In the world of horror podcasts, some can be a nightmare. Or, in the case of Scream Dreams, AMP’s podcast, the horrors are actual nightmares, as the podcast dives into them in a compelling and unique fashion. With a myriad of guests from within the horror genre, co-hosts Catherine Corcoran and James A Janisse interview and get into what’s scary, both universally and individually.
I spoke with co-host Catherine Corcoran and managing director and head of production Bob Portal about where this started, how they keep it light, future dreams, and much more!
This interview may be edited for clarity.
This is Kristy Strouse with Film Inquiry. I love the show! First, can you tell me a bit about your background?
Catherine Corcoran: I’m an actor by trade and now a bit of a writer. I had gotten offers to do podcasts in the past and had always shied away from them. Not because any of the companies were bad or anything like that. But because it has a bit of a genre following, it always kind of gravitated towards this, like, news presenter angle. And that’s not particularly exciting for me. When I met Bob, Barbara, and AMP, they said that they were trying to do this, and it was also kind of right at the beginning of the strikes. It allowed for the ability to be creative because working on podcasts was not struck work. (We) played with how we could potentially engage audiences without this kind of news-forced presentational angle. We have this community of people, genre and outside of genre, who are constantly asked the same questions and always do these press junkets. And to be able to explore their psyche and what makes them scared kind of came up, partially because I only have nightmares. So this idea for a nightmare show was fun! It’s one that registered, and that’s how it all started. We spent a couple of months in the AMP office flushing it out. Bob spearheaded that. (We) decided to come together and do a test episode to see what happened. And we’ve been enjoying working together ever since.
Bob Portal: Indeed, we have. So, from our side, AMP is an independent production company. We handle production, financing, film sales, and distribution. We’ve been operating in these guises for about six or seven years. The idea of a podcast personally interested me because I listen to plenty of podcasts and watch YouTube videos. At a certain point, I realized I was consuming more podcasts and YouTube videos than movies or TV shows, which may not be an admission I should make. [Laughs] But it showed me how many people spend their time, including the audiences we want to reach as filmmakers. One thing I liked about it was the direct engagement with the audience. In film, interactions with audiences are usually filtered through distributors, studios, and marketing departments. With a podcast or YouTube show, engagement is direct—they like it, they don’t like it, they tell you what they like and don’t like, and you can see what’s working. Of course, with podcasts and YouTube, there’s a lot out there.
However, we wanted to enhance the AMP brand and showcase interesting people. Catherine mentioned we started during the strikes when there weren’t so many film production opportunities, and it grew into a tie-in with the kind of movies AMP produces and the guests we’ve had. Our hosts are people we work closely with. Barbara Crampton has been part of the AMP family for quite some time, and you’ve seen all the movies we’ve produced together, which received nice reviews from Film Inquiry. She wanted to do a show but didn’t necessarily want to handle the heavy lifting of producing it.
When I met Catherine earlier last year, she expressed interest in doing a podcast show, which made sense. We were lucky to have James A. Janisse join us. He has his own hugely successful YouTube genre shows, “Dead Meat” and “Kill Count,” and wanted to work with Catherine and Barbara and interview people in a way he wouldn’t necessarily on his show, where they don’t do as many formal sit-down interviews. That’s how it all came about.
That’s awesome. Did you have a few ideas that you wanted to do for podcasts before meeting her?
Bob Portal: Before I met Catherine, we discussed some generic show ideas. One of the other people involved in discussions early on, because she’s an experienced podcaster with a long-running Fangoria show (Colors of the Dark), is Rebekah McKendry, who you may know, and we worked with on Glorious.
Loved Glorious!
Bob Portal: Yes! And Rebekah gave us some of her thoughts on what we should and shouldn’t do. We had initial meetings about that. But I think in terms of the actual germ of this idea, it very much came from everybody talking together and Catherine‘s nightmares – the fact that she doesn’t sleep well and only has nightmares. What a horrible life. That was a big part of it. And I’ll let her take the rest of the question. But yes, there were other ideas that we floated as well. We had a whole list of them.
Yeah, Catherine, that’s horrible. Are nightmares all you have?
Catherine Corcoran: We joke on the show that it’s just a way for me to have therapy for my issue. But no, it’s been that way since I was a little kid. I don’t sleep well in general. I’m a chronic insomniac, but I’ve always had horrible nightmares. It’s really hard to have a restful sleep. I can name maybe two or three times when I’ve had a positive dream. And I think the nightmares are my way of processing stress and anxiety because, a lot of times, they’re not even that terrible. Some will be, but many things haven’t happened but could happen. So, like, my power’s out right now, and I can’t Zoom properly, so I’ll have a nightmare that you’ve decided I’m a terrible person and are just gonna write terrible things about me. That’s what’s up. But yeah, that’s how it works. When James wanted to do the show, what was interesting was that he talked about how he doesn’t remember many of his dreams. It became two different angles on how to approach that. But also, it’s hilarious that James’s wife, Chelsea, with whom he does his other show, also struggles to sleep. We’ve had her on the show and listened to different people’s processes in not only their sleep health but also how dreams and their way of processing stress and their nightmares inform their creative work. So we’ve had people like Nick Antosca, a showrunner and an Emmy-nominated filmmaker. He talks about how he won’t look at his phone in the mornings, which I’ve now adopted for the first couple of hours every day. He discusses how he won’t even respond to an email until he’s done certain morning meditation things. Otherwise, it’s just too stressful. Or, like when we had Mike Flanagan on, he talked about his sobriety, how fear evolves, and how it’s influenced his work. So it’s actually, in a weird way, becoming this kind of community therapy. Group therapy is also a community resource for processing the natural stresses of this business and life in general. We’re combating things that are unprecedented all the time. Even this week alone, it’s like LA got more rain, there are mudslides, and people’s cars are stuck under them. We’re constantly processing new, strange things. And not just as entertainment professionals but as people. I think it provides these kinds of interesting community and coping skills that many shows don’t offer while having fun. You don’t hit anyone over the head with any lifestyle. It’s just about coming together.
