Reel Talk: Mothman Prophecies

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Scary Stories we Tell. I am still your host, Christashio, and I'm joined by a couple people who you have heard here before. One of them is one of the hosts of Surreal to Dustin. Hello, and this is an episode of a thing I've been wanting to do for a very long time, and there will be a couple of things that I need to address before we get to what we're talking about. But we are also joined by good friend of the show.

You've heard him here before. He is now a podcast host in his own right. That would be fair you technically was on Rankin and Bass to begin with, but this is the first time he's going out into his own on his own, into the wilds of podcasting. The host of Richard Adam's paranormal Bookshelf. Richard Adam, Hey man, how are you also the writer of the Mothman prophecy?

That's purely secondary, right, That's not why I think you do tonight? Right? Yeah, yeah, tell so, Richard, this is the first time we talked about it on the show. Before we get into Mothman, tell the audience a little bit about your show. You're You're soon, You're soon to come out show.

Yeah, So it's called Richard Adam's Paranormal Bookshelf. It's sort of a personal memoir slash paranormal podcas cast. The premise is every episode, I take a book off my shelf, one of my many, many classic paranormal books, the nonfiction ones. I'm not talking about Stephen King. I'm talking about Colin Wilson, Whitley Streeber, you know, John Cael, John Keel.

Yeah, real life people writing about purportedly real life events. And I talk about the book. I'll sort of do a deep dive into the book or deep ish depending on the week, and then and then definitely segue into what was happening in my life when I read the book, what the book brings up, you know, what it refers to. There's always a personal story in there too, so it's sometimes it's way more personal stories. Sometimes it's just the book and my opinions and thoughts about the book.

Usually it's somewhere in between. So, but it's really fun. It's all it's very autobiographical. It's all personal memoir and personal opinion and personal remembrances. I think it's fun and funny and sad and I've enjoyed writing it more than I've enjoyed writing anything for decades.

So I'm having a good time and I've never done anything like it, So this is totally new. So check it out. Richard Adams proin normal bookshelf on your favorite podcast platform. That's not why you're here, Richard. That's not why I'm here, and that's not why Dustin's here.

The three of us are here to do and this will come as a surprise to the audience because I have not talked about it yet, but I will say this is the opportunity to do so. This will be the penultimate episode of scary stories we tell for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, due to just rearrangements in life and time and scheduling and all the other things that come into and go out of making a creative endeavor. It's not that I don't like this one anymore, and it's not like I don't want to keep doing it, but there are other things that are taking my time away from this, and it is taking the time away in a way that what I would be providing to the audience would not be something of the level and quality that I am.

Okay, putting out, and so I am making the decision, along with Dustin and Emma and Jess, to take a step back from the show for the foreseeable future. That doesn't mean it won't come back in some form in the future. There will still be episodes and things that still need to get run that were side projects that we were working on while doing the show. But I just wanted to let you the audience know kind of what's going on here with the show, why there's been a gap and everything going on, and all the other unfortunate things that come with reassessing and readdressing time and how one uses time for creative and personal endeavors, but in this respect creative. So yeah, I just wanted to make you the audience aware, because I don't want you to feel like, oh, and then one day the show just stopped posting, and nobody understood why.

I respect you as an audience member way too much as someone who listens to this show to just disappear off the face of the earth. So yeah, so this is the possible, more than likely the penultimate episode of the show. We'll do one more episode just to kind of bring everything to a close, as it were, But I mentioned all of this because this is something that I've been wanting to do for a very long time. Richard. You and I have talked about Under Siege Too a lot, two times at least I think in recorded form, once on on Sagull and once in the Culture Cast, but we have yet to talk about The Mothman like at all.

Like we've mentioned it when we talk, but I've never just asked you, not even not none. That's going to be this like gonna be a grill fest twenty twenty four. But there will be questions that I've been right. There will be questions that I think Dustin and I will have for you. But at the same time, I do want to talk broadly about kind of the Mothman, and you know, the the Mothman himself less specifically the movies version of the Mothman, I think is a good way of putting it.

But when Dustin and I were talking about kind of where the show was going to go, he was like, what was one of the what is one of the things you always wanted to do on the show, And it was talked to you about this movie. Because as much as I like Under Siege Too, Uh, if you go and listen to the episodes that we've done about it. You the listener will know that Under Siege Too ain't exactly Richard's project all the way through. Now this, on the other hand, this, this is right Richard, Like this is your this is your thing. Still Like to this now, I would say, yeah, it's you know, I mean definitely.

You have to understand when when you talk about a writer's work being represented in a future film. Sometimes Okay, so you had a question, Oh oh, okay, so I remember it, and I'll begin Yeah, just go for it, go for it. Yah. In terms of answering, well you had asked before, you know, how does the movie represent my work? I think it does in a big way, more so than Under Sage Too does, Right.

I mean, I know we've talked about that before, and like you always say the thing of like there's only one line that I wrote left in the movie, and like I never know if you're being hyperbolic, like cause like it's like me saying I didn't do anything last year, and it's like, I mean, I did plenty of shit, but like I you know what I mean, Like, are you being hyperbolic when you've said that in the past, or is that actually the case, Like, I don't know, Richard, because I've as much part of the industry as I am, Like, I'm not, You're right, I mean I and it's weird. I mean, it's it's hard to understand. Even I have trouble understanding sometimes. There's there's so many answers to look. Answer number one is when your name is on something and someone comes up to you and says, hey, I saw your movie.

I really liked it. You say thank you, even if you didn't write a word of it. Okay, now, right, that hasn't been said. That's just that's just the way you behave in Hollywood. That's, you know, the correct way to make common courtesy that you're giving to someone who doesn't more than likely understand the industry, even less so than I do or Dustin does.

Yeah. Well, you know, there's a story about Jerry Lewis. I think it's about Cherry Lewis. It should be about Cherry Lewis where someone came up to him and complimented one of his films and he's like, what are you talking about that piece of crap? I hated that movie.

You should have seen we wanted it to be this, and it turned out to be that. You know, my god, that's a piece of crap. Go see the other nutty professor or whatever. Right, and the walks away, and I forget who the person was standing next to them wasn't Dean Martin. But they're like, what the hell are you doing?

That person liked a movie of yours. They don't need to know your story and your disappointments. You say thank you and let them have a good interaction with you know what. You think you're correcting them, but you've talked to them out of liking your movie. Good work, right, And now the next time they talk to anybody else, they're gonna say, you know, I used to like this thing, but then I met my hero.

I mean hero is what people always say a like. But then I met the person. I was like, ah shit, Well you become afraid to say anything nice to anyone. Now now you meet someone else and you want to say, I want to say I like that movie, but maybe they don't, so all right, or just not say anything. Okay.

I don't know why I'm saying all this. I'm thrilled with underseege too. I'm even more thrilled with Mothman. The situation with Underseage too is that Matt and I wrote a movie that if they had made the script that we had written, it would be a beautiful, wonderful, perfectly crafted at venture film. We leaned heavily into planting and payoff building moments.

I mean, we really tried to make it as good as die Hard, you know, and it was a die Hard ripoff. It was die Hard on a train, but we did not do it cynically. We were like, can we do something that's just as good? And we tried as hard as we could, and of course our vision was Harrison Ford being the hero of our movie. Once it became a Stephen Sagall movie, a development process kicked into gear, which it had to because Steven Sagall is not Harrison Ford.

And it was like, okay, well, now that it's a Steven Sagall movie, it has to be a particular thing. It's a sequels under Siege, and it's got a big budget, so it's got to have like a big, sprawling action. It can't just be him doing you know, martial arts against other martial arts guys in an alley. But there's got to be some of that too, and it's got to be written in a way where the Stephen Sagall persona makes sense and the character we wrote was not Steven Sagall. So a process kicked into place.

Brian Helglan did a rewrite. Jonathan Lemkin did a rewrite, Mitchell Kaepner did a rewrite. A bunch of people came in. Some of them took the took the movie backwards in terms of, you know, making it a just a machine that delivers action joy, which is what we wrote. Some of the rewrites took away backwards, some of them took its side, some of it took it a little four.

But mostly what they all did was somehow try to figure out how to make it a Stephen Sagall movie, which is what you needed to do. And ultimately what you see structurally in terms of the things that happen in the order that they happen, according to the story and the plot, that's me and Matt. The tone changed, a lot of the actual physicalization of action scenes were just like, okay, this is no longer a clever action sequence. This is now two guys fighting in a room. Okay.

Those were those changes. That was my experience on that movie. Thirty years on people of that movie. I enjoy watching it. It's gained this weird sort of cult kind of like oddity respect sort of thing.

And that's great. That aside. Now you got Monthmann prophecies, manthmat prophecies. Is this movie tonally and word wise? My lines?

This is ninety five percent my first draft when it was made late nineties, early two thousands. That's unheard of. I was not a known screenwriter. I was not on set. I was not a director, no claim.

There was no reason to give my script any respect whatsoever except that the director liked it. He was the one who read ten drafts, ten rewrites by who knows what different writers. I've never read them, read all of them, and then scraped off the top nine, went back to my original draft and said this is the one I like. This is the movie I'll make. Now.

