Women Talking

by Carrie Frye

As December draws to a close, Flaming Hydra contributors will be sharing things from the year that fortified or comforted or delighted us—the things we most want to hang onto. Here’s Carrie Frye with our inaugural entry in Flaming Hydra’s Best of 2024.

I Saw What You Did Podcast

I can pinpoint when I cathected on I Saw What You Did, the weekly film podcast hosted by Millie De Chirico and Danielle Henderson. It was January 2021, and the movie under discussion was Graveyard Shift (1990), which is based on a Stephen King short story and set in a creepy mill in Maine.

The two hosts wanted listeners to understand that the mill is heavily infested with rats. Way more infested than any ordinary “We’ve got a rat problem” situation. More like, “You come into your job expecting to see a line of rats on whatever machinery, and it doesn’t even faze you.” The conversation then zeroes in on the uncanny character work of the movie’s “rat actors.”

Millie: I swear to god they should all have been nominated for some kind of Screen Actors Guild award. That part at the beginning where they’re lined up on the top of that wall, I was like, Damn, these are good acting-ass rats, man.  …  How does that work out? They’re fucking professionals.

Danielle: I want to know, Who trained ya? Who trained ya? Was it Pizza Rat? Is there a lineage? What’s going on here?  …

Millie: They’re like the Barrymores. The Hustons. It’s this lineage of rat actors.