The Man Behind The Boogeyman w/ Actor Bill Oberst, Jr.

The Parallax Views #HalloweenPodcastMassacre continues as we turn our attention to the horror movies archetypal villain: the boogeyman. The cinematic boogeyman that haunt our nightmares comes in a variety of forms from classic monsters like Frankenstein's Creature, the Wolf Man, and Dracula to fictional serial killers (often with a supernatural twist!) like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger. And they come in all shapes and sizes too from gigantic beasts like Godzilla and King Kong to pint-size terrors like Chucky the killer doll and the Leprechaun. Some are men of brilliance, like the ingeniously diabolical Dr. Hannibal Lecter, while others, like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface, have only the mind of child. And then there's the really weird ones like the sadomasochistic "Hell Priest" Pinhead and his army of demonic Cenobites in Clive Barker's Hellraiser and its many sequels or the shape-shifting Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King's It. From goblins and ghouls to ax-wielding madman and brain-eating zombies these are filmland's most frightful menaces that make up our culture's Horror Hall of Fame.

But what of the men behind the monsters? Horror movie fanatics will point out to you that Robert Englund is the man behind the horribly burned face of Freddy Krueger, that men like Kane Hodder and C.J. Graham donned a hockey mask to become Camp Crystal Lake's machete-wielding madman Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th films, and that the Golden Globe Award-winning Brad Dourif provided the voice for the foul-mouthed, murderous doll Chucky in the Child's Play movies. Generally, however, the men behind cinema's favorite boogeymen remain in the shadow of the frightful figures they bring to life when it comes to the casual moviegoers whose pants they aim to scare off.

Parallax Views, ever eager to provide listeners with a perspective they may not have considered before, decided it'd be interesting to seek out one of the men behind cinema's boogeymen. And few are better equipped to do that than our guest on this edition of the program, the legendary character actor Bill Oberst, Jr. An Emmy and Lon Chaney Award-winner, Bill Oberst has made a career of playing strange, menacing, and monstrous characters in everything from TV's Criminal Minds (where he portrayed the "Unsub", one of the series most memorable killers, in the season nine episode "Blood Relations") and Scream Queens to horror movies like Ditch Day, Circus of the Dead, and The Devil's Junction: Handy Dandy's Revenge. Additionally, he's also appeared as the doomed Tony Commando in Rob Zombie's 3 from Hell (a sequel to The Devil's Rejects and House of 1000 Corpses), played a zombie hunting Abraham Lincoln in Abe Lincoln Vs. Zombies, creeped out social media users as a "Facebook Stalker" in the interactive short film Take This Lollipop, played a 21st century update of Falling Down's D-Fens in Mark Savage's Stressed to Kill, and appeared on stage as such historical figures as the special effects maven Ray Bradbury and, believe it or not, Jesus Christ. And now he even has his own podcast, Bill Oberst's Gothic Midnight, where he puts his thespian skills to good work for theatre-of-the-mind adventures into the world of the macabre vis-à-vis dramatic readings of spooky short stories!

Bill joins us to give an insight into what it's like playing the monsters and madmen that haunt the horror movie landscape.

Check out Bill Oberst's
Gothic Goodnight Podcast

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The War State:
The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945-1963
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