#77 | May 2: The Tribute | Beyond The Box Set Podcast |

**Listen to our May episode on:**

If you’ll indulge us, we’re going a little bit obscure for this week’s episode. Released in 2002, May was shot on a budget of just $500,000 and barely made a dent on the box office. That said, the film – written and directed by Lucky McKee – was warmly reviewed, with the late Roger Ebert granting it a perfect four-star rating, while the horror website Bloody Disgusting named it the among the top 20 genre movies of the decade. It also somehow found its way into the rotation of this week’s guest, friend of the show Kit Sheppard, who joins us this week to explain why the ‘cringe factor’ of the movie resonates so strongly with him.

May stars Angela Bettis as a cripplingly shy and socially awkward young woman whose only real friend is a home-made doll that she keeps locked away in a glass case. After having her heart broken by a self-absorbed mechanic with beautiful hands, May swiftly becomes obsessed with creating the perfect companion – inspired by her mother’s misguided advice “If you can’t find a friend, make one.”

Join us in this week’s episode as we discuss May’s powerful subversion of classic horror tropes, our own doll-related childhood traumas and which one of us was monstrous enough to find a scene featuring blind children crawling over broken glass hysterically funny… (long term listeners can probably guess that last one).

We also brainstorm some potential May spinoff ideas, which this week include a big-budget, Aliens inspired all-star sequel, a look at May’s life after the credits rolled on the original movie and a twisted spin on Pixar’s Toy Story franchise that retells the movie from the perspective of the creepy doll…

This week’s episode is available on all good podcasting apps via the links at the top of this blog post, or by simply searching ‘Beyond The Box Set‘. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review, we say it every time but it truly is the best way to help us to reach new listeners.

Beyond The Box Set is also available on Patreon, where listeners can access all of our exclusive bonus content for as little as $2 per month, thanks to our ‘pay what you feel’ tiered system. These include access to our weekly movie review show Beyond BTBS, a 30 second ad-slot on the main show and the opportunity to choose a movie for us to cover on a future episode.

Next week, we’ll be taking a sharp change of pace with a look back at a classic feel good adventure from 2002, featuring a much-missed Australian superstar sporting some of the best – and worst – hair of his all-too-brief career. Until then, happy listening and remember – you should only dismember your exes if they have really attractive individual body parts.