Podcast: Max Evry on ‘Something Evil’

When you host a podcast structured around review scarcity, you just sort of figure that some filmmakers are out of reach. But you gotta hand it to writer and journalist Max Evry, who managed to find the one Steven Spielberg movie that qualifies for Certified Forgotten. In our latest episode, Max joins us for a conversation about his new book, Stranded on Earth: How Night Skies Became E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, as well as in-depth conversation about Spielberg's Something Evil, a made-for-television title with a fun approach to demonic possession.

After getting tired of the Manhattan rat race, Marjorie Worden (Sandy Dennis) and her husband Paul (Darren McGavin) decide to move to the countryside. At first, everything is wonderful. Paul commutes to and from the city to his high-profile advertising job, and Marjorie gets to know the locals, learning about their strange customs and solemn approach to urban legends. But when things start to take a turn for the dark in Marjorie's household, she turns to local writer Harry Lincoln (Ralph Bellamy), who believes that the Worden farmhouse may be possessed by an ancient evil.

In this short excerpt from the episode, Evry explains why Something Evil remains a surprisingly hard-to-find entry from Spielberg's canon:

It has never had a proper remaster, it's never had a proper home video release. It might be remastered and it's just sitting in a vault, but I believe these are being withheld at the request of Spielberg because he's not happy about them. As as I've already noted with Night Skies, he likes to rewrite his own history. We're talking about a guy who lied about his age for about a decade and a half because directing your first show for television at age 22 wasn't cool enough. He had to be 21.

The Something Evil episode of the Certified Forgotten podcast with Mike Mendez is now available to stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, or the podcast platform of your choice.