Are you interested in angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, influence, and how to protect against the unknown? If so, then welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
K-A-L-S-H-I. Kelchi. Trade what's next? $18 plus only. Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Event contract trading involves risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Kelche products are not available in all jurisdictions. Prices, values, and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information, see Kelchi.com slash regulatory.
Back in early January, I published a two-part conversation with Father Birdsong on the do's and don'ts of exorcism. As you may or may not know, Father Birdsong and I, along with all the other co-hosts of the Paranormal Rundown, Vic from Trailer Trash Terrors, and Dave, are phenomenally good friends. And we always have a wonderful time talking regardless of the circumstances. But there is something very special about that episode. Something that we will get to later on in this one. Where I'm going with this is that there needed to be another part of that conversation.
And it is around sacraments. And that conversation was a lengthy one and will be published in the next two episodes. However, before we even begin, Father Birdsong wanted to discuss an eye condition that I suffered over the holidays. And that too became its own living, breathing entity. And so this particular episode will focus on that talk, which can essentially be a preamble to the main topic of conversation.
Yet before we get into that, I really wanted to cover two recent horror movies that I had the chance to watch as A, one raises some technology concerns which may have been overblown, to be frank, and B, they both demonstrate the state of Shudder as a horror platform. Yes, I am back on the Shudder train, though that stop will be brief, I assure you. Welcome back to season 5, episode 3 of Southern Demonology. As always, I am your host, JJ. As you may know from my previous coverage of the streaming service, Shudder has some standout movies and series.
Some self-produced and others garnered through streaming rights. Terrified, We Go On, One Cut of the Dead, Anything for Jackson, and of course, the Creep Show TV series. Well, I can now add one more movie to that list, and that is Late Night with the Devil. It began streaming on April 19th after its theatrical release, and boy did it come in with both a great deal of fanfare and more than a little bit of controversy. The movie did get amazing reviews almost universally, which is a rarity, especially for a horror movie.
Of course, I never trustees after getting bit more than once on that front. Anyone remember It Follows or The Babadook? But I was hopeful, as I usually am. Just not enough to risk seeing it in a theater. But the controversy quickly followed suit, as apparently the movie made use of AI. See, the film has these interstitial screens which indicate the depicted TV show going to or coming back from a commercial. While there's only a handful of these that appear for only a few seconds, one featuring a skeleton that was used heavily in the movie's promotional materials.
And reports came out that these were generated by AI. The studio later came out and clarified that yes, AI was used for the initial images, but that they were then modified by actual graphic artists. But that was enough to send the internet into a spiral as usual. Now, the use of AI is an important consideration, especially when it comes to eliminating humans from the equation. I'm considering doing an entire future episode on it as I have been a programmer for 25 years and also a user and developer of AI systems.
But the important thing to consider here is that the algorithms that fuel the biggest platforms are also driven by outrage. So a huge grain of salt is usually needed with any hot take, especially when those making the videos covering it are typically motivated by the amount of money or the invisible internet points that they can earn from them. Not always, but there's more than you can shake a stick at presently.
The movie centers around a fictional late-night TV talk show in the 70s, whose host was originally viewed as being a rival to Johnny Carson, but was now fighting to keep the show on air. And he thinks that this particular Halloween special will accomplish both of them at once. The characters are likable, the action fast-paced, and it avoids the all-too common trap of attempting to signpost upcoming plot points by attempting to disguise them as random lines or events. An idea that was interesting was Shawn of the Dead, but is very tired now.
While the movie isn't deep and could have obviously benefited from an ounce of research into the demonic IFC, if you listen to me, I am available for consultation anytime. Its ending wasn't broadcasted early on, nor did an attempt at some poor excuse of a twist in order to make it interesting. Rather, the director focused on exactly what should have been done and made the entire movie itself interesting, which is perhaps even more of a rarity nowadays. Late night with the devil was obviously crafted with love and it clearly shows. I really could not recommend it highly enough.
However, not everything came up Roses for Shudder, as can be expected. Its sheer lack of quality control was on clear display yet again with the release of another horrible horror movie a few weeks before Late Night with the Devil. And this one was called You'll Never Find Me. Others I had talked about it built it as a slow burn. And if it was any good, then that would definitely be its defining character. Yet the movie never bothered to catch any type of fire at all, but instead rapidly fizzled out. The movie is entirely shot in a rundown trailer in a supposed remote part of Australia.
