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You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky.

A few months ago, we put out a call for our listeners to tell us about your favorite guilty pleasures. We heard from a lot of people, including a few of you who were against this premise on principle, because you said no one should feel guilty about liking a work of pop culture, so long as it’s not offensive.

But what fascinates me about the concept of guiltily pleasures – especially with sci-fi and fantasy – is that these genres began with lowbrow origins in pulp fiction and Saturday matinee serials. Over the years, creators have tried to elevate sci-fi and fantasy to critical acclaim and levels of respectability. And I think many of these “guilty pleasures” are really about the pure pleasure of enjoying something that is just really weird or fantastical. And we got submissions about all types of media, but we were particularly in movies because movies work so well as spectacles, and they can give you that hit over and over again.

So, let’s begin with Corey Esser. He calls himself a, quote, connoisseur of bad movies. In fact, he says they’re guilty pleasures only in that he feels guilt in how much he loves to inflict them on his friends. It all started when he was a kid.

COREY: My uncle is eight years older than I am. And he, you know, watched me as a kid. So, he would get the movies like, oh, don't tell your mom, we watched this. So, we'd watch like the Italian sword and sorcery kind of things like the Death Stalker that was like Conan but taken into the next level. So those kinds of things, you'll Beastmaster and, and that's kind of my, my niche. Was he the one who was he, the person who introduced you to the whole idea of the bad movies? COREY: I think unintentionally he did. I just because those are the kinds of movies that, you know, we, we would go and get, because we weren't supposed to watch him or we couldn't watch him when, you know, there were other adults around because nobody else would want to watch those. Um, I found out later on, and as I got a little older that, uh, my grandmother also had a little bit of that twisted sense of humor to her. I popped in unexpectedly one night and walked in and she was watching Pumpkin Head. Ha! COREY: And I had never seen her watch a scary movie before. And she kind of was like, what are you doing here? And sit down and grab some popcorn. We're going to watch the rest of the movie. So maybe it's just the genetic thing.

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Years later, Corey was browsing through a video store. And he saw a movie that looked like hideous off-brand versions of The Muppets. It was called Meet the Feebles, and it’s about these puppet characters that put on a show while there’s a lot of backstage drama. Corey didn’t know at the time, but this was Peter Jackson’s second film and it got Peter Jackson a lot of attention in 1989 because it was really shocking. Or as Corey describes it:

COREY: If the guys from South Park and the guys from Jim Henson studios got together and used a whole lot of illegal substances and then recorded their ideas because it's all there. It's just layers on layers of weird and they just don't hold back on anything.

HEIDI: How dare you speak to me like that, you horrible spiteful rat! TREVOR: I’ve heard better singing from a mongoose with throat cancer. HEIDI: I don’t stand for this!

It's funny. So, I'd actually never watched it before. I'd always heard of it. So, I started watching it. And at first, I was like, oh my God, this is brilliant. This is subversive. And after about half an hour, I couldn't take how horrible all the characters were, except for the super naive character, like love interest, everybody else was just like so horrible. COREY: Yeah. There, there are very few redeeming characters. Have people ever had that reaction when you showed it to people? COREY: Yeah, a lot of, a lot of people are like, well, if they focused on that part and it was like the love story of the new guy with the, you know, the sweet little hedgehog and they're like show more of him, but then they keep going back to, you know, these awful, you know, the, the weasel making snuff films in the basement or the, the, uh, the fly paparazzi that lives in the toilet tank, you know, things like that. And they're like, go away from that and let's get back to the fun part. The first scene that made me like, be like, oh shit, this is getting dark. Weirdly enough was the drug deal that happened on the golf course, because I think because it was played so straight, except they’re all like, giant puppets.

MR. BIG: It's good stuff, boss. BLETCH: When can we expect delivery? CEDRIC: Meet Louie in the alleyway at 6.

COREY: And I think that's what, what kind of sucks people in, because they'll see things like that. And I'm like, is there going to be like a serious subplot of this? Or is this just 3 something ridiculous? And then, you know, that just kind of goes away and they get into the, the surreal stuff again. So, when you show people Meet the Feebles, is there one scene that's often the deal breaker? COREY: Usually it's when they get up to the, uh, the basement snuff movie with the, uh, the cow and the cow sits on a cockroach. That's, they're doing like a bondage scene and accidentally kills the, this cockroach.

