Published Tuesday, October 20, 2026 at 07:41 AM PT

Burbank · Tuesday, October 20, 2026 · 7:41 AM · 60°F, 78% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.34 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 6

🍿 What to Watch Tonight

Tonight’s pick is Late Night with the Devil, the one AV Pop Culture crowned the actual top of their 13 Nights of Halloween Watchlist — not a participation trophy, the real number one. Their pitch: “stylish, creative, and anchored by an awesome performance by David Dastmalchian,” shot like found-footage TV-from-hell, the kind of thing that “puts you in there” and turns into “a spectacle of horror” about, fittingly, the dangers of entertainment itself eating its own host. On-brand for a night when you’re also letting an AI narrate your network traffic back to you.

Why tonight and not, say, the thirteenth rewatch of a Friday the 13th documentary lamenting what they did to Jason: because October is closing in like a Hue motion sensor with a grudge, and AV Pop Culture’s whole thesis is that this is the one that “fits here because it’s about the dangers of entertainment” — a smarter hook than anything involving Mumra the Ever-Living or another CGI kaiju birth cycle. It’s a found-footage talk-show-gone-wrong, it’s got one killer central performance carrying the whole bit, and it clocks in lean instead of demanding a three-film franchise autopsy.

Skip the Jason eulogy, skip the nihilistic sci-fi anime list unless you want to spiral about corporate dystopia at 11 PM, and let David Dastmalchian ruin your evening instead. As AV Pop Culture put it: “be kind, rewind.” Watch here: AV Pop Culture — 13 Nights of Halloween Watchlist

Pencil me in as surprised: today’s haul skipped the usual trailer-drop nonsense and went straight for lore theory, slasher obituaries, and two different Jon Stewart podcasts arguing with the universe. Somewhere between a kaiju eating a volcano and a guy explaining why he didn’t high-five an intruder in his house, I found an actual theme — everybody’s either digging up the past or trying to figure out what the hell to do with a franchise that’s outlived its own good ideas. Grab popcorn. I’ll grab the aspirin.

Avatar Lore and a Slasher Who Lost the Plot

WatchMojo.com dropped “10 Things You Missed in Avatar: Seven Havens Episodes 1-6,” and if you were hoping for a casual lore recap, buddy, wrong channel. The video digs into how the original avatar got made — Wan merging with the spirit Rava to contain Vatu after he got loose — and argues Rava and Vatu, opposites bound as “two sides of the same coin,” are quietly foreshadowing new characters Pavi and Nisha as a future hero-villain pair. There’s a gate symbol in the Havens that apparently echoes the Rava/Vatu imagery, which is the kind of detail that only a WatchMojo editor and three people in a Discord server notice, and I respect the commitment. The video also connects the show’s new Seven Havens — born from the ashes of the old Four Nations after, per the clip, “our ancestors banded together” — to the Seven Chakras concept from the original series’ Season 2, where Aang’s chakra-opening is all-or-nothing once you start. WatchMojo floats that Book 1’s title, “Survival,” lines up with the Earth Chakra, the one fear blocks shut, and that Pavi and Nisha cracking it open could be the season’s actual arc. There’s also a dangling thread about a secret room in a character named Karthik’s office that Pavi and Nisha stumble into in episode five — the clip cuts off before paying it off, so consider that a cliffhanger WatchMojo handed to both the show and me.

Compare that to JoBlo Horror Originals’ “WTF Happened to Jason Voorhees?” — same impulse, opposite mood. Where WatchMojo is thrilled a franchise is doing something new, JoBlo is standing over Friday the 13th’s grave asking if we even need Jason anymore. Their complaint: the most recent official, rights-holder-sanctioned Jason content is “bland and lifeless,” official in a way fan tributes never got to be, but gutless in exactly the way those fan tributes weren’t. The video’s real target is Crystal Lake, the TV show that is, once again, a high-profile Friday the 13th property that doesn’t actually feature the Jason anyone showed up for — it centers Pamela Voorhees instead, pre- and post-drowning, repositioning her as hero, villain, and newest slasher in one package. JoBlo’s counter-examples are a tidy little syllabus: Art the Clown from Terrifier as the silent-slasher heir who’s “far crueler” but still scratches the itch, and the Hatchet series as the gold standard for doing a legacy-mute-slasher right — consistent look, a real backstory, and Kane Hodder, the actor most identified with Jason himself, doing the honors. Ecclesiastes 1:9 says there’s no new thing under the sun, and horror franchises are Exhibit A — JoBlo’s whole argument is that we keep handing Jason a new coat of paint instead of admitting we already liked the old one better.

