Marc Meyers (We Summon the Darkness, My Friend Dahmer)

We Summon the Darkness and My Friend Dahmer, two of prolific director Marc Meyers latest films, unfurl almost opposite takes on serial killers. Dahmer is a sober, anti-sensationalist exploration of how a confused teen became a reviled cannibal. Darkness turns a Satanic Panic-era killing spree into a headbangers' ball of dark comedy.Meyers, as you can probably guess, has a lot of range.We Summon the Darkness opens with three young women (Alexandra Daddario, Maddie Hasson and Amy Forsyth) road-tripping to a metal show in Indiana in the 1980s. The radio mentions a string of Satanic murders, they meet three boys in the metal show parking lot, and things happen. Johnny Knoxville turns up as the voice of the religious right.We're keeping things deliberately vague, and this episode contains no significant spoilers.You're probably wondering if we also talk about Jeffrey Dahmer, the Midwestern murderer who kept victims' body parts in his freezer. We sure do.Here are highlight of the interview, with timestamps:3:00: Interview with Marc Meyers begins5:20: We talk about the short documentary "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," one of the influences on We Summon the Darkness. 10:00: The Satanic Panic "did feel really real at the time."10:45: Guns N Roses are to Slayer as alcohol is to heroin?13:00: Writing and directing vs. writing.15:00: Marc Meyers on proving My Friend Dahmer wasn't just another serial killer movie: "We had to almost make the movie to prove it as a concept."16:30: Are kids less mean than they were in the 1970s and '80s?22:00: How teenage Jeffrey Dahmer went wrong.23:20: A very subtle spoiler about We Summon the Darkness.23:50: Very subtle spoiler ends.24:45: How things are going with our big, not-by-choice video-on-demand experiment.28:00: Will COVID-19 recalibrate what we consider dramatic? 30:00: Shout out to Richard Linklater.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.