. Maybe be like, hey, do you know this guy well? Just seems like maybe just banging the floor three times if fucking you're having a problem up there.

I don't think my friend would know the difference. I don't think she'd know the difference between someone banging for help and this guy just living his regular life.

What if that's his move? His move is like, if I pretty regularly make the sounds of a struggle, people will become used to the sounds of struggle up here and they know I'm alone. So if they hear these sounds of struggle, these Rick Flair woos and that way when you do have a victim who's doing the sound of struggle with Rick Flair woos, people downstairs are like, ah, it's just Jacob being Jacob or whatever.

That's true.

It's a great plan. Great move, great move.

Yeah, I might use that at my next place. We'll see. Make them think you're crazy.

Don't do that.

So all these people seem like true lunatics, but we don't really know how crazy they are. We just know the experiences we've had with them. We do know, though, that there are some neighbors in history who turned out to be just as insane and dangerous and deadly as your worst nightmares would suspect them to be. The first neighbor from hell that we're gonna talk about was so good at hiding that no one even suspected that he was a neighbor from hell. Ed, have you heard of the BTK killer?

Not only have I heard of BTK, I think the K stands for kill.

Oh yeah, that's right.

A little bit of like an ATM machine situation. That said, not only do I know BTK, I amazingly have a very good friend who's no longer with us, RIP, but not because of BTK. She would laugh at that, it's fine. I have a good friend, Katie, who when BTK was arrested, he was basically her neighbor. Like I think he lived, this is Kansas, so you know, distance and stuff like that's subjective. But he lived about a mile up the road, so when I knew he would be doing this, I texted her mom, and I was like, hey, what's the story with BTK or whatever? And she told me that, yeah, he lived about a mile up the road, and this is her quote, that he actually let my friend, Katie, go in front of him in line at a grocery store on Friday, and then the next morning, she said his face was plastered all over the news. And so, you know, of course, my friend was like, holy shit, that's the guy from the store, blah, blah, blah. And I guess he was also, they say, the compliance officer for the city. So, yeah, I guess he did his best to not stand out. I'm not exactly sure. But yeah, fucking crazy small world, so nuts. RIP, Katie Grove's one of the all-time greats. Not RIP piece of shit, BTK, I think he's still alive. I think there was no death penalty where he was. So only the good, only the good go, I guess.

Well, that friend was much luckier than one of BTK's other neighbors, because back in-

Well, he'd been out of the game for many years by the time he was arrested, I think in 2005, 2006 or something. So yeah, he was out of the game for a long time. So luckily these people, they were literally, it was just like a guy down the street. It wasn't, you know.

Right, right. Well, for those who don't know, BTK was a serial killer who operated out of Wichita, Kansas from 1974 to 1991. His initials stood for Bind Torture Kill, which is what he did to his victims. He was also really big into making a name for himself. Like the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco, BTK sent a lot of letters taunting the police and the media. He used puzzles, he used codes, and he even suggested a few nicknames for himself that didn't get used, but I like that he gave these little test balloons here. He suggested The Asphyxiator and The Wichita Hangman, which I think Wichita Hangman sounds like a pro wrestler.

Yeah, I don't hate the second one, but it does seem to leave out a lot of his things he was doing. He didn't, I think, actually, I think he did hang people up.

He did, but not everybody. It was all very rope-based murder, but I don't think he hung a few people, but that wasn't always what he did. But for years in Wichita, no one knew who he was. The entire city started to eye each other suspiciously. They started keeping their doors locked. They bought guns and alarm systems. The whole city's trust in each other's neighbors took a turn for the worse. And probably for good reason, because on April 27th, 1985, BTK strangled his actual neighbor to death. Her name was Maureen Hedge. She was a recently widowed 53-year-old woman and BTK had snuck into her house and was waiting for her when she came home from a bingo game with her new boyfriend. BTK, like the coward he was, waited for the boyfriend to leave. And then hours later pounced on Maureen and strangled her in bed. And when her body was later found on the side of the road, police actually didn't connect her death to the activity of BTK. The only reason we even know that this happened is because when BTK was caught in, I think, yeah, 2005, 2006, he admitted to it. And the details are so fucking creepy. BTK was Maureen's neighbor for 30 years. 30 years he was friendly with this woman. They weren't close from what he described, but they passed each other on the street. They waved, they said hello. I'm sure this was like a sugar and milk neighbor borrowing situation. Now, for some reason, he did always call her Marie instead of Maureen, which kind of tracks because serial killers, well, clever are not usually the smartest bunch in the world. And BTK kept track of Maureen. I couldn't find for how long, but long enough that he actually named his surveillance of her Project Cookie.

Creepy.

Which is just awful on so many levels. So he broke into her house, he strangled her to death, and then he took his neighbor of 30 years to Christ Lutheran Church, where he had already stashed away plastic to tape over the windows. He put all the plastic up, and once the windows were covered, he laid Maureen on the altar and tied her body up in different, very sexually graphic forms of bondage and took photographs of her corpse with a Polaroid camera on the altar in a church. Like full on horror movie, fucked up, disgusting shit. It was only after that that he disposed her body on the side of the road, and then he went on to kill two more people before he stopped in the early 90s.

Now he racked up, what, 12 plus murders, I think. I don't think it was two people.

No, no, no, no, no, no. He only killed two more people after this woman. He killed the rest of his victims before this woman.

Got you, got you, got you.

So this would have been number nine or 10 or something, and then-

Yeah, I think there's like nine or 10 confirmed and then a couple that like he said that haven't been able to like track or confirm it.

Yeah.

Now, am I crazy? Didn't he work for like a security company?

He did at one point, yeah. He worked for a security company, I wanna say early in his serial killing career, but when they caught him, he was the president of Christ Lutheran Church, the very same church where he had dragged that corpse and taken pictures of her.

God, fucking president of the church, goddamn compliance officer for the city. And I wanna say he was also a Boy Scout leader, like a troop leader, but I don't wanna drag the Boy Scout to add any kind of alienation to that group. But I wanna say he did some crimes whilst doing that. When the kids went to sleep, he'd left and did crimes and came back before they woke up.

He definitely did. I think the Marine murder, I don't have it in front of me, but I think somewhere in my research, I read that he excused himself from some kind of Cub Scouts, something or other.

Yeah, I don't know if it was the Boy Scouts or, cause again, I think the Boy Scouts is a good organization. I'm not trying to say that anybody who shouldn't, you know what I mean? I don't wanna drag the name of the Boy Scouts, but I think it was either the Scouts or something else like that where he was in charge of young people. He didn't hurt any of those people, but when the kids went to sleep, he fucking left and did murders and came back, which is nuts and it was like an alibi. We couldn't have done that. He was out on the campsite or whatever. Years ago, I read John Douglas's Mindhunter book. It was super interesting and I retained some of the information, but yeah, a lot of fucked up people out there and I don't love it. And the thing about that guy in particular is he didn't get caught for a fucking ton of time and I think it was something nuts. It was like his daughter or niece or something and she went to college and she like, I don't know, went to the nurse or whatever the hell you call it in college and got like some tests, blood work done or fucking staph infection, who knows? But she had gotten some medical stuff done there and then the FBI subpoenaed the fucking lab, like her lab results to test her DNA which would have been similar enough to his and since her DNA hit on the DNA they had on BTK, they knew it was him. Like they couldn't subpoena him. And I realized I just jumped over a bunch of shit. So feel free to fill us in right now with anything I might have jumped over.

Yeah, well he stopped in the early 90s and then in 2004, the Wichita Eagle ran a piece on the 30 year anniversary of the appearance of BTK. And this dude was so narcissistic, like many serial killers are, that he couldn't help himself but start writing letters to the police again. And they traded letters and puzzles and stuff back and forth. And then I forget exactly why or how they tricked him into doing it, but at some point, BTK sent a physical, I don't think it was, it was probably like a three and a half inch for you old heads out there.

Was it a floppy disk?

Yeah, he sent a computer disk to the police and they were able to check the metadata on it. And through the metadata, we were able to track down that this computer was at the Christ Lutheran Church and that the person who was signed in when the data was copied to the disk was Dennis Rader. They might've pinned his DNA down after that, but I know the first part of it was just, they didn't know who he was at all and he started writing letters because he couldn't help himself.

Yeah, a lot of these guys that are doing stuff where the DNA just doesn't matter, it's just there wasn't databases, there wasn't whatever, a lot of these people were going back to 60s, 70s, what have you. Let me just say, the thing that's so crazy about him is it was like, you do not know your neighbor. Fuck, the people in his church didn't know their neighbor.