TREVOR: Didn’t you realize you were sitting on its face? COW: It was a bit uncomfortable, but I thought it was my hemorrhoids.

COREY: It's a completely ridiculous scene. And I can't imagine being in the room where they're pitching that or, or, you know, the writing team gone, all right. Here's what we're going to do today. Um, but a lot of times that's the one where they're like, nope, got to go. So how come the, you know, the things that bother everybody else about, about the movie, you know, that make them, like, they often can't even get through it. How come those affect you? COREY: I think it's because I like to look at where they come from and what they're doing with it, because you know, for the time it was made, it really kind of hit home a lot of issues. And you have the sub-plots of like the promiscuous rabbit host that ends up with, you know, the big disease and, you know, they leave it go on named or, they kind of tackle interracial relationships by having, uh, an elephant that had a baby with a chicken and it pushes envelopes and things like that. So, I kind of ties into those and say, you know, this was doing things that people appreciate when they see it on like South Park or, you know, they see something more modern doing, doing something that pushes the envelope. This was just, you know, 15 years earlier.

That’s the other reason he loves Meet the Feebles. It was made by a good filmmaker, early in his career, who had nothing to lose.

COREY: It kind of was the catalyst for some of the things that came later. So, um, a lot of the people that worked on Meet the Feebles carried through with Peter Jackson’s whole career. And it worked even for just that little nugget of trivia that you can watch through the credits and see, you know, some of the people that built puppets for this built the, the puppets and the feet and the prosthetics for Lord of the Rings, or they did affects work on King Kong.

So, if people who went on to make Oscar-winning film began with Meet the Feebles, I wanted to figure out, what defines a guilty pleasure? I checked in with 4

Lou Hare because he hosts a podcast called Guilty Pleasures, and this is a question they talk about a lot on his show.

LOU: I define a guilty pleasure in like the simplest term is a first of all, I guess I should qualify. I don't think guilt is associated. I don't feel bad for liking some of the movies that I like. I don't think anybody should, but it's the common place holder for what I call qualify as like a bacon cheeseburger type of a movie, you know, it's not good for you. You shouldn't eat it all the time. You shouldn't base your diet around it, but man, you just, you bite into one and it's incredibly satisfying. What I say on my podcast is a guilty pleasure is a movie that you love, despite what critic’s public opinion or even your own God-given sense might tell you.

If guilty pleasures could be considered a genre, there are certain movies in the canon like Roadhouse, Con Air and Grease 2. But the one he’s not comfortable with is The Room, which was a low budget movie by an indie filmmaker named Tommy Wiseau. The Room was such a flop, there was a Hollywood movie about the making of The Room where James Franco played Tommy Wiseau.

LOU: But the more you learn about the making of it and the more you learn about Tommy Wiseau, and it becomes like you're laughing at something and you're dunking on somebody and be like, Oh, look at how awful and how untalented you are as opposed to, oh, look at how fun and silly so if something brings you joy in a positive way and isn't problematic to other people, I have no problem telling people. I had a thoroughly lovely time at Cats. Did you really? LOU: I did. It's one of the worst movies ever made, but it was so insane. I loved my -- I had a lovely experience of it. Wow. LOU: But I also know in the back of my head, I'm not going to tell people Cats is a legitimately good movie. You shouldn't go there expecting to see a good piece of cinema. You should go expecting some bunker stuff that you've not seen in another film before. I do think for me, I get less pleasure from watching amateurs make a bad movie because of that punching up versus punching down mentality. I would rather say a listers swing for the fences and miss, which is again, one of the reasons I love cats so much because everyone from that movie is going to be fine. Yeah. Laughing at the movie is not as bad as say, you know, this was somebody's dream and they just, it didn't pan out What is the difference between a cult classic and a guilty pleasure? LOU: I think a cult classic is a movie that maybe wasn't given its due in its time, but then finds it to do as the years go on. The big Lebowski is kind of the big gold standard, I 5 think for a cult movie because no one knew what to make of that movie when it came out and now it's so often quoted and nobody says, Oh, it's so bad. It's good. People genuinely like that movie. Does Rocky Horror Picture Show kind of walk that line? LOU: Oh yeah. A hundred percent. Cause I think they lean into the camp of it too. And that's, I guess some people's flavor of guilty pleasures is, do you want a movie that knows it's silly and leans into it? Or do you want a movie that takes itself seriously and become silly accidentally? Oh, that's so interesting. Right? Because at first people thought it was a really bad movie, and then it became a guilty pleasure because everyone was making fun of it, and now we realize it’s a cult classic because they knew what they were doing. LOU: Yeah. I would agree with that. So yeah, they knew they were a send up of those B horror films and going wild with it and they nailed that. But it obviously wasn't ready for a mass audience at the time.

