ACFM - ACFM Trip 28: Horror

Episode Date: October 30, 2022

ACFM reunite for spooky season with one thing on their minds: the horror, the horror! Nadia, Jeremy and Keir embark on a historical, literary and cinematic exploration of scary stuff. Why do (some) humans love to be terrified? What can horror teach us about the nature of the universe? What do the latest crop of […]

Hi everyone, this is Gem, calling from the future. After we'd recorded the show, we thought that we should probably give a spoiler warning because there are a lot of films, books, movies, some of which we just casually refer to, some of the key themes of, some of which we do really give away key elements of the plot. I think it would take too long to explain in detail how much we spoil of each text. I'm really just going to go through the list of text that we refer to in the show, some of the references to which do include spoilers. But here's the list quite quickly.

It's not in chronological order with reference to the order we did them in the show. It's just quite random. Anyway, here's the list. A movie called The Woman in Black, the general work of H.P. Lovecraft, Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, Sigmund Freud's essay, The Uncanny, definitely gave away the end there.

Horace Walpole's novel, The Castle of Atranto, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, H.G. Wells, the War of the Worlds. The film White Zombie, the film Night of the Living Dead, the film Dawn of the Dead. Stephen King's non-fiction book On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft, the 1950s film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the early 80s film Poltergeist, and the classic slasher film Halloween. We also mentioned the Roman Polansky film Rosemary's Baby

and very definitely spoiled that one. We talked about the more recent film Get Out. We talked a little bit about stuff that happens in that that you wouldn't know from the general publicity. We referred to the general setting and themes or 28 days later and children of men and the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. And finally we referred to the brilliant

Sweeney-themed horror role-playing game that Keir and I are lucky enough to be playing in at the moment run by our very clever friend Vaughan. Shout out to Vaughn. But the only person who knows what's happening in that is Vaughan. So we can't have spoiled that for anybody. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert, and I'm here as usual with my friend Nadia Idol.

Hello. And Keir Milburn. Hello. And today we are talking about horror. So this is coming straight after us doing an episode about magic. So why are we doing this? Have we become goths? What's the story?

I don't think we have become goths. Let's work that out later. we wanted to do an episode on horror, partly because this is Halloween season, the traditional time for all things spooky and horrific. So it's a good excuse, I think, to examine the topic of horror and perhaps get into the relationship between the dominant monsters or the dominant forms of horror fiction, horror fiction and horror films.

It's almost a cliche that the monsters that emerge at particular time, reflect the fears and anxieties of that time and perhaps more specifically they reflect the fears and anxieties of the audience of that particular story or film because especially when we get into the early parts of horror the early roots of horror the gothic novels etc that had a very specific audience who are only a particular part of society so yeah that's sort of what what we're interested in and i think it'd be an interesting a bit later if we did a sort of be history of horror and try to think through how it relates, not just to the social, political, economic situation at the time, but also how that might relate to the psychological to some degree. Yeah, I love this topic. Thanks for suggesting it, Keir. I guess I've got a slightly different in to this, which is I'm mostly interested in exploring what it is that horror actually does for people. Why is that affect chaste, in a sense? And like you said, why it's related to the time, if it's related to the times we live in and what it says

politically and economically and culturally, I guess. And so I generally, as I think I've mentioned before on the show, I don't like to brand people with, you know, a certain fixed identity, but I do wonder, having thought about this, whether there is a character type that is attracted to horror stories, kind of listening to them, reading them and watching them, and whether, in a sense, you have to have some kind of a particular emotional landscape to enjoy that because I'm fascinated with the idea that anyone would like to seek out being horrified or frightened. And I cannot empathize with that at all. So I'm interested in things like what makes people able to suspend disbelief in that way. And whether in fact it relates

to, you know, the security that they experience in their real lives. Like is it, and also if it's gender, does it relate to how you perceive threat of, you know, violence or fright or invade, or, or those other types of ways that, I guess, somebody can be horrified. And I think we'll talk a bit more about this and the distinctions, perhaps, as we go through the show. But I don't think it's the same as thrill, for example. Like, I'm in some ways an adrenaline junkie, like, you know, I like roller coasters and stuff like that, but I hate horror. And I'm still haunted by the ones that I watched when I was 13. It's also, I think, quite different to Macabra, which is its own genre, which I really love and enjoy.

So, yeah, I'm interested in what makes people want to be scared in that way. That's the number of my area of interest. Yeah, I'm really interested in that question as well, actually. And I'm also, I'm a little bit skeptical about the idea that what people are experiencing when they're enjoying horror fiction in any form is actually fear. I'm sort of suspected something else that might be physically or emotionally related to fear, but it also involves not actually having anything to be afraid of. So I'm not sure.

so I'm interested in teasing it out and I'm also interested in the way in which it's such a blurry category horror as a sort of genre designation at least because when I was a kid there was a you got all these books that was advertised themselves as books of ghost stories and the ghost stories like a specific genre and I'm still very fond of like the Edwardian ghost story but I'm not sure if that's horror