He ran the church.

His own wife and daughter didn't know that he was a bad neighbor. This guy is a bad neighbor in sheep's clothing. Like it's so crazy. I mean, I'm sure we're gonna get to some more overtly bad neighbors, but I, fuck, you do not know your neighbors, people. Jeez, Louise.

Well, the second worst neighbor in history, I will say, had no such aspersions to a proper life. The second worst neighbor in history who I wanna cover on the podcast today is a man that some of you might have heard of. I think I almost watched a documentary about him once and I ended up not, but I will now. This guy, Ken McElroy, is absolutely, he never killed anybody, but I think as far as bad neighbors go, he really might be the worst in history. And this also might be a spot for Mr. Disclaimer to chime in because even though we're about to shit all over Ken McElroy for fun, I really can't overstate how bad of a guy this guy was.

Nah, he already called, so you just go right ahead.

Over the course of his life in Skidmore, Missouri, Ken McElroy was accused of dozens of felonies by his neighbors, including assault, child molestation, statutory rape, arson, animal cruelty, hog wrestling and burglary.

That's obviously not in order of most severe.

No, no, no, that's just.

Okay, okay, that's just the way it came out.

He was indicted 21 times, but never convicted of anything until 1981 when he was finally found guilty of attempted murder in the shooting of the town's 70-year-old grocer, Ernest Bow Bowencamp. And the story gets even crazier from there. But to really understand it, we have to take a quick look back at how Ken McElroy became one of the most over-the-top worst guys in the world. He was born poor, the 15th of 16 children, to tenant farmers.

That's too many.

Well, his parents were farmers.

Oh, in that case, they're just making workers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm.

Free labor, free labor, yeah.

Part of it. They moved the family around a lot before settling down in Skidmore. Our boy, Ken McElroy dropped out of school in the eighth grade at age 15 and quickly became a local scumbag getting up to scumbag shit. He started rustling cattle and hogs, stealing things and getting a reputation as a womanizer, which at age 15, I mean, maybe they just meant over time.

No, it could be 15. If you ever read anything about Charles Bronson's childhood, some crazy shit, and he was like, yeah, so I was 12. I was with a fucking carny hooker or whatever, like just so much shit where you're like 12.

Yeah.

Charles Bronson lived a crazy life prior to his 16th birthday.

He was running wild, but can you imagine this Ken McElroy is like a 15-year-old crime boss, like with a cigar in his mouth?

It's like he's in the newsies. He's one of the Delancey brothers.

Just surrounded by babes and stolen hogs. They're just like-

I mean, you keep what you wrestle, dude.

That's true.

That was the law of the land here, Skidmore.

As Ken grew up, he was not only suspected of being involved in theft of grain, gasoline, alcohol, antiques and a shit ton more livestock, his worst crimes-

Grain theft auto.

His worst crimes were against women. He fathered 10 children by at least three different women. He was married multiple times and he met his last wife, Trina McLeod, when she was 12.

All right, well, that's a terrible sentence.

Trina's parents obviously said, get the fuck out of here. You can't date our 12 year old daughter.

Okay, let's not throw obviouslies around. We weren't there.

But Ken McElroy doesn't take no for an answer. So to help change their mind, he burned down their house and shot their dog. That was his reaction.

I don't think that's gonna change their mind. I didn't like him before. No, I really don't like him. He shot our dog and burned our home down.

Well, look, you are stronger willed than Trina McLeod's poor parents because they begrudgingly agreed to let Trina marry this guy.

No, when you said he met her and did all this, you're saying she's 12 and all this is happening. It's not like met her at 12, but then when she turned 18, he burned their home down.

No, no, no, no, come on. Ken McElroy waiting for the big one eight?

No way, I guess not.

No, Ken McElroy wanted what he wanted when he wanted it.

And now this is all the thirties?

No, no, no, this would have been, I think by this point, he was in his thirties. So this was in the seventies, I think.

Geez.

Well, I know when the story ends, so I'm assuming this was somewhere in the seventies. So Trina's parents, they agreed to let Trina marry McElroy. Trina became pregnant at 14, dropped out of school in ninth grade, and went to live with McElroy and his second wife, Alice, who he was still living with as he was knocking up a 14-year-old. And then what Ken McElroy did is he divorced his second wife, Alice, and married Trina in order to escape charges that had been filed of statutory rape because Alice was the only witness to the crime.

Now, you know this is something that is a be in my bonnet, the child bride laws in this country.

Yes.

Now, did he do that because by virtue of getting married to someone under the age of 18, the statutory rape law is then abolished in the sense that it supersedes that law. So if it's your betrothed, it doesn't matter anymore because that's so fucking greasy. We should be changing that in every goddamn state.

I think I used the wrong name when I said it before, but he divorced Alice and married Trina, I think because Trina was the only one who was trying to charge him with statutory rape, but she was also the only witness and you can't compel a wife to testify against her husband or a husband to testify against his wife.

Oh, so it's like double greasy laws. So he basically took advantage of two shit laws in this country.

Yes, so he escaped those charges and then 16 days after Trina gave birth, dude, this is fucking-

He went out for cigarettes?

No.

The cigarettes he would use to light the kerosene on the next girl he's in to his family's home?

Well, 16 days after Trina gave birth, she and Alice decided to make a run for it.

Thelma and Louise.

And they ran, guess where they ran to?

I couldn't possibly.

They ran to Trina's parents' house.

Oh, you mean the rubble?

Yes.

They ran to the rubble?

They ran to the house that had been rebuilt on the foundation of the burned down home. And according to court records, Ken McElroy tracked them down and brought them back, waited for Trina's parents to leave, and then burned the house down again and shot their new dog.

Well, at least he has an MO that he sticks to.

This guy, this guy is the fucking worst. So then in 1980, which is a bunch of years after this, so he's kicking around just being a shithead, the skid mark of Skidmore, and one of McElroy's 10 children in 1980 gets into an argument with a clerk at a local grocery store, the grocery store owned by the aforementioned Beau Bowencamp. The clerk claimed that the McElroy kids stole candy, the kids said they didn't, they had a big fight, and Ken McElroy's very normal response to this was to begin stalking the Bowencamp family.

Oh, geez.

So after some time of parking outside their home and being silently threatening, he became physically threatening when he showed up at the store with a shotgun and threatened Beau Bowencamp in the back of the store. And at the ensuing confrontation, McElroy shot Bowencamp in the neck with a shotgun, and somehow this 70-year-old man survived. But it was enough to finally get McElroy arrested and charged with attempted murder.

Because they finally have a witness he couldn't marry. Finally did him in.

So he almost kills this man. He's charged with attempted murder. And then he was finally convicted of assault at the trial for this crime. But he was freed on bail pending his appeal. So immediately after being released at his post-trial hearing, McElroy.

Burn down the courtyard.

Burn down the courthouse.

Shot the drug sniffing dog.

Shot the judge's dog.

Shot all the dogs.

Yeah, but McElroy went to the tavern, the D&G, a local bar. This is, mind you, immediately after being released at his post-trial hearing, he shows up at the bar with an M1 Garand rifle with a bayonet attached.

Boy, so he brought a World War II-era gun to the D&G, which is at the Dogs and Guns.

The Dogs and Guns Tavern, yeah, where he decided to go ape shit. No, he showed up with this rifle, with his bayonet, starts drinking and just making graphic threats about what he would do to Bo Bo and camp. And I wish that there were quotes attached to those graphic threats, because I'm sure it was a spicy. So he's in the middle of ranting and raving. After his appeal hearing gets delayed, a bunch of the town decides they need to do something about this guy. So they meet at the Legion Hall in the center of town with the county sheriff to discuss how to protect themselves.

So it's amazing, the whole town, while he's drinking and ranting at the bar, some people slip out to be like, hey sheriff, the guy's at the bar right now saying all this crap. It's like, okay, we'll round up everyone in town. We'll meet at the Elks Lodge or whatever and deal with this.

I don't know that this was the same day. I think this was a little bit later because according to the county records.

He shot 11 more people and then they met up.

During this meeting, McElroy shows up at the DNG Tavern with Trina. I don't think it's the same day because I assume he didn't leave and come back. Maybe he did, but this was probably a different day. So he shows up with his 14 year old wife who has a kid and as he's drinking at the bar, word gets back to the Legion Hall that McElroy is back at the DNG. So I love this. The sheriff instructed the assembled group not to get into a direct confrontation with McElroy, but instead seriously consider forming a neighborhood watch program. The sheriff then drove out of town in his police cruiser.

