Ted Raimi is a living horror legend and genre mainstay, using his undeniable charisma to host the new Screambox talk show, Your Dearest, Darkest Friend with Ted Raimi. Ahead of the show’s October 30, 2026 premiere, I had the pleasure of speaking with the host about his latest venture as a talk show host and a lifelong Fango fan.
“God, I've loved FANGORIA since I was a kid,” he says. “I bought the first issue off the stands when I was 13 years old, and I remember saying, ‘Why is Godzilla on a magazine cover?’ That was weird, because there weren't that many magazines available then. It wasn't like a publishing bonanza like it is now […]. I was like, ‘What is that?’ And then I bought it, and I still have it, which is crazy.”
Your Dearest, Darkest Friend with Ted Raimi plays out like Pee-wee's Playhouse, but set in The Haunted Mansion, and our cool Uncle Ted fed us all cocktails. To which Raimi laughs and tells me, “Yeah, basically that’s true!” The darkly whimsical talk show stars Ted Raimi and his puppet pals as they welcome celebrity guests into their gothic manor for thrilling conversations and thematically appropriate libations.
Tony Wash and Charlie Queen first approached Raimi about developing the show for Screambox. “I immediately liked them,” he tells me. “They were cool guys, but they have a history of making their own movies, so they weren't just a bunch of MBAs that got exec positions,” Raimi explains. “These guys came from the trenches, so they understood the horror crowd like most people making decisions don't.”
When they said they hoped he’d join them to host the talk show, Raimi admits he initially had reservations. “Oh, great. The last thing we need is another Conan O'Brien style thing,” he jokes. “All props to Conan because he's great, but we've been doing this theme of a guy in a chair in front of a desk with two single club chairs and a loveseat deal for 65 years, but they wanted to make something different.” From there, Raimi came up with the idea of taking guests through a creepy, dilapidated mansion at the end of a lonely street in what was once a thriving town, so every conversation had an active element.
“It's a weird kind of concept. We're sitting down for a while, but most of it, they're just up on their feet and having drinks, so they're getting drunker and drunker as we're walking around. That's kind of the idea. And there's puppets because I love puppets.”
But don’t be fooled by Raimi’s adorably abominable assistants; Your Dearest, Darkest Friend with Ted Raimi is not for children (unless you’ve got really cool kids). “I think you could sit your kids down for some of it, but I wouldn't recommend it,” Raimi says. “It's really probably closer to R-rating than PG-13, so be warned, parents!”
The folks behind The Last Podcast on the Left voice the puppets, with Ed Larson starring as Ted’s co-host, Mortimer Dustworth, a reanimated head in a jar. Henry Zebrowski, Marcus Parks, and long-time Last Podcast collaborator Holden McNeely (co-host of the Nerd of Mouth Podcast on the Last Podcast Network) will make guest star cameos throughout the season as other characters and, yes, puppets.
“While I was coming up with it, a friend of mine who's a screenwriter in London, Ontario, a great writer named Jordan Morris (Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe), said, ‘You should call the show Your Dearest, Darkest Friend with your host, Ted Raimi.’ I went, ‘Oh, cool, Jordan. I'll call it that,’ thinking, ‘That's the worst title I've ever heard. Who the hell can remember that?’ Then I went home, still thinking about it because it was so ridiculous. And then I woke up the next day, I was like… ‘That's a great title.’ He was right. So we called it that.”
As a host, Raimi has a knack for drawing real conversations out of his guests instead of regurgitated, PR-team-approved talking points. I asked whether that is a testament to the questions he asks or a result of his natural charm. “Oh, what a lovely two options I have there. I guess there's no wrong choice!” he tells me. “Thank you for the kind compliment, first of all. Secondly, it's a response to all of the dumb questions we in the horror industry always get asked, except from legitimate publications like FANGORIA.”
Raimi laments how often non-horror publications, including major trades, ask the most ridiculous questions of folks in our industry. “Did you have any supernatural occurrences while you were on set? Did you see a ghost while you were shooting? It's like, if you're shooting a car race movie, did you really see a car race? No, it's just a bunch of crew guys who all want to eat the second meal of pizza and go home like any other movie.” His show responds to that nonsense.
“Except for [FANGORIA] and probably six other publications on this planet, we're all sick of those dumb questions. I wanted to ask them questions that I would like to get asked, took it from there.”
While the full guest lineup for Your Dearest, Darkest Friend with Ted Raimi is still under wraps, the trailer reveals genre favorites like Barbara Crampton, Joe Swanberg, Joe Lynch, and musicians like Lars Frederiksen of Rancid. “I wasn't looking for a specific personality type, but rather I was looking for people who'd been in the business long enough to be able to have some stories,” Raimi says.
“I wanted people who had some experience under their belts, so that included authors and musicians and filmmakers who all circle around the planet of horror in one way or another, who are moons in that planet.” But the real key was needing folks who “should have at least a relative ease with loquaciousness,” says Raimi. “Otherwise, what are they doing there?”
The show’s final ingredient comes in the form of themed cocktails, which were crafted by a professional and executed by Raimi himself. “I am a good cocktail maker, but they brought in an expert for me because I sort of make them my own way. I'm not making them the proper mixologist way,” he explains.
“The cocktails were a funny thing because, being a lower-budget show, we'd often shoot the interviews first because the guests usually would have to go. So we started shooting at nine o'clock in the morning, and by 11 o'clock I'd already had two and a half drinks and had to go sleep it off for a half hour. Everyone would go eat lunch. I'd just go, ‘I got to crash.’ I go, BAM! Then I'd wake up with six cups of coffee and finish the day doing gags and stuff.”
But as Raimi tells me, the point of this whole show is to get audiences who love horror into an environment he thinks they'll dig even more. If you make things only to please everyone else, you'll wind up pleasing no one, and I just made this to what I thought I would like to see,” he says. “And I think horror fans might too.”
Your Dearest, Darkest Friend with Ted Raimi debuts on Screambox on October 30, 2026.