Was I on set, No, never never got anywhere near the set. I had one phone call with Mark Pellington before he went into pre production where he basically said what I just told you and said, love your script, need you to trust me. I'm going to go make your movie. And I was like, all right, what am I going to say? No?

You know, so you went and did it. And during the time the movie was being made every day I'm like, I don't know what's going on. It's probably being destroyed. In I would say early two thousand and one, I was invited down to the Lakeshore offices because they had some footage and they're like, you should see some scenes from the movie, or at least some dailies. So I went down there and I was terrified.

I was like, okay, I'm going to see stuff I don't recognize at all. And I went and what I saw were for maybe twenty minutes, half an hour of material, my lines, my scenes, my tone, and I remember looking at them and going, okay, well, if they did that scene, then that means that these other four scenes have to have also been shot because that scene wouldn't exist, so those other ones must be safe. It's literally like counting hostages. Okay, Okay, now that line okay, So if they use that line, that means that they've got the one that sets it up and then the one that pays it off later okay, so that stuff is safe. By the time I left that day, I'm like, Okay, if this is for real, I'm going to get eighty percent of my movie, and then when they finally showed it to me, I was like, oh, I got a lot more than eighty percent.

I got almost one hundred percent. And again that's unheard of. Most movies go through a really crazy development cycle that you really don't know what's going to happen when that movie comes out the other side. So I got really lucky, and I was happy with the movie then and I'm even happier with it now. So how does that feel having had the under siege experience?

And I'm sure it's just kind of just the way the industry works. You create something, you push it out of the nest and let it go fly off and see what it becomes. How does that feel when you see your creation kind of be what you intended it to be. It was the most important thing that might still be the most important thing that's ever happened in my career, not only for my career but for me as a human being. And I didn't realize it fully at the time, although I mostly realized and I realize it even more now that when you as a writer write something that is then represented on the screen, you are being validated as an artist in such a powerful way that that it it I want to say, it sort of buys back your soul.

I know a lot of writers who have written things that have been made that are not what they wrote, and it took to weigh at you. And I know other people who have just never had the opportunity at all. They've written other things for other people, but their work has never really seen the light of day, which means their voice and their soul and their you know, their blood has not found its way to the audience for which it was intended. And that is such a powerful thing when that weapons. There's a lot of talk about this today, and I think people get it wrong about representation and voices that were not heard because it feels like it's all political.

It feels like, well, oh, okay, so you just banging a political drum so that you know, whatever group you're with gets representation. It's totally personal. It's personal when your story and your truth is allowed to exist side by side with other voices that, for the past hundred years have been overwhelmingly those of white men. Not only does it validate you as an individual human being. And yes, maybe there's a group of people, a class of people of a country and ethnicity, an orientation of people that go also that's also my story.

But for the artists themselves, this is what allows you to get up off the ground and say it's worth it. I can do this. There's light at the end of the tunnel and these it supercharges you to tell more story. Yeahs. And as most writers know and most artists know, and you guys know, if you want to tell a universal story, tell an intensely personal story.

It feels counterintuitive. It's like, well, yeah, but my specific experience can't possibly but it is. It is the experience of other people. And the more personal and idiosyncratic it is. When people recognize that stuff, a bond is made.

And again, not only is it powerful for the person doing it, but then for the audience you're reaching. They feel that you have seen them and now their story and their life has been validated and is worth something. And if they decide to then turn around maybe and become an artist, a writer, a director, a musician, an actor, then they continue the cycle. And it's a cycle that brings people together and connects us as human beings. And that's why all of these mediums are so powerful.

So it's something like the Mothman prophecies and you kind of mention, you know, going on on to make something deeply person and all that allows it to connect directly more broadly, I mean in your approximation, in your opinion, did you succeed in that terms with Mothman? And in your words, what is what are those moments in Mothman that you wanted to stand out or that you were using personal experiences to mind? Because I mean, obviously the film is quote based on the book by John Keel, but the book by John Keel. To adapt that book is like it's like adapting Naked Lunch. It's like, I don't know how You're like, it's not necessarily narratively set up.

The source materials not to tell a through line has a narrative in character's story any more than Naked Lunches, which I think you know that's what drives this question. But where do you kind of where did you place your own personal stuff and how much of that was just also when you were looking at the source material noticing that it might have also been there. Okay, so the story that I've told in the past is part of the answer. Now to be very very clear, I have never had a supernatural experience. So in a particular way, I was not saying, hey, I want to I want to share with you a supernatural experience that I've had.

What I have had is a lifetime of reading, studying, thinking, wondering about these experiences that people do have, and wondering what that feels like and what it would really be like. And for a long time in my youth, I thought, well, that'd be the greatest thing in the world to have a supernatural experience of any kind. Would tell you that the four walls of rationalist, reductionist materialist philosophy is it crumbles, and once you once you bring down, once you even have a crack in one of those walls, now you've got a way out, and now you've got room to speculate on a range of things. So I thought that would be so great if I could just see a ghost, I could make to see something a UFO, then I would know this is not all there is, and suddenly disky's the limit and everything and anything is possible.

Well, that event never happened, and that's okay. But at the time when I was thinking a lot of this stuff for the first time and really trying to figure out what do people when they have these experiences, what does it do to them? And that was the story I wanted to tell because I'm like, well, there's many movies about audit houses and all kinds of things, but they tend to be at a certain point they have to fulfill a plot. It's like, well, there's a body in the basement, there's bones, there's a murder. We're going to catch the murder.

You know, you know, the person who's possessed will now be unpossessed. It becomes the concerns become quite material. And I'm like, you know, in real life, when you read about people who have supernatural experiences, none of that happens. They have a very strange experience and they never figure it out. And I thought, is it possible to do a haunted house movie where a guy moves into a house it's haunted, and then he does every smart thing you've ever hoped a character would do.

He sets up cameras, he brings over people, he records all the phenomenon. He brings a priest in and has the place exercised. But he brings a scientist in and has all the gases measured? You know, is he hallucinating every single smart thing you can do, and none of it solves what's going on and it never gets resolved. And that's it, because that's what really happens.

These things do not get resolved no matter how hard you try. Right, So I thought, is there a way to do that? And I, you know, I've played around with it. I didn't write a word. I just was always thinking about it.

But in the year before I found the book, this was really boiling around in my head. And then one day I found the book and I read the back of the book, the Illuminat Press copy, and the back of the book basically said, here's all these things that happen. It would make a great movie, right, you know. And they were like, you know, they're trying to sell their book, but they're like this, you know, this paranormal classic, you know, written twenty years ago, you know, you know, is the weirdest thing you're ever gonna read, and and it culminates in a shocking conclusion. I'm like, what the fuck is this?

So I bought the book and I read it, and of course anyone who's read the book, your first reaction is John Keel. His voice unlike any voice writing in the in the field of true paranormal. It is so engaging, so entertaining, so funny, so propulsive, so scary, and his mind just jumps from thing to thing to thing, which is why you say it's like naked lunch. I mean, there's there's a progression of events, but there's just so much crazy shit going on, right, It's that line. It's just like the stream of consciousness continuing and it's like he's just going and but that's good, Like you said, like there's very few voices like well, you know Burrows as well, similarly, because like I mean maybe I think that way, but I definitely write that way, and writing that way, being able to externalize the internal is it like the internalized thing is very hard.

But those who could do it, it's like holy shit, like a John Keel or a Burrows. Yeah. Yeah, And I thought, well, there's so much here. The job isn't going to be really inventing phenomenon. It's going to be basically just clearing stuff away so that one one sort of through line remains what's happening in point pleasant and just getting enough to bring him through.

And then and then the next thing was making it emotional giving. So the stuff I invented was the personal stuff, the relationship, the wife he was never married, you know, the the you know, reflection on sort of the existential questions that are posed by death and the death of a loved one. So all of that stuff was like again, you know, I mean, that's any Stephen King novel does that, you know, in the first fifty pages. So it's like it was these were craft decisions that would allow me to deliver this story. But at the same time, because it was a non fiction book, my entire desire was to convince the reader that I have found a book that you've never heard of, where things happened in real life that you're not going to fucking believe.

And when I wrote the screenplay, I actually wrote an author's note that was the first page that preceded the title page even I think, and it basically said, the events in this screenplay are true. The timeframe has been updated some there's been a compression of you know, the span of the narrative, and some names have been changed, but the phenomena took place, It's happened all over the world for thousands of years and the events have never been explained, and I wanted people to know that when they started to read the screenplay, so they go in with that feeling of really and then I wanted the first twenty or thirty pages of the screenplay to not have anything really that's scary at all, just really feel like, Oh, these are just real people buying a house, going to work, doing their thing, and John Klin slowly becomes more and more enmeshed in the paranormal and tries to figure it out.

So anyway, that was my whole thrust with getting this done. The personal questions I wanted to address were can you answer these questions conclusively? Are these questions things you can answer? And my feeling was that they are not questions you can answer, and that in trying to pin them down you drive yourself crazy. This is not the sort of thing that might ever be fully pinned down.

