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Lydia realized she had a problem when her Spotify year-end roundup included a podcast in her top five.
Not just any podcast. The “haloween episode” [sic] of “untitled horror podcast” (all lowercase, no show image, one 3.5 star review, a couple hundred subscriptions). The episode had dropped in the second week of November and she’d listened to it just about every night since. Angrily.
Because this podcast objectively sucked.
She’d stumbled upon it by accident when she’d exhausted all her other ASMR podcasts and needed something to put her to sleep. Senioritis and her job at a local magazine were working together to kill her and she couldn’t pull all-nighters anymore. If Lydia took any more melatonin gummies she’d start hallucinating. And she’d choke before she asked her stepmom for any essential oils to spritz on her pillow.
So she’d seen a reddit user link to this podcast in r/asmr, which piqued her interest as a horror junkie. Curious, she’d scrolled through the comments. The top upvoted one read “Yeah I don’t know. Guys a freak but he has a chill voice to listen to and idc that much about horror so I’m not invested.” Ten upvotes. Enough for her to check it out.
She regretted her decision three minutes after hitting play.
First of all, the commenter hit the nail on the head. Whoever the host was (his handle was “beteljuese420,” going by BJ on air, but that couldn’t be his actual name) definitely had a nice voice. Especially for ASMR. A chainsmoker’s rasp with a wicked laugh and a weird plasticity to it that could swap into accents on a moment’s notice. He sounded, frankly, great. The way he rolled over words scratched an itch in her brain, soothed her the way a chocolate bar or a warm blanket would.
But God, his opinions repulsed her.
The guy clearly knew nothing about horror cinema, or technique, or film more generally. On one episode she’d heard he claimed he’d been to Juilliard, but that was certainly bullshit. Stolen academic valor. It’d be easier if he spoke Russian or Italian or some other language she couldn’t understand so she could filter all his stupid out and just let the rumbly gritty voice run between her ears. Alas, it was not to be.
She’d complained about him to at least three of her colleagues, each of whom had responded by giving her significant looks over her cubicle.
The show had a formula. Each episode BJ would talk about a movie. Not a film, a movie. Never anything with themes or authorial vision or artistic direction. No giallo, no j-horror, no vintage classics. Not even a single black-and-white or silent film. Just the most basic, horror-bro monster flicks and slashers and b-movies. He wouldn’t summarize them, really, just bounce around shots or motifs or lines that interested him. He’d read listener emails at the end. One episode a month he’d conduct a live call-in show over Google Voice where other freaks could argue with him and be wrong in different ways. The couple dozen subscribers on his Patreon got access to the live calls and the ability to talk to BJ. As if that was some sort of privilege. Who would ever want that?
The worst part, though? The part that had forced her, against her will, to download the Halloween (sorry, “haloween,” what a moron) episode to her phone? The “Smash or Pass” segment. Every time he’d talk about a movie, he’d rank characters, whether final girls or death-marked twinks or monsters, on a “smash or pass” scale. Honestly, Lydia had no idea why he bothered with the scale. It seemed like every character got a “smash.” And she (and presumably his other miserable listeners) had to endure him describing the fuckability of your Jasons and your Xenomorphs and what have you.
The awful “haloween” episode was only smash or pass. And a call-in special to boot. Lydia had memorized some particularly infuriating segments.
Such as. "Pyramid Head is such a basic fuckin’ answer, my guy. What, think you're edgy? He has a six pack, idiot. Get better material. God. You and the quote-unquote Chads who think they could 'break' Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body." Pause. “Not that Megan Fox couldn’t get it, duh, and Pyramid Head, but c’mon! Be at least a little creative!”
And, “Caller Number Three, you’re basic as shit and I'm signin’ you up for every kinda spam I know. One, Godzilla’s barely a horror movie. Two, everyone wants to bang the lizard."
Or, agitated, “Sanderso - of course the Sanderson sisters are a smash, are ya stupid? What the fuck? Get a load of this baby who thinks Hocus Pocus is a horror movie. It's a classic, sure, but - Jesus Christ.” Beat. “Of course I'd fuck the Sanderson sisters."
