Secret Movie Club Podcast

Movie theaters by movie makers for movie lovers.

Secret Movie Club Podcast is a tv podcast hosted by secretmovieclub, with 100 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

secretmovieclub hosts Secret Movie Club Podcast, a tv show with 100 episodes published.

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  Episode #265

  SMC Pod #227: Obsession, Backrooms, and Gen Z and Gen Alpha returning to movie theaters

  Aug 20, 202633 min

  Stop us if you've heard this one before. . .Curry Barker's dark horror comedy Obsession and Kane Parsons' sci-fi horror mindbender Backrooms are scrambling narratives about the decline of movie theater attendance. These two low budget horror features combined have made almost $800 million box office. More than that, teens and twenty somethings are attending these movies in massive numbers. So what can we learn? What can we do about it to keep this sudden energy going? Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at how these two movies in 2026 have, at the very least, made everyone reconsider. Movies may just have another great era yet again...

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  Episode #264

  SMC Pod #226: The Odyssey, The Epic, & Film Formats

  Jul 31, 202645 min

  Christopher Nolan's just released The Odyssey is another Nolan juggernaut, having made $700 million in just 12 days of release. It's also the first movie shot fully on IMAX film. And it's a certified classical epic. Often, cinema has pulled a kind of miraculous magic trick by finding technologies and film formats and the right epic material to make a movie in the theater a must see experience. Every time the naysayers write off movies or the movie theater, sound (1920's), color (1930's), widescreen (1950's) or 70MM (1950's-1960's) or immersive 3D (2000's Avatar) and now IMAX (2000's-present) somehow brings folks back. And makes believers out of us again. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill looks at this history of epic-film format-rejuvenation. And wonders what we might be able to learn from it.

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  Episode #263

  SMC Pod #225: The Cult Classic Movie

  Jul 23, 202645 min

  A cult classic movie often wasn't a mainstream hit upon release. But over time, a devoted committed subculture grew around the movie with the belief, nay, the knowledge that this was a masterpiece movie. Cult classics like Elvira Mistress of the Dark, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, El Topo, Eraserhead, The Big Lebowski, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, may never get the mainstream recognition or popularity of an Avatar or Sinners but to its fervent audience, the cult classic is as beloved as great literature. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill explores what makes a cult classic movie. And what we, as movie lovers and movie makers, can learn from them.

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  Episode #262

  SMC Pod #224: Movie Twists, shock endings, and comic buttons!

  Jul 16, 202646 min

  There are so many ways to end a movie. Some of the most powerful, yet hardest to do, are movie twists. This is where your entire reality and understanding of what has come before gets a kick to the head. Movies like The Sixth Sense, Psycho, Fight Club, even the wonderfully hysterical and nutty I Know Who Killed Me starring Lindsey Lohan fall in this category. The shock ending is different-it doesn't reconfigure reality but it leaves us gut-punched and stunned. Martin Scorsese's The Departed, Frank Darabont's The Mist. Secret Movie Club founder.programmer Craig Hammill takes a look at these kinds of endings and more. He also offers a COMPLETE LIST OF MOVIES DISCUSSED at beginning of pod because he's going to talk/spoil many of them. If you want, see them first, then listen here.

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  Episode #261

  SMC Podcast #223: Movie Structure-The 3 Act, 5 Act, Symphonic structure & beyond

  Jul 10, 202639 min

  Aristotle in his POETICS made a simple yet incisive claim-good dramatic work has a 3 act structure-a beginning, a middle, and an end. Horace in classic Rome expanded this to a 5 act structure. In the age of cinema, a slightly modified three act structure has been the dominant approach in American screenwriting. Yet many, if not most movies, actually deviate from this structure. And filmmakers like Kurosawa and Kubrick embrace other structures like the symphonic structure-4 movements. Yet, ultimately, many variations can still be harmonized to a progression of 3 distinct parts. Secret Movie Club programmer.founder Craig Hammill looks at Pulp Fiction, Memento, The Thin Red Line, 2001, Mad Max and many others to discuss all the different kinds of successful and discovered structures. And what that might say about an even more profound structure in successful cinematic work.

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