And can we be okay with that and at the same time not dismiss it completely? Can we accept ambiguity in our lives? Can we accept living with the question. That's what I wanted to do, that it's not a Friday night at the movies let's go get a tub of popcorn and a pizza and then go home and make out in the car. You know, It's like people want a monster or and they want to fight, and they want to see the monster killed.

So I was shooting at a very narrow target and that was and I knew it when I wrote it. I knew it. So that's when Dustin and I watched it last night, that was something that we were both kind of commenting on and want I wanted to ask you about it. And I think this ties directly into the idea of the Mothman as both obviously a character in the film, being represented by your script and John Keele's book, but also like again Mothman broadly right, like just the Mothman and the phenomenon surrounding it. How important was it to have a Mothman in the movie or was that a thing that had to be added at some point, because because I think, for Dustin and I one of the things that I think, and I think not that we're you know, sitting here and going, well, we know how to do it better, but I think what would have worked in the I think one of the things that may have actually helped the movie in the long run, but I think it would have hurt the movie for the audiences at the time, just based on what you're saying.

Saying is it could have stood to have been a lot vaguer, but the audiences, the audiences would have fucking hated that at the time. But like now it's somewhat okay. You can make movies that are even more ambiguous and vague, and I think people embrace that more. In twenty twenty four, I mean, people's filmmaking film viewing tastes have changed so drastically, and I mean not really maybe not even drastically, but they've definitely caught up with things that are asking them to ask more of themselves than the things that they're watching. Because that's the thing about your movie.

It's asking a lot of the audience, which, like you said, a movie and we watched the trailer for it. They don't even know how to advertise the movie because like, it's not a horror movie, but it is, and it's not a thriller but it is. It's like more of a lot of things kind of all at once. So like, how I guess my question to you is how important was it to hw to the real story of the Mothman, but also bring your own spin to the story via you and John keel Well. I wasn't worried about representing the events in Point Pleasant in nineteen sixty five, sixty six, sixty seven.

That was not my interest at all, and I purposely changed the facts of the case so that it was sort of made overtly clear to anyone. You know, the very first thing you would ask is, well, how many people died on that bridge? And it's very easy to know the number, and I gave the wrong number because I wanted to make it clear that, on no level was I trying to tell the real story, because real people died, and you know, you're dealing with the lives of relatives who are still alive, and I wanted to make it clear I'm not just getting it wrong or you know, if I tried a little more, it would have been worse because they would have said, well, you had a character named this, and you had that character named that.

So I changed everyone's names, and I you know, anyway, my goal with the script was to was to answer a question, but not answer the question. And this was part of the movie that I think could have possibly worked a little better. By the way, the bridge collapse is amazing. I think it's one of the most incredible things I've ever seen on film because it feels real, does not feel like, oh, okay, so this was designed in a computer and we're watching computerized images. It really feels physical and it is.

Much of it is that having been said in the screenplay. What is made very evident is that many of the things that happened in the movie that were just weird and kind of odd and mysterious get answered. So like there's sound effects, it's like, oh, every time there's this weird, you know, shrieking sound on the phone, and you realize later, oh, that's the sound of the cables twisting, and oh there's other the weird visuals of the red and green light sort of tumbling through the sky that people think are UFOs, And then it's like, oh, no, that's that's the police car tumbling through the air and then sinking through the water. And the impression you're supposed to get is that there was a voice in the universe that was trying to issue a warning but could not speak our language, and so it was using sounds and images and weird reference points to say something's going to happen.

It was trying to warn us. It just didn't have the words, and then the thing happens and it could never have been stopped. That to me would have sort of said, oh okay, so that the things that we saw that didn't make sense ultimately sort of made sense. But it's only when John Klein gives up. It's only when he's like, I'm done, I'm done with this.

I'm not going to answer the phone. I'm just gonna I've made my decision. I'm no longer going to try to figure out the answer to any of this. I'm going to go back to point pleasant, go to Connie's house and have Christmas Eve. The minute he makes that decision, the entire universe just tilts and opens up every single doorway in front of him, every doorway that's been shut.

He's been in his head against every doorway. None of the door is open. The minute he incites to stop looking at the thing, but look over here, everything coalesces into he and again this is in the script, not in the movie. He goes, there's no you know, there's no flights. Oh wait, there is a flight.

Yeah, there's one seat left. Great, I'll take it. He lands, you know, in Ohio. He's like, I need a rental car. I'm driving to Point Pleasant.

I'm sorry, it's Christmas Eve. If there's no rental cars. Wait, there is a rental car. Someone comes up. Oh, oh, there's one, you can have one.

Every single thing opens up, allowing him to be on the bridge when the disaster happens so that he can save Connie. That's it, that's what the universe wanted. Once he took his eye off the ball, he was able to achieve his actual goal, which is re enter the human race, step out of the fog of grief, reapproach actual life. And that's the answer. The answer is Connie.

And once he understood that, he was able to effectively at every other question for the bulk of the movie that he was trying to answer and figure out our questions. No human being is ever going to figure out. And so at a certain point you got to set those aside. And that's you know what's funny, Richard, when you talk about it that way. The idea of the Mothman in the movie right and again, like the character of Indrid Cole has given a voice, and we see them at one point ostensibly, and I like the idea that we get to see them, and I like, you know, you kind of going further as to exactly say what the purpose of the character is.

I think it's interesting because again, like for for me as an audience member watching the movie for the fifteenth time or whatever it is at this point, because that's the I mean, that's the weird thing in a lot of ways, like you and I are friends because of something that has nothing to do with the Mothman. You reaching out to Mike and I and saying you like something that we worked on. So I've never blown smoke up your ass about the Mothman. Like it's something that I've enjoyed despite despite all the issues I'm sure you think it has or that it does have or whatever. I enjoy it.

And even though it's it's probably my favorite Richard gear movie. And I don't like Richard Gear all like he I find him to be just for me. He's his acting style and the things that I've seen him and don't resonate with me. But I understand that he resonates with a lot of other people. That being said, you mentioned this idea, and like it comes back to you know what I was thinking about when I watched this movie every time, which is if he didn't leave immediately when the phone rang, she would have died the end.

That's the way I mean, right, like you said, like the idea of and I think it would have been really great to have those scenes of like, oh my god, like it's just that one. There is one, and it's just you got the one, and that's the universe telling you like you needed to be there, you had to be there. But like at the end of the day, if he sat and talked on the phone to his wife quote unquote for any amount of time, the way the movie chronologically sets it up, she would have died, right And you know, and look, there was a lot going on in Point Pleasant. There were UFOs, there was the Mothman, there were men in black, there were there were there were there was poltergeist phenomenon in people's homes.

There were these strange phone calls, people were having precognitive dreams. I mean, there was the whole range of supernatural phenomenon going on that that you know, you try to fit all the puzzle pieces and you can't. There's just as well. There was you know, John Keiola had a big imagination he was making some of that stuff up. He may have been, but at a certain point it's like, well he wasn't making it all up.

I mean, there was a lot going on. There were people who were witnessing things and it's funny the Mothman, and I'm like, well, I'm not going to show the moth Man. I mean, that's just not really ever going to happen. And what is the role of the Mothman? And the people who saw it emotionally were it was terrifying.

They they had an emotional reaction to what they were seeing that had nothing to do with what they were seeing. There's all kinds of scary things you can see, but people when this thing got near, they experienced a feeling of dread. But in a weird way, that character the Mothman was the least interesting. But I thought, okay, once I started telling the story, and because the Mofman is sort of unknowable, I'm like, well, maybe there's a way to do this where if you see the Mofman you're going to die. That can be a thing I can do that people who see them off man will later die.

You won't know it until after you see the movie. You see it a second time, maybe a third time, it's like, oh, anyone who saw it died and in various ways. So I'm like, okay, well that's a use and and thematically that fits because that is how the town felt once this stuff really started happening. It's very hard for human beings to go, well, okay, does a lot of weird stuff actually is happening? The very next question always is what does it mean?

What are we supposed to do about it? Why is it happening to us? Why are we chosen? What's happening? So, and it usually feels bad because you see something and it's scary.

You're like, I think something bad is going to happen. There was a lot of fear and a lot of paranoia in the city at the time, and Keel reports about that and talks about that, and then when the bridge collapses, Yeah, could be a coincidence, but there really was. That was the end of the reports of strange phenomenon in Point Pleasant From then until now, it just really has not continued to be a hotbed. So who knows. You know, the people in the people in the town, don't.

Their reaction to the book isn't well drawn. Keel's a big city slicker who came down here and made fools of us. Honest town folk, They're like, no, he reported what we told him, and he did his best to be accurate. You know, they stand by their stories. So to that degree, the mofman showed up, other stuff happened, A bad thing happened.

That was the end of that. I never really took the Mothman very seriously until I don't know, about six or seven years ago, when stuff started happening in Chicago, and those sightings have convinced me that there is a supernatural phenomenon called seeing a large winged humanoid because the people reacted to it with fear. People are seeing it. There's many more reports around Chicago than there ever were in Point Pleasant. Mothman is not something I associate with Chicago and the O'Hare Airport environs much more than Point Pleasant.

It's been seen dozens of times, described in the same way, and people stand by their stories. So let's let's take that tangent for a second. We'll come back to mothman prophecies, but to talk about the Mothman broadly here. Dustin and I were actually talking about that last night when we were watching the movie. Dustin mentioned to me the Chicago sightings.

But I mean again, and and you know, I've asked you this privately, but I feel like this is a question that I can get away with asking you on podcasts, which is, you're now the Mothman, right like it was. If John Keel was still around, which he's not, it would be him on Twitter. But I think when people interact with you on Twitter, they're like, hey, it's Richard HadAM, It's the Mothman. He's the Mothman guy, and like that. But like that is that a bad thing?

I personally don't think so. I mean, look, you mate, I like I was telling Dustin last night, there were how many movies about aliens and other things? There's how many movies about all polter guys and everything else. How many movies are there about the Mothman? Yours are?

Nobody will touch it except Richard had Him. I don't think people think I'm the moth Man. I think people think I'm the Mofman. Prophecies, movie man there are wow, you know. I mean, in terms of if you're interested in the in the phenomenon.

There's Lauren Coleman, there's sure, I mean, I mean, I can go get the books all. To be fair, I think of Lauren Coleman more as a bigfoot guy than as a mothman guy me personally. Well yeah, But then there's uh Tobias Wayland Island. I always get his name wrong, but he's written, He's written several books. And to be fair, you I mean like, I also say that because Richard, you have kept up with the information about the Mothman, like, don't sell yourself short, like you know about the Mothman too, you know what I mean?

Like, but only because people ask I to go read the books of the expert, so that I have I can go, well, go read this Tobias's book, Go read a Laurence book, go to Lawn Strickler's you know, uh website, and and keep up with with the reports as they get reported. But people have come to me and said, so what do you think? So what is the Mothman? And I'm well, A, I don't know that I'm the wrong guy to ask. I've I've got you know, theories and ideas about ghosts and UFOs and stuff, But mothman is a tough one.

I mean, I can read books about near death experiences and alien abduction and there's all kinds of things that can be talked about and people can form theories about. Really, the Mothman seems to be a thing that shows up, scares the hell out of people, and then leaves the end. So what is going on in Chicago? Richard? That that was the That was the other part of the question.

So what now? So I mean, I know, so uh god, I feel like I should grab the book Tobias Ways book, The Lake Michigan Mothman. I'm showing it to you. There, it is, there, it is. Okay, Tobias is a guy who's thought about this way more than I have.

I've talked to him a little bit, you know, we're sort of Twitter friends. But here's one of the more interesting parts of the book, and it's you know, it's written in a very clear eyed sort of Okay, here are the reports. Here what the people are saying. Let me tell you a little bit about the area. So here's the funny thing.

In the years before these sightings happened, but just you know, just previous to it, the sort of climate topography around O'Hare Airport changed and became much more swampy, and it became a place that large, for want of a better phrase, sand hill cranes and other large winged egrets started to live. We know a thing every about sand hill cranes. That's those are native to Nebraska. Western Nebraska has a huge sand till crane migration thing. Rights, yeah, yeah, yeah, And you know there are there are large birds, and there are and when you see a large bird or an owl and you're not expecting it, it can be shocking.

And and if it's if it's out of place, if it's not something that's seen all the time, then people react and well, what did I just see? So the strange thing is that these birds began to live in the area of the sidings just before a lot of the sightings were reported. Okay, and Tobias talks about it doesn't hide from that, but he but it's that thing of Okay, it is very odd these large birds move in. But now people are reporting things, some of which sound like the birds, but some of which sound like they are distinctly some other thing. Now, why is that and why is it happening in that one place.

Now, are is it just that some people are completely misrepresenting what they're saying, and it literally would be all along the lines of instead of thinking you saw a deer, you thought you saw a ten foot tall, four legged, red eyed beast. You know. With it's like, well, wait a second, you can't misinterpret it that hard. You can't misinterpret it that hard. But it's so frustrating and yet so classically fortyan that that there's always the oh, except for that one thing that makes it very difficult to say, this is definitely a supernatural thing and it happens.

It's almost like there's a trickster figure on the one hand, going, oh, this will be hilarious. Let's make sure the mothman sidings take place in a place where large birds have recently taken up residents, and it's got a fuck with everyone, okay, Or the phenomenon itself is like, oh, we can go here now because we can move about undisturbed, there's already large birds. Maybe we won't be as noticed, but the fact remains. Some people report seeing the large birds, and other people report seeing a human figure that looks like it's been punched out of a hole in the universe with glowing red eyes, giant wings, and when it takes off, it makes it sound like, you know, a bus slamming on the brakes, a loud, screeching noise that these birds don't make, just enough for debunkers to go, well, you have your answer, but not enough for the people who had the experience, who say, well, no, that simply isn't what I saw.

So I guess in your mind, and you mentioned it in terms of comparisons to the Mothman sightings that drive the narrative in the movie that you wrote Chicago is now where the Mothman has taken up Ruce for a while, idly as the friends for the foreseeable future. Well, I don't think there's one of anything. I don't think there is a big Foot. I think there are many, you know, and I don't men. Moth men.

I think they are. I think they are sometimes physical, but they are not always as I mean. I know. Look, and now we're not really talking about the movie. We're talking about people having supernatural experiences.

If you look at the entirety of witness reports and you're just you know, physical evidence sometimes and eyewitness reports what you would be left with is in terms of most Bigfoot sidings, and certainly all Mothman sidings and many UFO sidings. Is something is seen, it becomes gradually more physical. It can interact with the environment, it can interact with people in ways that we don't understand, and then it can disappear very quickly, sometimes in a way that makes it seem like the thing is becoming less physical in our reality. So are these things that you know are Do they move in and out of dimensions? Do they have ways to get in and ways to get out?

That's what it feels like. That's what people seem to report, and maybe one day we'll understand what that mechanism is and if that is indeed what's happening. Well, that's when Dustin and I were watching last night. That was one of the things that we were kind of talking about. Is the idea of the Mothman being like a I guess if you were to put a term to it would be like ultra terrestrial, like able to walk around like in less about traveling space, but more traveling time in between.

The space is in between time and space. I guess it's not we don't I mean if we don't even understand the concept of how these things are being, there's no way that we could explain it to ourselves unless we happened upon it by pure accident. Well, I was just going to say, there was something I watched the uh on the Trail of the Mothman Lake Michigan documentary, which you ended up being on it when I was watching it. It was the Breedlove documentary. Oh yeah, yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, oh great, that's a great one.

Yeah. And somebody on there was talking about a sighting of the Mothman and it was almost like it was in a strobe light as it was moving, And I thought that was an interesting way to describe it and kind of what you guys are saying, like how it can move about like it's not it's not like us. It's moving through our type in space much differently. That's so I love that description, by the way, like it's flickering ye a little bit, and it's you know, it's it's not quite holding it's its physical form, uh, but it's trying and then it and then it recedes. There's a there's a kind of sense that this makes, you know.

I think in talking about these subjects from the seventies, from the days of in Search of to tonight, there's been a movement of breaking down the walls between them, between ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, all these things. And once you do that, you realize, oh, these things overlap all the time, but they're often left out of stories because the people collecting them are focused in a particular field. So people collecting UFO stories will tend to leave out details. When a person tells their UFO story and says, but right before we saw the UFO, we saw this bigfoot creature. Because they're like, well, look, I have enough trouble getting people to take my UFO reports seriously.

Now if I add in that you saw bigfoot, they're not going to listen to any of this. So I'm going to cut out the bigfoot part, but I'm going to talk about the UFO part, and we're going to compile it with other UFO reports and try to put forth a case that these things. You know, there's similarities in the reports and so there may be something to study. But if we start throwing in bigfoot, no one's going to listen to a fucking word. We say again, they barely listen now, Whitley Strieber and his wife Anne when they were getting letters from people after hero Communion.

They're going to letters from people, and so many of them said, oh, on the spaceship with the aliens, when I was abducted, I saw my dead relatives. Well, now that's really weird, and that's still really weird. But they're absolutely convinced that the UFO phenomenon is directly connected to what happens to us after we die. All of these things suddenly when you listen to entire reports and they become mora alike and suddenly like, oh, it's ghosts and it's UFOs that act like ghosts. They're here, then they're gone.

Bigfoot is there? Then gone tracks lead out. I mean there's you know, maybe that's the reason we've ever found a Bigfoot body, because Bigfoot isn't an actual animal. It is more associated with ghosts or UFOs. So this has become a something that people can talk about in a way I don't think they could even twenty years ago.

Well, I was just to say I mentioned to Chris last night much in the way that like I can think of, like when Carl Sagan was explaining in a two D world. How a three D object would be perceived in a two D world. They wouldn't see it as three D. It would just be seen as this intersection, this line in their two D world, you know, as it moves through the two D world. They would they had no concept of three D.

