Behind the Spooky #04 — Joe Solmo and the Origins of Weekly Spooky

Conversation transcript, edited from an automatic transcription. Minor transcription errors may remain; not checked word for word against the audio. Advertising and separate introductory promotional material omitted. Speaker changes are not individually labeled.

Behind the Spooky I know, I know. I'm very sorry. It's been so long since I talked to you all. I got very busy with the day job and I was directing a western while still recovering from my unfortunate battle with COVID-19. I am doing much better. My lung capacity is at almost 95%. And I brought you guys a very special piece of Behind the Spooky because I have the man, the myth, the legend, Joe Splatter Solmo, the man behind PendinBlood.com, which was our biggest collaborator ever on Weekly Spooky.

And without it, I don't know if we would ever get this close to 100 episodes. Their stories have been featured on more episodes than I could count, and Joe's got some cool insight, and also just, uh, he's a fun guy to talk to, so we're gonna go to that conversation right now. I hope you enjoy it, and thank you so much for supporting us right here on Patreon. It makes a huge difference.

You guys are literally keeping, literally keeping the lights on, literally paying the light bill, so thank you all so much, and, uh, on with the show. Joseph Salmo, Joe Splatter Solmo. Do you mind if I call you Spla? Is that okay for short? That's all right. It's called my name. So, Joe, how are you today, first of all? I'm doing well today. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about how did Pendant Blood start?

I've been writing on and off since like third grade. Nothing good, of course. but when I went back to school, um, I worked warehouse jobs and I hated it. And I went back to school when I was around 40 and, uh, creativity was stuff I went to school for, you know, like graphic design and film. There's some film work and stuff, but it wasn't like the major. And I decided to put on my stuff online.

I was like, what's the worst that can happen? You know, somebody reads it, doesn't like it. And then, oh, well, they don't like it. And then they can go about their day. Yeah. So I put a bunch of mediocre stories, stories online for people to read and seem to do pretty well. Well, and I, I would have to heartily disagree about them being mediocre because when, when, uh, Dan Wilder and I started weekly spooky, we needed stories.

Obviously that's like the big, we have a scary story podcast, no stories mind you, but, uh, no. So we needed stories and the first words out of Dan's mouth were Joe Solno. So how did you and our producer Dan Wilder meet? Through a mutual friend named Jim. Jim and Dan were high school friends, and Jim and I were roommates. So Dan would come over, and I was like, oh, look at this vampire-looking guy.

I bet he likes horror movies as much as I do. And we kind of just talked here and there over Facebook, and he wrote his story. And I had written my story, and I asked him advice on some of my stuff and how to get it published on Kindle and that kind of stuff. So we just started talking about production and stuff like that. So at this point was penned in blood.com already up and running or.

I believe it was still an idea. I figured, you know, I did a little bit with web design with my band. We created a website for that. So I was like, I'll just put it up, you know, I'll make a website for it and. You know, I'll pay the monthly fees for the website and not worry about it and just try to get people to see the stuff. And I had Dan write stuff too.

So that way I could, you know, steal from his celebrity status. Early on, you had multiple authors because I know Dan was writing on there and Shane Migliavaca was writing on there. Yep. Shane writes occasionally still for me. I have some other friends that write. I was just looking actually on the website a little while ago here to check it out. There's Blaine, who is a friend of mine that's a fake name.

Nobody names her kid Blaine anymore. My friend Gwendolyn was published in the Kindle book. She's going to be stopping over my house in a little while. We're going to discuss the next volume. Oh, excellent. Excellent. Yeah. Plug that real quick for everybody listening. Cause the people who are listening to this are the weekly spooky diehards. They actually dropped as much as a dollar to hear this when they could just listen to the regular show completely for free guilt-free too.

So, well, if you go on, on Amazon, a pen and blood volume one is on there. Some of the stories are from the website. Some of it's exclusive content. I actually did some poetry for it. um, dark poetry, of course, of course. Um, there's some fantasy stuff. There's horror. Then there's the extreme horror, which is mostly just my stories. Most of my friends stop at regular horror, but I have to take it up a notch.

Yeah. You're not afraid to, and I can appreciate that very much. Actually. A lot of those stories were stuff that we wrote like, no, this is too much. So what you're getting is a watered down version sometimes of what my brain wants to do. Fair enough. Well, I remember, um, I think one of the stories that stuck out to me the most, I mean, cause it's hard now because, uh, as of the time we're recording this, I've done, I think it's 93 or 94 episodes of weekly spooky.