We will hear more from Lou Hare, and other listeners about movies that were very silly – intentionally or not -- after the break.

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Alison can’t give us her last name because of her job, which sounds very mysterious, but the truth is more mundane. It’s just a technical thing with her employer. Anyway, Alison grew up in Orange County.

ALISON: Where I grew up is so focused on youth beauty and Southern California in general, and me being nerdy and everything. It's, you know, I, I was a teenager in the ‘80s and ‘80s teen movies really captured that whole thing in general. And so, as the nerdy kid and being in Southern California, you just kind of, you start to realize that that you're sort of out of place and don't fit into that whole kind of thing.

When she was a kid, she discovered Logan’s Run, a movie from 1976 about a futuristic world, where everyone is beautiful because they’re not allowed to live beyond the age of 30.

TRAILER: Michael York is Logan, policeman in a perfect world, trained to tracked down runners until he is forced to run himself.

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Alison enjoyed the pulpy aspects of the film – the cheesy robot, the laser battles, the men wearing skimpy costumes. But as she kept re-watching it over the years, she began to relate to the message of film.

ALISON: Like I said, Southern California, plastic surgery, young people, people denying that they're getting old And then you showed it to your friends, and they all said, oh my God, this is so profound. ALISON: No, no, no, no, no, no. For part of my friends, I am actually the oldest one, most of my friends are at least 15 years younger than me. They grew up in a post Star Wars science fiction world that this kind of thing to them is just quaint. I think, quaint. And it's like, hey, this is really of it's time and good, you know? Was it appreciated in its own time when it came out? ALISON: No, not at all, you know? Okay. It made, it made a decent amount of money, but critics thought it was terrible. Well, can you understand the problematic elements of the film when people point them out? ALISON: I don't think that people who are criticizing it have really paid attention to the story enough. I’ve heard people say oh, that’s so terra-bad, you know, and I’ll say why, and they’re like, ugh, the special effects are so bad and I’m like what about the story? Well, it is ironic. Cause I'm in this story is all about not looking at superficial things and going beneath the surface and finding depth and wisdom, but everyone's judging the film based on like, oh, that fashion so outdated, right? ALISON: Correct. Yes. There is a definite irony to that. I, that I really agree. Do you, do you own any memorabilia of the movie? ALISON: I do. I do. I have a pin that has the hand that represents, um, you're the maximum age -- they have like this crystal in their hand that starts flashing red when they reached 30. And that's when basically letting you know that your time is up. And so, I have this pin of the hand with the red crystal in it. No, I was thinking, so you saw this as a kid and it's about people turning 30. Now you're well over 30. ALISON: Yes. Um, what is it like, uh, to keep watching this particular movie as you age? ALISON: I'll be honest when I turned 30, I cried because I thought I'm old now. Did you relate to the Logan's Run in that regard? ALISON: It's funny because I do remember the jokes about like joking with my friends and family about it. I was like, oh, time to die. I'm 30. But um, my friends who are younger than me as they've as each one of them turned 30, they don't, they got a Logan's Run birthday card from me involving the hand, the hand with the red crystal in it. But as, yeah, you know, as I've gotten older, I don't know. Even, even though I'm 7 older now, I still have the same affection for that movie. I just cannot purge myself of it. Not that I want to.

It's hard to put your thumb on why you like a guilty pleasure movie, often because you feel contradictory things when you’re watching it. But Lou Hare made an interesting point about what a lot of these movies have in common.

