EP#305 Director Tyler MacIntyre ("It's a Wonderful Knife", "Tragedy Girls")

Kevin Lane's Spill Your Guts

Happy holidays from all of us here at SYG!

The winter solstice is upon and it’s one of the darkest times of the year. So as you're enjoying the lights on your Christmas tree and lighting your Christmas candles, just remember that though the holidays are a time for joy and cheer, it has a much darker history than that. This, our annual Christmas special, will be our final episode for the holidays but we’ll be back in a few weeks with more discussions with some of the luminaries of darkness.

Everyone has their favorite Christmas movie classics but perhaps the gold standard is Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Featuring Jimmy Stewart learning that every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings, it was only a matter of time before some master of the macabre took a stab at the setup for a horror film.

And boy are we lucky that that particular filmmaker happened to by our guest today, Tyler MacIntyre with his new film “It’s a Wonderful Knife”.

If you don’t love the title already you deserve to be boiled in your own Christmas pudding.

With a genre cast to die for, a razor-sharp script by Michael Kennedy (who wrote the genre hit “Freaky”) and a Christmas killer sure to join the ranks of the great Christmas slashers, “It’s a Wonderful Knife” has all the ingredients to become a Christmas horror fans tradition.

Tyler and I sat down to discuss the importance of inclusivity in modern horror, some tips of the trade for pursuing a career in filmmaking that are sure to be of great help for our aspiring filmmaker listeners, what he took from Hallmark when creating his own Christmas tale and how the film nods to “It’s a Wonderful Life” in some very sly ways. We also discuss the creation of Justin Long’s insane and wonderfully bizarre villain.

“It’s a Wonderful Knife” is available on Shudder, AMC+ and anywhere you rent your movies.

Okay, let’s sharpen our candy canes and get our wings with Tyler MacIntyre!

★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★