THE ONE LONG CONVERSATION EP. #12 (WITH PHIL NOBILE JR.!)

HI, EVERYBODY!!! Kinda hard to believe it’s been, like, FIVE MONTHS since my last recorded One Long Conversation! Suddenly, this new book reared up and demanded I write it. And the next thing ya know, it’s the tail end of summer!

But one of the last podcast episodes I recorded before vanishing was this one, which I really, really love. It’s an EXTREMELY wide-ranging conversation with a really smart guy I had never met before, but who has spent the last eight years – doing an amaaaaazing job, if I might say – of editing horror cinema’s premiere magazine, Fangoria.

In keeping with this week’s horror controversy de jour, we start out relentlessly pissing on Generative AI. Then we move on through the legacy of the great George Romero, the real-life horror of our current administration (Apocalypse By and For Dummies!), Phil’s origin story, the dangers of insularity for modern horror writers and filmmakers, the value of experiencing art outside genre, some major love for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Talk To Me, It Follows, Hitchcock’s Frenzy, Tarantino, the end of the 80’s horror boom, dream logic, the expansiveness of South Korean cinema, my problems with Lucio Fulci’s extremely narrow emotional bandwidth, aging, the calcification and erosion of souls, the glorious pre-Code movies of Mervyn LeRoy, learning to accept that some art wasn’t made for you, and why stomping around and being a dick about it might not be the best idea.

In other words: FUN!!!

I’m gonna apologize for a little thing that starts at around 2:50 minutes in. Some technical confusion around recording leads up to two minutes where my mouth movements don’t sync up with the noise actually coming out of my facehole. YIPES! Fortunately, that shit straightens out around the 5:00 minute mark. And then it’s all hunky-dory.

So ENJOY! I’ll be doing a bunch more over the next several weeks, with a wide variety of fascinating folks ranging from Portland-centric to internationally known. Because whether you’re going local or global (or both!), you never know where the next amazing conversation will come from.

And who your next great friend might be!

Phil Nobile Jr. is a writer and producer, creating non-fiction storytelling for over 30 years in various mediums. He has been Editor-in-Chief of FANGORIA magazine since 2018, and he swears he’s almost got it figured out.