LOU: There's an element of surprise in a guilty pleasure that I think is at the core of what, why people like guilty pleasures. You walk into a James Bond movie, you, you kind of know what's going to happen. You don't expect James Bond's not going to get the bad guy or he's not going to get the girl or he's going to die or something like that. You're looking more at the execution and how we get there. What I love about guilty pleasures is I like getting thrown for a loop. I like getting something that surprises me in these kinds of movies because they take such big swings. They grab me in unexpected ways. It was like, I did not see you making that choice, most likely because it was the wrong choice. And why would anybody make that choice? But I thank you for knocking me for a loop and knocking me on my butt a little bit.

That’s why Nicole Blackburn loves to watch The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. That movie came out in 1984 – the same years as Ghostbusters, Gremlins, The Karate Kid and Footloose. Buckaroo Banzai didn’t stand a chance.

SOLDIER: Buckaroo, the President’s on line one, and he wants to know is everything okay with the alien spacecraft and Planet 10 or should he just destroy Russia? BUCKAROO: Tell him yes on one and no on two.

The story is kind of a grab bag of ideas with evil aliens, a mad scientist, and nerdy heroes that save the day with a Cold War setting, of course.

Nicole had heard people mention the movie before, and the title alone made her curious. Then she caught it one day on a local cable channel.

NICOLE: To me, it was like finding buried treasure. It's just so odd. And like, even to describe the main character, I feel like when you ask a child, so what do you want to be when you grow up? And they just spout off, like, I want to be a scientist rock star, brain surgeon, samurai, then that person grows up and becomes exactly that. That is the main character. Well, tell me a bit more about the elements that were sort of the guilty pleasure part, the things that you're just like, there's one side of my brain that's telling me, 8 like, I'm a person with good taste. I don't normally like this and there's another side of my brain being like, I freaking love this?! NICOLE: Yeah. That was a thought when the movie got over too, I was like, my brain was wrestling. Is this terrible? Or is this amazing? And so, I think I immediately hit repeat, and I watched it again and again, I kept like revisiting it because it was so layered, but it is bonkers in that it does not stop to explain things. And you have no idea where the story, it's not the typical, the typical act structure. I think that we see in a lot of popular films. The alien ships are made with spray foam and paint and like whatever they found lying around from other movies and other like production offices. The wardrobe feels like it was from a thrift store. And the makeup is very stiff, you know, on the aliens. It's not super high quality, but there's just something about that, that's endearing. How often do you watch the movie? NICOLE: Pretty often actually I'd, I'd say at least once a month. And sometimes when I put it on, I'll put it on and then be working around the house and then I'll just hit repeat, like, just play it again. Well, when you first saw the movie, was there anything going on in your life that made it stick in your mind, where you felt a particular connection to it? NICOLE: I think, um, I had sort of recently switched jobs and I was finding myself in with people who I, who believed in me, and I believed in, and it felt like, you know, it's a good group. I work with a very good group of people, and it feels like everyone has different skills and talents and we're not all just one thing. We have multiple things going on in our lives and that's something I'm really drawn to with this movie. It's like the people are, so they're not just one hit wonder character. You know, they're not just two-dimensional characters. They're also good in combat and they're also a mathematician. And they also like, but they're also skilled musicians. Like they all play in a band together, which is so odd, but I find that so endearing and that, that's kind of what we're all looking for in a job is like where we all feel like we're working together for something, a common goal, like it's this core group of people that just work for this Institute that treats scientists like superheroes, like there's literally groupies that hang outside of the scientific Institute and like, wait to see the people coming and going like in the world. It's like, how cool is that? It's like just the, it's a world where your nerdiness and like your weird skill or quirk has value.

But not everything from the ‘80s is retroactively delightful. There were a lot of elements in Buckaroo Banzai that are “of its time” in a bad way.

NICOLE: The main character is supposed to be of Japanese descent. And he's played by Peter Weller, which last time I checked was not of Japanese descent. The women in this movie are just sort of pawns or just sort of side characters. The inclusion is not 9 great, also almost every character, including the nine-year-old is packing heat and they will pull out guns at a drop of a hat. Like there are obvious things wrong with this world and scenario, but there's something I find so fun about it.