The owner, a middle-aged man, opens the door in the midst of a severe storm to the presence of a young woman on the doorstep. The rest of the movie features only these two characters, and that is not a dean to the movie. I have nothing against two-person movies. Heck, that was largely the movie Nefarious, and it was one of the best horror movies I have seen in a very, very long time. Yet this one has quite a few issues with it. First, it attempts to keep the audience interested in what's going on by leaving the most unsubtle mysteries about both of these characters.
And if you've ever seen a movie before, nevertheless a horror one, then you're probably guessed what's going on halfway through. The dialogue between the two is forced and uninteresting at times, and the movie depends entirely upon the mysteries big reveals. And to me, none of them were worth the amount of time needed to sit through it. There were some good ideas presented in the film, and I actually wanted to like it. Both actors were good and convincing, but they were let down by the plot itself and its execution.
In the end, I wish that the movie lived up to its name and didn't allow anyone to find it. It needed a lot more work to be a decent movie. Nevertheless, a great one. I was frankly bored through the majority of it, and my poor wife fell asleep a quarter of the way through. I know this episode is a week late in releasing, but I had to work in a review of Late Night with the Devil. Because it's been a while since I've done a horror review, and I really wanted to talk about it. Plus, if I can save anyone the time needed to watch You'll Never Find Me, then I would consider that a fair trade.
After all, I'll never find that hour and a half again. Now that that's out of my system, let's turn our attention back to where it rightfully belongs. And that is the Father Bird song as he joins me for a conversation about how the dark afflicts us in an episode I call Late Night with the Evil Eye.
Alright, well, one of the things that you mentioned this in one of your last podcasts. That's where we left off. I really hate to say this. And I really hate to bring it up. But it is my thought and my I'm I'm I'm just gonna say discernment. Is that okay? That what we have been talking about and what we have been dealing with, and I'm not talking about just me, but I'm talking about you, myself, and those around us of things that we deal with day in and day out, and things that we discuss and bring out to light, so to speak.
You have to understand that we are we are bringing darkness into light. And unfortunately when that happens it is no fault of our own, but what we are doing, the enemy will attack physically. And the reason why the enemy attacks physically, because if we or the kingdom of darkness, so to speak, can attack us physically, then it will eventually attack us or affect us. That's what I really want to say, affect us in our spirit, in our soul training. If we're attacked physically, like in your eyes, you you have to think that in your eyes that's what you see, right?
And you unfortunately already have one eye very bad. With that being said, if the enemy can affect your good eye, that is going to do its best to distract you. And frankly, JJ, I don't I don't wanna put anything on you or say this is where you were, but I mean, come on. I I I know for a fact you were there for a moment. It would depress you.
Because when you can't for about a week. Yeah. To be completely honest with you, while this was going on, so I went to the emergency room for for everyone's elucidation that don't that didn't follow along with recent conversations on Southern Demonology. Yeah, share share the whole story if you don't mind. I had been having blurry vision for a few weeks until I went back home for the holidays in Tennessee. And it was to the point where I was having to use my 75-inch TV as a monitor for my computer just so that I could actually see what in the world I was doing on uh for work.
But I made it work, saw an ophthalmologist, and they were like, ah, your uh your eye besides some minor blood vessel leakage, it's okay. Your left eye is actually worse. We're gonna schedule some stuff to take care of it, but your right eye, nothing really should be causing you issues right now. And I'm like, okay, that's weird, but thank you for spending five minutes with me to uh c address my concern. And then finally went back to Tennessee and was with my mom. And one night I felt a I felt like I had a boulder in my eyeball.
Oh my god.
My good eye. Nothing would take care of it. I was rinsing my eye out with eye drops, that did nothing. Got to the point where I was so desperate that I ran my eye underneath tap water hoping to dislodge whatever it may have been. And that just made it worse. Next morning I woke up in mortal pain. Could not open my eye. If I did, then pain would lance throughout my entire head. And then I had my mom who can't really drive anymore, at least not all that well.
She had to take me to the nearest town of Dixon, to the emergency room, where they saw me, and about an hour I was out, thank God it wasn't packed. And they're like, Well, we see a uh an abrasion on your cornea. So they flushed up my eye with saline, did a couple of other things, but they're like, Here, use these eye drops and you should be okay. And I went, Alright. So for the next two days, I sat at home with my eyes closed, not being able to watch anything. Light seared my eyes.
And I just sat in darkness for two days straight, hoping that things would get better, and they wouldn't. And I still felt like I had a boulder in my eye, couldn't open up my eyes, was just listening to an audio book the entire time because there was nothing else I could do. And it but I was I was petrified. I knew that I was going to go blind. And my worst fear is that because I have always been afraid of going blind. Even when I was a little kid, I had to sleep with the nightlight. If I didn't, I knew I was gonna wake up blind the next day.