So bring that into what we're talking about, like a four D world, let's say, intersecting with our three D world. Just as an analogy to what we're talking about, you know, these these uh beings, Mothman, Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts, is just that what people are experiencing, these little glimpses of something intersecting with the three D world, our world and then moving out of it. That's then the other question that I always have in all of this, including with the Mothman, And I mean this comes back to something that's talked about in your movie Richard it Uh you know, the book I think approaches it a little differently. But the character of Richard Gears character John Klein in the movie, he's meant to be John Keel from the book.

He talks to the Mothman on the phone, he interacts with him directly. Well, he talks to Indred Cole right Andred Cold. Who again, I guess the question becomes Cole Well, who is Indrid Cold? Right Like, if Indred Cold is not the Mothman, how is Indured Cold something else? Right?

Well, they talk about that different frequency too in the movie. Yeah, Andred Cold is Mothman's manager. It's his front man. He comes in make sure the hotel room is right, man, the green eminems have all been taken out right, you know, he checks in, he works. He sort of is the layers on between Mothman and the labels.

I mean, but that's the thing like Indrid. So that's That's one of the things about the movie that I've always wondered about and I've never asked you about. And again, John Keel's book is one thing, but having you as a source of knowledge is another. The relationship between Indred Cold has been talked about, the relationship between Indrid Cold and Mothman has been talked about plenty. I Mean, one of the things, Richard, that I know you've watched and I watched as well, was Hellier.

And they talk about Indrid Cold a lot in Hellier, Like, if not Indrid Cold being the focus of that show, he kind of ends up being the focus for like a swath of episodes in that show. But how important was it for you to represent Indrid Cold and the Mothman as again like separate entities but of a same possible path. Yeah, like they're like, you know, off Bank kicked the door open and then Indrid Cold slipped through, and you know the UFOs and some ghosts. Well, Indured Cold to me was so interesting because it was there was a it was more of a character. You know, it was like talks is dialogue, talks dialogue a person.

See, It's like, oh, this is you know, this is really interesting. And what was really interesting to me about Indred Cold was this sense that it was a thing that was taking a human form but it was having trouble getting all the details right. To me, that's the scariest thing in the world. And one of the things that I wanted to put across in the movie was not that really any of these things were evil. They're not evil.

You know, A great white shark isn't evil. A black widow spider is not evil. We're afraid of it. It can hurt us, but it has no moral motive insect politics. Yeah, it's just it is what it is it does what it does?

Yeah, yeah, I'm a rattlesnake. Sorry, Yeah, what did you expel me? Not to staying you? Yeah? And I love the notion that that that's what we were dealing with here, that Indrid Cold, these aren't demons.

This is something that you know. And really the only thing in the movie that I don't like is when Indrid Cold on the phone says, I know what scares you? Because I'm like, no, that's that's not he's trying not to scare you. That's a demon thing. Yeah, I know what scares you is sort of like, oh, so these are like evil demons that are coming.

It's like, no, they're scary because they're different. It's that uncanny valley. It's the thing that's trying to be human that's coming up and going, ah, how are you don't be a fire to me? And you're like what the fuck? You know, I like, it's the scariest thing in the world.

And it's wearing a Richard suit. Yeah, it's like and it's you know, trying to walk and you know, it's like brenning constantly and you're like, you know, what the fuck. So to me, that was really scary, and I was like, that's better because I don't want it. The minute it's evil, then the narrative becomes, well, we're good, therefore battle, therefore we win. And I'm like, I it was so hard to try to maintain a narrative and thematic through line that did not do anything to trigger those feelings in the audience of Oh, now I understand.

Now I know who the bad guy is. The good guy is. The bad guy is the world in Mothman prophecies. The bad guy is things happen that we don't understand. Sometimes it's a brain tumor, sometimes it's a moth Man.

Good night, everybody, another fun night at the movies thanks to Richard had them well. And that's the thing that you mentioned about, you know, the injured cold character in the movie not being perceived as evil. And I think that is important obviously, because again, like I've mentioned kind of at the top here, I think your movie was ahead of its time in a lot of ways, because again, like the Mothman now is no is is no, I don't know, it's like it's not something that's unknown, Like it's not an unknown I'm not saying in two thousand and two it was an unknown but Mothman is more known now than it ever has been, right, And that's the thing I mean when I think of Mothman Prophecies, I really think about your movie as like it was made at a time and a place for an audience that was never going to appreciate it anyways.

In a lot of ways, like the real questions at the center of the movie are finally more acceptable to be talked about publicly in the present, more than it has been before. I mean, like you said, I mean, this is a this is mainstream now, Like this is a mainstream way of doing things, which is making a movie about it, Like this is the mainstream way of approaching the topic. They just did it twenty years too early, or ten probably fifteen years too early. Honestly, you know, I and I made the mistake of thinking, well, there will be critics that will understand this. They'll go, Okay, the movie is called the Mothmann Prophecies, but what the movie is really about in then they would then they would explain my thesis and they would go good job.

None of them did. Every last one of them was like, this is garbage, this is stupid, this is is a you know, a movie that doesn't know what it is. It it ends, it takes the easy way out by answering your question and never asked. It's it's it's boring, it tries it. It's foolish.

It wants us to take something seriously that is absurd. It's that this is you know, there's some nice performances and boy Mark Pellington does everything he can with a shitty screenplay, but blah blah blah, and it was sort of like, oh, so the part they got right was it's atmospheric. Mark Pellington does a beautiful job. Acting is great, but in retrospect, I don't know why I expected anything different, because these are the kinds of questions that movies just don't deal with. That most fiction doesn't deal with the uncanny, the sort of like, oh, we're something strange happened and we're not going to get an answer.

It's just it's weirdly taboo because these experiences have been so thoroughly ridiculed by certain voices in our culture, mostly self appointed skeptics, and then and then otherwise, you know, sort of righteous spokespeople for science like Carl Sagan sort of feel it's their duty to say, well, all of this other stuff is just stupid bullshit, and you should not no one should even be thinking about it. You just just just go take a science class and learn what reality is. And yet the people who have had the experience is not me. They're the ones saying I'm not banging in a drum for any cause something happened to me. I'm telling you what happened.

And I'm going to science with my arms wide and saying what happened, and they're kicking me in the nuts. Well, guess I shouldn't be talking about that anymore. I wrote with my left hand and the teacher slapped me with a ruler. Guess I better not right with my left hand anymore. And it's sort of like, wait, hold on a second, is this really our best approach to literally thousands of years of people having experience?

And you know what, if you want to come up and tell me exactly, it's like, oh, you know what, it turns out it's this disease. It's like bipolar. Oh, it's this thing. It's like schizophrena. It's like we figured it out.

It's a brain imbalance with this chemical and that chemical. And you really want to do it and prove it and give medicine to the people who are alien abductees and suddenly they're fine again, or you want to explain it some other way, that there's some sort of natural phenomenon that provokes hallucinations of a very particular kind. By all means, bring it on. I don't care if there's an explanation and we can get to it and it makes sense. But anything other than the lazy, lazy ridicule that serves no one but a bunch of guys hanging out at the Magic Castle, you know, feeling superior to everyone else for absolutely no reason at all, I think, And we talked about it a little bit ago, and I guess, tell me if this is kind of what your formula for the movie was, but we kind of talked about it where going through the movie, it kind of presents it presents the moth mean as it is this thing that exists.

But then there's little parts of the movie that make you question that, like or is it or is it just this thing that's happening? And like we saw when we were watching the movies, there's all these introductions of dual red lights everywhere, everywhere like throughout the whole movie, which I thought was really fun to kind of spot. Yeah. Yeah, that was one of the things Mark did a great job of. And also that there's this sort of a it's almost like a y it's like a line with another line off it that sort of is a visual motif that gets sort of a woven in and out mark of the moth mean, yeah, kind of the mark of the moth Man.

So yeah, I mean it's constantly sort of tipping its hat to you know, oh wait, what did I just see? Wait? What did I just see? I don't think it was in there to say, oh, this is what they're seeing. I think the movie is trying to train you to look for stuff, get primed and then go oh my god, what oh no, that's just tail lights?

Was that kind of the concept of what you're going for, where like the movie's presenting it as like the Maffian is this thing that everybody's experiencing or is it? Well I wanted to be. I mean, look, I you know, you if Mark Pellington was on with us, we could get his sort of approach to the visuals and kind of what he was saying. And it's funny because I never got an opportunity to sit down and have these discussions with him that that it was just sort of like, yeah, I think, you know, I'm sort of doing my thing and then he's doing his thing and they tend to match up, and Okay, that's cool. And in the time since the movie's been made, I still haven't had a conversation with him, So I don't I don't really I can't answer for him in terms of those visual flourishes, but what I what I can say is that I respect it personally for what it does, because that's what I think it does.

But but on the on the page, my intention was there was another moment in the script that that doesn't really play out in the movie, but there's it's on the bridge as it's you know, starting to collapse, and a guy you know, like rolls down his window and he's looking up and the you know, bridge is kind of swaying, and he looks up and he sees the mofman. It's it's one of our clearest views in the script, and he sees it, and then we were back on his face, and then we're back where he's looking and whatever the mofman was is actually just sort of one of the cables. It's like it sort of resolves into the cable having been pulled out, and it comes down and basically like slices his head off. The idea of being, of course, that once again you see the offman, then you die.

So it's like, yes, he saw the Mofman, but I mean, and it's funny because we did have a lot of conversations with the producers and even with Richard gear I had conversations about how people experience this stuff. And one of the ideas, and it gets talked about in one of Keel's books, is that is that when people see a UFO or mothman or whatever they're seeing, they're seeing an energy form from another dimension, something that is not typical to our physical world, and the brain doesn't know what it's seeing, and so it's flipping through and flipping through and flipping through, and it's almost like like a roar shock test. You're trying to figure it out really quick and figure it out, and you sort of like land on something and then that's what it is for a second, but that's not what it is.

And even the aliens, the gray aliens with the big eyes and the big heads in various abduction scenarios. They tell people this is not how we look. We look this way for you, but this is not what we are. And that's always strange because I'm like, oh, because the way you look is creepy. This double scary for me.

Again, it's like, if you're doing this to make me feel better, it's not working. Honestly, what do you look like? Oh imagine, right, like cosmic terror, Like you see it and you go insane like well yeah, because because you don't, you don't know what you're looking. I mean, look, brain can't process it at all. It drives itself crazy trying to process what it is.

It's so hard to imagine and it's really scary. But people who have had these experiences say there is a level of terror wholly unique that occurs when you are interacting with something that is not human. Right, it is an intelligence that is greater than ours. It's not human, there are no emotions. It is another species, but it's above us, and you share then you're like, oh, yeah, that is scary.

But it's almost impossible to imagine what that feels like because there's nothing, really nothing like it. There's nothing comparable until that thing happens and the people that happens to it changes them. They're very convinced they know what they experienced, and typically they don't want to talk about it. Often they don't talk about it for years. This is not a situation where people are like, Ooh, all I got to do is tell my UFO story and I'm going to make some money.

People want making money. No one's making money with these streamers not making money. He destroyed his career as a novel who was making far more money before he wrote Communion than after. If he had just continued writing horror novels, he would be Dean Koon's, he'd be Stephen King, he would be living in a mansion. He's living in an apartment.

It's Antamonica. He is not a wealthy man writing Communion. Made money off that book, and then it destroyed his career for the last forty years. And I hate that people think that, you know, that's the easy path. Is I am an author or I am a participant in this thing, and therefore someone will write a book about it, or I will and I will make a lot of money.

It's like, well, it's also I mean it's a completely fascile argument that could apply to anything. Well, that's why Michael Shermer writes his Well, you're only opposing as a skeptic. You aren't really a skeptic. You're just doing it to cash in and make money off skepticism and off the which is an absurd statement. But what the hell.

As long as we're throwing around absurd statements, why not throw some back over the fence, right? Well, yeah, and that's the other thing. So you mentioned John Keel a couple times. Obviously, John Keele wrote the book on which the movie is based. You spent some time with John Keele, I'm sure more than just some, given that you adapted his novel.

What was it like to get to work with him? And you know, what did he think of the film after the dusted settled ones that had come out? Like what was kind of what was it just like to be in the presence of someone who again you, like you mentioned you picked the book up and read it and realized that like this was a thing, and then at some point you're in a room meeting with this person like what what? What was that like? Well?

I got lucky because by approaching him the way we did. So my agent reached out to him and said, hey, you know, I've got this writer who wants to do an adaptation of your book, and we would like to discuss terms for an option. And my agent went to a guy named Knox Berger, who was a big New York literary agent represented a lot of very famous people, including John Keele. And what's really funny is if you watch Annie Hall, I forget this scene, but there's a scene. I think it's the one is like Cheryl is it Cheryl Ladd or Cheryl Pink.

Sure a Ladd has a cameo in Annie Hall. But in any case, in the scene prominent in the scene on the street of New York on the street you can see a big sign that says Knox Burger and Associates. And I'm like, oh my god, there's John Keel's manager, agent, lawyer. Anyway, get in touch with that. I mean, that guy's inn irascible old New Yorker.

These guys are very different generation. John keel Is, He's the Kurt Vomia generation. He's a guy writing, you know, short pieces around the world in the fifties and short stories and trying to get published in any way he can. He's writing fiction, but he's also writing nonfiction because that's an interest of his also. But these are writers, these are proto, These are these are guys who feel that they are journalists.

And Keel was a journalist. There were so many what we call men's magazines Argacy and you know, literally dozens of them where you could sell articles about your adventure crossing a mountain or you know, crossing a desert, something that would appeal to male readers who would then go buy these magazines off the newsstand. And that's what Kiel was doing. He was writing for those people. So he was a different generation.

When I approached him and said I want to pay you some money to option your book, he was blown away because he's like, well, this is the only time Hollywood's ever come to me through the front door. He's like, you got to understand. When the book came out in the seventies, I got a phone call one day telling me that they were making the movie in California. They were already sun Classic International was just making the movie. They hadn't approached me, hadn't paid me.

I didn't know about it. They were making the movie. I found out about it. I told Knox Burger. He shut it down.

So the very fact that I came to him and said, Hi, I'm a fan of your book. I would like to pay you money and write out a contract where you'll get credit and also more money if it ever gets made, it was like I bought some credibility, right because I had no idea he'd had such a bad experience, so I thought, I think, right there, I got lucky. I got led in the door to a guy who was very cynical and very alone and not very wealthy, and suddenly he was like, oh okay, someone cat And I went all of my conversations with him, and all of my communications with him were just like, your book is so great, and your other books are so great, and you're so great, and let me ask you questions and you get to a certain aging in your life.

And he was not getting that reaction. By that time in his life, he realized he was never going to figure out the secrets of the universe. I think for a while he thought he would, but by then he realized he wouldn't. And once you cross that border, your sense of humor kicks in, and he would go to these UFO conferences where people are just grinding their teeth. They're so damn serious about disclosure and alien bodies and whatever.

And he would get up there and they would be waiting to hear answers, and he'd start making jokes and they aided that, but he was just like, I mean, talk about no fucks left to give. He was just sort of like, guys, if you can't laugh at this, then you're missing the whole fucking point. It's fair. And his knowledge was so wide ranging that he would start talking about UFOs and then he'd start talking about devil cults, and then he'd start talking about the Himalayas, and then he'd start talking about Poltergeist and everyone's like, no, no, there's a UFO conference, where are the bodies And he's just like, that's not my gig. I didn't care less where the bodies were, even if I did know it.

I tried it that way, you know, and I realized that that every trail you're sniffing down leads to nothing. And I cause I sniffed those same trails twenty years ago. So sorry, I just I cannot take this stuff seriously. I believe it. I believe people have experiences.

I think things happen, but I no longer think we're within spitting distance of figuring it out. And so when I met him, you know, again, my national level was very high and his was fairly low. Again, I think it gratified him that one of his titles was going to be a major motion picture. And he joked all the time that, you know, Richard Gear was cast because of their resemblance. And he got some you know, and look, we all like money, and certainly at his age and his generation, you know, literally getting paid, you know, pennies or word to finally see some real decent money.

I think it helped him, and I think it validated him in a way, and I'm glad, I'm so I'm so glad the movie was good that you know, a rational human being could look at that movie and go, this is respectable, this isn't garbage. And he got nothing but good stuff out of it. So and it sold more of his books, it sold more copies of the mothmat Prophecies. It suddenly was on the charts again. So so good for him.

And we remained friends and wrote letters, actual handwritten sometimes typed letters to each other and we talked on the phone and were friends, and he liked being a funny, irascible, cynical guy and was he was a character and he knew it and he did not disappoint and so we were friends as much as you could be friends for the last handful of years of his life. I like the kind of chain of events of how you mentioned earlier Pellington kind of taking your screenplay and using pretty much its entirety, and how validating that was, and how great that felt. And it was a moment in your life that, you know, the finest moment in your life you'll never forget. And you kind of did the same thing, you know, for him when you said, I want to turn your book into a movie.

Pay you money, and like all of a sudden, he's part of this process too, And like you said, how validating it was for him, Like I just think that's cool. Like it was almost like it was meant to be. In true Mothman prophecy form, there is this unstoppable force that was set to happen, and it happened. Well, you know all of these things, you know, and not to bring everything full circle back to my new podcast, Richard Hadam's paranormal bookshelf. But the reason that podcasts like scary stories we tell exist and all the other ones where people just gather like we're gathering now and talking about all the things we don't understand, it's because there's a gift in the not understanding, and there's a gift in recognizing that these things are right now beyond our full grasp to explain, because it allows us to react emotionally with fear and wonder and excitement, and it allows us to find a connection with each other because we're interested in the same things.

But the fact that these things aren't conclusively answered opens the door for emotional storytelling, and people do connect these things with their lives, and it finds its way into the fabric of your life. There are people who make ghost investigation clubs and they travel around their area or they go far flung and they investigate places. They go places they never would have been, meet people they never would have met, see things in the world they never would have seen because they're on the trail of ghosts. I mean, it's it's supernatural. Anthony Bourdain.

