Some ghosts are so effective they don't even need to show up to haunt someone. Is this the case for the Palmers (Twin Peaks reference intentional), a family dealing with their daughter's tragic drowning in some questionable ways? Or is there actually a restless spirit in their house?

This is the central question proposed in Lake Mungo (2008), an underrated masterpiece of a fictional horror documentary from Australia. In this episode Patrick looks at the detail-driven film and all the smart choices director Joel Anderson makes to really convince the viewer that what they're looking at really happened.

There's no getting around it, for a movie about a piece of furniture that eats dogs, this is pretty grim. It's also fairly sui generis, a modern horror masterpiece which finds a truly captivating lagrange point between A Woman Under the Influence, Cloud Atlas and The Shining. This week Patrick takes on Oculus (2013) and talks about the exciting career of Mike Flanagan, the value of the "editing brain", and the proper way to throttle a child actor.

Lon Chaney Jr. may have had to hide bottles of vodka in his bandages to get through some of those later sequels, but this is a fast and breezy episode you'll be able to blaze through with no trouble, as we take on the hour-long Universal B-horror flick The Mummy's Tomb (1942)!  In this episode Patrick charts the rise and fall of Universal's classic monster movies, with a rise that began long before Bela Lugosi donned his cape and a fall that began long before Abbot and Costello met anybody. Also track the winding road of Universal's oft-forgotten Mummy series, from an eerie Dracula rip-off in Egypt to a shambling monster strangling Creole people in Louisiana!

Welcome back to another episode of Tracks of the Damned where Patrick asks an important question: If a sexually frustrated teenage girl wants to run away with her geeky boyfriend's hunky next door neighbor, is it really so wrong just because he's a bloodthirsty vampire? This is the sort of adolescent philosophical discourse you get into when you watch Tom Holland's Rear Window meets Dracula classic Fright Night (1985)! 

Welcome to the very first episode of Tracks of the Damned, the horror film commentary track podcast! Your host Patrick Ripoll opens this venture somewhat inauspiciously with a track for the cult giant monster movie classic The Giant Claw (1957)! Hear as Patrick explains the giant monster movie craze! Witness what a couple hundred dollars and a Mexican puppet factory can accomplish! Marvel at director Fred F. Sears' saving Columbia Pictures thousands of dollars by blanketing a movie with narration instead of paying actors to speak!