Lou Hare says it’s no coincidence that many of the guilty pleasures he covers on his podcast come from the ‘80s. Even when he goes back and watches some of the movies he liked as a kid, they made him cringe because they seem so inappropriate.

LOU: I think the one that, uh, struck me the most was a film called Little Monsters. We went back and watched it for the podcast, and I was like, oh, there's some fun in this, but there's also some real nastiness to this, that like, and stuff in a kid's movie that shouldn't ever have been in a, in a kid's movie. And it just kind of made me feel it took the rose-colored glasses off. And is there something about ‘80s movies too, where it's sort of a combination of excess, bad taste and everybody on cocaine? LOU: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All and all three. There was such a desire form. It seemed like the blockbuster era was upon us in the ‘80s. And so, there's just churning out movie after movie to try to be as spectacular or much of a spectacle as you could. Uh, or even kids were going back to the theater. So have a lot more family movies, but they didn't quite know what a family movie should look like in the ‘80s. And then the sequel machine really ramps up, I think in that time period. So, you get six Police Academy movies and four Critters movies and all that kind of stuff. Well, do you think that there's something about being a Gen X-er? Cause I think that I feel like we had a Stockholm Syndrome, because not only were there not that many channels, but there also weren’t even that many cable channels. And I remember when Cinemax first started, the only thing they played was Beastmaster like all the time. And so, I started like watching it. Is there something about being a Gen X-er that, that, that these guilty pleasures have a certain place in our, in our hearts? LOU: I think there is because those movies get replayed into perpetuity on, on those cable movie channels, these kind of mid-tier films that didn't do very well. I'm assuming they were because the rights were just cheaper. And I also think because of that, I don't think our parents were safeguarding the way we do now as parents. Oh, we were the latchkey, the latchkey generation. LOU: Yeah, exactly.

But if you’re a Millennial coming in cold to an ‘80s movie, it can seem really weird. Take Highlander. It’s a movie about immortals that fight with swords, starting in medieval Scotland. 10

KURGAN: There can be only one!

I think most Gen Xers would not call it a guilty pleasure. I mean, the sequels are considered bad, even among the fans – but the original is usually thought of as a cult classic. But when Derek Beyer first saw Highlander as a teenager in the 2000s, he was dumbstruck by some of the choices they made in the film.

DEREK: You have a movie with Sean Connery in it, and the movie is called Highlander and Sean Connery plays a Spaniard. It doesn't make any sense. And the movie doesn't care.

RAMIREZ: You must learn to conceal your special gift and harness your power until the time of the gathering.

DEREK: The main character, the Highlander is played by a Frenchman.

MCCLOUD: What gathering?

DEREK: And so, his accent is kind of a weird Scottish as well.

MCCOUD: Give me your hand, brother.

DEREK: And even being a movie with sword fighting in it. There are some good, there is actually some fairly clunky sword fighting in it. The very first sword fight in the movie is supposed to be this set piece that introduces you to the whole idea of like an underground immortal sword fighting club. It's pretty obvious in that first scene when they cut between the actors and the actors, stunt doubles, you see kind of a guy who's who has kind of stiff shoulders, swinging a sword. And then there's like a hard cut. And that guy is doing like rubber spined back, flipping across the garage. So, I had amazingly never watched Highlander and I there's very, there are very few movies in the ‘80s I missed, which is so it's kind of amazing that I hadn't watched it. So, I watched it for the first-time last week. And it's so weird to see an ‘80s movie I didn't grow up with because there are so many things that happened in it that I'm like, oh yeah, that happened in the ‘80s all the time. Not the real ‘80s, but the movie ‘80s like that, that happened all the time. Like where did those elements where you're like, oh, that's such an eighties trope where you were like, what the hell is going on? Why is this happening? DEREK: (Laughs) Uh, it is, it is such, you have two major locations in the movie between the Highlands of Scotland in 1985, New York. And it is so particularly 1985 11

New York, I have been to New York. I have never been to 1985 New York. It's almost a fictional setting in its own right. It's as real to me is like Middle Earth is because, because I I've never been there, and I can't ever go there.