Almost everyone, and everything, came up as “smash.” He didn’t seem to care about what his viewers might think about the lack of variety. Or the increasingly disturbing and detailed ways he’d describe how smashable certain characters were. He’d ventured forth actions he’d conduct on Sadako from Ringu that had Lydia opening an incognito tab to Google what they were.
(Once she’d picked up her jaw off the floor, she listened to that stretch of the podcast another three times.)
She started wondering what would make this degenerate “pass.”
It took minutes to create a dummy email. Just a string of random numbers – nothing that could be traced back to her. It took two hours to craft the email she sent him. His latest episode had concerned another attempt to relaunch a “horror cinematic universe,” giving Lydia a lot of material. So she wrote paragraphs schooling this moron in the chronology of the Universal monsters, why Boris Karloff deserved his respect, and the myriad reasons he should have his podcast revoked for calling the Creature “Frankenstein.”
Lydia added as a postscript: “The Thing from John Carpenter’s The Thing – smash or pass?” and hit send with a sense that she’d done her job well.
So the next time he released an episode, she sat in her dorm bed, practically bouncing with energy, until she heard BJ’s unmistakable voice announce he was opening his inbox. And she waited as he whistled to himself, scrolling through, until he made an interested little “oh.”
“New address, let’s see…aw, this is long, dude. Someone wrote a fuckin’ essay in here.” He cleared his throat. “This one’s from, uh, one nine three…and like six more numbers, I don’t care. Subject is: ‘Corrections from Last Week’s Episode.’” His voice increased in volume. “Hate mail! Fuck yeah! Haven’t gotten one of these in ages!”
He didn’t read the entire message on the air, which made Lydia feel vaguely disappointed. He mostly just…laughed (at her) with his stupid annoying cackle. Her face turned red. “Okay, uh, thanks for the email, I guess, sorry I pissed you off so bad, except I ain’t sorry at all, weirdo.” Air horn noises from his awful soundboard. God, she hated him. He didn’t sound bothered at all.
“And uh, smash or pass The Thing?” BJ let out a sharp bark of laughter, peaking the sound. “Smash. No contest. It can be whoever you want. Whatever you want. Obviously! But props for creativity, Mister Numbers.”
Lydia definitely didn’t feel a little warm tingle in her stomach when this absolute idiot complimented her. No way.
The next week, he picked another of her messages to discuss on the air (she’d made an effort to be more concise this time in hopes he’d read every word), but instead of saying all the numbers, “I’m just gonna call ya ‘Gwendolyn’, ‘kay?” Again, he zoomed through her thought-out commentary like it didn’t even matter. “Leatherface? Hmm. You know what? He loves his family. That’s cute. Sure. Smash.”
And the week after that, “Oh, Gwendolyn again, ‘sup? Blah blah, more boring shit, aw hell yeah, Angela from Sleepaway Camp?” His voice went even raspier, lower. Lydia shivered. “What a babe. I want her to kick my ass. I’d choke on her cock. I’d let her fuck me raw. No lube. Absolute smash.” A pause. He murmured right into the microphone, warm and intimate, “Good choice, Gwen.”
Lydia squirmed, felt herself blushing and slapped her cheek. Stop that. She’d already started drafting her next message.
After two more weeks of emails, Lydia bit the bullet and paid the five dollars to subscribe to his Patreon. She didn’t want to give him money, but getting access to the live link proved too tempting. What if she could harass him on the air? Pay him back for ruining her sleep? He’d practically rewired her brain at this point, giving her a newly critical eye for the fuckability of various ghosts and ghouls. As subscriber number forty-three, her inbox pinged five minutes later with a voice call link and the message “talk to you soon, freak! Xoxo.” Lydia rolled her eyes.