Wait, so they met with the sheriff at the Elks Lodge and he was like, honestly, nothing we can do. The guy seems too powerful with each child bride he acquires, he grows that much stronger. There's nothing we can do.

It's reverse Scott Pilgrim.

Yeah, I suggest what you do as non-deputized citizens of Skidmore, just lock arms in defiance of the way he lives his life and walk around with flashlights and say you're part of a group that he will not respect. Best of luck, best of luck. So the sheriff just fucking quit. The sheriff quit?

The fact that he drove out of town makes me think that he said, don't get into a direct confrontation with him, but instead seriously consider forming a neighborhood watch program, wink, wink.

Oh, so I see. So he's like, listen, I'm gonna take the night off. If anything happens when I'm not here, I can't do anything about it. So he was basically like, go be vigilantes. You know what I mean? It's like, I have no good example of-

This is the example. And this was the middle of the day. I don't think this was at night because when the sheriff left town, the citizens decided to go to the tavern, the DNG where McElroy was drinking. They filled up the bar, but the crowd did not phase Ken McElroy. He finished his drinks. He bought another six pack to go, left the bar, got in his truck with Trina, and the crowd followed.

Wait, so you're saying the crowd came into the bar, the crowd meaning the town.

Yes.

They all went in the bar and did they make their presence known in the sense of like, we're up to no good, or they just like go to the bar, like so now all of a sudden he feels like there's a lot of people here.

I actually don't know. I didn't see anything about exactly what they did when they got to the tavern. The source I had said that the crowd filled the tavern. So I don't know if they filled it to be like, get the fuck out of here, or if they filled it just to be like, that vibe of everyone's here and you know why.

Yeah, but I guess at the end of the day, he's like, if he's still cruising around with that World War II fucking rifle, it's kind of like, okay, let's let him know that we're not pumped about him being here, but also like he's armed, so don't do anything stupid.

Well, no one to this day has spoken about exactly what happened next, but as Ken McElroy sat in his truck, a number of shots were fired, two rifle shots struck and killed Ken McElroy in the driver's seat of his truck, and no one called for an ambulance. To this day, the only witness who has named names is Trina. No one else will talk, but when this all happened, the DA declined to press charges, and there was apparently an extensive federal investigation too that also didn't lead to any charges.

So basically what you're saying is, this is a man that everyone hated so much that the fucking sheriff was like, I'm gonna leave my gun on my desk, and I'm gonna step out, and as long as that gun is back on my desk, by the time I get back, I'll never question that it left my desk. And then everybody in town was like, hey, I think it's pretty well understood that we're gonna do something here today and never talk about it, right? And it's like, yeah, and then they do that, and then the fucking law enforcement has to act like they are trying to solve the case. And she's like, I saw, you know, Trina's like, I saw, you know, Martha and Susie shoot them, and they're gonna be like, whatever, shut the fuck up.

Like, who cares?

And then we'll make it seem like, if anyone questions that we told her to shut the fuck up, listen, the paperwork's been turned in, we went and looked at the truck, you know, no one saw anything, don't know what to tell you.

Yeah, exactly.

Vigilante justice, bro.

It is, you know, and I'm not a fan, really, of vigilante justice, but this guy.

I think with this dude, people like this, I don't know, 22, 23 indictments, what is an indictment? It just means that someone claimed something?

Well, yeah, an indictment, I think, is that there's enough to-

Arrest you?

Put you through the system, but then he always skated, usually because he intimidated witnesses and no one would come talk.

Okay, but I'm saying is like, you get like, the numbers are adding up, like you're a fucking ship bird, dude, and like, you're a ship bird racking out, like with a fucking child bride baby factory that is your fucking house.

Yeah.

Like I think maybe there's, I don't know, fucking some people gotta go.

Yeah.

Shit, gonna get in trouble for saying this.

When we start our movie watch alongs, we're gonna revisit this case because it turns out a TV movie was made about it in 1991. It's called In Broad Daylight and listen to this cast.

James Woods, always James Woods. We have his movie from Satanic Panic to watch, another TV movie.

Yeah, this I think might be better. It's Brian Dennehy, Cloris Leachman, Marcia Gay Harden and Chris Cooper.

I love Chris Cooper.

Yeah.

I hope he doesn't play the main bad piece of shit.

No, I would assume Brian Dennehy plays Ken McElroy and Marcia Gay Harden probably plays Trina.

Shit, okay, so that's a bad neighbor. That's a proven bad neighbor, which is to say all of your neighbors were willing participants and you not being their neighbor anymore.

Yeah, exactly. You don't want to be that guy, so don't be that guy. I think the only thing worse than having a monster like BTK or Ken McElroy-type freak as your neighbor is having a neighbor that you might not even know about. And you might not know about them because they're living inside your wall right now. And I'm not talking about stalkers or thieves. Those are criminals who have targeted you or your things and they might hide near walls in pursuit of those things. And I'm not talking about squatters. Squatters live in empty houses. I'm talking about the much more bizarre phenomenon of frogging with a pH. Ed, have you heard of this? Did you know this is a thing?

No, the most I know about people who live in walls are the guy who lived under your house and listened to you fuck. And then also the movie Bad Ronald.

Right. So yes, you don't know too much about frogging. That's because frogging is a pretty new thing. According to the article, your guide to living secretly in a stranger's home, which was posted to Lifehacker.

Stop it. What the fuck? That's like, there's a WikiHow for this?

Well, it's a Wink Wink article. It's on Lifehacker. It wasn't posted on some dark web message board, but it was posted this past November. And according to this article, froggers are amoral criminals who, for reasons either practical or financial or just thrill seeking, have chosen to live a rent-free lifestyle in other people's homes. So what they'll do is they break in, they find a hiding spot in the house that's out of the way or relatively unused, and then they come out only at night or when the owners are gone. They'll eat your food, they drink your drinks, they watch your TV, they play your video games, whatever, and then they'll hide back in their spot when the owners come home.

So now, is this something where it's like, I'm a very rich person who has a huge fucking house in like Wayne Manor from Batman, and there's like a whole wing, I might not even hear someone being and kicking around in, or is it like they hide under your bed until you go to work?

A little bit of both. The article has tips on ways to frog without getting caught, which for legal reasons, maybe we shouldn't say on the air.

No, we won't.

But yeah, like you wanna think about the size of the house. You wanna think about, you know, is there a dog in the house or a cat? Cause a cat is fine. A dog will literally might sniff you out. So it's people, no one knows exactly who froggers are because to quote the article, supposedly there's an underground community of froggers out there who never draw enough attention to themselves to be caught or be the subject of news stories. It claims that, or it has been claimed, that they congregate on dark web message boards where they share tips for successfully avoiding detection in strangers' homes. And this creeps me out. Even posts video of themselves standing over sleeping homeowners for bragging rights.

Fucking no thank you, no thank you.

No.

I do not care for that activity. Although I do, in my mind, I do desperately hope that you were like, oh, there's a collection of them, a group of them. If they have like letterman jackets that say like Frogger on the back and then on the sleeves instead of like years and like JV things, whatever, it just has like little green monopoly houses for like each house they frogged in. It has the little like patches on the jacket. And it's like, oh, look at this guy, pretty cool. You know, it would be a bad way to hide. People would probably know pretty quickly you're a Frogger.

Yeah.

But always looking for merch in the store. So let's add the merch store, get these Frogger jackets out and we'll sell little patches.

If this podcast ever gets big enough to catch the attention of Atari Inc, we will do a licensed Frogger remake. But instead of the F Frogger trying to cross the road, this will be a pH Frogger trying to walk across the floorboards in the attic without making a noise.

Oh, that's really good.

Similar game play.

That's really good.

So I guess the guy who lived under my first place was kind of Frogging. I mean, I don't know. He wasn't inside the house. He was under the house.

But he was plugged into your power.

He was plugged into our power. So yeah, he was Frogging. Now I will say that probably would have been like 2010-ish that that happened. So I was curious if Frogging was even a thing at that point.

Yeah, it might not have been a thing yet, but I imagine that there have been weird motherfuckers who have probably hidden in walls, hidden in places, done this kind of really risky squatting, if you will, this sort of, I got broken into a couple of years ago. And when the person breaks in when you're home, the police call that, they told me they call this a hot prowl. I think it's hot because the owners were home when the breaking happened.

That would be a great name for a schlock title.