I haven't had time to investigate this very thoroughly, but I found it very difficult. I haven't been able to track down when the specific term horace starts getting used. I mean, the standard accounts, narrative accounts of, or where does this genre come from, will always point you back either to Gothic literature of the mid-18th century or to classical tales in ancient Greece and Rome about reanimated dead people and ghosts and things and witches. but when that term actually starts being used I'm not sure and like in my mind like horror proper sort of I mean it's basically what it refers to is the output of Stephen King and anything that's very closely related to that and then the further you get away from that the more it

blends into like weird fiction or other potential designations so I guess to be honest I'm always quite I am quite turned off by the term horror I've never really liked it that much as a term And of all those areas, I'm least interested in the ones that are most obviously, definitely designatable as horror. But then that might just be a quirk of mine because, like, you know, I do really enjoy a lot of creepy supernatural fiction. And I sort of love, you know, I love role-playing games where you're getting scared and your characters are going mad and dying. We love playing those games. Probably more than I like watching films about it or reading about it. Because you two were declaring that you didn't particularly like horror, I should declare that I absolutely love horror.

Not all horror, actually, not all horror. No, no, because I do enjoy me and Jeremy play a role-playing game, which is sort of... Oh, you've not mentioned that before, you guys play role-playing games. Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, we keep it under our hats close to our chest. So it's a Call of Cthulhu game set in a sort of Sweeney, 1970s London setting. And the horror bits are great. Like, I really, really enjoy playing them. But I enjoy watching horror films, but not all horror films.

And I think that is a way into trying to disarm big. or to break up this idea of like what is what are people after this horror tried to horrify you or is it just misnamed and it covers a whole load of of different different things because if we think about the sort of ghost stories that jem was just talking about you know perhaps m r james and these sorts of ghost stories i don't think they are trying to horrify you that perhaps there's moments of like a little bit of shock and stuff they're more trying to provoke this sort of sense of creeping dread if you know what i mean that something's not quite right and that that sort of knocks you off kilter a bit.

And there's lots of films like that, I think, that tried to provoke that sort of thing. When my daughter, May was young, probably like 12-ish, so just about the time that you got put off horror, I decided to give her an education in horror films. So we did a sort of chronological... Psycho. We didn't get to psycho, no.

But just I'm going to interrupt you just to get an understanding of what you initially said when you started this segment, because this is a thing that I struggle with. So you just said, I wanted to give my daughter, May, an education in. And the thing that I find difficult to grasp with that is the academic distancing of like, this is a genre, let's look at it from the outside, whereas the whole point of the genre is to give you that effect, where you are actually scared or jumpy or, you know, you've got that creeping dread.

And I just think, why do you want to put someone you love through that? That's what I don't get. Once again, it's just bad parenting, but well, no, because she was sort of interested in it, and we watched a documentary, which listed a load of films, we wrote them all down and said, well, we watched these in order. And so, like, she loved it, but it's also, like, genres are genres. They've got certain tropes, et cetera, that you learn,

and then they get played with, so you do, you can sort of learn this sort of stuff. And I do think that that affective nature of horror films, the sort of different bodily corporeal feelings that are sort of inculcated in it, The way I like to think of it is that they can be used, they can get you out of your normal state, sort of physically, and they can be used to introduce interesting ideas. Now, lots of horror doesn't do that.

So about the same time I was giving me this education in horror, I took her and some friends to go and see a film called The Woman in Black. Basically, all it was was jump scare after jump scare, you know, fake jump scare, it's creepy music, leading up to nothing, leading up to nothing, and then there'd be a ghost's face. And that's all it was. but I was in the cinema with, like, loads of young girls just screaming every time. And I just, I was completely alienated from the film.

I'm just absolutely laughing at all of these young girls screaming their heads off. Well, I just want to say that the horror films I don't like are that what people call torture porn was so sore. And the saw series of films, one of them where it's, you know, people are trapped and they have to do horrific things. You know, if they've got a sore their own leg off to get out of this trap and all of this sort of stuff, it just leaves me cold. I don't want, you know, I'm just not interested in that and I'm much more interested in films which disorientate your body and then introduce ideas and probably analogies to everyday life

that relate to the sort of feeling that the horror aspects have formed in your body. That's what I'm really after when I go to a watch a horror film. Who wants their body disoriented? But then I like going on roller coasters. So I just, yeah, exactly. I don't know, like you saying that, I'm just like, oh, who wants that?

It's so weird. Obviously, quite a lot of people in the West, at least. And I mean, you know, horror is not something that exists only in the West, of course. We're going to mostly be talking about the cultural examples are, you know, UK and US, I think. I mean, obviously, there is a lot of East Asian horror in cultural, you know, films and writing as well. Okay, so I want to play Halloween by the Dave Matthews band. I'm a massive fan of Dave Matthews band. I partly want to play it because I really like the use of the violins and the vocals,

which kind of switch between a fokey vocal and then quite a scary, deep voice, but also because the song was written because of Dave Matthew's frustration over his girlfriend, not wanting to marry him three times. It's actually quite misogynistic, the lyrics. And in that way, it's very scary. That's cool. Tattoes on the windows. Lead our

never will read me home to-day. I will leave me home to-night from about 15 years ago. I thought it was interesting, but he made this paper basically in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology by this guy Paul Santilli from about 15 years ago. And I thought it was interesting that he makes this distinction between horror as the human exposed to naked fact of being, which I had to think about for a while.

