200 Episodes Later
CineMortuary is a podcast that reviews sequels, prequels, remakes, and anything canonically related to a horror series other than the original film. If I recall correctly, I took co-host Rob’s pitch for a general bad-movie podcast — which was all the rage in the 2010s — and spun it into this. My theory was that most horror franchises represented Hollywood at its absolute money-spinning, creatively bankrupt worst. I have been proven so wrong over the years, except for the times I was totally right.
We released our 200th episode today: a review of George A. Romero's bleak post-post-zombie-apocalyptic yarn, Day of the Dead (1985). Every fortnight since 2017, Dave has cobbled enough coherent audio from three increasingly middle-aged white men spewing in-jokes at each other to create something releasable to the world. It is a fantastic achievement — more so given that the vast majority has been recorded in person, despite one of us always having lived in a different city (ahem). When we started, I would've been happy if we had reached 20 episodes before calling it quits.
We were ever so slightly late to the initial podcast boom, but I had designs on making CineMortuary successful enough that it would either pay for itself1 or become a full-blown multimedia empire. Our listener numbers held up really well in the first two years, comfortably in the hundreds per episode.
Just as the trajectory looked promising, COVID killed us. I naively thought everyone being cooped up at home would result in bigger numbers, but we plummeted into double figures as every bored celebrity and known media figure flooded where all good podcasts are available. And suddenly podcasts were more video-focused; and once the world opened back up again, they toured in theatres and replaced actual TV programmes. No hobbyist can speak louder than recognisable faces and production budgets.
I remember reading a celebrity-fawning article about the best podcasts around, which took aim at the glut of homemade shows that sounded like they were “recorded in a shed on the M62”. But wasn’t that meant to be the fucking point? For better or worse, podcasts were supposed to be the leveller of voices, giving everyone a shot at broadcasting without prior approval from the establishment.
Of course, this is based on the delusion that CineMortuary coulda been a contender if only podcasting itself hadn’t changed. It couldn’t. We never even attempted a Patreon as none of us could be arsed creating more content.
All I know is that we’ve stayed steadfast in doing our own thing. I would rather eat glass than make a video version of our show, for example. Having a camera gawping at me while I try to explain the intricacies of an Italian zombie sequel (thanks, Dave), my mouth moving like a broken animatronic robot, sounds like torture. The pressure for podcasts to be more than just little ramshackle audio files is why I’ve lost a lot of interest in the medium.
So why continue making them? Because the personal importance outweighs everything else.
Dave, Rob, and I met at university 20 years ago this September. I know, as I’ve experienced with other friends, that lives diverge down different paths as adulthood rolls on and you unintentionally lose contact. Podcasting is the excuse we need to keep seeing each other, the release schedule ensuring we’re never too long away from being back in a room together. In that regard, CineMortuary has meant the world to me, even when I’m forced to sit through the 95th Jaws rip-off.
I assume CineMortuary will end someday. Two hundred episodes would’ve been a neat full stop. But the incentive to reach our 10-year anniversary in September 2027 is now so strong… and once we get there, we won’t be too far from episode 250. And so we’ll go on and on and on. I’m simply glad the alleged money-spinning, creatively bankrupt churn of horror sequels will keep giving Rob, Dave, and me stuff to talk about.
https://open.spotify.com/show/7aBZZPHueafxbwDjaoVJ9W?si=7371d88353534ceb
- Though, thanks to our hosts at Film Stories, we now earn enough revenue to pay for the annual CineMortuary Christmas meal!