Hot prowl, I'm sure it is already one. And I also don't know if there's a cold prowl if nobody's home. That said, this kind of hot prowl squatting, this is hot squatting, if you will, this bickrum squatting, it's probably been around much longer, but it took it being gamified. It's like when you told me that people now are recording themselves with the owners sleeping and stuff, now it's gamified, it's on the deep web, people wanna do it no different than fucking climbing a sheer face of a mountain, or I don't know, now that it's a fucking euphoria episode, we're gonna have kids calling it frogging.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no one really knows, I tried to find the origin of the term frogging, and it kinda makes sense, hopping from place to place, I think is where that terminology started.

But why the pH?

Well, it's sort of like fishing.

Oh, fishing for hacking. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And there was, what was it called when you would, when people would hack pay phones and stuff?

That's called freaking.

Freaking, there you go. That's freaking, yeah. With a pH, right?

Yeah.

So the first place he was ever defined, as far as anyone knows, was on Urban Dictionary in 2006. Which you gotta figure, by the time it makes it to Urban Dictionary, it's probably a term that people are using out in the world. And my thing was in 2010-ish, so it's possible that it was just somebody looking for a free place to stay, to frog.

I guess they frogged.

They frogged.

And if you're listening right now, no harm, no foul, and if you're a fan, hit us up by the frogging jacket. We're probably gonna be working on those.

Yeah, we'll do Frogger fans with pHs. It'll look classy.

And you can get yourself a little Monopoly house patch to put on your jacket.

There you go, it's perfect.

Although we don't recommend anyone do it, like that's a patch for unrelated reasons. We're not actively endorsing frogging, and we're not, by virtue of doing this, if we ever did it, it would not be an endorsement, and it would not be a reward, however you use it.

We definitely wouldn't give you a cool shirt with a happy smiling frog on the front and a back that says, number one frogger. We definitely wouldn't give you that shirt.

I broke into Chris's house and all I got was this T-shirt. I wouldn't give you that. We wouldn't give you that T-shirt.

We wouldn't, we wouldn't. One of the things I think is actually most sinister about frogging, besides the obvious creepiness and invasion of privacy, is that the signs of having a frog in your home, things being out of place in subtle ways, doors left open, unexplained sounds, objects moved, they all mirror the symptoms of psychosis. So like if you have bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or other mental illnesses, these are all things that you'll experience without a frog in your house. So if this starts to happen to you, you might have someone in your house or you could be losing your mind. And that's what a frog might end up doing. Like they might make you feel like there's something wrong with your brain. And statistically, there probably is something wrong with your brain. If you think you have a frog, the first place you should go is to the brain doctor.

Well, the thing is too, is because it mirrors so many of those symptoms, you might be like trying to tell people and then they think you're crazy and not that like, like the reality is that you're mentally slipping a little bit. It seems a lot more realistic than a person has like backpacked into part of your home. You know what I mean? Like has been living there, camping out.

Made you a stop along the Appalachian Trail.

Yeah, I do wonder if there is like, you know how there's like that old tramp hobo language. They would like have hobo signs. They would like carve into park benches. So, you know, like this is a safe place to sleep for the night. This is a safe train to get on, blah, blah, blah. It was like a hieroglyphics for people who rode the rails. I wonder if there's like a frogging version of that. Like, oh, this house is safe to frog in, that house is safe to frog in.

Well, you never know in the city, if it was disguised as just like random graffiti, you know?

Yeah.

You'd only know it if you were looking for it.

Yeah, well, you'd have to be taught it by an older frogger.

That's true, by a much older and wiser frogger.

It's like those guys at like Alpinus that climb the craziest stuff without any kind of like gear or whatever. It's like, you don't meet a lot of old ones.

Yeah.

So I don't know how long you can frog before you're caught, you know?

But I also think it's interesting that all the signs of frogging are signs that people point to when they think their house is haunted.

Oh, shit.

Because froggers create strange noises, pets will act strangely, they might take an object and then put it back out so it looks like something moved or disappeared. And so I'm not saying that, you know, every ghost is a frog, but going through a lot of this research, going through these cases, it is crazy how many frogging victims at some point thought their home was haunted before someone got caught frogging in their house.

Oh my God. Yeah.

And actually there's a, well, any movie I mention will get spoiled, but there are one or two movies who have this. So I wanted to, you know, obviously dig up some stories to share with you guys. There's dozens and dozens of cases of this. Although a lot of them don't quite nail the idea that the pure frog is just out for that sweet free rent and nothing else. But there are two that I want to highlight. One for the pure frogginess of the case and one for pure nightmare fuel. The first story here is from the Columbus dispatch dated May 31st, 2008, regarding an incident that actually occurred in Tokyo. The headline is, woman lives secretly for a year in man's closet.

And that's the thing, men, we do tend to have closets we don't visit. Like I think, I'm not gonna be like, men drive like this, women drive like this. Like I will say all the shit I need are in my drawers. My closet, I don't really go in there. I kind of just stuff shit in there, you know? Like I don't go in there to like get shoes and dresses and stuff.

This is Japan, so like the homes tend to be a little bit smaller, more compact.

Well, we don't know if it's in Tokyo. It might be in fucking some place outside of the city where you have a little bit more land.

That's true, that's true.

But if they have those paper walls, it's on them, we're not seeing.

Yeah, you gotta be real quiet.

You gotta be, oh man, you have a silhouette-shaped dress that like you just always have in your closet and you're like, it must just be that, right? It's gotta be my silhouette-shaped dress.

Yeah, so the article reads, a homeless woman who sneaked into a man's house and lived undetected in his closet.

It says sneaked, I don't trust this article.

It says sneaked. Now, I don't want to undermine the journalists in Columbus, Ohio, but I'm not sure sneaked is...

Yeah, maybe it's like hanged and hung, I don't know.

It might be. I'm gonna assume I'm the idiot here who thinks it should say snuck, but it does say sneaked.

And looked it up and snuck actually has a pretty interesting history, but more importantly, has become the preferred past tense of sneak.

We'll check the show notes to make sure the article wasn't written in the 1700s.

If it was, then our bad.

A homeless woman who snuck sneaked into a man's house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing. Police found the 58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man's closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itokura said yesterday.

Top compartment, so she's like a contortionist?

She's living in an Ikea-built something or other, it sounds like.

That's what I thought, if it said compartment, I'd think of like a cubby, like she's living in a cubby.

Yeah, the resident of the home in Kasuya installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing from his kitchen over the past several months. One of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home Thursday after he had left.

I can't even fucking imagine getting that alert on my phone because I'm thinking maybe a rat, a fucking rat maybe ran off with a pimento loaf. I don't, if you turn it on and it's just a fucking person, crawling like the fucking girl in the ring out of a cubby in your goddamn closet, I'd be like, hey officer, can you go to my house and burn it down please?

You should call Ken McElroy, burn it down and shoot the dog.

No, don't ever call Ken, don't ever shoot a dog.

But the camera that captured this thing, it didn't capture her coming out, it just captured someone moving inside his home. So he called the police thinking that he had a burglar. But then when the police showed up, they found the doors locked and all windows closed, which is like a crazy locked room murder mystery of like, I saw this person and then they show up, they're like, yeah, it's locked, no one's there.

Oh my God.

They searched the house, they checked everywhere she could hide and when they slid open the shelf closet, there she was nervously curled up on her side. The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked, snuck into the man's house about a year ago when he left it unlocked. And the article ends by noting.

That's her house now because of some sort of squatting rights. Technically, she's been here a year, I guess this is your roommate, officially this is your roommate now, I'm sorry. Legally, you live with her.

There's nothing the emperor can do about it. The article ends by noting she'd moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, it Takura said, calling the woman neat and clean.

I gotta say, devil you know, you know what I mean? You got a beautiful roommate like this, who's quiet, clean, doesn't bother you.

She's so small, she could fit in your closet cubby.

All you gotta do is be like, listen, can you toss me a few yen a month? And I think this arrangement works great.

She basically sounds like a leprechaun or like a fraggle.

I think it's more like a fraggle. She looks more like a fraggle. Cause a leprechaun has like a pot of gold. This lady is just like, I'm broke.

That's true.

I'm broke ass, so I can fraggle. But like, yeah, I don't know. It seems like he's given up a great roommate. That could be, if honestly, I don't know, where's the like Netflix series about, you know, I met my frogger and now we're in love. Like where, you know what I mean? It was like, it took them living in my closet for me to ask them to move in. Like that's the trailer for the like frogging and love, like finding your one true frogger, whatever stupid 90 day fiance bullshit you would definitely watch.