When it came to it, she couldn’t bring herself to talk to him, though. The Tuesday night he was scheduled to record the live episode, she slid on her headphones and sat cross-legged in her bed, two glasses of wine deep and feeling warm in her bathrobe. No sense being uncomfortable. BJ tuned in late to his own recording session (unsurprising, given his complete lack of a regular uploading day and inattention to editing) and she could hear him crack a can of something before saying in his regular smoky rasp, “Awright, assholes, what’s up, it’s ya boy BJ, just saw this movie called Abigail, and before you ask, no, the jailbait vampire is not a smash, nice try, FBI.”
Lydia snorted. He was just as much of a dick live. Did he edit any of his podcasts, even a little? At least he didn’t need to worry about dead air, since he never shut up. She tried to tune him out with more wine but he was currently talking about blood effects and how CGI wasn’t really that bad compared to squibs, not really, which made Lydia grind her teeth. She’d douse him in stage blood and see if he thought that was different, she thought, vicious. Lydia blinked, shook her head. Nope. No time for that. He was making her thoughts go to weird places.
She couldn’t suppress the idea, awful as it was, of just…fucking the stupid right out of him. Ugh. He was probably ugly and in his sixties, some kind of divorced dad who sold insurance. Unfuckable, like she’d insisted when the one coworker had raised her eyebrow at Lydia for complaining too long about a prior episode.
When he didn’t read a listener email that night, she tried not to feel disappointed, and dozed off frustrated after a masturbation session that felt like nothing. At least she didn’t have a roommate to worry about.
In her lazy hours between classes, Lydia typed BJ’s username, and some spelling permutations, into Instagram. Nothing. She sent her usual sniping message to him and wondered about his whole deal. What his type was (besides “anything with a hole”). Where he lived. (Probably some tiny town in Kansas or something.) If he sounded like that in real life.
The next episode (on the ‘80s Pet Sematary but spelled “pet cemetery,” which made Lydia scream into her pillow) though, she got a bite. She’d only included one correction out of an abundance of restraint, and he read it on air this time. “Oooh, another one from Gwendolyn, let’s see…hm, not much today. Guess this means I’m gettin’ better!” He cackled. Lydia’s eye twitched. “Gwendolyn says…” BJ cleared his throat and affected a posh Received Pronunciation BBC accent with absolutely zero effort, God, she hated when he did shit like that, it always made her jump, “‘Tim Burton didn’t invent the hollow-eyed look for horror characters semicolon,’” he made a gagging sound, “‘Robert, uh, Whiney did in The Cabinet of Doctor Cali…’ nope, not tryin’ that one. ‘If you knew anything about film history you’d shut up.’ Or maybe you could shut me up, babes. Wink.” He said “wink” out loud. Lydia’s fingers itched to strangle him.
“‘P.S. Smash or Pass, Annie Wilkes in Misery.’” Dead air. Lydia blinked. A good five, ten, fifteen seconds. (Seriously, was he allergic to editing?) “Uh, look, Kathy Bates is slammin’ and all, but I gotta pass on this one.” His voice lowered to a near whisper. Lydia leaned forward, straining to hear. “She kinda reminds me of my mom.”
What.
Lydia grabbed a notepad from her desk and scribbled “AWFUL PODCAST MAN FACTS” as a header, before writing “mommy issues????,” underlining it twice, and circling it. God, if only he had a wiki or something. That would be a fun little bit of lore to drop. But the second Lydia thought that, she realized she’d have a lot more fun hoarding this tidbit of information to herself.
So in spite of herself, Lydia kept tuning in. Kept lurking on the live calls. Kept sending him five dollars a month. Kept telling herself that this fucking guy’s heated growl, when he talked about rubber masks and death order in slashers, didn’t absolutely drench her. Kept pretending she hadn’t fingered herself to his podcast, thinking about him gritting out the syllables in “Lydia” instead of “Gwendolyn.” (Really, really tried to ignore the way the sad tone in his voice when he’d dropped that one bombshell nearly made her come on the spot.)
She just liked his voice, okay? Totally normal. Completely fine.