Indrid Cold
episode
People’s Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos: Horror Stories, Weird Fiction, and Film Reviews
20 min
1 speaker
3 chapters
transcribed 2 months ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hey, everybody. This is David. And we're getting in.
What does Indrid Cold (the Grinning Man) legend originate from?
We're getting everything ready for the next season. And we're going to get back to having regular interviews. But I got a little bit of time, thought maybe we'd talk about something that is near and dear to my heart. We're going to talk about an alien, a con man, a figment of somebody's imagination. Most people call it an entity. And that entity we're talking about today is Indrid Cold. Now, those of you who recognize the name and know who I'm going to be talking about, probably first heard it in one of two ways. Either the book or the movie, The Mothman Prophecy. Now, before I go into Indrid Cole, I want to talk just shortly about and then leave the movie. The movie has certain things that John Keel said happened.
his book but a lot of it was never meant to be more than fiction and let's be frank here I often think that maybe a lot of what Keel wrote was meant to be fiction too and the movie is horror in the fact that you know after I saw it I thought I saw red you know glowing eyes and windows for hours afterwards For what it is, it's a great movie in the fact that it's scary in this non-repetitive jump scare, blood and gore way that most horror movies are. Now, in his review of the movie, Paul Meehan basically said that aliens don't really spit out uh, end of the world, doomsday prophecies and UFO literature. Well, we've got to be reading different literature there because from a lot of the stuff that I've read, especially the stuff that fifties, sixties, early seventies, you know, where the, the Mothman prophecy supposedly happened, you know, that's their bread and butter.
Aliens were always spouting, uh, semi-pseudo-Judeo-Christian, you know, prophecies. So, yeah. And we've got to remember that this is also associated with the case where the term high weirdness was coined. It's going to be strange. It is interesting because it is strange. It is mysterious because it is strange. bluntly it is scary because it's strange so in the movie Will Patton plays Gordon Smallwood now this character is based on a real-world person named Woodrow Derenberger now Derenberger definitely had his ups and downs it didn't have an easy life but He fares a lot better than the fictitious Smallwood, who basically seems to be obsessed by this and dies because he's left out in the cold, or was he murdered by this entity?
You know, that's one of the things that the movie leaves blank for you. That didn't happen. Darren Berger will pass away. but he'll live much longer than his fictitious movie counterpart, and his death will be much less mysterious. So let's talk about the person or entity that is going to make Woody Derenberger famous, Indrid Cole. In November 1966 in West Virginia, Derenberger is driving home from work. And he sees what is probably the most uniquely shaped spaceship that's ever reported. And he describes it kind of like the chimney of a hurricane lamp. So it's sort of flared on the top and the bottom. And then it's tubular until it gets kind of flared out, becomes sort of almost... egg-shaped at the bottom and then goes to be a little bit longer and flares out for those of you who did not grow up with hurricane lamps and then it basically lands in front of his truck and this person comes out and this person's wearing a coat it's light blue made a little lighter blue pants he looks like a human being
But the thing that catches Derenberger's attention, and then later for decades, the occult audience and the people that read UFO and supernatural encrypted stories, is the man's seemingly never-ending smile. This is where he gets the nickname Derenberger. the grinning man or the smiling man. And this is what pop culture is going to remember the most about them. And the fact that if you look at any paintings, drawings, sketches done of Indrid Cole in the last 20 years, maybe 30 years, almost makes him look like pre-Heath Ledger Joker.
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