The Last Drive-in Lives On: Joe Bob Briggs Discusses Horror and Season 7

Manjourides: Because of the freedom we have, because we’re not bound by commercials—we’re not bound by sort of a time frame, because we’re not on a linear program—we can experiment a little bit. You know, if Joe Bub wants to do a 40 minute intro, he can do a 40 minute intro. If we want to have six guests on and have each segment be 20 minutes because of the interviews, we can do that. And we always try to figure out what feels the best, what works the best. We have sometimes over an hour of content that we shoot for each episode, you know. When on TNT, they maybe had seven, eight minutes worth of content because of commercials, and that’s the time frame that they were limited to for each segment. But here [on Shudder], it’s just a free-for-all of whatever we want to do. The amount of time it takes to shoot an episode is prohibitive sometimes. We tried one movie an episode, but there’s something lacking in that, you know. The Joe Bob double features is what it’s all about, you know, the two movies that are themed together and it’s an all-night thing, that’s what people really wanted. So how do we do that, but still allows us to sort of make something that can be shot and scheduled on a regular basis? And the once a month situation sort of just came out that way, rather than having a season that is seven months long, or something like that. We’re now able to do sort of a 10 or 11 month season and beyond, throughout the year, more than just starting in March or April and ending in December. 

Paste: You mentioned people liking the double features. What do you personally like about the idea of the double feature?

Briggs: I like the double features because it’s more… I don’t know, when I do live shows, I usually do double features simply because it just makes it more of an event. It just makes it more of an evening where we’re all together enjoying movies, not just a movie, but we’re enjoying movies, enjoying the experience of the drive in. The drive in was always a double feature, if not a triple, you know. So that’s what it’s about.

Paste: And it’s really easy to do with horror movies, because they tend to be pretty short, you know.

Briggs: It’s true. It’s true. I don’t know. I don’t know why that is exactly, you know. I think probably because they would be exhausting if they were longer, but yeah, I think the ideal length of a horror movie is about 80 minutes. And once they go to an hour 45 you start to say, “This is too long for a horror movie.” That is absolutely the case. I don’t know any other genre like that.

Paste: Over the decades, you’ve screened a lot of legit classics, along with, like, a ton of real schlock. As a host, what’s more fun to share and talk about?

Briggs: They both have their fun aspects. You can’t show schlock all the time. The phrase that I don’t like is “so bad it’s good.” What I try to do is celebrate the effort, even if you can’t celebrate the results. And so a lot of times, we’re celebrating the fact that this movie exists, and we don’t say this is the worst movie ever made, and that’s why we’re watching it. You know, like some cult film enthusiasts do, we celebrate indie film, and so even those that don’t quite… I’ll give you one example, The Mutilator. It’s not the greatest… if you take it apart at film school, you know, it’s got a lot wrong with it, but it’s just so much fun. It’s just so much fun. The Brain, you can really find a lot wrong with that movie, but it is so much fun. If you watch it with a crowd, it’s always a huge crowd pleaser. And then the films that are classics, you know, like Nosferatu and everything, it’s like, I love to go into the deep background and the deep history of those films. I just love to talk about them. And in fact, that’s what we’re doing this Friday night, because it’s the 100th anniversary of the movie that we’re honoring. And then we’re doing a really crazy remake, a more modern film. It’s a crazy remake of the film we’re honoring. We never say the titles, but this one is so obvious that everyone has already guessed it. 

Manjourides: The episodes that I’ve had to push through and were like, “I really want to show this and really want to get this done,” have been the more shocking ones. I had to fight the network to do Street Trash. The “Shot on VHS” episode of Things and Sledgehammer was a fight, but that’s the stuff I really like to do. I would love to get more mainstream stuff. I would love to hear Joe Bob talk about some of the more mainstream movies. But that’s all studio vs. studio, network licensing deals and things like that. We’re limited as to what we can actually show, but I’m all for trying to get just fun, weird stuff on there as much as possible. I want to do another VHS night. I want to do some really strange, you know, foreign films, like Adam Chaplin or something like that. That’s just like a splatter fest of nonsense. Those are the ones that I think are really fun and surprising for fans, you know? I mean, I was really happy we were able to do Dead or Alive in one of our early seasons. Those type of films have such a division among fans; they either like them or hate them, you know, they’re not mediocre movies and those have the most chatter. I mean, where else would you have a, you know, a Takashi Miike movie actually trending on Twitter because so many people are arguing whether it’s a good movie or not, you know, right? 

Paste: Joe Bob, what you were saying about the “so bad it’s good” thing, that’s also like the idea of a guilty pleasure, which I don’t like. If you like something, you shouldn’t feel guilty about it, you know. If it’s good, it’s good, not so bad that it’s good. It’s weird that people talk about things this way.

Briggs: It’s true. We try to never be superior to the movie. You know, I make jokes about the movie, but we’re not superior to the movie. Anybody who completes a feature film, we applaud that. That’s not an easy thing to do. Also, we discover a lot of hidden gems from the past that really should have been more celebrated at the time that they came out. And we discover a lot of just weird, one of a kinds from the past—you could never make it again, but for that time and that place, it was an achievement. We showed a movie called Demon Wind that is just crazy, just a crazy movie. And I noticed in the year after we showed it, it was turning up all the time at midnight shows and repertory theaters and so sometimes we rediscover these films that would otherwise be lost. 

Paste: So as fans of horror movies, what’s your favorite era?

Briggs: For hosting, I would say my favorite era would be the ‘70s, because the ‘70s, the studios were dying, the studios were going away, and nobody knew what  the future held, and therefore all kinds of crazy stuff was getting greenlit. That’s the era of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s the era of Halloween. It’s the era of Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker. There was virtually any kind of movie that could be made in the ‘70s. So that would be my favorite era for hosting. As far as just the quality of the movies, I would say the ‘50s. Actually, it was the era of science fiction. There were probably 500 science fiction movies made in the ‘50s of varying degrees of quality. Some of them were exploitation films. Some of them were things like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which is a very thoughtful film. And then you also had, on the other extreme, in the ‘50s, you had the Creature Feature. You had every kind of big bug movie starting with Them. And you had every kind of rubber suit monster starting with Creature from the Black Lagoon. And so the ‘50s just had it all, as far as horror goes.

Manjourides:  I would say it used to be the ‘70s. I mean, when Anchor Bay was doing their Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci releases, I was really big on those. I think it shifted now more towards ‘80s stuff. I remember, you know, going to the video store, or even before that, going into, like the camera store, which would rent videos in the early ‘80s, and renting them and seeing those boxes. So that’s the type of stuff that I’m really into now. And I’ve been getting more and more into sort of the local or, you know, shot on video stuff, because it’s just something about it. So guerilla and just, like, independent. It’s just fun to see people going out with the camcorder and making some some crazy stuff.

Season 7 of The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs premieres tonight on the Shudder TV and AMC+ TV feeds at 9 p.m. ET / 8 p.m. CT, and will be streaming on Shudder and AMC+ this Sunday. 

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.

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