He makes this kind of link to Heidegger's work on anxiety, which I thought was interesting. But then he goes on to do this distinction between horror and evil, as evil being defined within a cultural matrix, but horror as the undefined other of a culture. So it's like horror is the, it brings to light the sickening presence of being as being. And I just thought that was interesting in a way to think about it as a distinction from evil, because I do think it is completely different.

This idea of horror as being a kind of reaction to the sort of inescapable ontological reality of being. And I mean, it crops up in a number of different theoretical registers. a lot of philosophical, theoretical, academic attempts to account for horror as a genre will go to various kinds of psychoanalysis and the tradition of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis is always looking at the ways in which certain aspects of physical biological reality

or of our mental lives become things that we have to sort of repress or not fully confront the, reality of or the reality of our lack of control over and that is sort of one version of that and then there's also philosophers who are very interested in the idea that the idea of confronting the indifference of the cosmos and of you know the physical universe to human intentions or desires or agencies is something philosophically necessary but also incredibly emotionally difficult for people to do and quite often people who are interested in that idea of

we're also very interested in the idea that's certain kinds of horror, some sort of dramatize the idea, this idea of confronting a completely indifferent universe. Arguably, that's one of the strands of horror fiction that's been most drawn upon by philosophers and theorists, the sort of the cosmic horror, which is associated with the writings of people like H.P. Lovecraft. Yeah, but like indifference is completely, you don't, there's no need for any concept of evil in that. This is the thing. I mean, Lovecraft, I mean, Lovecraft is this really key figure who, if you're talking about the history of horror fiction. I mean, the general consensus today in English is that Lovecraft is sort of the key figure in the evolution of

20th century horror fiction. He's this very odd figure, you know, had some very problematic kind of views politically. He was writing. He died in a wall racist. Yeah, he was writing in the 20s and 30s. And he wrote these stories. stories in most of which at least there's this imagined cosmology according to which actually the universe is ruled by these bizarre supernatural entities who are completely indifferent to human existence and as far as they could be classified as good or evil you know in human terms they're they're completely evil and they're just completely self-interested and they would just see human beings as sort of prey or something they they don't care about and

And, you know, this cosmology is only ever sort of hinted at, and there's some sense that, you know, there are some people who end up making contact with these entities and worshipping them and trying to sort of bring about the end of the conditions which make human civilization possible, because somehow that will, you know, give them something they want. And it's all sort of alluded to. But, I mean, Lovecraft, if you actually go into those texts, like a lot of the time, firstly, it's not really, it's quite ambivalent, actually, as to whether the idea is that actually these evil entities, are malevolent to humans or actually they're just so alien that's the only way humans can conceptualize them and the truth is they are sort of properly indifferent to the point where if you've got the idea that they pose some sort of real threat to human civilization that's just another paranoid response to encountering this completely alien other i mean there's yeah there are some bits in the lovecraft corpus where it seems like that's what he's saying

lovecraft is also a kind of direct descendant of people like m r james and what really typifies most of those stories is actually what happens most of the time is some upper middle class gentleman like encounter, it has a brush with some cosmic supernatural horror but manages to deal with it. It just, you know, it turns out not to be that threatening to anything much. And it doesn't affect his very nice tailored, you know, outfit. Doesn't affect him. I mean, I think we'll come back, we should come back to Lovecraft a bit more because we're going to do with sort of chronology. But Lovecraft, but I would say there's a particular sort of, you know, the literary cultural theorist Tony Bennet in the 1980s proposed

this term I'm really fond of, which is the reading formation. That's basically a set of discourse, a set of ways of talking about a particular set text or set of text, which end up generating a sort of received meaning about them, a sort of critical orthodoxy. And the sort of dominant reading formation around Lovecraft these days says that what he was doing was cosmic horror and it was what he was doing was creating this picture of a completely, a horrifically indifferent ut cosmos. And I'm quite skeptical, actually, about that being a very credible reading of what he's actually doing.

I think it's a lot tweer than that. But nonetheless, whether that's true or not, the idea that there is this lovecraftian tradition, which, yeah, it sort of goes beyond good and evil, or it presents a vision of the universe in which the truth, the actuality, the cosmic actuality of the universe, universe, if you had to conceptualise it in terms of good or evil, would have to be conceptualized as evil just because of its sheer indifference to human existence could only really be experienced by humans as malevolent. So I think, I guess the answer to all that is there is horror does play around, play around at the boundaries between designating certain aspects

of existence or the universe as actually evil. And on the other hand, just recognising them as so indifferent to human systems of classification, that the concept of good and evil wouldn't really be meaningful when thinking about. But that's part of what's unsettling. Yeah, exactly. That's part of what's unsettling. Is you're going like what is going on here? And I mean, that's, I guess, part of what plays on the psychology.

I still feel like we haven't totally nailed, I know, what is horror as an affect. Because if I think about that term horror, being a good scholar of canonical, called the English literature. Yeah, the first thing I always think of is Joseph Conrad, the Heart of Darkness, which famously, you know, concludes with the lines, the horror, the horror. And the thing that the narrator of that story is horrified by, well, I mean, it's notoriously ambivalent. I mean, it's a story in which a guy finds out that some African colonialist has sort of

gone native and has sort of become the sort of cult leader of a group of wild African you know, savages, and as they would put it. And it's left really sort of ambivalent in the reader. Like, what is the horror of the horror? Is it the fact that human, beneath the veneer of human civilization is the capacity to regress into this barbarous state? Or is it the fact that the colonial project itself is so sort of hideous and damaging, which is one of the themes which comes out in that novella? Like, what is the horror of the horror? But the term sort of in that Nevada, it designates coming to terms with some sort of reality that is so awful that you just can't really conceptualise. It's sort of ineffable. But I think the term horror, it designate,

it does designate a sort of ineffability, doesn't it? Like you are horrified by something that you can't, that sort of exceeds your capacity to describe or explain it fully. I think you're right. There's something about being stunted out of being able to describe in words. but I do think being horrified is almost different in a way to what actually horror as a genre does because of all of the examples that, you know, especially Keir made, they're talking about the different kinds of horror films and what they do. Like I don't think a jump scare, which is one of the key things that a horror, you know, a type of horror film or a horror or reading, you know, a horror piece of fiction might do

or that kind of creeping horror feeling is the same as when one says, been horrified by this situation, which seems like a much broader and deeper sense than a kind of, you know, hormonal level affect. Yeah, I do think there is something there to that. You know, something that escapes description. Classically with Lovecraft, he, in Lovecraft, he sort of says, this person was confronted by something which is utterly indescribable. And then he goes on to describe it, basically, in much depth. But yeah, but it does get to something, isn't it? And the other way you can get to that is, you know, something which sort of defies boundaries that doesn't quite fit or, you know, an amalgamation of different things

that doesn't quite fit in our established categories. And people use the term the monstrous to talk about that, you know, that's something that doesn't fit in our understanding of how the world works or what should exist in the world. I've got one record, which is like the seminal classic goth record, which is from 1982, a Bauhaus is, and Bella Legosi's dead. Bella Legosi was the great Hungarian actor who was famous for the first of the classic silent film portrayal of a vampire in the film Nosferatu, where he played, I mean, he plays Dracula in effect. And Suzie and the Banshee has really sort of defined the style and one of the stylistic variations of what would become goth music on their album, Juju, which we played a track from last time. but the band that sort of defined goth as a style

and as an aesthetic most explicitly and took it also brought it closer to sort of dance music in some ways this was released as a quite popular 12 inch was Bauhaus White on white The bats are left The bats have left the bell tower

The victims have been Blood red red velvet lines The black box Are we ready for the bestiary? Are we ready for the chronology? Are we ready for the history yet? If you think about like classical sort of folk traditions of horror, you do get that sort of thing that doesn't quite fit together. So like werewolves, for instance, jumping ahead a little bit in the chronology,

but werewolves are one of these things, which are part man, part animal, you know, the division between these things that should be completely separate. This is the human, this is the animal, you know, it gets blended together. And in fact, that's probably, you know, the Halloween season we mentioned earlier, you know, the, well, I think the reason that we associate Halloween with monsters and dressing up and horror films and these sorts of things is that, you know, it relates back to this, to this sort of pagan festival. Is it Samain the end of summer, basically, where the idea is that the barrier between the worlds, the natural world and the super natural, become thin and spirits can leap through into. leak through into our world, and so you sort of do certain rituals, etc., to ward off the spirit, and then eventually that turns into hiring a zombie costume from a dressing-up shop and walking round. But it's precisely because, I mean, you said, you know, the werewolf is, you know, a horror type,

or, you know, like a horror beast because, you know, the human and the animal are supposed to be completely separate. But I think that's the point. They're not, like humans are not separate from animals. but it's in culture where you culturally define yourself as separate. And so the horror comes in and is reminding you of something that is not separate in the same way that, you know, you think about a human being on this earth, alive, being separate from, you know, the world of the dead. And of course, we're not separate from the world of the dead, you know, in a cosmic sense. It's not so much that there is a separation.

It's that there is an imagined separation in culture, because culture needs to create that separation in order to function so your mind is not constantly blown by the connection and oneness in a way is my reading. And that's the area that horror plays in. Yeah, but that's what's provoking the sort of, it's the breaking down of these boundaries of understanding or these clear distinctions we thought we had,

which give the sort of the feeling of disorientation and even horror is out of limits, I think. So we've got two tracks about wolves to talk about on this show. One is Warren Zevon's 1978 classic Werewolves of London which is a sort of talking blues with a sort of walking piano sort of boogie influenced walking piano underneath it

about Worldwolves of London it's actually pretty danceable, pretty funky quite the novelty classic very typical of some of that 70s piano-based singer-songwriter stuff you get in the wake of people like Elton John and a really weird theme for a song Ah, hoo, where are wars of London Ah, hao,

uh, I'm hallow, where a war was in London? Ah, hoo. The hair I'm howling around your kitchen door. You better not let him in. So our second werewolf song is from 19. This is Jegsy Dodd and the Sons of Harry Cross

and a scouse werewolf in London. Jegsy Dodd absolute scouse icon and this was on the classic album Wine Bars and Werewolves on Pro Plus Records released in 1986 and I very much recommend anybody who can stream that or listen to it in any other format doing so.

The boot and shape drawer and put off the sheep to the boogie through the door. Jots of the yellow squad course is seven. So after getting better, so I'll be left. Things got strange later that night. Scared of your hands, you've got a terrible fright. The classic theorisation of horror as a, of what we're calling on your thumb. They're blowing on your back and dreadlocks, arm'd be blown.

The classic theorisation of horror as an, of what we're calling horror as he. or horrific affect in the 20th century is Freud's essay on the uncanny. We'd still get cited and cited again. And it relates to the ancientness of some of these tropes, because as you've alluded to you here, you know, the earliest instances of what in the European tradition, of what is called horror fiction, these ancient Greek and Roman stories,

which feature ghosts and werewolves and other were animals. there's some sort of ghost or temperamentally reanimated corpses who talk and also witches who do bad things to people with their magic. And so all this is, you know, these are really persistent tropes. And Freud in that essay on The Uncanny, I mean notoriously, actually, he doesn't really come up with a properly psychoanalytic, like, account of the uncanny. It's mostly he just sort of strokes his chin and points out how persistent,

like in everyday life, never mind him. fiction when he's writing like at the turn of the 1920s century is how persistent fears and anxieties which are which in his terms are very primitive in nature his point is basically like nobody would have any weird feelings around dead bodies if they didn't have somewhere in their brain like whether it's repressed or whether it's conscious a lingering belief or partial belief and like the ancient ideas that the dead might come back that after death you know the the spirits of the dead might become malevolent towards the living or something. His point is basically that those are sort of animistic worldview

or a really pre-scientific worldview, to some extent, it's still really difficult for people to shake. And it's really, even though they might consciously not believe in it, also children will fairly, he argues, will fairly spontaneously develop this sort of animistic worldview in which, you know, objects have intentions, and living be animals, including humans, are animated by some sort of supernatural force, which you might call a soul or something,

which has some kind of independent survival, independent of the body. And, I mean, that is the classic, I mean, that classic Freudian argument, which has all sorts of problems with it, but it is, you know, it suggests that these are one reason why these are such persistent tropes

is precisely because, really, the whole business of moving into a different kind culture from a sort of, you know, say, originally human, hunter-gatherer culture and a complete and a sort of animistic and magical belief system about the world into some more rational scientific or pre-scientific view about the world. That whole experience is one that involves having to repress and never quite completely let go of, all kinds of assumptions about the way the world works and the cosmos works and it's something that

I mean one of the big claims of psychoanalysis actually is that the business of becoming like civilised incultured human beings is to some extent something that every human has to go through like whatever you know even if they're living like in the 21st century in a highly advanced urban society everybody still

has to go through it and the process of going through it is always sort of imperfect and produce and makes it necessary to repress various kind of fears and assumptions that you're never quite free from. And so the idea is the uncanny is the experience of those things, kind of coexisting, those feelings, those assumptions still coexisting with us. And that, I guess that does provide a fairly nice explanation of why, yeah, these tropes which we first see emerging at the

very beginning of European urban civilization, like are still pretty persistent and seem to produce really similar feelings in people. Yeah, it also gives a sort of an explanation of why people would want to revisit those repressed fears, et cetera, et cetera, to rehearse them and therefore bring them under control in some sort. Yeah, well, that's one of the other arguments, isn't it? Partly, yeah, we enjoy this stuff partly because it's a sort of way of, you know, experiencing those feelings in a basically harmless way. It actually serves to delineate the space of our lives in which they're acceptable.

And one of the arguments is, well, people like going to horror films precisely because going to watch horror films lets you experience those uncanny and superstitious sentiments in a place that you sort of know on some conscious level is totally safe and is completely fictional and that helps you sort of get rid of them and so you are able to actually experience actual death and dead bodies and everyday life

without like falling back into superstitious beliefs as Freud or somebody would put it. Like a ritual of licence, you mean? Yeah, exactly, yeah. Right, okay. No, that's interesting. I mean, I just think this is the thing is that if, again, I'll go back to the issue that I have with that argument, which is that it makes the assumption, which for a lot of people we know is true. I mean, clearly it's true for Kier, this idea that you're experiencing that while you're watching it or reading that and then it goes away. So there seems to be an end point. Whereas for someone like me and other people who don't watch horror, it's like it doesn't go away. It stays with you. And it affects your day-to-day life because you're, you can't. to spend disbelief in that kind of boxed out neat way and exercise that kind of thought control. So that's the thing that, you know, I just think there are different characters or emotional landscapes in terms of it's not just about where we are in time. It's about what the kind

of person that you are. Perhaps that's what I was doing when I was teaching, a given me an education in horror. I was teaching the tropes so that she could then, you know, put to be able to position them, et cetera. Maybe. Defense Against a Dark Arts classic in a report. Yeah, I mean, maybe you're doing the right thing. Maybe all parents should be doing this. Maybe it was excellent parenting here. Thanks, thanks, yes.

Well, she does like horror films now, so that's fine. And she can watch them, you know, and then put it behind us straight away, I think. Although she does seem to scream and cry at night alone. The next song I'd really love to play is Enter Sandman, My Metallica. This is a band that I have big problems with, There are political leanings by absolutely love. And again, I really love the sound of that song. And it's also very scary.

That's from 1991. I can't believe Nadia's a metal head. A massive Metallica fan. I love Metallica. Are you kidding me? I love Metallica. Say your prayers, it's a one. Don't forget my son to include everyone.

I talk you in or within. Keep you free from sin. Till the sand in you come. swing with one eye on there gripping your pillow died That idea that horror tales, etc., a way which we can rehearse these ancient and sort of ontological fears and anxieties, that's not always true because they do actually emerge into the everyday world,

these sort of panics and have really serious sort of effects. I'm trying, of course, to make some sort of connection to talk about witches and the witch hunts that sort of sparked in the sort of late medieval period, the whole witch hunt panic, etc. That swept across Europe, swept through Britain. We mentioned it last trip we had, etc. When I mentioned my partner Alice Nutter

taking her name from one of the witches that were hung on Pendle Hill. You know, this is super interesting. And like I would say I'm not, I don't regard myself as a real, like, academic authority on the history of witchcraft and witchcraft, but I like, I've got good, close friends and colleagues who are, and I've sort of, it's an interesting topic, so I've sort of tried to keep up with it a bit over the past few years. And yeah, I mean, actually, this is

interesting to think about in relation to those sorts of classical sources, because if you're like in early medieval Europe, for example, the position of the Christian church on witches and witchcraft is this is all just nonsense. These are just old superstitions. This is stuff like the pagan Romans and Greeks believed in and stuff like ignorant peasants believe in, but it's just a myth. It's not something that proper modern Christians should even believe in at all. I mean, that is the official position of the church in like the 12th century. And then what happens is, you know, there's this growing literature from the sort of 14th century onwards really, initially mostly written

by sort of highly educated you know men in places like Italy which claims actually no no there really are witches and there's all this demonology and there's this and they worship the devil and they do all this stuff and basically I haven't heard a historian put it in exactly these terms so I might be

misunderstanding something but as far as I understand it they are basically taking a load of tropes and at one stage are just dismissed as old-timey fiction by the authorities but they are putting them in a slightly different, in a sort of academics or quasi-seudo-academic form and saying, no, no, this is true.

This is all true, this stuff. It's a conspiracy, it's classic conspiracy, the architecture of it. Yeah, it is a sort of conspiracy theory. And then that develops. And these guys, they're sort of intellectual, they're sort of intellectual entrepreneurs, you know, they're sort of making a name for themselves and, like, becoming, selling books and getting to position's authority on the basis of these claims they're making about their knowledge of, you know, witchcraft and demonology.

and how to deal with it. It coincides with the effect of the Reformation and then with the massive social dislocations that people are experiencing, like in the, as you move from the medieval into the early modern period, you know,

and by the early 17th century, you've got this situation where it's like codified in law in places like Britain and many other countries, the idea that there is witchcraft, people really do do it. You need to have the state authorities intervene, and it accelerates, as we talked about in the last episode,

into the actual, you know, the witch panics, the literal witch hunts, under the Inquisition in Catholic countries and under the, you know, auspices of professional witch hunters in the Protestant countries like England and Scotland. So, yeah, so that isn't, I mean, that is really, it does seem like that's a situation in which what you might call, like, sort of horror fictions at some stage, then just like getting believed by people.

You see a later iteration to that and much more recent, when, you know, the impact of the sort of wave of horror films, a lot of them with, like, satanic and witchcraft themes, you know, in the 70s, like, is clearly a key factor feeding into the moral panics around suppose Satanism and ritual child abuse in the 80s. You know, we were talking about this preparing the show, and I remember when I, you know, I moved from the northwest of England to the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, you know, for a couple of.

of years when I was nine and it was really sort of incredible that a lot of the kids I was at school with who were even from evangelical Christian families like have this entire cosmology they firmly believed in about like the presence of Satan in the world and ghosts and hell and stuff which clearly derived more from horror films than it was actually from the book of revelation that's interesting actually yeah how the personification of it is coming out from culture rather than from, you know, the pictures written in the Bible or whatever. So sometimes people do end up believing this stuff that's clearly, that it does, you know, these shapes do feed into, like, people's actual beliefs in a way

which has really, really damaging effects. I mean, it's a feature of, like, the rise for a certain kind of American right-wing politics in the 80s and 90s, a belief, you know, that Satan is an active presence in the world, like, rather than, like, capitalism being the thing that is, you know, causing you to lose your job and stuff. Of course, QAnon is the latest iteration of that, which ticks up all of that, satanic panic, ritual abuse of children, etc. adds in some more fiction, such as adrenachrome from Hunter S. Thompson's Fearing Lovin and Las Vegas,

you know, the boundaries between fiction and what people believe, or at least act as though they believe on these things is thin, yeah. I'd also love it if we play the, original theme tune from the 1984 film Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr., which I just think is a really fun song. And for anyone who grew up in that era is kind of a jingle that gets stuck in your head. Let's something strange in your neighborhood. Who you're going to call?

Ghostbusters! Should we move on to the Gothic novel? that sort of wave of horror fiction, probably the first wave of horror fiction, but it's got its roots in those sort of folk traditions of monsters, et cetera, et cetera. Every account of Gothic in English literature says the first Gothic novel is Horace Walpole's book, The Castle of Atranto, which is published in the mid-18th century. And the Castle of Atranto was this literary sensation because it was the first time a novel had been published that was explicitly scary and people,

critics and readers talked about how they enjoyed it scariness. And this was seen as a huge novelty. He read it now. It's more like a sort of medieval fantasy. Like it's about sort of, you know, it's set in a vaguely medieval setting. It's got knights and princesses and magic. But it has kind of tragic overtones and ghosts feature in it. I mean, ghosts don't really feature any more heavily in it than they do in Hamlet or Macbeth actually. Not much more. I mean, ghosts are a really central role in the two two of Shakespeare's tragedies the most iconic

texts of the entire English literary canon. So again I think it's as much about the reading formation that emerges around them as it is about any the specificity of the text themselves and it's about the fact that the castle of a Tranto is seen

as leading to a wave of so-called Gothic fiction and Gothic, I mean Gothic is a funny term you know because originally it comes from the Germanic people who had very complex and often very hostile relationships with the late Roman Empire, the so-called Goths. And the idea of Gothic as designating an aesthetic was really related to the fact that in the 18th century in Britain and in the 19th century, they were generally perceived as having been two main aesthetic traditions that cultural form

could draw on. And they were the classical. So it was this idea. of all the clean lines and pure rationality of Athenian and Roman Republican culture and there was the Gothic by which they really meant actually sort of medieval. I mean, why they said, I mean, there was a whole kind of, there was a lot of

pseudo history to the reasons why they thought that like medieval architecture and medieval literature had their roots in the culture of the goths, which is just nonsense really. And they differentiated this from the kind of classical tradition but that's why we call the architecture of like the house of commons gothic but really what

we mean is pseudo medieval as distinct from so classical which is how people would have thought of it so but they're so basically the term gothic sort of just means anything that's a bit sort of medievally and i think that's interesting for us because well there's quite a blurry distinction from that point on between the gothic and just sort of what we would just call fantasy basically because the castle of atranto is really just a sort of fantasy novel with with some ghosts in it. It's a tragic fantasy novel with some ghosts in it. But the reasons of later critics and literary historians see it as the beginning of this phase of gothic literature

is because it sort of culminates in the publication of Frankenstein. And it's Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, which really marks this very distinctive and quite new, I think, sort of literary form, these very new sort of tropes, which obviously connects. to some of these really old themes, but it does so in a really new way. When that is published in the early 19th century, I'm not a literature specialist, but I would sort of want to throw it out that it's really Frankenstein, which is the first modern horror novel,

like more than Castle of Atrante, which is an interesting sort of intermediary thing. Yeah, I mean, Frankenstein's interesting because it's obviously linked to the Enlightenment, isn't it, basically? And it's sort of a, it's a warning around science, basically because it's obviously Frankenstein is the doctor who reanimates the corpse

etc but he doesn't just reanimate course he creates a whole living being from body parts and through the power the scientific power of electricity yeah because people have really had their minds blown like very recently in the time when this comes out

by the realisation that there's some connection between electricity which they're just starting to be able to produce and generate and like the animate the thing that makes bodies move but like Mary Shelley's a really interesting person because she's the daughter of William Godwin who's like a really early anarchist political philosopher

basically really really really tied up with it with this idea of the Enlightenment you know reason is going to lead us to a better world etc etc and her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft an early feminist theorist of course activist. Yeah the author of Indication of the Rights of woman. So she is, so basically her, for him and my dad, really at the forefront of like the liberatory potentials of the Enlightenment and of reason, et cetera. And that Frankenstein is

almost like a warning, a warning that that could go wrong. Do you know what I mean? That in fact, we have to sort of pay attention to these sorts of things, et cetera. We can't just do these experiments and then let them loose into the world. You know, they need to be cared for in some sort of way or brought back into the world of reason, not just let to go off and run page around and kill a young child and all these sorts of things. But it's that sort of link to the liberating potentials of the Enlightenment, I think, positions Frankenstein in a sort of interesting way, as in, it's probably one of the first of those sort of Gothic novels that couldn't have been written in a different historical period. Then if we're going to go on

along our chronology, we'd probably go to sort of Dracula, wouldn't me? But there's leap quite a lot, actually, doesn't it? Because like, Frankenstein's 1818, and Dracula is like 1897 or something, I think Bram Stoker's Dracula. But vampires are an older sort of trope, also sort of emerges in different parts of the world. And in fact, vampires are in capital, aren't they? Because Mark says, capital is dead labour, that vampire-like only lives by sucking living labour. He would have written that before, and Bram Stoker's novel came out. So that imagery, that idea, that idea, that this is undead which have to suck the blood of the living in order to survive, which is this metaphor for capital, of course,

which can only survive by exploiting living labour and capital itself is dead labour. It's the machinery and plants and the capital that's been produced from the living labour of the past, etc. That metaphor of the vampire is obviously quite prominent before Dracula, Bram Stoker's Dracula comes out. There are sort of different poles and like at one end of the continuum of horrific, It is basically just fantasy fiction in which the baddies are like ally to the devil or something and the goodies are having adventures preventing them doing their evil doings. And then at the other end, there's this incredibly bleak picture of a universe which is coldly

indifferent to human suffering and probably just conducive to it. And then I guess that sort of golden age of the early 20th century, you've got these writers like M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft, who we talked about earlier. and I guess actually what makes them so lasting and influential and still so seemingly brilliant is the fact that they play with those elements. They sort of move between those two poles very deftly in a way which is very sort of affecting, I think.

