John Brennan joins Wicked Horror for a video discussion of Summerween horror (and lot of other stuff, too!)
Prolific producer, filmmaker and musician John Brennan digs DEEP into summertime and summertime adjacent horror flicks!
John Brennan is kind of like that old Tittha Sutta parable about the guys groping different parts of an elephant. One guy grabs a trunk and thinks it’s a snake, one guy grabs a leg and thinks it’s a pillar, you know the drill. To complete the clumsy analogy, who and what John Brennan is will likewise vary greatly from person to person.
To some, he might be the musical mastermind behind any number of Troma classics, including Return To Return To Nuke ‘Em High’s infamous Silence of the Lambs parody sequence. Others know him as the lyrical virtuoso behind The Last Drive-In. Others still might recognize him as the songbird from Up All Night. And some people might recognize him from his long-running podcast, Yuki and John’s Patreon Buffet.
To say that John Brennan wears many hats is sort of an understatement — a more apt description would be that he IS the hat store, all of the employees inside it and the guy who changes out the ink printers every few months, all at the same time.
Brennan is undoubtedly a busy dude; he’s got his own upstart media production company (Goblin-In-Law, LLC), a new vertical web series with DAILY content (Deranged Cinema) AND he’s taking his latest short film … which, at the recommendation of the Wicked Horror higher-ups, I’ve been asked to abbreviate as Never [nondescript transitive verb] A Wendigo … making the rounds at film festivals all over the United States.
And he STILL finds the time to catch all three hours and 21 minutes of George Stevens’ 1956 epic Giant on the weekend, along with the occasional Weird Al Yankovich and Iron Maiden concert on the side.
When it comes to horror personalities, John Brennan — not to be confused with the former Central Intelligence Agency director, although you have to admit that would be a great ruse — is about as authentic as it gets. His Letterboxd profile alone (spanning more than 80 pages) lets you know upfront that he KNOWS his cinema, and the obscurer and more esoteric the better. Which makes him a.) the perfect inaugural guest for Wicked Horror’s new video interview web series and b.) the go-to-guy to dig into the nuts and bolts of “Summerween” cinema … hey, if Variety is writing about it, we here at WH might as well hop on the bandwagon, too.
So kick back, pour yourself a refreshing beverage and enjoy John Brennan digging DEEP into the wells of summertime and summertime-adjacent horror … it might be the ONLY time you’ll hear Liz Phair and the 1976 mutant earthworm creature feature Squirm mentioned in the same sentence.
Oh, and do yourself a kindness and be sure to follow John Brennan across the social media cosmos via his uniqitious @badtechno handle. And whatever you do, do not … nondescript transitive verb … a Wendigo, this summer or ANY other season, for that matter.