I love 90 day fiance.

I know you fucking do. But I think you would also love, you know, finding your forever frogger.

There you go, all PHs.

Yeah, finding your forever frogger, you would watch the shit out of that show about like, I heard a scratching and I thought it was a raccoon. Turns out it was a human lady and now we're married.

She was knocking on the door to my heart.

Yeah.

From the inside.

Yeah, yeah, she was knocking on the door to my heart from the inside. There you go. She was waiting for me to open the door to my heart, leave to go to work, really enjoying my heart when I wasn't home. And now that was fucking nuts though, right?

So the second case I want to highlight is less a true case of frogging, but it is a thousand times more frightening. It's the case of the Denver Spider-Man.

Stop it. I thought it couldn't get worse. It couldn't get worse. They don't give that moniker to somebody who's a vibe.

Especially not in 1941 when this went down.

Oh my God. They didn't even know what spiders were yet.

The science had so much to learn.

They did.

I'm reading an article here from All Things Interesting, The Denver Spider-Man. On October 17th, 1941, Philip Peters, a retiree of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, was home alone. His children had grown up and moved out, and his wife Helen was recovering in a local hospital after breaking her hip during a fall. Now, he had just gotten home, and about an hour after he got home, Peters' neighbors found his body. He'd been beaten to death with a cast iron stove shaker. The neighbors called the Denver police, but the authorities could find no signs of an intruder, and began what would become a fairly significant investigation. So, this guy's dead. The authorities were like, we don't know who did it. It doesn't even look like there was anyone else in the house.

And if the authorities are me, they're gonna go, what the fuck is a stove shaker?

I actually, that's a good question. I don't know. I assumed it was like-

It's gotta be one of the things that are like, that you see people who have fireplaces, they have like five things, like a poker hanging.

Yeah, I figured it was like the claw one to like shake something hot with.

Yeah, probably is. But that is, I had never heard of a cast iron stove shaker, but this is the 40s.

Yeah, they had all kinds of things that we don't have now.

Automats, stove shakers.

Yeah, so the police are called, they can't figure this out. They don't know, it doesn't even look like there's anyone else in the house. The investigation begins, and as the investigation begins, Helen, the wife, is released from the hospital where she was recovering from her broken hip. So she gets home with a fixed but busted up hit. She's a widow living alone in the same house where her husband was just murdered. And this is where the story gets really good. Because before long, Helen starts to experience strange things. Missing food, weird sounds, items not being where she remembered leaving them. And she became convinced that her house was haunted by the spirit of her murdered husband. So she eventually moved out to Grand Junction to live with her son and the house just sits there vacant. But neighbors also started to think the house was haunted. They kept reporting strange sounds and foul smells coming from the home. But each time the cops came around, they found nothing. And then one night in 1942, in July, these two detectives decide they're gonna stake out the house. Bill Jackson and Roy Bloxham. So the most plain named guy in the world and the weirdest named guy in the world, a real odd couple.

Don't worry, we're sending Jackson and Bloxham. They're on the case.

Yeah. They decided to stake out the house. No one had reported anything that night, but the detectives thought it might work to their benefit because if something was going on at the house, and they were surveilling it without anyone having to call, maybe they'd have a better chance of catching someone. And sure enough, after a little bit, they see a man in the house, so they go inside, but when they get there, the man's gone until they hear a noise coming from the attic, the entrance to which was in a closet on the second floor. And so they go to the closet to look at the attic and there's these two legs disappearing up into the hole in the ceiling.

Ooh, it's like human legs.

Yeah, human legs. So the cops grab these legs and pull this guy out.

Yeah, these two Pinkertons jump to action.

Bluxom and Jackson jump to action and they find this guy named Theodore Coney's. And what they learn is that Coney's had met the dead man, Peters, through the Denver Guitar Club, which I hope graduated some hard rockers.

Of the 40s? It's all a lot of Django Reinhardt stuff.

Yeah, but when Coney's fell on hard times, he decided to go to Peters and ask for help. But when he got there to Peters' house, Peters wasn't home at the time. So Coney's decided to break in and steal some food. A few days later, he comes back, also planning to ask for help. And again, Peters isn't there. So Coney's goes inside and that's when Peters comes home. And in that time before the neighbors found the body, it turns out that Peters was upset that Coney's was there and Coney's claimed it was a split second decision to kill Peters after which he made a nest up in the attic.

This guy's story does not track for me. Guy comes home and be like, hey man, sorry I broke in, I was hungry, I got some food. We know each other from the guitar club. Like this doesn't track. This guy, he had plans to beat the shit out of this guy and kill him and did it.

Maybe, maybe they were competing songwriters.

Why would he create a fucking man nest in the attic though? None of this tracks for me.

Well, that's the thing. I am curious if the nest was there first. Like if the wife was in the hospital and this guy got into the house and put that nest up.

Yeah, if anything, the man discovered him living in a man nest, feeding smaller men by chewing up worms and spitting in their mouths.

I'm just picturing tombs from that X-Files episode, like covering newspaper shreddings in bile or liver.

I think realistically, he was living the man nest life for a while. He was on an episode of Pimp My Nest. And then the guy comes home. He goes, what is this? A nest in my home? And the guy's like, oh, it's not what it looks like. It's not what it looks like. I'm not living in a fucking nest. And then he's like, you get out of here right now. They came to blows. He hit him with a fucking stove shaker or whatever. And you know, Bob's your uncle. We got a dead guy. Well, I don't think there was any version where he was like, okay, wasn't there. Then I came back. And he was, you know, all the like back and forth doesn't make sense. But if you find a man living his best nest life in your attic, then yeah, it can come to blows. I get that.

True. Especially if Peters was jealous of how pimped out the attic nest was.

Oh, he's living better than him. He's living better upstairs than he is down there. Him and his wife are eating scraps of what's left behind from the stolen food. You know, they have no shaker. So they're fucking fires garbage.

Yep. And Coney's just upstairs. He's got a set of turntables with fish that live in the bottom of them.

Oh my God, why?

Because it's pimped.

Oh yeah, I forgot that Exhibit came in 1941 and redid his nest. I don't know why I referenced anything to do with pimping, I'm sorry.

So one officer goes up to check out the nest.

Falls in love with it, moves in.

The smell was so bad, he puked.

Okay, and moved immediately back out, sure.

I'd love to know if this was Jackson or Bluxom.

Bluxom's like, you're not gonna put that in the report, are you? And he's like, you know what? I fucking have to, I have to. And he's like, no, man, it's to be a solid.

Well, whichever of these cops it was, they spat a great line. They said, a man would have to be a spider to stand it long up there. Thus, the Denver Spider-Man story was born, and Coney's was ultimately convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, as he should have been. For his ostentatious display of nest wealth.

Yeah, he showed his nest wealth off, thought as emperor of this nest domain, the laws don't apply to me, and killed a man, got arrested for it. I just told that story a little faster than you did. It's a good summary, though.

Now, if you're thinking a lot of these stories sound like they could be movies, you're not wrong. Like we mentioned at the beginning, there's a whole history of movies about terrible neighbors. And today, we are psyched beyond words to bring you an interview with the writer of your next favorite movie about a neighbor from hell. The movie is called Destroy All Neighbors. It debuts on Shudder on January 12th. And the writer is my good buddy, Charlie Pieper. Charlie, welcome to the show.

Hello, for the record, one of the writers, but yes, the one who kind of started it all. We can get into all the details.

Yes, yes.

I'm the one who lived it in a way along with the director and got the ball rolling on this very relatable topic of troublesome neighbors.

Yes. So I've known Charlie since I think like 2005 or 2006.

Yeah, no, definitely 2005.

Chris, were you one of the neighbors that inspired this movie?

No, I wasn't. I don't think so.

My brain is mush, but no, I remember you as a fellow. You were like a spooky horror supernatural guy. We ran in similar circles way back when and still do, clearly.

Yeah, we met at Emerson. I was in the little building. You were at Beacon and then at some point I was in an apartment on Beacon Hill. I first actually think I might have run into you as a sketch comedy guy before I knew you were a horror guy. I can't remember what came first, but I quickly found out that Charlie is many things. He's an artist, a writer, a director, a stop motion animator, a person from New Jersey, but don't take it from me. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, yeah, so I grew up in North Jersey. My parents are goofy, weirdo theater people. And so they, for better or for worse, were super up for my weirdo interests. Day one, I came out a monster kid and no one knows where that came from.

You mean monster like Fangoria monster or you were just a brutal child?