All of this fed into my irrational fears to begin with, and then for two days straight where I couldn't see shit. Excuse the language. No, no, go ahead. I was pondering what my future might look like. Right. Would I have to go on disability? Would I have to relearn all of these voice commands in order to be able to continue to work in some fashion?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and I I and I got so fearful that I finally told my mom, I said, You've got to take me back to the emergency room. I it's not getting better, and I don't know what's happening. So she took me, drove back up to Dixon in the middle of the night, checked in, and they again did the same scan. They're like, We see something on your cornea, but that's all we can do. They attempted to do a 15-minute slow saline drip over my eye where they actually insert a plastic cup inside of your eyelid. Do uh-uh uh they just let water wash over your eye. Well they had to knock me out.
Oh, it it was not comfortable, and then after a minute, it got so painful. I'm like, no, I I can't handle this. Uh it is killing me. They take it out, uh, they wash my eye again, they give me some ointment, and they're like, okay, go. And they said, Look, there's nothing more that we can do here. You have to go see an ophthalmologist. And I'm like, that's fine, I don't know who to go see. And they gave me a name for a guy who was literally right down the road and said, Go see him, he's really good.
So first thing in the morning, we get up, and we didn't get back home until like three something in the morning. We woke up at nine, call the ophthalmologist, and he's like, Yeah, I'll see you right now.
Wow.
Okay.
And the man had hold on, JJ, hold on, hold on. Go ahead. I am so sorry to interrupt you right here. But do you do you realize how blessed of God you were right then for ophthalmologists to say, yeah, come on in? Oh, it gets even better. Okay, okay, good.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but please. I mean, this is meant to be a dialogue, not just one person telling the side tale. Yeah. I get into the ophthalmologist. He's an older gentleman and his wife. They are the only ones that run this clinic that they have.
Oh, okay.
The man says about 15 words to me. He plops me in a chair. He thrusts my head into a into uh one of the uh observer things that they have. He runs a light test, he runs a blue light test, and he goes, hmm. Okay. And then he opens my eyeball without telling me a single thing of what he's doing and plops in a contact lens. What? And I'm like, what? Okay. And to this day, I had no idea why he did that, but the moment he did, oh my gosh, it was utter relief.
Wow.
My eye felt like it was normal. And he finally said, for the first time he talked in this entire exam, he said, You have a severe tear in your cornea right over your pupil. Okay. This will make it feel a lot better. And it was slightly tinted because I couldn't even go outside without sunglasses. I mean, even when I did kind of open my eye up a little bit, it was bad. I was playing the game the entire way of can I guess where I am based upon the curves that I feel that we're going around? And it was an old country road, so there's a hell of a lot of curves. Oh yeah.
And then he said, Come in on Saturday, which is like four days away, and I'll follow up with you. My office is closed, so it's just you that's coming in. I'll drive in to see you. And I went, okay. And this time he was a lot more friendly when I went for the checkup, but my vision began to slowly return back to normal. He saw it again. Uh he gave me some more powerful antibiotics to put into my eye. And I thought things were done. Like this solved the issue.
And then the 29th, December 29th, the day before I was supposed to leave to go back to Northern Virginia, and three days before my birthday, woke up with my eyeball burning, and I felt like there was a boulder back in my eye. And I'm like, oh gosh. And this was a Sunday. And I call and he's like, Yep, come on in. I'll open the office just for you. I go in, he sees me, he uh puts the contact back into my eye, and he goes, Whenever your cornea heals, it can heal unevenly. The cells don't fully lay back down, and that can lead to a reoccurrence of the abrasion.
Oh my.
And now I finally have that con that new contact lens off my eye. Things are better.
Good.
Hopefully that no re-abrasion happens, and if they do, then I'll have to have another contact on for a while. But in that week, week and a half where I knew nothing was going on, I was in the depths of despair and panic.
So you would probably, with all that being said, what Josh would say, Josh, you are you hearing all this? What circle of hell was he in? Yeah, what what what what was Dante's the fifth? You were in the fifth circle of hell, so to speak. I mean, eye pain the only thing that I ever remember of eye pain is I used to be a welder. Oh gosh. I welded aluminum for many years. And any anyone that knows what it's like to weld aluminum, if you ever had or ever experienced the burning of your eyes from it, it is horrendous.
And then when light hits it, it's like when light hits your eyes, it's like a pain that you will never, never forget because it goes throughout your body. So for you to contrast the way you were feeling, especially when light hit it, what I felt was probably minimal to what you felt. And so that probably hit you from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. And I can't just to even think about that pain that you experienced makes my whole body just I can't explain it. It's just it's not even imaginable the pain that you felt.