So I've read a lot of stories, uh, many by you, many by Shane, many by, uh, Dan, many by, um, Rob Fields and a few others. And, uh, I think it was history hysteria may have stuck out is one that stuck out the most to me next to the one. Uh, pardon me for forgetting the title, the one about the little boy with the nightmares. yeah my terror story i don't remember the name of it right now either so it might have been only a dream or something like that uh but that one also freaked me out but history hysteria this concept of a uh like a fetus coming for you in a dark and well and mainly especially though the dark room element just being in this pitch black room and i know you have a really interesting backstory to writing that yeah so what happened was um my wife was actually in the hospital having a hysterectomy when I wrote that story in the waiting room.

So a lot of the problems that she had had, they were like, are you sure you don't want to have children? You sure you don't want to have children? We don't want to give you the surgery. We're both agreed. We don't want children, you know, but that was such a big deal to them that kind of like twisted it into a story as I was sitting there. Cause they had to knock her out and, you know, anesthesia and all that stuff.

And it was just like, what would happen if you had like a crazy anesthesia dream about, you know, because the first thing, last thing that you hear is I'm talking about babies or whatever. Just think about the baby that could have been coming to get you because you didn't want to have it or something like that. Being haunted by the, the, the non-born, you know? It wasn't like an abortion gone wrong or anything like that.

I have other stories like that, but it was more straight up, just, you know, one that never existed to begin with and just the guilt somebody might feel for not producing like the way humans are kind of, told to do like you need to have get married have children do these things but that's not the way it is in real life you know sure well and that was that was what made it stick out to me it was it was a little bizarre but it was also incredibly creepy and you could tell it came from a you know there's some stories you hear or you read or whatever and you just know that like no one else is going to write that but the author and that's the to me that's the ultimate compliment i can give i don't know i would ever read that story if you hadn't written it you know what i mean like i don't think that story would ever existed if you hadn't written it you know what i mean yeah and it's one that i'm actually pretty proud of i mean i wrote that whole thing and i think a three-hour window isn't it amazing how you know sometimes it's a faucet and sometimes it's a fucking udder of a cow you know sometimes it just comes out all at once the creative process and sometimes you just gotta it's like you know removing teeth yeah i have stories that are a paragraph long and I just can't get back into them no matter what I try.

It's hard. It's, it's really hard. I mean, I don't write a lot. I really barely ever write prose, but I've written screenplays, you know, forever. I started writing screenplays when I was very, very young. So I've completed tons of feature length scripts, short scripts, stuff like that. But even that can be, sometimes it's, it's this amazing fun experience and sometimes it's harrowing. That's what I'm learning right now. I'm writing six simultaneously, six episodes of a show that I want to make.

Um, and they're all going to be 45 minutes long. So that's quite a lot of screenplay writing, which I'm not used to doing. So you're a brave man. I think going from writing dialogue to writing prose is harder than going from prose to writing dialogue. But I could be completely mistaken. I find dialogue very natural to write. I have no problem writing two people talking to each other, but once I'm talking to an audience, once I'm writing to an audience, it gets weird because that's the other funny thing.

I can sit in front of this microphone all goddamn day and never shut my goddamn mouth. But the moment I have to write some prose, I just freeze up. I don't know why. I hear that too. I think a lot of my stories have a lot of dialogue in them compared to some other stories. I would say that's not an unfair assessment, but, uh, but that also makes people, you know, identify and makes them, uh, feel like they're listening to a friend, you know, which, which is one huge bonus to the show because I sit and read them to you.

So it doesn't hurt when you can kind of picture the person that's telling the story to some extent, even if it's not actually me. I'm just a vessel per se, per se. I think the reason why that does that for me so much is I've been a dungeon master for so many years. I'm used to like reading, reading a little bit here. Then now what do you want to do and let the people talk?

Yeah. You know, it's like a paragraph of, okay, the dungeon has, you know, wet walls or whatever. It's just slime and mold. Now what do you want to do? So I let the characters do the talking for me, I guess. that makes sense so to go back a little bit because uh i i don't want to bury the lead of of how you got involved with weekly spooky so do you remember what when dan came to you and told you this whole this whole deal was starting yeah he said he had a friend who was starting a podcast and wanted to read one of my stories on there and i said have had anything on the website you want to use like i support dan 100 i know he supports me the same way we've been pretty good friends um so I told him anything he needs to use go ahead I mean I would sing Dan's praises as well but I he might hear this so I don't want him to you know get my big head no Dan's a mensch he is he's really a great dude and an incredible collaborator um just he can uh he and I collaborate a lot on movie stuff and uh he has so much enthusiasm on the days where all I've been doing is paperwork and talking to lawyers.

