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Tonight on The Introverted Obelisk, we sail back to 1922 for a film that gave vampires their cinematic passport — Nosferatu. It’s the story of Count Orlok, a man who looks like a plague rat in formalwear, and poor Hutter, the real estate agent who thought closing a deal with the undead was a good career move. What follows is a slow, creeping nightmare of shadows, rats, and real-estate regret as Orlok brings pestilence to Wisborg and an entire generation of silent-film audiences learn to fear pointy ears and long fingers.

We’ll also wander through the chaos behind the scenes — how this unlicensed “Dracula” knock-off got sued by Bram Stoker’s widow, who demanded every copy be burned, and how the film survived thanks to a few brave souls who refused to let horror history go up in smoke.

So grab a candle, close the blinds, and join me as we descend into the world where sunlight means death, silence screams louder than sound, and the shadows have teeth. Because tonight, The Introverted Obelisk shines its flickering light on Nosferatu, the vampire who started it all.

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This week on The Introverted Obelisk, we scale the heights of tragedy and stone with The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)—the film that gave Lon Chaney the keys to cinematic immortality and taught audiences that monsters aren’t always born, sometimes they’re sculpted by cruelty. Beneath the shadow of Notre Dame’s great cathedral, Quasimodo rings his bells, worships from afar, and discovers that love and loneliness echo just as loudly from the belfry.

We’ll explore how Chaney’s self-inflicted makeup turned empathy into horror, how Universal’s massive Paris set nearly bankrupted them before Frankenstein and Dracula could finish the job, and how this silent epic gave voice to every outsider history tried to hide. Expect cathedrals, torches, and heartbreak—with just enough Obe-brand sarcasm to remind you that the Middle Ages were not known for their HR policies.

It’s been a hundred years since Quasimodo first cried “Sanctuary!” from those stone towers—and the bells still ring.

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Stranded on an isolated island with nothing to eat except a suspicious buffet of oversized mushrooms, a group of wealthy socialites slowly discovers that hunger isn’t the only thing gnawing at them. In this episode of The Introverted Obelisk, host Obie Knox dives into Matango, Ishirō Honda’s eerie, slow-burn descent into fungal madness. We follow a pleasure cruise gone catastrophically wrong, a derelict research vessel covered in mold, tempers shredding under starvation, and the creeping temptation to take just one little bite of those forbidden mushrooms.

Turns out that bite comes with consequences—namely, the gradual transformation into one of the island’s haunting “mushroom people,” the Matango. As Obe recounts the unraveling of each passenger’s sanity, he digs into the film’s Cold War-era anxieties, post-Hiroshima trauma, and the way addiction, class tension, and environmental decay seep into the story like spores in the walls.

Equal parts atmospheric horror and psychological tragedy, Matango proves that sometimes the scariest monsters aren’t giant kaiju, but the things you’ll do when you’re starving, desperate, and surrounded by mushrooms that won’t stop staring at you.

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