Halloween is right around the corner, so in this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, we turn sadism and mutilation into a pretty fun time.

That’s because my guests are Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti, partners in life and filmmaking whose first feature, the found-footage chiller It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This was a berserk highlight of TIFF’s Midnight Madness program, It’s continuing to terrify audiences across North America as we speak: Here’s a list of upcoming playdates. (Nick and Rachel plan to be in attendance at most of them.)

Rachel and Nick are goofy, cheerful people who love horror in all of its forms … even the torture-porn genre, as exemplified by their pick for the podcast, Eli Roth’s Hostel. You know, the movie where a bunch of American bros go to Slovakia for a promised sex romp, only to discover that truth in advertising laws are very, very different in the EU.

Are they right? Is Hostel an underrated classic of splatter cinema? Listen and find out!  Subscribe to the show at Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while strapped to a gurney, thinking about the choices that brought you to this moment.

And once you’ve done that, there’s plenty of Shiny Things to catch up on; last week, I wrote about the disc debuts of Exhuma and A Quiet Place: Day One and the new Criterion double-bill of Val Lewton’s horror classics I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim, and subscribers to the paid tier got my latest list of weekly recommendations, Want to see what they see? Sign up right here, and get to reading!

… and if you’re reading this on Tuesday morning, there are still tickets available for tonight’s TIFF Lightbox screening of The Void, part of our free monthly See the North series celebrating Canadian cinema. And this one’s in Cinema 3, which is a nice big room for all the Lovecraftian weirdness. So come join us, won’t you?