Despite being around for nearly two decades with increasing cultural dominance, podcasters are a relatively rare presence in the movies. In sci-fi blockbusters, they can be conduits for wonder—a character in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” is literally named Podcast—whose underdog status lends them a certain counterintuitive credibility. (See also: Brian Tyree Henry’s conspiratorial podcast host in 2022’s “Godzilla Vs. Kong.”) They can also lend quaint texture to an independent drama like “C’mon C’mon,” in which Joaquin Phoenix plays an NPR-style “radio journalist.”
But it’s in horror movies, the place where we go to collectively digest our subconscious hatreds and fears, where you can see how we, as a culture, feel about podcasts and everything they stand for: the collapse of traditional media, the rise of influencers and parasocial fame, misinformation, the attention economy, and the unnatural, brain-breaking din of hearing what everyone has to say about everything all of the time. And how do we feel? We hate it and we want it to die.
As with their content-obsessed cousins, livestreamers (quite negatively portrayed in “Deadstream” and “Dashcam”), if you’re watching a horror movie and someone is introduced as a podcaster, this is a character whose death you’re about to relish. At best, podcasters in horror movies are self-absorbed and gullible. At worst, they’re cancerous presences who stand in for a director’s hatred of their critics. The rise of podcasts happened in tandem with the rise of social media, which made it easier than ever for trolls to talk trash about famous filmmakers. And a podcaster, at least in the movies, is basically a professional troll.
The meanest of them all is in “Tusk,” Kevin Smith’s 2014 pivot into horror and the ur-text for this niche subcategory of horror films. The irony here is that Smith is himself a podcaster, and hosts an astonishing seven shows at the time of this writing. The film is based on an episode of Smith’s podcast “SModcast,” which was itself based on an online ad offering free room and board to anyone willing to dress up like a walrus for two hours a day. That ad turned out to be a hoax, but now we have a movie based on it, which is just kind of how the internet works.