So his enthusiasm is grating, but appreciated. I have to say with all sincerity, humongous. Thank you. You know, the first episode of weekly spooky, which is still one of my favorites. Um, not only because it was the first episode, but because I really loved mischief night by Shane Migliavaca. I thought it was such a cool story. It hit all the right notes. It's not super long. It's got lots of creepy elements.

It's got lots of interesting, you know, imagery. And that was a story from penned in blood.com. Shane is a great storyteller. Like he comes up with some really great ideas. I read his stuff and I get jealous. He, and he's another guy, like every story, it's like, you don't know. It would not come out of anybody other than Shane. There's no doubt about it. And I only know Shane in passing, but he's been super cool.

I've enjoyed, you know, working with him and publishing his stories. And I, one of my favorites of his is a Deb, Debbie, Deborah. right. Yeah. Which was, that was when we sort of, we kind of sort of collaborated on, I gave him a bunch of ideas here and there and we bounced ideas and I had so much fun with that, but I could not believe how great it was. Cause my, my biggest input was, I was like, it should be about like this depressed middle-aged woman in her perspective.

And man, he ran with that. I mean, he really did. Um, and made that story shine, you know, made it, made it very alive. And so to go back to pendantblood.com and to, uh, to all of that. I just wanted to say, you know, somewhere where it's recorded, how much I cannot tell you how much I appreciate you giving us that carte blanche access to your stories on pendant blood and also introducing us to other authors.

Uh, you know, Shane McGlovaca gave us the same carte blanche on any of his stories on the website. Um, and how you guys have then, from then you've written new stories and let us use them on the show. There was a time in the, I mean, and don't get me wrong, you know, we're still a pretty small podcast by and large. Um, but there was a time when I would literally tell Dan, I, uh, you know, I'd be like, Oh God, what are we going to be Monday?

I'm like, what is Wednesday going to be? And, uh, and he would literally just send me a link from pendant blood to a story and be like, you should do this one. And it got to a point for a little while, you know, where, where Dan was kind of curating Pendant Blood. But then later on, after I had read maybe 10 or 15 stories, I was like, I don't need a curator.

I can really just pick one and it'll be fine. It'll be great for the show. And I really do think that, you know, without PendantBlood.com's existence, I have no idea how Weekly Spooky could have been weekly that first 30 weeks, 40 weeks. I really don't know. So thank you so much for your contributions. I really, really do appreciate it. Yeah, no problem at all. I know like Shane and I have talked many times.

We're friends as well. You know, we both enjoy hearing our stories on Pendant Blood or on Weekly Spooky. I'm getting confused now. But yeah, we like the fact that other people are enjoying it. I think one of my one story, Wolf Moon was one of your popular ones. It's one of the most popular. There's a on Weekly Spooky. It's the most it's one of the most popular quote unquote out of season stories because in October the, the listenership explodes for about, well, for around Halloween for about two months, which makes sense because people are looking for spookier stuff.

So in season, um, actually in season, uh, your photo, uh, was it photosensitive? Uh, I believe was the title. Um, I believe it was. Yeah. That one is one of our most downloaded ever. Um, I think it's in the top four or top three, but that's in season. And those literally have like a decimal mark, a decimal point more downloads than the average season. But, but in the off season time, Wolf Moon is one of the most downloaded episodes of the podcast ever.

And that was just a camping trip. I went on and I just like, I'm going to turn this around and make it a werewolf story. Well, and it was fun and a great twist. If I do say so, I thought the twist was, was solid. The way it was revealed was solid. Cause that's the other thing I'm used to with movies. you show don't tell. So you don't really get as good at telling as you guys, when you, uh, you know, when you're authors or when you're writing prose and that was a great, you know, telling in an exciting way, if that makes sense.

I'm not, I hope I'm not making a, I hope I'm not confusing. Sundays are not Sunday afternoons are not my strongest time, time of the week, but, but no, I really did love the way you revealed her, you know, also being a werewolf. I also want to ask you about uh writing a holiday themed uh because as you know i am obsessed with holiday themed in the month of october we do strictly halloween themed stories in the month of december we do strictly uh christmas themed stories um have you have you been enjoying doing those for us i have it gives me a chance to uh think outside the box like okay here's one thing that needs to happen christmas or whatever and how am i going to make that into a splatter joe story basically um and it's like silent night deadly night i have to channel that energy as i'm writing real quick tell everybody so the pen and blood volume one they can get that on amazon right correct it's on amazon and you can get on kindle or on paperback so you guys if you're listening to this and you've been enjoying weekly spooky for quite a while please go and grab pen and blood volume one i wrote the forward for that you did yeah and that was really fun i mean well it was nice to be involved.

Cause you know, I I'm you, you and Shane and Dan have kind of a frat to me. You guys are going to have this thing. And I was thrilled to be able to be a part of it. Cause I don't know. I love when creative people are supportive of each other. We have a secret Facebook group just for the authors of weekly spooky. And I love how awesome everybody is in there.

Yeah. I don't get in there as often as I should though. Oh, well that's because you know, you're not a good guy. You know, you're a terrible person. no but i mean we and obviously i mean it'll go dormant for weeks uh but then i'll come in there and just be like so who's got something or who's got something with witches or who's got like what was it one time it was just like you know it's cold outside anybody got something cold yeah and usually somebody does yeah usually i mean like um a couple weeks ago john oak dalton who is a screenwriter turned uh author for the podcast i've worked with john on a bunch of movies uh i even produced his first two films as director uh he wrote a story literally all i wrote wrote him was i was like john you haven't written anything in a while i once it was like it was like wednesday i was like i need something by next tuesday that's about um what was it that's about a heat wave because we were in the middle of a heat wave so i was like give me give me a story about a heat wave that way when i'm introducing the show i can be like my friends i'm sure you're all feeling as hot as i am but not as hot as the people in this story you know like it's just you know it gives me a little incentive to sell the story to the audience a little extra.

So, well, do you have anything cooking right now other than, I know you said you're working on Pended Blood Volume 2? Yeah, we want to do a Volume 2 out by Halloween. Oh, nice. I don't have any stories written for that other than what's on the website, so I need to kick my ass in gear. I have some ideas floating around, but nothing solid. We're looking about the same amount of stories, like 15 or so stories, but we're going to up the word count by a little bit because they seemed a little short.

When I went back, we were editing them. I'm like, wow, there's a lot of stories here, but they're all like six pages long. Yeah. So we want to up it to about 5,000 words this time around. We want more, a couple more fantasy stories. I think we only had one in the first word, first volume. And then we had a couple of poems. We want to get a couple more of those.

So we start reading the book in the beginning. It's kind of, I don't want to say too scary, but as it gets farther and farther, you know, I got to start coming up with those extreme stories. I do want to ask you before you take off, what got you into horror? What got you into the macabre? Because clearly you're all in. I'm not sure. I know when I was in third grade, I was reading Stephen King novels, and I thought they were kind of tame and boring.

And I started reading books by this guy named Edward Lee. And there was this one called Ghouls. It was the goriest thing I've ever seen. I was like, I could read at that level, but I was still immature enough where I would hide it from the moonlight under my pillow. because I was afraid things might come out. You know what I mean? But it was so gory. The story of A Party in the Woods, where the monsters destroy that woman's body, that is almost an homage to that story.

He basically, one of the monsters in that, sticks his arm up inside the woman and viscerates her from the inside out. He just pulls it all out. And that's just like, you know, sixth grade, I'm reading that. Yeah. There's words in there I didn't understand. Ask my mom, what's viscerate mean? or there was like a scene with two girls and I was like, what does 69 mean? I'm like, you know, my mom's just looking at me like, what the hell did I do?

What did I buy you? So I got in trouble because in the fourth grade, did you ever read any Chris Pike, Christopher Pike? A little bit. Yeah. Did you ever read the last vampire? I don't know if I read that one. So I had an older sister. She was about nine years older than me. So I was reading like fear street when I was goosebumps age because she had all the fear street books left over and you know, we didn't have a ton of money.

So it would be like, I'm bored and it's a Sunday. And they'd be like, here's a Xerox box full of paperbacks. Your sister doesn't want anymore. And I'd be like, Ooh, and they were completely inappropriate. And they had a comp like a little omnibus of like the first three last vampire books in, in one book, like really thick book. And I read that and spoiler alert, if you, for people who've not read the last vampire, but I did a book report on it because I hate, I I've always been a slow reader.

It's not that I hate reading. I just have trouble with the process of reading. So I read, I read this book for fun. So I was like, you better believe I'm going to get a book report out of it. Like for school. Oh yeah. Cause I'm such a slow reader. So I did a book report on the last vampire. The book is about a world where AIDS has become so, so devastating.