So whatever the thing is you love that gets you out of the house and gets you meeting people and gives you a common place to start a conversation. That's amazing, and that's that's what this is. And so I didn't feel bad. I didn't feel like, oh, I'm not respecting the truth of you know, the the every word he wrote. I told him, I'm like, I'm gonna I want to tell the truth of what some of your theories are.

But I can't do it if I just transcribe your book, because no one will see it. It'll be too clouded with fun details. I want to take all the fun details out and allow my themes to sort of. I guess it's a movie. It's only going to be two hours tops.

So and he's like, I totally get it. And I sent him the script. I'm like, look, take a look at the script. And he had every write and reason to say, this is not my story, take my name off it, do something else, you know, and just call it fiction. But he didn't.

He got it. He's like, no, that's that is my story. My story was about me trying to figure something out and never quite doing it, and that's what your story is. So same story, So go with god. Well, I think also, it's it's it's an admirable thing to make a movie where you know how it's going to end, and the ending is going to unsatisfy the audience, right, Like in a lot of ways, it's like there's the movie Zodiac by David Fincher, like there's no good way to end the movie.

Just like Mothman, there's like there's I mean, you end the events of the movie, but the Mothman persists, the Mothman will be back and die another day. I mean, I mean, you're right, because but I mean, that's that's more what I'm getting at. It's like the Mothman doesn't go away right, and neither does what happens that day. But like again, like that's the thing I like that about your movie. My theory is always that the final minute of the movie is is the way to figure out the movie.

So you just take the thing that happens at the very end and go, well, if it ended there, then just walk backward through the movie and you'll it's like doing a maze backwards. You'll you'll find the path and go, oh, okay, I get it right because it ended there. If it ended over there, then the story is slightly different. It's off a couple degrees, right, And I figured if I end the story with John and Connie together and it's like, yeah, well we found you know, we you know, we pulled thirty six bodies out of the lake and or out of the river, and you know, Connie, you would have been number thirty seven. And she's like, wake up, number thirty seven.

And they look at each other with the feeling of that's what this was about for us as human beings who have to make sense of our lives and come up with our own meaning. That's what it means for us, and this is the story we'll tell our grandchildren. Well, like you mentioned earlier, like all the trying to figure out the Mothman and the plan and saving people like that's driving that the people that are involved as driving them crazy. But like early in the movie, Connie Till talks about her dream surrounded by presence in the water, Basically we're told the end of the movie at that point, but we don't know it. And so no matter like everything that happened, like like you mentioned, there's these choices that could have been made that would change the one degree and completely change the ending.

But I don't think like I said before, like it was this unstoppable force that maybe the mothmade was just trying to communicate this is going to happen. He could have answered the phone, but he never was going to, you know, to talk to his dead wife, because Connie already talked about what was going to happen. She already said she was going to be number thirty seven. Well, you know, and we're given information earlier in the film that the voice that calls itself injured cold can also imitate other people because people say, oh, you called me the other night, or or you know, someone else's like, oh that's right, what do you you know? You know, Will Patten's on the phone and he says that indured cold is with him.

He's standing. Yeah, whatever that energy is is imitating his voice. So it's like, well, how maybe it's going to imitate your dead wife. It's going to come on and imitate Deborah Messing. Yeah, And Connie is the only That's what's so great about Connie, She's she's always very clear eye about this.

She's like, you know, you don't have to do this. And that voice on the phone, what answer is it going to give you? You know, And that's the that's the other because we know, like I know of people who go to psychic mediums all the time hoping to continually, continually, continually communicate and talk to a dead relative. And I get that impulse, and yet at the same time it seems sad and ultimately, why, you know, what is it going to do? What?

What is one more supposed conversation going to give you beyond I'm in a different place now, I'm cool, It's all good, and I'll see you. I'll see you in August thirteenth this year, you know whatever. But it's like, Okay, got it, I don't need I'm going to talk to a dead person every single day? Am I really talking to that? How much am I talking to that dead person?

How much is he going to be talking to his wife? What answer is he going to get? Go on it? Yeah? Well, I like the line Connie had you can miss your wife here, you know, and it's like, yeah, and you know you're talking about this is the story of grief.

It's like it kind of lifts the veil of that. It's like, yeah, take a breath, exhale and well yeah, and that was that was the real, the real gift over time was people writing to me or you know, communicating to me that the movie spoke to them on a level of a sort of a reflection on grief. My mother died, my sister died. I was going through a bad time. I watched this movie and it it touched on those things and helped me, which is amazing because I wrote the movie and it was about grief, but I was not in a process of grieving.

I was not coming from a place of you know, someone close to me died and then I wrote them offmad prophecies. Grief is a part of everyone's life. Yeah, it's universal. It's universal, and it has nothing to do with people, you know, dying. It has to do with things going on in your own psyche right, parts of yourself dying, your vision of the world dying, your vision of your parents dyings of your childhood dying.

As you grow. It's almost like a snake letting its skin go. You go through these processes, and grief was the theme, and people reached out and said, yeah, you nailed it, and that movie meant something to me. And I understand every and I've talked to people who come out of nowhere and tell me the theme of the movie. They're just like, you know, I love your movie because ABC dn E.

And I'm like, well, you win the prize. If it worked for you, then my work is done well. And that's the thing for me. That's what's really funny, Richard, is you know, we've talked about plenty of times on the Culture Cast and other shows the idea of x as y in horror movies. And I think in a lot of ways, the Mothman is grief in your movie.

I mean you just said it, right, I mean that that is what it is. But I love I love the idea also of again like that, in my opinion, is why this movie kind of came out too early, because if it had come out in the last like three or four years, like people would be like holy shit, like and I mean again, like it has a cult following or whatever it's being claimed on IMDb or Wikipedia. But the thing is, like, the message of the movie stays the same. The message of the movie is universal. And when I kind of put dustin on the spot last night when we were talking about the movie, uh, but I'm glad we've both gotten there, which is exactly what you said.

Richard, which is the grief. And you know, grief doesn't mean losing someone, doesn't have to mean that, it can it universally in a lot of ways for a lot of people. That is that feeling when those things happen. But I mean, grief is just it's just another human emotion. I mean I have I mean, as someone who is going through things right now, including this show going off the air, I have a level of grief about that, about something that I have loved that is a creative endeavor having to take a step back from it.

And if you the listener can understand that or that seems silly that I feel that way about a podcast, remember that anything that you've listened to has been an hour and a half of the amount of time spent doing all these things. So when you're in it making it, you're in it, and like with Mothman, you were in it making it like you had to throw yourself into it to get out of it what you wanted, which is a movie that talks about hey, you need to like look around for a second and realize that, like this is not okay, and you're making it not okay. It's the thing grief makes it harder to make things easier for yourself, because you ultimately make things harder for yourself unintentional, and you know, and people who are going through grief, you know, it works differently for everybody.

You know. Recently, there's been a lot of sort of pushback on the five Stages of grief because people are like, you know, the five stages, Yeah, those are common feelings that people have during a grieving process. They're not always felt in that order. They're not all felt. Sometimes it's just one or two or none or whatever.

But ultimately, people grieve differently and it and it follows its own path. And there are people who, while they're experiencing grief also experience self judgment and exterior judgment about how they're experiencing grief. And there's some people who are like, I feel guilty because my mom died and it was three months ago, but I feel okay, and so now I feel like that makes me bad? Did I not love my mom? Am I a bad person?

Do I not have feelings? Am I associate path? And then you know, people are like, no, it's okay, it's okay to feel okay. And guess what a year from now, something might happen. You'll hear a song or find a letter and you you'll cry, and that's okay too, that's all part of grief.

And then there are other people who are like, well everyone else has moved on, but I haven't. So does that make me a broken person? Is there something wrong with me? Am I going to feel this way forever? And then you're questioning and questioning it.

And so the message now, and I think it's a healthy message, is grief is real, It happens, It is experienced differently by all kinds of people, and don't judge yourselves. And if and then in a lot of cases, if your grieving process involves going to a medium and seeing if you can talk to the dead, have ad it. If that helps you, great, that could be very therapeutic. And for a lot of people it is a lot of people are mired in grief and they have one session with a medium and they hear what they need to hear. They hear enough whatever it is they hear, whether it's facts or whether it's just you know, hey, they're in a better place now.

And the people walk away and are like, I actually, yeah, I feel better. I can get through my days a lot easier now. Well, and that's that is the other thing about you know, the Mothman prophecies and the idea like you mentioned of grief, Like I think it for me is more important to move through the grief, not be stuck in the grief, because being stuck in the grief, I think, at least for me, implies no movement being made at all. And like and stuck doesn't necessarily imply complacency, I'm saying our complacency or being complicit in one's own you know, inability to move Like some people just take grief way harder than other people. And I mean again, like having to learn coping mechanisms how to deal with those kinds of things in a healthier way is important.