I know, I was a shy, awkward little guy, but I've been reading Fangoria since I was in the first grade. There was a magic shop, a couple of towns over for me called Ken's Magic Shop. And one of the people who worked there, he was this hella old school goth teenager. And he literally, you know, black every day, the makeup. He told me that he slept in a coffin that he built himself. And I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I was like, what, eight or nine? And one day after I'd been there a lot, like I was a regular along with my parents at the store. He was like, check this out. He pulled up a Fangoria magazine and let me look at it. And the rest was history. I got a subscription. I went to my first Fangoria weekend of horrors convention in New York City. Later that year, there are photos of me with Tom Savini as a child, like excited. And he's just like, what the fuck, I'm like, okay. And, but yeah, thankfully my parents were so supportive. They let me watch whatever I wanted. They would fast forward the naughty bits, right? Cause I was a kid, but all the gore and the violence, that was fine. And also I knew about special effects because of looking at magazines like Fangoria. So my dream job as a kid was to be a practical effects monster maker. And you know, my parents would be a little squeamish and I'd be like, oh, that's a rubber head filled with meat. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. So yeah, I've been into horror and stuff. And yeah, I went to Emerson, met Chris there. I was in the comedy troupe, Chocolate Cake City.

I remember it.

One of the big ones there. And even in college, I was kind of awkward and shy. My joke is we all went to a communication school because we didn't know how to communicate.

Yeah, a lot of truth to that, yeah.

This guy, he works in animation now, along with his wife, Josie, his name's Marley. And they were in Chocolate Cake City and I was friendly with him. And he's like, Charlie, just come do the animations for us. You could just animate our shorts. And I was like, great.

You can be the Terry Gilliam of Chocolate Cake.

Exactly, right. That was sort of the plan. But of course, once you're in a comedy troupe, you end up doing a little bit of everything. And I had that latent theater kid energy in me from my parents. So honestly, yeah, that comedy troupe kept me at Emerson more than the classes, more than the film stuff. And now, 10 years on or more, my focus is in film and animation, but I'm still very connected to those comedy people. And yeah, this film is a comedy. It's a splatter gore comedy, but it's wacky as hell. I sometimes do very serious dark and bleak horror films as well, which we can get into. But this one, this is Creepshow on steroids. This is just wacky.

The trailer has a very, maybe not quite as grotesque as like Meet The Feebles, but like early Peter Jackson, Dead Alive, gore comedy vibes to it, which is really amazing because we don't really have a lot of boofies like that anymore. I feel like once A24 stepped into the horror scene, everything became very like moody and ponderous and to have something that's a crazy shotgun blast is awesome.

So I think for our listeners, in case they hadn't watched the trailer or something, we know it's about a bad neighbor, but there's actually a little bit more to it than that, right?

Yeah, Charlie, how much do you want to tee up?

Okay, well, beyond just a bad neighbor, the film follows a struggling would-be prog rock artist played by Jonah Ray. He works at a rundown recording studio in the Valley. He's a button pusher. No one really listens to him. No one really cares about prog rock, but he's been trying for years to finish this epic magnum opus album. And then this crazy loud neighbor moves in next door, played by Alex Winter from Bill and Ted and Freaked. And the neighbor is so loud and insane that Jonah can't focus on his music. And it drives him nuts to the point that he decides he has to kill his neighbor. And one crazy thing leads to another, and there's tons of accidental murders, which bring back the corpses as sort of antagonistic frenemy ghosts that end up sort of helping Jonah finish his album as his backup band.

God, I can't wait for people to see this fucking movie.

It sounds unhinged in a great way.

So yeah, let's get into where Destroy All Neighbors came from. Let's talk about Neighbors From Hell. So you say you lived the story that inspired this. Was this based on one bad neighbor or multiple bad neighbors?

It was based on multiple. I had one particularly harrowing, ongoing neighbor situation. And one day I brought it up to my good friend, Josh Forbes. He's a music video director, great guy. He's the one who ended up directing Destroy All Neighbors. So I told him about my experience. He also was going through a rough neighbor situation at the time. So by multiple, that's what I mean, is that both he and I had similar issues. So we just, honestly, we started complaining. And then Josh, like a light bulb, proverbially appeared on set. He's like, we should turn this into a movie. Everyone's had bad neighbor experiences. What if we just pool it together and just crank it to 11 Spinal Tap style? So that was, yeah, that was, I want to say, 11 years ago. And, you know, I had done more writing and he had done more directing. So this really began as a handshake agreement between friends. It was, you know, hey, Charlie, you know, write it for me. I'll try to get it out there. And with our combined energy, maybe it'll be easier to get produced. Still took a decade, but he was right. If I had tried to do this myself, as someone who had only directed shorts and didn't have feature, like this wouldn't be here. So it was this beautiful, creative collaboration. But yeah, it grew out of just wanting to fucking kill someone on the page, because we have people who are driving us nuts. And every time we brought it up to friends in LA, they're like, oh my God, me too. Like statistically, we all have frustrating neighbors. And statistically, we've probably also frustrated other neighbors. It's a cycle. And so that's where it started. And I spent about a year and a half, two years writing the early drafts and going back and forth.

Right, before we get too far into the process of making the movie, I want to hear these stories. Because earlier in the episode, we talked about some of my terrible neighbors and some of Ed's terrible neighbors. But so what was going on? I mean, obviously yours is probably the more like personal one, but with you and Josh, what were your neighbors doing?

Well, both of us had rather unhinged neighbors.

Yes.

I had lived in this apartment for, I think, yeah, I moved into where I still am now. Thank you. Rent control old building, oh my God.

Same, same, same. I'm in golden handcuffs. Like I can never leave my apartment.

So I've been here maybe, I want to say four or five years before this new neighbor moved in. He was a raging alcoholic who also had a bit of a cocaine problem.

Great combo.

You're up all night, you don't even realize you're drunk. It's a problem, bad mix.

He would have loud parties and just Blair 80s music and rock music. And again, older building, mirror image building. So my wall in the living room was his living room wall and most worst, my bedroom wall, my closet was also his closet on the other side. So I would just, it was like living next to a werewolf because I could hear him snorting up and howling and stomping around. Just imagine every classical bad neighbor stereotype rolled into one. He was just a really messed up dude and this went on for a long time. But it was a similar thing where Josh had a neighbor who was just kind of losing his proverbial marbles and it was just, it's rough, you know, cause like I never called the police on this guy cause he was so unhinged. I was afraid of what he might do if they showed up. But so it was kind of, you feel like you're a rat trapped in a cage with another rat who wants to eat all your food through the wall.

Yeah, that sucks. That's tough.

Yeah, I know. And I've been in that situation where it's like, do you call the police? Do you not call the police? It's just going to upset them. And the police are like, I don't want to give them my name or whatever. But then the guy's like, who else would have called? Like you're the only one who shares. It's not that hard to deduce even through like a coke addled brain. You're like, wait a minute. It's clearly this guy.

I feel like from day one, he considered me the enemy just cause he knew I could hear him and it was scary. It was life draining. I was going through all sorts of creative and financial and career angst at the time too. And just, it was rough. And he was there for years before he finally got evicted. So.

Oh, so they did finally, the landlord tossed him eventually.

Because of me and kind of, I don't want to go into too many details with that.

Yeah, he might be a fan. He might be a fan of the show. You don't want to give away too much.

Honestly, I, there is a comical concern that he would find out about the film and be upset, but.

It's weird that you dedicated the film and used his real name to him.

Yeah, that'll be a problem.

You shouldn't have done that.

The film ends with a heart star wiped dissolved to a special thanks to this guy with his name, with his numbers, new address. It's amazing. He's really a, he's been a guardian angel in my life in the long run.

So. We thought it was important to talk to him at the end of the film. Hell yeah.

Yeah. That's awesome. Okay. So you guys, I mean, this is such a great example of like turning pain into art, really. I mean, like, cause I remember hearing stories vaguely about this guy as all this was happening. And yeah, it was so long ago.

I've written about seven other screenplays. Ones that I would like to direct myself is typically I write for myself, this thing with Josh Forbes, which is just a beautiful, unique situation, but almost all of them are based off things I've been through in my life. Cause I think inherently, I think I'm drawn towards horror because I feel like life is a horror story. It's uncontrollable, stuff happens. I've had a lot of health scares, medical scares. I'm in a very, I'm in a much better place health-wise than I was hell at the end of college and the start of my LA times. But yeah, there's something about taking that control back, right? You might not be able to control the situation in life, but if you turn into a narrative, you control it. And it's turning pain into art and art is, I think it's a life necessity if you're creatively minded.

