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SYFY WIRE Every Day Horror

Larry Cohen's The Stuff would kill everyone on YouTube

By Dany Roth
the-stuff

Horror monsters take a lot of common shapes and sizes. Vampires. Werewolves. Dudes in masks with sharp objects. Dooks of a Baba-like nature. But nebulous, shapeless blobs? That's a more rare beastie. In fact those mostly only appear in The Blob, its sequel, and the remake.

And in Larry Cohen's The Stuff, of course. You remember the classic 1985 film The Stuff, don't you? No? Oh, my goodness. Please, please, I beg: Let me rectify this right away.

Larry Cohen was a mainstay of TV writing in the 1960s. He either wrote or outright created shows like The Defenders, Branded, The Invaders, and just a metric ton of other stuff. But germane to our conversation, Cohen was also a writer/director on great, weird, schlocky B horror movies like It's Alive, Q, The Winged Serpent, and, of course, The Stuff.

The Stuff is a movie about a bubbling white substance coming out of the ground, yokels eating it, said yokels then being possessed by the white gloop, and then, in turn, forming a company to mass-market this marshmallow fluff from the bowels of hell as a tasty ice-cream alternative called ... "The Stuff."

Sound ridiculous? Well, did you know that, back in the day, people would test oil by tasting it? That's where the term "sweet crude" comes from. So who's ridiculous now?

It's Larry Cohen. And The Stuff. But the movie, bless it, is one of those things that's so bizarre that it manages to come out the other side as oddly entertaining.

On today's episode of Every Day Horror presents The 13 Days of Halloween podcast, Nash Bozard and Tara Deenihan join the show to talk about Larry Cohen's The Stuff. Why them? Well, they do a show on Radio Dead Air called What the F--- Is Wrong With You, and so this felt like a good fit. We talk about the silliness of the movie, how it's still kinda creepy, but mostly about how, if The Stuff were real and bubbled up today, YouTubers would line up to take "The Stuff Challenge." Unlike the usual anti-millennial rhetoric, you know this is pretty accurate.

On tomorrow's episode, we keep on enjoying the lighter, goofier side of horror when Elisa Hansen and Antonella Inserra return to talk about the basic cable, Sunday movie classic Night of the Comet.