Outskirts Film Podcast

Our first subject from classical Hollywood is a director who straddles that era and the New Hollywood revolution that would upend it: Robert Aldrich. After a long and unusual apprenticeship in Tinseltown that began in 1941, Aldrich graduated to the big leagues with such '50s classics as Vera Cruz, Kiss Me Deadly, and Autumn Leaves. In the next decade, this maverick independent transformed into another kind of filmmaker, turning in the likes of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Dirty Dozen, as well as starting his own studio, which quickly failed as he pursued personal and radically uncommercial projects. For his last decade, Aldrich became another kind of filmmaker all over again, including with hits like The Longest Yard or diverse varieties of neo-noir like Hustle or ...All the Marbles. This week on the podcast, we wrestle with the contradictions of this fascinating and prolific filmmaker.Follow Outskirts on Instagram / Letterboxd / Twitter / Bluesky / FacebookBuy the magazine at our online shop.

Outskirts Film Podcast’s Shocktober series concludes with a homage to the master of nightmares, the scream king of the waking dream, the one and only Wes Craven. Starting with a discussion of his groundbreaking slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street, we trace his bumpy trajectory through the film industry.Follow Outskirts on Instagram / Letterboxd / Twitter / Bluesky / FacebookBuy the magazine at our online shop.

In this Shocktober episode, we enter into the spooky but always wacky world of Hong Kong horror films made between the 1970s and early 1990s, discussing the likes of The Boxer's Omen, A Chinese Ghost Story, and The Seventh Curse.Follow Outskirts on Instagram / Letterboxd / Twitter / Bluesky / FacebookBuy the magazine at our online shop.

As the month of October kicks off, Outskirts Film Podcast starts its mini-Shocktober focus by delving into Jean Rollin's lyrical and eerie universe, often populated by sexy, melancholic vampires and other beautiful creatures from the world of the undead.Follow Outskirts on Instagram / Letterboxd / Twitter / Bluesky / FacebookBuy the magazine at our online shop.

Lusty wolves, sadistic squirrels, neurotic pigs… This week on the podcast, we're diving into the gleefully deranged universe of Tex Avery. If it was Disney who built the church of animation, it was Avery who spent his whole career slinging eggs at it. As a creative force, Tex Avery didn't care about character, didn't care about plot, didn't even really care about the rules of cinematic continuity. He cared about one thing and one thing only: landing the laff. We trace the evolution of this legendary cartoon-maker from his formative years at Warner Brothers to his golden years at MGM, cataloguing his career-long (mis)treatment of bodies and plot premises as disposable and fungible. With this episode, we try to map the contours of Tex Avery's rich and strange cinematic universe.Follow Outskirts on Instagram / Letterboxd / Twitter / Bluesky / FacebookBuy the magazine at our online shop.

As we kick off our second season, we're tackling the bizarre and beguiling career of the filmmaker who built one of hardcore cinema's most serious and ambitious bodies of work. A Navy veteran and Queens hairdresser turned director, Gerard Damiano is regrettably best remembered today for the adult film that became a controversial cultural touchstone of the 1970s, Deep Throat (1972).  But across the so-called "porno chic" boom of that decade and into the '80s, Damiano produced a run of loungey, varied, formally daring films that we talk through in this episode: Devil in Miss Jones (1973), Memories Within Miss Aggie (1974), The Story of Joanna (1975), and Let My Puppets Come (1976), as well as his own... loose "adaptation" of Homer's The Odyssey... 1977's Odyssey: The Ultimate Trip. These films and others feature a recurring troupe of performers — Harry Reems, Georgina Spelvin, Jamie Gillis, Annie Sprinkle — and when seen together suggest the serious-minded aspirations of this remarkable X-rated artist.In this first episode of the second season, we trace the throughlines of the man’s quixotic oeuvre, still sadly little explored, despite the best efforts of scholars and restorers, outside that one famous, challenging title.Follow Outskirts on Instagram / Letterboxd / Twitter / Bluesky / FacebookBuy the magazine at our online shop.

For our season one finale, we dive into the blazing world of Filipino master Lino Brocka, a filmmaker whose furious, hothouse melodramas and searing social issue films feel every bit as lively and vital today as ever. From his unlikely path through poverty, missionary work, and theatre to a fiercely prolific film career under the Marcos regime, Brocka forged a politically charged cinema of desire, exploitation, and resistance that still isn’t nearly as widely seen in the West as it should be. We also have a live segment of the podcast coming to you directly from Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, where a new restoration of Brocka's early masterpiece Weighed But Found Wanting is premiering in a dazzling new restoration.Follow Outskirts on Instagram / Letterboxd / Twitter / Bluesky / FacebookBuy the magazine at our online shop.

Wet lovers, sex hunters, tattooed flowers, feline nights… This week on the podcast, we're tackling Nikkatsu's Roman Porno line—the cinematic desire machine launched by one of Japan's oldest and most prestigious studios, which produced more than 800 softcore erotic films in the 1970s and 1980s. Operating under a set of rules that both constrained and contributed to artistic freedom, Roman Porno allowed many young and ambitious filmmakers, screenwriters, and cinematographers to develop their craft.Follow Outskirts on Instagram / Letterboxd / Twitter / Bluesky / FacebookBuy the magazine at our online shop.

On the podcast this week, we're talking about Jocelyne Saab, a pivotal figure in the history of Lebanese cinema, whose pioneering work shifted between television reportage, documentary, ripped-from-the headlines popular cinema, photography, and gallery work across a career shaped by Beirut and the Lebanese Civil War. Her early films captured this upheaval, the Palestinian liberation struggle, and other crucial regional political happenings of the time with rare immediacy, while her later work grappled, often imperfectly, with the question of how images can bear witness to and carry traces of living history.Follow Outskirts on Instagram / Letterboxd / Twitter / Bluesky / FacebookBuy the magazine at our online shop.

This week, Outskirts Film Podcast ventures into the catalogue of one of Turkey’s most prolific filmmakers, Atıf Yılmaz. A journeyman filmmaker to the bone, Yılmaz made more than a hundred films, ranging from melodramas and historical epics to musicals and psychological character studies. Through a selection of films that exemplify different periods and trends within his five-decade-long career, we only scratch the surface of his convoluted filmography, with numerous other films remaining to be discovered.Follow Outskirts on Instagram / Letterboxd / Twitter / Bluesky / FacebookBuy the magazine at our online shop.