And especially like you said, if there's so many people who you were like statistically hate their neighbors. It's like Death Wish when Death Wish came out. It's just so many people are like, I wish I can just shoot people on the subway. I'm not giving that the green light. I'm not saying that's to be our standard, but I imagine that movie was a small movie and it was a hit. And I think it was because people were like, fucking crime's out of control, man. I wish I could be Charles Bronson. And in your way here, you're like, man, what would I would love to do to my neighbor?

And then, I mean, during, you know, we had the quarantine years, there was like what, almost two years where we were stuck inside with our neighbors. It kind of resurrected the project, not to jump ahead a bit, but you know, because I'd written it and Josh had pitched it around and no one really bit on it. We'd had the lead actor attached as another wonderful handshake agreement, but-

And tell us who that lead actor is in case people haven't seen the trailer yet.

Yes, so the film stars Jonah Ray Rodriguez, who is, people might know Jonah Ray from, he's the current host of Mystery Science Leader 3000.

And if you live in LA, you might've seen him at Meltdown for many years with-

Yeah, he's a great comedian, big into horror and sci-fi. And much to his credit, we'd sent him my early draft of the script, what, seven years ago, maybe eight? And he came on board and it was another handshake agreement. It was pretty much, I like this, I'd love to be in it. Say I'm attached and let's see if we can raise the budget. And a little bit after he came on board, the first Punch Up writer was brought on. This wonderful writer, his name is Mike Benner. He's written for Bob's Burgers. I think he was on Gravity Falls. Wonderful cartoon, stuff I love. And the idea was, now that we have Jonah, how about we tailor his character to his sense of humor and his kind of style to make him more comfortable and kind of integrate him into the plot. And again, this started as a creative collaboration between me and Josh. So I was more than open to bringing on another writer to help pull it together. And Mike Benner, his comedy, he's legit. So we all oscillate on the same creative frequency. So his draft, cause again, remember, I started writing this when I was going through my troubles. I was a younger, grumpier, angstier guy. Mike made it more humorous and it just, it evolved and was then ignored or passed on by every company in LA.

So was Seinfeld.

I know.

Yeah, you're a good company.

Thank you. But yeah, it laid dormant for years until it got resurrected again during the pandemic.

And how did that come about? Was it somebody else who bit? Was it another actor? Was it a producer who came on? How did it come back?

Did more and more people start to like, by virtue of being stuck at home, really started to notice like, oh wow, neighbors are shit.

Well, I'm sure there was a bit of that, but really it's all thanks to Jonah. He just had a fire in his brain to resurrect the script. I think he had done a podcast or something with Alex Winter. It was sent to Alex Winter, kind of like, hey, I've been working on this script. I think you might like it if you like it. Do you want to maybe just become a producer on it? And he read the script and he liked it enough to want to play Vlad, the neighbor next door, and the rest is history. And it's been marvelous. I've been a fan of Alex Winter's stuff since forever. Freaked back in the day as a kid watching that. That's kind of like a big part of why my brain is the way I am. So the fact that we wrote something in that kind of similar over-the-top comedy style that got him on board, it's been great. And yeah, Alex came on board, Shudder came on board shortly after, and here we are, what, like a year and a half later.

Yeah, it's one of those things. That's how it goes, right? It's like nine, 10 years, and then all of a sudden it's like, we're really moving now. You go from grabbing Alex to a year and a half later, we're talking about the release of it, which is pretty wild.

Yeah. And I have to, another shout out, after Alex came on board, one other writer was brought on, just because remember, by this point, the script had collected digital dust for years. So one new writer was brought on to kind of resurrect it, kind of blend the two drafts together. And then he's a wonderful comedian, right? His name is Jared Logan, hysterical guy. And so he was like that final piece, that final key. He created a lot of callback jokes. See, like he put this writing ribbon on. So I just want to be clear that we share this script together. And I am so happy to have had it elevated by two other writers who just brought it up way beyond what I had initially done. So I lived it, arguably, but they elevated it and we share it together. And it's been a blast.

Well, that's great. Yeah, that's super fun.

That's awesome. And I think that's a really nice combination of like, like on indie movies, you don't as often, I feel like, have writers coming in and like, helping like put the pieces together. But I think sometimes in a case like this, it can be really valuable, especially when all those writers are on the same page, because you're really elevating the material each time, instead of working with one writer who is like, well, no, this is the version, and then fighting with the producers, and then things never happen. And like, I think there's a really nice charm and polish to that teamwork that makes it exciting, I think.

And you were, it sounds like you were open to it, Charlie, too, which is important.

Oh, dude, if I was younger or more controlling, I might've been, look, I could have easily put my foot down and then I'd have been a dumb chump chump who wouldn't have had a movie made, you know?

That's maturity.

Sharing the credit, allowing for a movie, it's great, it's wonderful. And I can say their version is more entertaining, it's funnier, it's still my characters, it's my plot, and a lot of my scenes are like, the flow is there, but they're just fucking, this is funnier, this is more engaging, it's-

I'm willing to bet your version from being younger, it was probably more mean-spirited.

Yes, it was.

Yeah, and then these guys came in with more of a global comedy sensibility, which is like, not every joke has to be undercutting something. And especially coming from someone who worked on Gravity Falls, worked on Bob's Burgers, they understand that. And then a standup who probably has a good mind for callbacks and how do you build an hour. So yeah, I mean, it sounds like you had some really great talent come on, and Jonah on his own is so funny and probably contributed so much.

Jonah is great, man. I mean, yeah, he stayed aboard this for like what, seven or eight years before it got-

Yeah.

Funded and that just, that means the world to me and he's legit.

And it kind of seems like a little bit, and I only mean this from like a, from a visual perspective, because I don't know all the twists and turns in the movies, but like, it kind of seems like Jonah's playing you a little bit. Like in the trailer, I'm like, oh yeah, that's Charlie.

I wrote it in the main characters, an exaggerated version of some of my worst, obsessive creative impulses. And here's something that's crazy. So my apartment, many years ago, I painted it, like the living room's this kind of calm, dark green color kind of museum. I just got tired of all the white. The set designers for The Surreal Neighbors, when I walked onto the set of the apartment, they had painted Jonah's character's apartment the exact same shade of green as my real apartment. Just coincidentally. So not only does Jonah kind of emulate me and kind of look like me with the glasses, the apartment looks like my apartment. They actually, without swung, they wrote a kind of running gag joke into the film on Jonah that's based off an issue. I'm very much there through him, and it's quite funny to see.

It's really funny because last week, we talked to Pat Casey and Josh Miller, who wrote Violent Night, and they're not in Violent Night. Although I think their cameo might have gotten cut, but it's just so nice and refreshing to talk to two people two weeks in a row whose movies came out and like are very much them. You know, you're literally kind of in your movie and their movie was not rewritten to death. Like it so rarely happens in Hollywood that people get to write movies and then have them directed by other people and come out and be like, yeah, that's me. Like that's my voice, that's my sense of humor. And I think it's really cool.

Thank you. I agree. It's been wild. And let me just do another shout out. The special effects were designed by Gabe Bartalos, who's this amazing effects artist. I've worked for him before. He did the puppets on my short film, Malachistraca. I grew up watching his movies. He did Frank Henenlotter's Brain Damage and Baskacase Two and Three. He did all the prosthetics in Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle. He's half in the horror world, half in the high art world. And he designed all the prosthetics and the creatures for this. And then the painting and application of the prosthetics was done by the Academy Award winning effects artist, Bill Corso, who's been working with Alex Winter since the first Bill and Ted film.

Oh wow.

So this film is full of practical effects, puppets.

You have some connective tissue with like station and stuff then. Yes, yes we do. Yeah, wow, awesome.

Awesome. There's some stop motion animation by Rich Zim, who's an incredible animator who worked on The Nightmare Before Christmas and Gumby in the 90s. This film, it's a lot. I think people have a lot of fun watching it.

So I guess we can also, we can also anticipate some stop motion in this movie then. If you have people like that working on it, then this is gonna be our second stop motion movie this year, where we've talked about, we had a really good time watching Onyx.

Yeah, also great creature designs.

Great creature design, yeah.

He goes by Creature Kid. I think he's in Colorado. I have a wonder cabinet in my living room, because of course I do, and it's full of puppets and monsters I built. But one of the little, I have a little sculpture of one of the Mole Men from the 1950s horror film that that creature designer designed years ago. I just bought it at a convention. Yeah, that guy rocks.