Well, if you wielded aluminum, then it would the smell would hit you too. I used to be a little bit more.
Oh yeah, the cadmium, the caddium of the aluminum, it was yeah, pretty bad.
Yeah. I worked as as a summer intern for an aluminum smelting plant during college and grad school two summers. And God, just working in even just working in the office and getting that smell waffed over you.
Well, I used to weld cartoon bolts, and that was aluminum and some stainless. Just but mostly aluminum and the cadmium or the chemical that comes off of the aluminum when you're welding it, it is well that's why I don't weld anymore. And that was over 30 years ago. So that should yeah, it just killed my eyesight.
But that is the strangest thing. When I had been both to the emergency room and to the ophthalmologist, they asked me, do you work with wood? Do you do metal working? Do you work outside? And I'm like, no, I do none of those things.
Well, every one of your symptoms, I would have thought if I didn't know you, every one of the symptoms that you brought forward, I would have thought if I didn't know you that you were a metal worker.
Well, and that's the most common reason this happened. Now, the only like mundane explanation that I can, and I have wrecked my brain just trying to think of it, is I do have a tablet that has a cracked screen. And maybe while I was running my finger over it, I got a very small piece of glass on my finger, and then somehow that got into my eye. But who knows? I I have no idea.
And that's that's very reaching. Maybe if you worked with fiberglass or like an insulation type setting where you made insulation for like homes and stuff, or metal, but other I say all that to say this, and this is what started our whole conversation. You mentioned in the previous podcast that people that have been talking about what we have been talking about have been affected by the supernatural. I brought this up because I know number one, you're not a medical worker. I mean a metal worker. I know you don't work with fiberglass or insulation. No.
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, there's no reason whatsoever that you should have gotten a tear of your cornea. Even with one eye with macular degeneration, it takes something to tear a cornea, okay? It takes something to tear a retina apart from the eye. You with me? And you don't work with none of that. So unfortunately, with my discernment, and I have withheld this for a couple of weeks now, maybe, or at least a week, just because I wanted to sit back on it and meditate and pray about it.
I would not be surprised if you were not being attacked because of the conversations that we as a group have been having. However, with that being said, I would say do not fear. Because as I told you before, the enemy is well, you even mentioned it in one of your previous podcasts where I said the enemy is pissed off and he is. And when he gets upset like us as humans, although he is a spiritual, angelic being that is full of pride and arrogance, he don't like it. And so he wants to try to show out and throw things in front of our face and say, Now what are you gonna do?
Well, it's up to us to say, okay, well, let me show you what I can do. Or as me and you as southern rednecked boys, we can say, Hold my beer and watch this shit. You know, you know what I'm saying. Anyway, uh that and I hate to say that, yeah, Pastor Mike just said, Hold my beer and watch this shit. Okay. At any rate, that's what we're facing. And I'm not gonna say, I am not gonna say, thus says the Lord, this is why you had the problem, you with me. But I am gonna say I would not doubt it.
Well, and to put this into further context, you and I had a conversation about the do's and don'ts of exorcism.
Yes, we did, and it was it was a good, it was the best one we ever had.
We recorded that before the holidays, and that was the next set of episodes for Southern Demonology that were set to come out.
Oh wow, okay.
And these eye issues delayed that by at least a week, if not no, more like two weeks. That is definitely something, but I will say that the conversation that we had together, it felt supernaturally inspired. Because we mean I I said it even in the when I released the episodes, we flowed and played off each other so well, yeah, it was unbelievable. Like I had never I've been doing this since April of 2017. I have never had a conversation go like that.
It was, and I have to echo the same thing. It was one of the most JJ, I can't even put it into words. It was what was it, Josh? We just flowed, so I don't I don't have a word for that. Josh said it was ordained session. Wow, that that says a lot. But he just looked at me and said that was a ordained session. But yeah, he just he just looked at me and then he just he didn't blink an eye and said that was an ordained session. And that's you know what? That's a pretty doggone way to put that.
It was I'll agree with that. I even had Chris from the Wandering Road podcast. Yeah, he listened to it twice, each episode twice, and he came back and he said, I really loved this talk. This was probably the best episode you've put out. And I said, I I agree.
Well, that that's absolutely wonderful.
Thank you for listening to Southern Demonology. Find us online at Southern Demonology.com, which offers links to all of our social media and episodes. Southern Demonology is fully owned, produced, and edited by myself. And the intro and outro music are composed by me as well. If you have a moment, please rate, like, and share this podcast, as it is the best way to help support my work. As always, I am JJ, and it has been a pleasure to speak to you today.