Bob Portal: Yeah, I mean, it has been an interesting time, COVID, obviously, here in LA, there were strikes, but generally, it’s been hard economically out there in other businesses, too. And, just general, I don’t know, where’s everything going? Another election year? Who knows?
Life can be horrifying!
Bob Portal: It has felt like one thing after another for the last few years. It’s been really ‘interesting times’ in that respect because when people talk to us, they partly talk about their actual fears.
Yeah, I love that. It’s incredibly fascinating, and I love the evolution of it and that it’s become what you were talking about, people giving kind of tips as to how they deal with it.
Have you considered expanding? I know you have Patreon stuff, like listener stories, or listener nightmares, or any kind of…
Bob Portal: Funny you should say that…
Catherine Corcoran: Yeah, we do. On our Patreon, we asked if people would write in some of their nightmares so that we could incorporate them into the show. And we have, which is in the Lin Shaye episode that dropped recently. Because we shoot three in one day, the games we play kind of become a blur. I tend to write the Mad Libs and Bob and I develop the games, and it is so fun.
What we did with Lin was read out the nightmares that people wrote in one of our games. So we did like two truths and a lie, trying to figure out which ones were people’s real nightmares, and which we’ve made up for the show.
Great idea.
Catherine Corcoran: Yeah. It does come up in conversations. And, we’ll start asking questions based on insights that people just have in general. What’s been rewarding for me is the audience’s reactions. I’ve read the comments and heard from friends. The show is not particularly aiming to be emotional – part of the reason we do things like Mad Libs and play games is to keep it light. But I’ve gotten multiple texts of people getting really emotional from listening to the show or people commenting about how certain things people said made them emotional and that they just felt seen. That’s rewarding because I think as storytellers, that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do. So to be able to do that, and readily get that feedback that it’s working and they feel connected, and they feel this kind of spirit of hope amidst this dark subject matter – I think that’s the best part.
Yeah, that’s wonderful. How do you see the future? Do you see any other kind of evolutions, or do you have any visions for how this will go down the line?
Bob Portal: Yes, we do. It does have a kind of crossover, just from an AMP point of view – it’s a production; it’s not a movie, but it’s a production line, believe me, as anybody who does podcasts will tell you. We tend to record them in batches, but you’re putting out one a week. Because of that, I think the things that sort of connect it to the rest of what AMP is doing and the future is number one.
We do get to interview some exciting people. To hear what scares them in life is a question that we always ask them. Also, what gives them hope, we call it their ’Night Light’ – we always ask about that. What’s the one thing they do, how do they cope with all this crazy, and what gets them through? So, yeah, I wouldn’t call it a therapy session, but the format allows people to get off script and talk about not just the latest movie promotion or whatever. And that was very deliberate when we chose this idea.
Even if a guest comes on and says, I never have nightmares, or whatever, or I never remember them, there are still ways to push the conversation. The interesting thing about the episodes is that we’ve had everything. We’ve had some hilarious episodes, obviously, partly guest-dependent, but sometimes just the way the conversation goes. Then we’ve had some pretty emotional episodes as well. And it’s not just because people are constantly talking about how they don’t get any sleep, which let’s face it, seems to be universal, but it’s also because it’s a very personal thing, sleep and what you dream about and what your fears are, and your hopes.
These are sort of topics beyond just things that people in the business or connected to the genre have – everybody has this. One of the things Catherine and I talked about early on – it’d be nice to expand our guest roster outside a little bit of the genre, but one also has to be cognizant of the audience when one’s doing it. We know from the Patreon subscribers we now have that they love these genre guests and they constantly say, can you have this person on and that person on? Quite nice, because some of them we’ve either already recorded or booked. So there’s a sort of synergy there with the audience, but the whole nightmare theme is kind of universal, and there are many people in different fields outside of genre creatives who are sort of connected to it.
That’s very interesting. Lastly: dream guests, do either of you have one?
Catherine Corcoran: I think for me, within the genre space, I mean, any actress would say this: Jamie Lee Curtis would be like the dream. I’ve been listening to her interviews for years. I am so in awe of her and how she processes things. But, outside of that, gosh, I’m a huge Lord of the Rings nerd. So like, if we could get someone from that franchise on, I think I would lose my mind.
I totally get that!
Catherine Corcoran: I think I would just be like, wait, what? But honestly, like truly, James and I talk about this all the time, and he gets to interview people who are at this incredible level constantly. He has been existing in the YouTube space for a very long time. But every time people come in, we always talk about how blown away we are that we even get to talk to them. I think for me, Tracie Thoms was a huge one. I was just like, my mouth was on the floor. Because just the nerdy theater kid in me grew up idolizing her, knowing how incredible she was. The fact that she would even sit down and want to talk to us about anything, let alone her fears, I think was just so crazy to me. The fact that we blew Mike Flanagan‘s mind with a realization we came up with on the show – that was wild. Like, the man is arguably a genius. So to have that moment, James and I have talked about that, we’re just like, oh, my God, how is this? How is this our life? We’re very blessed. And we’re very grateful to Bob for letting us have those conversations.
Amazing! Well, Thank you so much for speaking with me! Congrats on the podcast!
We want to thank Bob Portal and Catherine Corcoran for taking the time to speak with us.
Does content like this matter to you?
Become a Member and support film journalism. Unlock access to all of Film Inquiry`s great articles. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about cinema - get access to our private members Network, give back to independent filmmakers, and more.