Terror Talk: True Crime, Serial Killers and Horror

What does horror actually do to the person watching it and do this season's releases earn the reaction they're going for?
Season 9 of Shrink Chat opens with Evil Dead Burn, the series Silo and The Shards, and a run through the rest of what's landed lately: Disclosure, Obsession, They Will Kill You and Passenger.
Therapists Shannon and Cathy review them the way nobody else does, not on scares per minute, but on whether the psychology holds up: what the films get right about fear, grief, control and the way people actually behave under threat, and where they reach for a cheap shortcut instead.
Reviewed in this episode:
Evil Dead Burn
Silo (series)
The Shards (series)
They Will Kill You
Disclosure
Obsession
Passenger
Forbidden Fruit
Whistle
Plus, horror trivia and games with Cathy

More from Season 9:
S9E1 CULTS Part 1: how a group turns ordinary people into killers
Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT.
Until then... sleep safe. 😴
🎧 Follow Terror Talk wherever you get your podcasts and join us on Patreon for bonus content and access to the compound.📸 Instagram: @terrortalkpodcast | 🎥 YouTube: Terror Talk Podcast | 📘 Facebook: Terror Talk Podcast | 🎵 TikTok: @dark.psychology.girls
🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising

How does a nurse, a teacher, a software engineer end up participating in mass death? Shannon walks Cathy through the clinical pathway that turns ordinary people into killers using Heaven's Gate, the Zizians, and Jonestown to prove the same mechanism runs every single time.
⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussions of mass suicide, murder, death by poisoning including the deaths of children, cult coercion and coercive control. Listener discretion is advised.
Season 9 opens with the question that sits underneath every cult story ever told: how does a group turn ordinary people into killers?
Not people who were always dangerous. A nurse. A teacher. A college student. A software engineer. Someone whose neighbors would describe them as quiet and kind.
Shannon takes the lead on this one, and the argument is deliberately uncomfortable; the pathway from ordinary person to cult member to participant in mass death is not about weakness, mental illness, or stupidity. It's about psychology. And it runs the same way every single time, whether you're looking at a California mansion in 1997, a Silicon Valley rationalist community in 2025, or a settlement in the Guyanese jungle in 1978.
Same process. Different costume.
Three cases, deliberately chosen because they have nothing in common but the mechanism. Heaven's Gate believed human bodies were containers for extraterrestrial souls. The Zizians organized around AI existential risk and analytic philosophy. Peoples Temple organized around socialism and racial justice. Cosmic, rationalist, political; three completely incompatible belief systems, one identical psychological structure underneath.
That structure is what Shannon and Cathy spend the episode taking apart. Robert Jay Lifton's eight criteria of thought reform. Margaret Singer's self-dissolution process. Erich Fromm on why freedom is psychologically expensive enough that people will trade it away. Jung's Mana Personality, which explains why a leader's word can override what you can see with your own eyes. And running through all of it, Albert Bandura's moral disengagement — the four specific mechanisms by which a person with an intact conscience does something monstrous and does not experience themselves as monstrous while doing it.
The core argument, and where the episode lands:
The most dangerous thing about a cult isn't the leader. It's the moment when the group becomes more real to you than your own perception. That isn't weakness. That's how human psychology works. And knowing that is the only protection.

Heaven's Gate · Marshall Applewhite · Bonnie Nettles · Rancho Santa Fe, California · March 26, 1997 · 39 dead · the Next Level · "the Demonstration"
The Zizians · Ziz LaSota · rationalist and effective altruism communities · AI existential risk · "undead" and "p-zombie" ideology · six deaths, 2025–2026
Peoples Temple · Jim Jones · Jonestown, Guyana · November 18, 1978 · 918 dead, 304 of them children · White Night rehearsals · the largest mass death of American civilians before 9/11
Clinical terms: thought reform · coercive control · moral disengagement · self-dissolution · cognitive dissonance · milieu control · dehumanization · DDD syndrome · the Mana Personality · the ShadowThis is Part 1 of a three-part Cults series. Part 2 goes into ritual violence. Part 3 goes deeper into contemporary cases
Until then... sleep safe. 😴
🎧 Follow Terror Talk wherever you get your podcasts and join us on Patreon for bonus content and access to the compound.
📸 Instagram: @terrortalkpodcast | 🎥 YouTube: Terror Talk Podcast | 📘 Facebook: Terror Talk Podcast | 🎵 TikTok: @dark.psychology.girls
🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising

What does it mean to be scared in 2026?
Horror Facts with Cath is back — and so is the watch list that somehow kept growing. This month Shannon and Cathy work through thirteen titles across film and series, from a claustrophobic submarine nightmare and a wedding week that was never going to end well, to a spider in a 1930s trench coat and a medical examiner who doesn't know when to quit.
This episode covers:
Film:
Iron Lung — claustrophobic, gorgeous, more blood than any horror film in history
The Backrooms — A24's liminal space debut from the youngest director to ever hit number one at the box office
Hokum — Damian McCarthy's follow-up to Oddity, atmospheric Irish horror
Lee Cronin's The Mummy — demon possession, practical gore, and a Blumhouse/Atomic Monster collaboration
Whistle — teen slasher meets cursed artifact meets Final Destination logic
Thrash — hurricane sharks, Netflix, Tommy Wirkola, exactly what it sounds like
Undertone — audio-driven A24 horror built almost entirely on sound design
Return to Silent Hill — the third attempt to adapt the greatest horror game ever made
Send Help — 2026's genre wildcard
Scream 7 — Sidney Prescott returns. Ghostface returns. Shannon and Cathy have thoughts.
Series:
Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen — Netflix, Duffer Brothers produced, wedding horror, 8 episodes of dread
Scarpetta — Nicole Kidman as Kay Scarpetta, Prime Video, forensic thriller
Spider-Noir — Nicolas Cage as a 1930s New York superhero-turned-private investigator, Prime Video
Two licensed therapists — one forensic psychologist, one clinical marriage and family therapist — reviewing horror so you know what's worth your time and what's worth avoiding entirely.
Until then... sleep safe. 😴
🎧 Follow Terror Talk wherever you get your podcasts and join us on Patreon for bonus content and access to the compound.
📸 Instagram: @terrortalkpodcast | 🎥 YouTube: Terror Talk Podcast | 📘 Facebook: Terror Talk Podcast | 🎵 TikTok: @dark.psychology.girls
🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising

Who gets called a psychopath and who just refused to perform grief the right way?
Part 4 of Shannon and Cathy's decade-by-decade Female Psychopath Series lands in the 2010s; a decade that gave us some of the most psychologically complex and culturally fascinating dangerous women in both true crime history and popular culture.
This episode covers:
True crime:
Jodi Arias — the courtroom theatrics, the manipulation, the clinical picture behind one of the most watched murder trials in American history
Joanna Dennehy — Britain's rare female serial killer and what her case tells us about female violence
Gypsy Rose Blanchard — Munchausen by proxy, coercive control, and an almost impossible story of survival and culpability
Katherine Knight — Australia's most notorious female killer and the psychology behind decades of escalating violence
Fiction:
Villanelle (Killing Eve) — making psychopathy look like the most interesting personality on television
Amy Dunne (Gone Girl) — redefining what a female villain could be
Cersei Lannister (Game of Thrones) — weaponizing every system around her
Rose Armitage (Get Out) — the smile that hid everything
Therapists Shannon and Cathy bring their clinical lens to the real and the fictional — unpacking what these women have in common, where they diverge, and what the 2010s' cultural obsession with dangerous women tells us about female psychology, female rage, and female power.
Part 4 of 4. The Female Psychopath Series concludes here.
Previously in the series:
Part 1: Female Psychopaths of the 1980s (S8E4)
Part 2: Female Psychopaths of the 1990s (S8E9)
Part 3: Female Psychopaths of the 2000s (S8E18)
Two licensed therapists — one forensic psychologist, one clinical marriage and family therapist — analyzing the psychology of real killers and fictional villains so you don't have to wonder what's actually going on.
Until then... sleep safe. 😴
🎧 Follow Terror Talk wherever you get your podcasts and join us on Patreon for bonus content and access to the compound.
📸 Instagram: @terrortalkpodcast | 🎥 YouTube: Terror Talk Podcast | 📘 Facebook: Terror Talk Podcast | 🎵 TikTok: @dark.psychology.girls
🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising

In Part 1 we followed the investigation. Now Shannon and Cathy go somewhere far more unsettling, inside Gary Ridgway's head. What does it actually take to live a double life for nearly two decades? To hold down a job, get married, attend church, and kill without remorse? In Part 2, our two therapists unpack the psychological machinery behind one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.
Ridgway's profile wasn't that of a thrill-seeking sadist, it was something arguably more chilling: a methodical, compulsive need to kill driven by psychopathy and paraphilic disorders. Shannon and Cathy dig into the cognitive dissonance that allowed him to rationalize his crimes, the narcissism that ultimately helped investigators break him, and what his case reveals about the darkest intersections of psychology and violence.
If Part 1 asked how he wasn't caught sooner. Part 2 asks who he really was. Buckle up.
Until then... sleep safe. 😴
🎧 Follow Terror Talk wherever you get your podcasts and join us on Patreon for bonus content and access to the compound.
📸 Instagram: @terrortalkpodcast | 🎥 YouTube: Terror Talk Podcast | 📘 Facebook: Terror Talk Podcast | 🎵 TikTok: @dark.psychology.girls
🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising.