From Bayview to “Knight Light”: How Prince Jackson Turned a Love of Horror into a Top Podcast

When Prince Jackson tells you he grew up "seeing things little kids shouldn't see," he isn't trying to be dramatic. Born and raised in San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point, Prince spent his childhood navigating a neighborhood that pushed him to make hard choices early. "It molded me," he says. Sports didn't stick. School did. Curiosity did. So did movies-especially the ones that creep in after midnight.

A family move to Fresno in middle school wasn't part of his plan. Foster care made ordinary logistics feel like mazes, and the bullying he experienced after transferring schools could have closed him off. Instead, he doubled down on academics, loaded up on AP classes at a medical high school, and took every summer school he could. When his grandmother enrolled him in the People to People program, he spent three formative months living in Australia and visiting a Māori community in New Zealand. Travel cracked the world open. Horror would make sense of it.

The pivot came in a theater in 2005. A French film called High Tension (from the wave known as New French Extremity) jolted him. It wasn't just scares-it was voice, metaphor, a challenge to censorship and to audience comfort. Years later, the film's director invited Prince to contribute an essay for a special-edition re-release. More essays and an audio commentary followed, including work on The Innkeepers and Green Room. "Full circle" barely covers it.

By 2009, Prince was exactly where he wanted to be: Cal State East Bay. He intentionally skipped a San Francisco commute and moved into the Sequoia dorms a week before everyone else. That choice set the tone. "Stay on campus," he says to every prospective Pioneer who asks. "If you just drive in, it can feel like a glorified high school. Living here gave me a real college experience."

Campus became the engine room of his next chapter. He tutored in Communication, stretched meal dollars by loading funds onto his campus card, and found mentors who changed his trajectory. Design professor Suzy Wear "showed me what it meant to be a designer," he says. Her gentle but incisive critique-and the simple, catalytic nudge of "you should put that on a T-shirt"-helped Prince incubate a streetwear brand that paid for books and built confidence. Kevin Pires, program coordinator for Renaissance Scholars, worked behind the scenes to line up grants and aid. "Because of Kevin, my schooling was basically free," Prince says. "Without him, I'd still be in debt."

After graduation, Prince's path zig-zagged like a midnight chase scene: merchandiser at Anthropologie, a Mountain View internship where a packaging design later appeared on store shelves without credit, grueling weekends hauling photo booths to events on Treasure Island, and finally a steady role at the Apple Store. The design career he imagined never quite materialized. The creative urge never left.

So he started a blog. Then he invited co-workers to write for it. Then he asked a bigger question: what if we talk about this out loud? The first experiment, a variety show called GoodKnight covering movies, games and comics, was "a smorgasbord-too saturated," he laughs. But it taught them rhythm and reps. And it made him long for a horror-only space.

He built it. He named it Knight Light-"night" with a K-and recorded the first episode with friends after a group watch of The House of the Devil. He took tough feedback seriously, iterated on the format, and leaned into an accidental innovation: monthly themes. In October 2019, Knight Light debuted with a fitting premiere date-Halloween.

The breakthrough arrived during a painful national moment. In June 2020, amid Black Lives Matter protests and a social media effort to amplify Black creators, horror news leader Bloody Disgusting asked for recommendations on Twitter. Prince replied. That single act-plus years of groundwork-sparked a bonfire. Knight Light soared to #2 on Apple Podcasts in TV & Film and blew through its hosting limits in a day. Two days later, Bloody Disgusting invited the show to join its network.

Since then, Knight Light has produced 300+ deep-dive film episodes (and roughly 500 total including interviews), kept a steady foothold in Apple's TV & Film Top 100, grown to thousands of Spotify subscribers and six-figure annual listens, and landed brand partnerships with studios and genre-lovers alike-from RLJE Films and SpectreVision to Alamo Drafthouse. The show's ethos is part scholarship, part campfire: dissecting subtext without losing the thrill of being scared together.

Ask Prince for favorites and you won't get the usual suspects. For found footage, it's Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, a sharp riff on livestream culture. For possession, try Daniel Isn't Real and Possessor. For slashers, he champions the cult classic Alice, Sweet Alice. International picks abound: the Argentinian chiller Terrified; the sea-sick sci-fi dread of Sea Fever; and Fulci's grindhouse gem Zombie. The horror that surprised him most? Swallow, a delicate and disturbing portrait of control. The icon who made him feel the genre's poetic potential? Candyman. And the score that still gets under his skin? Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" from The Exorcist-with a nod to the dreamy soundtrack of Starfish.

For Prince, horror was never just about jump scares. It's community, catharsis and empathy. It's the way a dorm floor becomes a film club, or how a late-night DM becomes a conversation about grief and monsters and why we tell these stories at all. "Have an open mind," he says of his East Bay years. That mindset built Knight Light. It's also what keeps the light on for anyone who finds courage in the dark.