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The Scares That Shaped Us Episode 51: Let's Scare Jessica to Death with Bob Pastorella

Matthew Jackson

17 Oct 2025 — 1 min read

I met Bob Pastorella, a fellow Texan horror lover, podcaster, and writer, at Ghoulish Book Fest this past spring. He pitched his novel The Small Hours to me, and we talked about vampire movies, and almost immediately Let's Scare Jessica To Death was the thing that bonded us.

I love this weird, patient, deeply creepy hippie vampire movie, and it clearly made a huge impact on Bob as a horror fan and as a horror writer. The Small Hours is a riff on Dracula and Carmilla more than it is on this film, but it's all part of one long vampiric continuum, and we had a very time unpacking it all on this week's episode.

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And as always, you can check out every episode we've ever done on our host archive.

Next week, we'll be back with another brand-new episode as middle-grade horror author Ally Malinenko stops by to talk about her new book, BROKEN DOLLS and Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Tell-Tale Heart."

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