Behind the Curtain: Titans, Kaiju, and Why Nihilism Never Gets Old

Trash Taste Highlights posted “What Anime Does a Hollywood Producer Watch?” and the most interesting bit isn’t the favorites list, it’s the production talk. The producer and host get into how a live-action adaptation of a densely-illustrated, scale-obsessed anime (context points hard at Attack on Titan) would actually have to be shot — they bring up that the real Attack on Titan live-action films were filmed on Gunkan Jima, the abandoned “battleship island” off Japan, using forced-perspective camera tricks to sell giants interacting with normal-sized humans, the same trick Lord of the Rings used to make hobbits look small at a dinner table. It’s a nice reminder that “giants standing on giants,” as the host puts it, is a miniatures-and-camera-angle problem before it’s a CGI problem, and that the cheap trick is usually also the good trick.

Marvelous Videos’ “Entire Pacific Rim’s Kaiju Life Cycle” is doing the lord’s work of explaining a franchise built entirely on “giant monster hits giant robot” by actually taking its internal logic seriously — drone-kaiju merging into a “Mega Kaiju” en route to detonate Mount Fuji, stopped by Gypsy Avenger, is Pacific Rim Uprising’s plot and yes, it is exactly as unhinged as it sounds, and no, I will not apologize for loving it. The behind-the-scenes nugget worth keeping: Guillermo del Toro and Travis Beacham created the kaiju for the first film, Steven S. DeKnight directed the sequel (which underperformed at the box office, the video notes bluntly), and years of third-film rumors have apparently resolved into something more interesting — reports of a prequel TV series possibly landing on Amazon Prime, plus new graphic novels from Legendary Comics. There’s also a grim little worldbuilding detail about Hong Kong’s Reckoner Shantytown, a slum built around the carcass of a dead Category 4 kaiju. Humanity: give us an apocalypse and we’ll build a neighborhood on the corpse. Kandosii, I guess — that’s Mando’a for “nice one, well done” — and I’m saying it with my eyebrows raised, because that’s objectively horrifying urban planning.

Marvelous Anime’s listicle “10 Nihilistic Sci-Fi Anime That Make Cyberpunk Look Optimistic” earns its title fast — the GenoCyber entry describes a character’s rage-transformation incinerating “an entire city of millions in the blink of an eye,” then pivots to a genuinely strange epilogue about a couple, Ryu and Mel, chasing a cure for Mel’s blindness that their lower-class status keeps denying them, resolving in Mel regaining her sight and a newborn hinting at a reincarnation loop tied to earlier characters. The video’s framing is the real hook, though: Cyberpunk (as in Edgerunners) sells you corporate dystopia with “neon hair, guns with laser sights, kick-ass music, and a glimmer of hope” that you can still kick the establishment’s teeth in — the genuinely nihilistic stuff, by contrast, is the fiction that doesn’t even offer you that fantasy. They point viewers toward further gloom by name, which in the transcript renders as “techno-lies” and “Cassarin Sins” — I’m fairly confident that’s Texhnolyze and Casshern Sins doing their best to survive automated captioning, and honestly that’s the most nihilistic thing in this whole section.

Spooky Season Nostalgia

AV Pop Culture’s “13 Nights of Halloween Watchlist! ABC Family Style Spooky Season Nostalgia” is exactly the comfort-food programming you’d want this close to the 31st — a rundown that the host describes as running “from killer aliens to live nightmares that just might not be real,” built on the honest premise of ABC Family-era nostalgia rather than prestige horror. The one film he singles out as the list’s top slot is Late Night with the Devil, which he calls “stylish, creative,” and anchored by what he’s pretty sure is David Dastmalchian (the transcript mangles the name, but the performance praise is clear) — he highlights the film’s use of period-accurate cameras to sell found-footage dread, and frames its real subject as “the dangers of entertainment itself,” which, coming from a guy who films himself talking about movies for a living, is either self-aware or a cry for help. He also mentions he puts these films on in the background while he works, just to fill the house with seasonal atmosphere, which is the most relatable thing a content creator has admitted to all week. Shiny little recommendation, and I mean that in the Firefly sense — all’s well, nothing broken, just good seasonal junk food for your eyeballs.

Late Night, Satire, and a Guy Who Really Didn’t Want to Fight an Intruder

The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart posted a genuine Zentraedi-sized flood today — four separate episodes, which in Robotech terms means an overwhelming wave of content all landing on the same frontier at once, and yes, I’m calling Jon Stewart’s podcast schedule an alien invasion, fight me. The year-end wrap with Jon Favreau and Tim Miller is mostly outro banter — Stewart ribbing his own audio levels, joking he “shrieks like a scared girl” when the engineer turns down his gain, and some pointed-but-vague riffing on a political figure who’s apparently “tired” but still privately saying, at lower volume, the same stuff he says in public. The Oren Cass episode, “The Wealth of Wall Street,” is the sharpest of the batch: Cass and Stewart dissect Trump-era trade policy as fundamentally incoherent — taking a cut of Intel’s chip sales to China in one breath, slapping 50% tariffs on Brazil over how it treated Bolsonaro in the next — and Stewart coins the term “Tantronomics” for governing by impulse rather than ideology. Cass’s demolition-versus-rebuilding metaphor is the line worth keeping: tearing things down is a legitimate part of fixing a broken system, but if demolition is the whole plan, you’re not rebuilding anything, you’re just running out of things to knock over. The Heather Cox Richardson episode is pure decompression — Stewart cracking that Trump “rules the sea” with “his armada,” then going soft describing his wife as funnier, nicer, and (he suspects, as he ages) taller than him, blaming it on “compacting,” like cereal contents settling during shipping. The Graham Platner episode’s outro turns into the panel mocking an unnamed self-appointed arbiter of comedy who apparently declared Colbert, Kimmel, and Fallon “not funny” and unfit to be on air — the panel’s response, essentially, is to ask who died and made this guy the “grand poobah” of humor, and to note, accurately, that late night hosting half the country’s attention while alienating the other half isn’t exactly a failure mode unique to those three.

The Problem With Jon Stewart leaned more pointed. The Anne Applebaum interview on “Autocracy Inc.” is the most substantive thing in today’s haul — Applebaum frames today’s authoritarian drift less as classic fascism and more as “a heist movie,” an international caper between business interests and right-wing media cynics looting shared resources, and she’s blunt that modern autocracies — she names Russia, China, and Iran specifically — derive real power from using the Western financial system to launder stolen money through places like Caribbean islands and, yes, American states, before bringing it back home clean. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #213 says to stay neutral in a conflict so you can sell supplies to both sides, and that’s precisely the accusation Applebaum levels at Western finance — it built the laundromat and called it neutral. I’ll take Applebaum’s read over any Kremlin press release, because one of those is making an argument backed by how kleptocracy functions and the other is just the invasion’s PR department. The Oklahoma State Senator Nathan Dahm interview is a genuinely heated back-and-forth over voting-age restrictions and drag-performance bans, with Stewart pressing Dahm on whether “rights” that require registration or age minimums are still unqualified rights — it’s combative, unresolved on tape, and worth watching rather than summarizing secondhand. And the sketch “Why Are Working People Being Blamed for Inflation?” does what Stewart’s show does best: it takes the real talking point — that pandemic stimulus overheated the economy and workers now owe the “medicine” for it — and delivers the bit’s punchline through a crude, deliberately undignified metaphor about exactly where that medicine’s going. Subtle it is not. Funny it is. The companion sketch, “Team Freedom: Searching For Allies,” personifies France (by way of a character born in Lebanon) airing real grievances about Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawals, while “America” defends decades of foreign policy as “a beautiful buffet” with just “crumbs on the floor” — which is one hell of a way to describe two wars, but also exactly the kind of joke that lands because it’s not wrong.

Lighter fare: Screen Junkies’ Movie Fights tackled “Adventure Time Side Quests,” debating which cartoon the panel wouldn’t let a kid near power tools because of (the Lich, by way of voice actor John DiMaggio getting a shoutout) and, more entertainingly, which animated villain would actually beat Finn and Jake. The Mumra the Ever-Living case (“how do you fight that, you know? I guess you could bury him for eternity, but he’s been through worse”) is solid, but the Joker argument wins on comedy theory alone — the panelist’s case is that Finn and Jake’s whole identity runs on humor and fun, so a “God-level” force of disarming comedy beats them before a punch is thrown, mortal body or not. And Neal Brennan’s clip “When an Intruder Broke Into LL Cool J’s House…” is a short, surprisingly grounded anecdote — LL Cool J describing a home invasion, specifically pushing back on the idea that any of it was “cute” or “macho” in the moment, just dangerous and revealing about what you actually do under pressure versus what you’d like to imagine you’d do. No action-movie bravado here, just a guy being honest that an intruder in combat boots looking like “one of a Manson type” is terrifying regardless of how the story sounds once you’re safely telling it later.

That’s the stack — spirit lore, a slasher in a midlife crisis, a kaiju-corpse housing crisis, and two Jon Stewarts refusing to let anybody have an uncomplicated day. K’oyacyi out there, Little Mister — survive the week, and maybe don’t build your house on a dead kaiju. End of Line.

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