Everyone is dying like everywhere. And the vampires are starving because if you bite someone with AIDS, you'll get it and die. so vampires are like hunting and hunting and hunting for humans that don't have aids but at the same time if you kill the guy with no aids that might be the last guy you ever find to eat you know and the book ends with the main character intentionally drinking aids blood because she's starving to death and going crazy and then she gets she buries herself alive in a coffin and is just sitting in the pitch black wondering how long it will actually take to die and that's the end of the book and i wrote the book report and they called home i mean this was third or fourth grade no it was elementary school wow i kind of want to read them now they're pretty good and chris pike holds up pretty well did you did you become like a like a uh you know a follower of your local video store or anything after that yeah we had in our small town we had a garage that somebody had movies in and we'd go rent.

So I'd go look at the covers and go, okay, zombie lake. Zombie lakes. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. When you say garage, do you mean like in a residential area or do you mean like an old car garage or what do you, what do you mean? I mean, an actual one car garage that somebody turned into a video store. Holy, that is, I've never heard of that before. That is amazing. I mean, my small town I grew up in was only, you know, like six streets, one way, seven streets, the other way. population of like 10,000 maybe.

Wow. That's small. And I didn't meet Dan until I moved out of there, but Dan actually worked in a video store in the town we moved to. So then he passed on these, these other classics I've never seen before. Got me hooked on all the, you know, trauma movies and. Oh yeah. Yeah. Movies that I looked at. I'm like, this can't be any good. I need to see it. Like a hard rock zombies, for instance.

I, I am aware of hard rock. I pay $2 for that in a bargain bin. I'm not sure if I paid it was overpriced or not. I think you may have, I may, you may have been, you may have been scooped on that one, man. Before we get out of here. One other thing I want to mention is thank you so much for your contribution. Episode 100, which only people here are going to know, but episode 100 is a two part 10 author extravaganza.

And it's almost done as far as like the production, everything. Um, so, uh, what we've done is we've had, uh, 10 authors create 10 short stories, which are being read as if they are a part of my twisted family history. Like I'm reading through a photo book and we, we've done it like it's all extra. So there's an original score for, uh, for both episodes. So not just like canned, uh, stings and canned scares and like opening themes, but our composer ray mattis has done music for the entire part one and the entire part two we put in more sound effects than normal uh all kinds of things and i'm very excited for people to hear it uh but they've still got i think six or seven weeks before they'll get to hear it and i wanted to specifically point out joe your story nearly killed me i asked him like i hope he has a sense of humor oh man you said you'd love it first of all it references my passing which is just hilarious um but but second but the thing that that made me have to stop recording and catch my breath was i'm bread bread said um and the fact that all the aliens i'm giving no context so people just have to listen to the 100th episode part one to know what i'm talking about but all the aliens had food names which killed me uh and then the the the icing on top being the reference to one of my rescue dogs i was very very pleased and amused so i thought i wanted to tie it with enough realism you know so you would get a kick out of the inside jokes but still have it be i felt more like it was going to be a comedy i was like it's not really a horror and dan's like it's fine it's fine the way it is well and and that's the thing some people went for scares a lot of folks went for gross uh in fact part one is like so much gross comedy i wondered if because I let Dan, you know, he organized it.

So I, which I told Dan, I was like, did you just put all the gross stuff in part one? So people would never, ever, ever listen to part two. Like, was that your goal? Uh, but no, you know, that's, and that's, I guess to, to, you know, go to a point. One of the things I adore about the show is I adore storytelling and I adore, I adore, um, diversity of the stories of the types of stories, the genres of stories.

That's something that matters very very much to me i mean you could see it in my directing career i've directed westerns and romantic comedies and slasher movies and ghost stories and family dramas you know i love to tell lots of different stories and i love that on weekly spooky one week you could hear a story that you could actually maybe listen to with your kids and then the next week it might be a killer unborn baby ready to you know strangle you with its umbilical cord you never know and i'm proud to say you mr joe salmo fill our extreme horror uh content quotient very very well and i cannot thank you enough my man i appreciate it i'm blushing but you can't tell over the radio so before we take off is there anything you'd like to say directly to folks who uh who love the weekly spooky so much they wanted to hear what you uh thought about things well thank you number one for anybody enjoys anything i do i have like zero self-confidence so just having And one person liked my stuff.

It makes me float through the day. And anybody that loves horror, spreading horror is great. If you listen to the podcast, make other people listen to it. Force them to. Sit them down. Tie them up. Whatever you got to do. I do that at work. I play it at work and make the people that work under me listen to it. That's so good. I'm their boss. They're going to do what I say.

But yeah, just spread the word of horror. Because I think in the modern age, there's so much content out there. a lot of stuff gets lost. So, you know, force feed it down people's throats. What do you got to do? Well, and I will say again, thank you, Joe. And thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing your talent and being so generous with your time and your talent. So thank you very much, my man.

Thank you.