Derek still cringes at the bad tropes from the ‘80s -- like the bad cop who keeps using a homophobic slur, or the Black friend who is introduced and then killed by the villain, or the use of rape as a gratuitous plot point. But those are terrible things bad guys did. The strangest part of the movie for Derek has to do with the hero, Connor MacLeod.

DEREK: When Connor is first start starts getting tailed by the forensic analyst who figures out that something fishy is going on. He as an immortal, who's been hiding among ordinary. People wants to scare her off. He doesn't want anybody on her tail. And he accomplishes this by kind of stalking her across town. He, he follows her down the street. She got so uncomfortable. She ducks into a bar. He follows her into the bar, and he plays this really cat and mouse game with her. It's really uncomfortable to watch the hero essentially intends to intimidate a woman on the street in New York at night. And it just, it doesn't feel like something that a hero does in a movie. It feels like something we could totally see the bad guy doing. And we do see the bad guy do throughout the film, which is intentionally, make other people uncomfortable. You know, I understand why he's doing it, but if it feels like a choice that the hero should never make in a movie, Hmm, that’s interesting. So, have you had situations where you've like tried to convince other people to watch Highlander and you have, and they are, you think that they refuse to watch it, or they have, and they're like, why do you like this movie? DEREK: I've definitely tried to sell people on it and have them not have any idea what I was going on about or why I would be excited about this, but I've actually been on a couple of, uh, unfortunately first dates where for whatever reason, I ended up telling the other person about it. I think that the attitude that really draws me to this film, there's almost like a thesis statement in the movie, which is Connor says to Sean Connery's character, basically like, hey, what's going on? Do an info dump. Tell me how any of this works. Tell me who I am and what mortals are and what The Quickening is. Tell me all of it. And Sean Connery's character goes, what are stars, but pinholes in the blanket of night. And that's his answer, which is just kind of like, who cares? It's a movie about sword fighting and chopping each other's heads off. And the soundtrack is by Queen. Do you not understand the appeal of the movie? What do you, what, what, what world- building do you want me to do? God did it. I don't care. (Laughs) So, it's interesting. I mean, do you feel like what's so refreshing about it is that now so much of fantasy stories they have to have this air-tight logic or else all the 12 fans on Twitter will get really mad and they'll, there'll be like 25-minute videos on YouTube breaking down, why you've broken your own rules. And that this is just kind of like a, who cares, man? DEREK: For sure, for sure. Highlander, just, it just says that something works a certain way, and it just does. And you don't this complicated continuity of like, well, they couldn't be there then because the future stone or whatever, like, and you know, not that I've never engaged in that that can be a certain kind of fun in and of itself because you're trying to put together this really complicated thing, Highlander, doesn't ask you to worry about that. And there's something relaxing about that, that I don't think you get from a lot of media anymore. I like this for what it is. And I don't have to like, justify its literary merits. It doesn't have to be something that my contemporaries are into, it doesn't I enjoy this. And I really don't care whether or not you think I should. Do you own any memorabilia of it? DEREK: For sure. Um, I'm actually going to show you this one because this is, uh, this is something I've had since I was 17, which is my high school girlfriend got me a letter opener in the shape of Connor McCloud is a two-handed sword. That’s cool. DEREK: And that I, I leave that in my own mail bin, and I opened my mail with that every day. And you say there can be only one and then you chop off the head of an envelope? DEREK: I say there can be only one. And then I open a bill. Yeah. (Laughs)

Of all the guilty pleasures we heard about, there was one story which struck me because it didn’t quite fit the pattern. And it was also one of the most personal stories we heard.

In 2002, there was a thriller called The Mothman Prophesies, where Richard Gere goes to a small town to investigate spooky, paranormal phenomenon.

JOHN: What do you look like? MOTHMAN: It depends on who is looking. JOHN: I want to meet you. MOTHMAN: You already have, John. I’ve seen you afraid. You’re afraid right now, aren’t you?

Drew Shannon watched the movie when it came out. He didn’t think would have an impact on him. He just wanted to go to the movies that weekend.