And I mean again, I think your movie at its core strikes to the idea of what does it look like for someone to have that grief and the way to handle it forced upon them effectively? Right well, I mean he makes choices obviously, like I'm not taking away the autonomy of the Richard gear character in the movie. But at the same time, I'm an agree, I'm I personally, I am grieving right now for things that have happened in my personal life. I don't expect the Mothman to show up and help fix it. And I also, I mean, the other thing is like I don't expect that to happen because they know it's not going to.

But similarly to Richard gear in this movie, he knows he has to do better, and he does by not picking up the phone. And that is his decision to make that he does make outside of everything else happening. That decision that he makes allows him to save Laura Lenny right. And it's excruciatingly difficult for him to make that decision right, But it's the hardest decision he's ever made, probably right. But he's only able to make it because he is rational enough to go no, wait a second, I saw what happened to Will Patten.

I don't want that. You know. That guy went over the edge, and I am I'm coming right up to it. And that guy went so far he ate a gun, you know. And I can call myself more sophisticated than him, but I'm I'm on the brain.

I'm pretty much tanking my career now and my credibility. And now I'm sitting in a room waiting for a ghost to call on the phone, like, what what am I really doing here? He thinks he's going to alleviate his grief by solving this metaphysical question, because when you're grieving, it is kind of your your brain is trying to grapple with the big unknown death. And he thinks, if I can answer this, I'm can figure this out, it'll it'll give me closure and then I can move on from my wife. But it's the exact opposite, and that's what he you know, that's what he figures out.

So yeah, you know, you were saying a little earlier, I just wanted to say how fortunate I feel for so many aspects of this movie, but also because you were saying, well, you know, the movie it was made today rather than then, and it's like, yeah, you know, maybe it would be accepted differently. But I will say, the great thing about writing a movie that comes out in two thousand and two is that there's a home video market right in two thousand and two that didn't exist in nineteen eighty two. And then there's a cable market, and there's you know, there's DVDs, and and then just as that was sort of you know, coming, you know, getting to a saturation pointed at falling off. Here come the podcasts where suddenly it's almost like just fan groups getting together and it's like, let's talk about the things we care about.

And then suddenly I hadn't I talked about the mothmat Prophecies three times in probably fifteen years, and then starting it around twenty seventeen, I've talked about it five thousand times, and I've loved it every single time. But I've been able to talk about it because suddenly there's there's this show, There's astonishing legends, There's you know, Rob Christofferson's are Strange Skies, There's and millions of others where people want to talk about this stuff and they want to talk about the movie, and they want to talk about the the phenomenon, and then they want to talk about other things too that are that are laterally connected. And now we can and we can and people can find the stuff that's interesting, and thank god the movie was Again I'll go ahead and say personally, I think it's well written, but it's beautifully directed, wonderfully acted.

People still get something from it. And we live in a world now where I feel so lucky that I can hear about it, because people don't reach out to me and say, hey, I saw your movie. It sucks. Thank god it wasn't successful enough for people to feel the need to take me down a notch. I never got up a notch.

So all I hear are the people who are like, oh, I saw it, well I liked it, you know, and that's great. And so I get all the good stuff on Twitter and social media, and so I feel like, well, you know, I did I got what I wanted. I wanted to break a chord with people, and I did it. And I did it during a time in our human history when the normal fan can reach out any way they want and say I saw your movie. Awesome, good job.

So did that kind of come out of nowhere? You said, around twenty seventeen ish, there's like this mothmane resurgence did all of a sudden, like your inbox, your DMS, like it's like, WHOA, what's going on? It was at the time the movie came out, in the earliest days of the internet. I got some uh, I got some attention. You're just from fans reaching out to my email account, you know.

They they found it somehow and they wrote me an email. Then they're a big blank spot. But yeah, my first time on Astonishing Legends was talking about the mothband prophecies. And then and then that sort of started the ball rolling again for other podcasters and then just other people in general. And so then then you go to fan meetups and monster Fest, you know, and various things, and people know it and they walk up like, oh, I really you know, and then other things obviously this, oh you wrote for Grim you know or whatever.

You know. I love that show which is of East End. And that's great too, because I think about that all the time. You'll hear so many writers of my generation. I'm fifty seven now, okay, guys my age maybe a little older.

They talk about Coleshak The Nightstalker, a podcast that brought Chris and Mike White and I together, and the people who wrote on that show thought they were doing garbage work. There's like, we're working on a show the critics hate, the ratings are terrible the end, you know, And there was no Twitter. There there was there were no there was no Comic Con, there was there was nothing to prop these people up. Decades later, they've influenced everyone. Everyone who's doing the cool shit that we're loving started because they were a little kid watching collshak if only all of those And it's funny because I'm sure you know David Chase knows, but David Chase has moved on.

He's got the sopranos, so he does I need that. But there are a lot of people who are involved in that show who I think probably went to their graves thinking, yeah, whatever, Cole shack mine, and there was no way for them to know that they were influencing a generation of people who are coming up and they were going to make their mark. And so it's nice. It's nice now that you can do work and hear back from people, and it's overwhelmingly kind and people just saying, hey, I love that show. You worked and I loved it, and again, to bring a full circle, the correct response is thank you.

I'm so glad you enjoyed that. It's cool that streaming services and just the Internet in general almost have allowed like creative works like this to always be on exhibit, like always be attainable. Well that's what you hope. I mean, that's why it's so scary now for these platforms are just like, yeah, we're scrubbing everything. We've got like twelve shows.

Now you're like, what, I'm paying fourteen ninety nine a month and all I get to see is like, I don't know what my theory is there should be and they'll never do this because because they would have to pay residuals. But I think I think there's a way to do it. I think there's a way where, you know, I should be able to have Paramount Platinum, Warner Brothers Platinum, and if I pay a monthly fee of twenty two bucks a month, I get access to everything Warner Brothers has ever made every TV show, every everything, and the only and fine only pay residuals on my viewership, Okay, don't. It doesn't have to be oh well, you ordered it up and therefore we have to open up a residual algorithm where suddenly we're paying all these people and we're losing all this money.

Just let it be a view, a single view. Okay. But there are people who would do that, people who yeah, I want to go watch I'd like to see every episode of Riptide. It's like it would have to be on Universal Platinum. Nine to five, The TV show nine to five the TV show.

Just have the stuff out there for the people who want to pay. I will like pay per view. Just have it, and people will want to monetize the stuff you have. They just they have not figured it out. It's like people who had a Laddin's lamp and started throwing it around and it fell over the side of the ship, and now they're all like, wait, welcome, We're not making money anymore.

Don't ask us. You figured out. You're the Wall Street geniuses. We'll see if they do so, Richard, I'll give you the final thoughts on the Mothmand Prophecies, a thing that, like I said, is very near and dear to my heart, which is why I wanted to have you here to talk. Well, it feels like it has covered the span of my life, and yet it hasn't.

I found the book when I was I don't know, thirty one, but it answered something. When I read that book, I was like, Oh, things are falling into place here, specifically for the kind of story I wanted to tell in that moment, but it was also the culmination of so many things and anything I did not address in writing the Mothmand Prophecies. I got to address with the TV show Miracles, where we made thirteen episodes that thematically were very much like the mofmant Propit. So it was very much It wasn't like, Oh, is it happening or is it not? It was all about, yes, it's happening.

What does it mean to the people it's happening to? And once I got to do those two things as an artist, I was deeply satisfied. These things were not big hits. Mothman was not a hit. It never has been a hit.

Miracles is an unknown show that is also unattainable, like you can maybe get a DVD on Amazon every once in a while, runny eBay, it's on no streaming systems, but it is thirteen episodes of everything I ever wanted it to be, and the very fact that it exists allows me to feel like I got heard. I said my piece. It's out there, someone out there will watch these things, they will connect with those themes, and I will have done what I intended to do. So I feel very lucky, and mostly I feel lucky that I have never seen a Mothman in real life, and I don't want to very fair, very fair. Yeah, But according to the point pleasant mofman statue.

He has a rock and set of cheeks. No. I love how Mothman has sort of become this weird like symbol for every kind of you know, uh, every kind of sexual orientation or or or or or gender. A Mothman exists as this, as this sort of hero to all who who are undefinable and proud, yeah, and have rock and booties at the same time a booties. Well you know some of it.

Some of it is autobiographical. Oh my god, so Richard, until well, until the next time we do something more than likely not on this show. Where can people find the things that you're working on. They can find it on weirding Way Media. That's where I do stuff with you and Mike, And you can also find me on Richard Adams's paranormal bookshelf on any podcast survey you've got check it out, rate, review, subscribe, enjoy, And as for Dustin and I, yeah, like I said, there will probably be one more episode coming on the pipeline for scary stories we tell.

But as for us, big thanks always to Dustin and Maggie for the album artwork, and to our good friend Alex for the intro music, and to you Richard for joining us and finally getting to do this. Finally, it's been finally we did it. I know what's finally, And I'm glad that Dustin was able to join us because Dustin was like, is there something you want to do on your show? And it's like, oh, this, thank you for reminding me, because show could have just disappeared and never would have gotten to do it. So, since this is the penultimate time of saying this, we'll let our good friend, the host of Sightings, mister Tim White, heat us out.

No mystery is closed to an open mind.