Yeah, so it's actually kind of interesting. We've been talking to fun people and going to see stuff this year that has been like the independent world and the spirit of indie horror is really alive and well, and a lot of practical effects we've seen done really well. It sounds like we're gonna see a little bit of that in a couple of weeks when this drops too.

100%, oh yes.

And that's actually the other thing I was gonna ask about was the effects and the puppetry and everything, because that's another thing that I think really makes this movie feel like it came from you, even though other people help bring all that together, the fact that it has all those puppets and stop motion and all that stuff.

Because that's the sort of stuff I've loved forever and have pushed, and I've done a lot of stop motion animated shorts myself, whether I animated them or produced them more lately. Yeah, when I was younger, I mean, by the end of Emerson, I was focused strictly on stop motion animation. And then I sort of ended up more in the live action space. But whenever I can bring in puppets and stop motion, I do, because I just, I love it. And arguably, that's another reason this film took so long to make, because it needed more time and a little bit more of a budget for the animation and the effects. But we stuck to our guns. And I think the end result will stand out all the more because of it.

Amazing.

It'll probably live longer too. Like I think about this all the time, practical effects, even if something looks hokey or slow or like that's not as smooth as CG, what have you. It always just feels timeless. Like my favorite thing in the world is 80s lightning. The like drawn lightning.

You will like this movie.

Cause that's to me, like I never get tired of looking at it. I don't care what the movie is, whether it's a big Amblin movie or something small or weird science.

I just rewatched Gremlins 2 last night and Gabe was on the puppet team for it. He designed the lettuce gremlin and was on it. And like that lightning gremlin hand animated frame by frame, it's incredible.

Have you ever seen the Key and Peele Gremlins 2 sketch?

Oh my God. It's so spot on.

We'll put it in the show notes. We're putting it in the show notes. Do you want us to put your shorts in the show notes? Are those anywhere?

Oh sure, absolutely. Yeah, I have some of my stuff public on Vimeo and I have my own website.

Well, make sure we get that info. We'll add it to the show notes.

So January 12th, Shudder. Make sure you see this movie. And Charlie, you also I think told us that there's going to be a theatrical rollout as well.

Yeah, it will be in select Alamo Drafthouse theaters across America, starting also on January 12th, going through that weekend and maybe a little bit into the next week. So it'll be in LA, it'll be in New York City, it'll be in Texas, I think DC area, Virginia. There's a website where you can find more info. If you go to watchdestroy.com, it'll have all the info on there.

Great. Okay, we'll put that in the show notes. So yeah, if you want to eat some nachos while you're watching Alex Winter's head fly around, yes, that'll be a great way to do it.

As above, so below.

Well, Charlie, while we've got you here, we end each episode by discussing the fear tier, which is a ranking of how scary we find the topic of the week. And it's on a scale of not scary at all to the top of the scale is getting a bucket of hot piss and shit dumped on your head.

That happened to the tourist on Hollywood Boulevard a couple of years ago.

Yes, this is exactly what I'm referencing.

Yeah, okay, well, I live off the corner of Hollywood Boulevard a little bit more to the east. Like I'm not riding the heart of the beast, but fucking, amen. Like that's, I think you just would rather just die on the spot than have to continue living with that drama.

That's what I'm saying, dude. So I'm glad that like, so we have a guest on right now who knows exactly what I'm talking about and has apparently stayed in your brain the way it's rolled around in my brain. But yeah, it might change in season two. But as of right now, I'm glad that you know what that's referencing because it was alarming to read. Anyway, so we have a thing called a fear tier and I think Chris will take you through it.

Now, we don't have a visual yet. The fear tier is constantly evolving.

That's kind of the joke of the first season is like it's coming next week and it never comes.

Yeah, so I'll start just to like give a sense. I would place Neighbors From Hell fairly high on the fear tier, not as high as the worst, the ultimate disgusting top of the fear tier.

Well, it was like a hobo. He's technically all our neighbors.

That's true. But I would place Neighbors From Hell on par with The Hat Man and maybe a little bit higher because The Hat Man is questionably real. And Neighbors From Hell, even if they aren't serial killers, even if they're just like your old neighbor, Charlie, who was just like a nightmare, they're very common. They can be really difficult to live with. So I place it pretty high. I'd put it up there by Hat Man and above Talking to the Dead for sure.

Talking to the Dead would be relaxing compared to having to deal with a live human actually there.

I don't know, your whole movie, I think it rides on Talking to the Dead.

Fair enough.

The interaction is equally shitty. I would put that super fucking high. I've had some, I mean, I've lived in the same apartment for 13 years. I have pretty good neighbors comparatively and any that aren't great, I'm not gonna mention because I've lived in the same place 13 years. But that said, yeah, I don't like the shitty neighbors know where I live. And that's to me like just a problem. Like, I don't know, I'm extroverted in some ways, but I avoid confrontation. Like, that's all I do all day is try to avoid confrontation. So there's so much cocaine banging around I would put up with before I ever felt like I'm gonna put myself in a position to A confront someone and B, I just assume any confrontation is going to end with retaliation in some kind. And so that's a bigger fear for like a bad neighbor. They know where you live. They know when you leave. They know when you come back. It's like they can stake you out on their couch. You know what I mean?

Precisely.

So yeah, I don't love it. I think it's very high. A bad neighbor or a neighbor I would find or consider maybe dangerous is super high for me.

Same.

Yeah. And Charlie, I know you don't know everything else on the fear tier, but it sounds like you would definitely put this pretty high on your list of fears.

Like a one to 10 or is it just-

It's like a one to 10. Let's just say it's like a one to 10.

Yeah, until further notice.

Bad neighbor, it's like a 7.5 to eight. Like it's not the ultimate top, because that would probably be more of a absolutely non-stoppable supernatural thing, right? Because it's less, but real human interaction that goes on and the fear of if you do something about it, they'll come back. That was my life for years. And so yeah, it's up there. Also just statistically up there, because I think we have all more or less been through it. And now I worry I'm that neighbor, because I'm listening to loud German art films at night. There's screaming and yelling and I live on the second floor. I do my best to tiptoe around. But after years of being hyper aware of this neighbor, now the fear is, oh shit, have I become him?

I smell a sequel.

Yeah, it's just a sequel is called, Is It Me? It's like, it's an hour and 30 minutes of people letting you know it's you.

Destroy all selves.

Well, I'm glad that we were able to end the season on a genuinely scary topic, because I feel like a lot of our topics, they're conceptually frightening, like abandoned towns, but not particularly scary. And this, I feel like we're ending on a high note, high on the fear tier, high on this awesome movie. So that's going to do it for us this week. Thank you so much, Charlie, for coming on. And we'll put everything in the show notes.

Sounds good.

It's been an incredible 2023.

I mean, as far as podcasts goes, I mean, I think 2023 has gone the way of the last four years.

Yeah, that's a fair asterisk to say.

Yeah, like, I think we're going to have to put an asterisk next to every year until I die, I think. Like, it seems like every year it's like, is this the year it becomes 2019 again? Oh, it's not. Well, we'll add that to the fear tier.

Yeah, with that said, 2023 was a great year for this podcast, especially and in particular and exclusively in the sense that we started it three months ago and we're up past 50,000 downloads. We've got people on Facebook, on Instagram, chiming in and talking. We've got a great group of fans. We're going to be back in a couple of weeks to a month or two with season two.

Probably some stuff in between.

Nice. Yeah, stuff in between. Keep an eye out. You guys are awesome. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And we will see you in 2024.

Thanks, Charlie.

Thank you.

Scared All The Time would like to thank Scott and Forrest for putting us out here. And Tess Feifel for all her hard work. And Mr. Disfamer for recording stuff when we need it last minute. And most importantly, we'd just like to thank all the people who listen. It's been a lot of fun. Seriously, we say it a lot, but it's been a lot of fun going through the emails and messages. And there's so much stuff we haven't even used yet. There's so much stuff that if you've heard from me or Chris and we're like, hey, we really want to do this thing or whatever, we just haven't even done it yet. There's so much more to come. So don't think that if we talked about it and then it didn't happen, it's not gonna happen. And we can't wait to read some of your poems and get out some books and some homemade bookmarks, whatever that's gonna be. Yeah, there's a lot more to come. So thank you again, everyone so much. Have a wonderful, safe new year and we will see you in season two. Scared All The Time is co-produced and written by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity, Tess Feifel.

Our theme is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew and Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

No part of the show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends production.

Good night. We are in this together. Together.

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