Tonight, Joe Bob Briggs returns for the Season 2 premiere of The Last Drive-In on Shudder. With so many horror fans staying inside these days, this is the perfect time for the return of the series, and Joe Bob talks special guests, world premieres, and more in our recent interview:
How do you feel about the success that The Last Drive-In has had since it first premiered, and the positive reaction on social media and from people you’ve met at recent conventions?
Joe Bob Briggs: Well, I'm amazed. The good vibes just keep on coming, and more and more people are joining our little group. So I'm very happy with everything that's going on with the show. I'm still not sure exactly why we're so popular because we're using the format that I've used twice before, going back to the ’80s. I think there's a desire for community right now. And movies give us that. People don't want to watch movies alone on their devices. They want to watch movies together, and so I think our show creates that group watching feeling.
I think one of the great things about The Last Drive-In is that it’s introducing horror fans to movies they may not have considered watching before. I’ve seen a lot of social media comments from people who are introduced to movies like Society or Q the Winged Serpent because of your show.
Joe Bob Briggs: There's really no such thing as an undiscovered film anymore because everything has been seen by somebody, and it's recorded somewhere on the web. And there's no such thing as a forgotten film. But there's still obscure films that we bring to light. But of course the thing about horror fans is they want to see everything. They want to see every horror film ever made. So they want to see films from the 1920s to the 2020s.
There was nobody clamoring to see Demon Wind before we showed it. But after we did show it, it became kind of a staple at midnight shows. And so a lot of times we're showing a classic film, but a lot of our audience hasn't seen it yet, or they haven't seen it with the commentary, or they want to watch it again. And so even the famous films, people ask us to show them on the show because they want to see them with the commentary and in a group setting.
I know that traditionally you don't like to give a lot of details about the movies that you're going to be screening ahead of time. But can you give our readers a little tease at what's coming up?
Joe Bob Briggs: Well, we're actually revealing one thing about the opening weekend of the season this time. We have a special guest, Chris Jericho, the wrestler is coming on. And the reason he's coming on is, well, first of all, he's a hardcore horror fan, and there's a longstanding connection between horror and wrestling. Years ago, I had Roddy Piper on my show. And of course he was the star of They Live and Hell Comes to Frogtown.
But Chris Jericho is a big fan of the movie Bloodsucking Freaks. And has been obsessed with it his whole life, so he's co-hosting Bloodsucking Freaks with me, but that's not our opening movie. Our opening movie is a classic that I can't reveal the title of. And we have the star of that movie on as well.
And then, the season is our usual mix of classics, cult films, films from the ’80s, films from the ’70s. We have quite a few films from the ’70s this time. And so bad it's good, some foreign films, some very recent films. We have two world premieres of recent horror films, and we have a lot more guests this season than we've had in the past, including some famous guests.
Speaking of newer releases, are there any horror movies you caught late last year or early this year that you really enjoyed?
Joe Bob Briggs: I guess my favorite horror film from this year would be The Invisible Man. It's a famous Universal franchise, but it's not like one of those hundred million dollar blockbusters. It was a fairly reasonably budgeted movie, just really well done.
Something I was thinking about lately is that my tastes in movies have changed and I find more to appreciate in movies I didn’t originally love or I may not be as passionate about a film that I really liked when I was younger. Do you find that with you and is there a particular film that comes to mind?
Joe Bob Briggs: I don't often change my opinion about a film, but I re-watched Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter recently. And I thought the writing and the direction on that was really much better than what I had remembered. And I was a little bit disappointed because they set up at the end of that film that the little boy, played by Corey Feldman, was going to become the killer. He was going to be the new Jason. And I thought that would've been an interesting direction for the franchise to go with a child killer. And they didn't follow that up in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning.
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