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DREW: And that one just really like got to me because of the vibe was really spooky. And it was also just about this guy who was searching for, for answers. And I felt like I really related to that at that point in my life. And how come, tell me a bit more about that. DREW: I grew up in the church and I grew up. I grew up kind of believing in God and, and, and it was kind of a given and I didn't really question it. And we went to church every Sunday and my family was really involved and it was just part of my life. And it wasn't until I got older that I started to have questions about belief. It's not that I thought there was something else. I just, I felt like at this point I was starting to really question or not, whether these things were something that I wanted to continue doing, or if maybe I was happy just not really knowing for sure. And so how did the movie play into that? DREW: There's a lot in the movie about like faith in, in a weird way. You know, I think Richard Gere's character has an experience that's, you know, first he, he experiences grief and death. And so, I think a natural human instinct is to want to know why and why you, and you have all these questions, and he has a, a real, uh, not a religious experience necessarily, but a spiritual experience when he goes to this town, and he starts to hear these voices and get these weird phone calls. And he's having a hard time existing in our reality because he's obsessed with finding out, you know, if there's a way to contact another reality. And I think for me at that point, I was like also trying to figure out if there was this other reality and whether or not I wanted to contact it, or whether I want it to have a relationship with it. He’s kind of like Richard Gere character. It's really hard for him to come back to what is real and what is, what is in front of him and the people that care about him. And I felt like, well, maybe that's where I need to be. That's maybe that's, what's important to me is just being present for the people that care about me and, and seeking these answers are not really going to, they're not really going to fulfill me in a way that I I'm hoping they will, because they don't really for Richard Gere's character either. So, the Mothman Prophesies was, um, not a big hit, not, I don't think it was that critically acclaimed. DREW: It wasn’t? What?! Sorry! DREW: I’m just finding this out now! No, I know it sucks. But does it though, I mean, what, what do you like? It seems like a lot of people have picked movies that are like super cheesy or over the top. And I think what's so interesting with the Mothman Prophesies is that it's not a bad movie, right. It's just kind of middle of the road. DREW: Yeah. I mean, and that's kind of worse in a way. Right? I feel like when a movie is bad, you can enjoy that aspect of it. You know, you can watch it, you can hate-watch it or watch it ironically and still, still enjoy it. And I think that, that makes like, there's 14 funny, there's, there's humor in that because it's like, Oh, wow. Like how badly they missed the mark on something, how badly they failed. But I think with a movie, like, Mothman where it's just like, it's fine. It's like, it's worse because it's easy to ignore. Maybe, maybe that's it. Maybe it's just, it's like, oh, well, it wasn't amazing. It wasn't great. It wasn't bad. Let's see what else there is, you know? And so maybe it just got overlooked in that way. Yeah. It's interesting. I'm I feel like that's also coming up as a theme in talking to everybody, especially with guilty pleasure movies. There's often a strong element of what you bring to the movie. DREW: And that's what makes them different than like a cult film. I think a cult film is under appreciated and it's like artistic brilliance, but I think that a guilty pleasure movie is just appreciated by the person who's viewing it in a way that feels personal to them. And I think that that's, that's what, like, kind of distinguishes the two to me. So, when you were watching it, like initially, and then as you watched it more or you started having kind of, it started sparking a lot of thoughts about faith and your personal faith. Does it still do that for you or are those questions kind of resolved in your mind? DREW: I think they're resolved in my mind in terms of the way that I have come to terms with my own faith and, and that kind of thing. Like, I don't go to church anymore. I'm not really religious in any way. If that is important to somebody and my family is still involved in the church and like, I respect the hell out of that. So that's been, that's been much settled for me, but I could still see the ways in which this film helped get me to that place.

I think that’s why guilty pleasures can feel so special. You can have a one-on-one relationship with that movie – it feels like the movie is speaking to you and only you. That can be a lonely experience but accepting a problematic work of art -- warts and all – into your life can be a type of love. And it’s nice to love something that seems to loves you back.

That’s it for this week. Thanks to everyone who wrote in. Even if we didn’t use your story, we really enjoyed reading them. And special thanks to Alison, Corey Esser, Nicole Blackburn, Derek Beyer, Drew Shannon and Lou Hare.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinsky and imagine worlds pod. If you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts, or a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover Imaginary Worlds.

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