Yeah, let's get onto when we can see this stuff in film, all of the stuff that I don't like watching. I don't mind reading. Well, Dracula and Frankenstein, I'll read, but I won't watch any of this 20th century movies. Like another reading of this, of this so lovecraft is associated with these gods who are indifferent to the suffering or even the hopes of human beings, you can link that to fiction that precedes it slightly, such as War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, in which you have these aliens from Mars who come down. At the end of that novel, H.G. Wells says, the horror is that these aliens, that the Martians were treating us as we treat the colonials. It's a novel about colonial anxieties, basically. What if they, they treat us the way that we treat them. And so that is a little bit of that,

the indifference of perhaps in Lovecraft, that's taken up to a cosmic level. And so it's more akin to something like, you know, humans stepping on ants or something like that. Well, the other thing to say about that is the standard account of where the sort of cosmic horror of people like Lovecraft in the 20s is coming from,

is that sense from the late 19th century onwards that humans have been completely decented in their picture of the universe, that both that Darwin's theory of evolution and the discovery of sort of this discoveries in geology which make it clear to people that the world is much, much older than people had thought and that humans had not been around for much of the history of planet Earth at all, that it really kind of freaks people out in lots of ways, and that this is being dramatized in these fictions about discovering that the whole universe works according to a different set of principles to the one that you thought it worked according to.

And this is really scary. But then, I mean, in people like M.R. James and in Dracula and stuff, it's not really that. It's more a kind of conservative fantasy in which you find out that actually a sort of medieval Christian cosmology is true. And there are various things you can do to protect yourself from these evil forces or you can just avoid them, not get involved with them. Yeah, I mean, the classic M.R. James protagonist is, like an Oxford Don.

A gold thing, at Oxford Don. Yeah. But, oh, an Oxford Don has come and who, so in that I whistle and I'll come to you, my love, which is a famous classic. My lad. My lad. Okay. Like, I've not actually read that, but I've watched the Jonathan Miller,

1969, which is the classic TV series of it. And in that, you know, he's a, the protagonist is in Oxford Don. He's actually an analytical philosopher. And sort of, you know, he's eliminated all of the fears, etc. Just don't fit in his categories, et cetera, and he finds this whistle and he blows it and he starts to get haunted, et cetera, and all these sorts of things. In M.R. James, there is these sorts of modern men, modern men of a certain type who don't believe in any of this mumbo-jumbo, and then they basically dig something up

from the earth and discover that these ancient fears are actually have something more to them, etc. Although, you know, you are right. They don't tend to come to a particularly sticky end. at the end of it. But are these, are these, you know, these works of fiction, are they written too horrify? No, I don't think they are. Yeah, they were, I mean, M.R. James was writing them to sort of perform, sort of, you know, Christmas ghost stories, perform like, as in readout to his friends, et cetera, and these sorts of things. So it was probably not to horrify somebody. It was more to, yeah, provoke that sense of, you know, uneasiness or

whatever. But I would say, you know, I would say that is a really central strand of horror fiction in the 20th century. I would say most of Stephen King is that. Most of Stephen King is, oh, you find out you're actually in this world which like gods and demons are real, but they're not like the totally controlling forces of the universe. They're ultimately things you can deal with. There'll be some collateral damage along the way. But if you know the right rituals or the right things to do or the right things to, activities to avoid, you can sort of deal with it. So I think, I don't think you can, and then, so I think that, I don't think you can say

the overall purpose is to horrify in a lot of horror fiction is to horror, the affect of horror is part of the experience of it but ultimately it's either just a sort of adventure fantasy or it leaves you in some sense like comforted. Yeah, I mean it has to be resolved at the end of it

otherwise it really is. It could leave you in a horrific way. Although obviously as you get later on, you know, you get the monster's been defeated by some teenage girls. So it couldn't have been a particularly horrific monster to start with or particularly effective monster start with. Hey, what are you saying about the effectiveness of teenage girls

to take over the forces of evil? Oh yeah, we said it's not evil. It's not the same as evil. Well, yeah, but they're not the SAS, are they? That's the point. It could be, you know, but that's not the point. My point is, you know, basically kill the monster and then, of course, the hand comes out of the grave

as the last scene of the film in order to permit a sequel and a series. etc. In the 90s there was this subgenre of hip-hop called horror core. It was sort of almost sort of like emerging out of gangster rap and it was a little bit like you'd push the sort of violent imagery of gangster rap into sort of almost supernatural sort of slasher film sort of territory if you're like.

Out of that we should probably play Gravediggers Diary of a Madman which is from 1994. The lyrics are about this scene where presumably grave diggers are in a are in a court pleading insanity on a murder charge. They're basically making the argument, look, the condition of young black men in America today, no wonder we go insane. So it's like that linking fruit to that,

from social realism into sort of almost camp horror, actually, in that. Be a witness as I exercise my exorcism. The evil that lurks within the sin, the terrorism. Possessed my evil spirit's voices from the dead. I come forth with grave diggers in a head full of dread. I've been examined ever since I was semen. They took the sonic.

and seen the image of a demon at birthosis surrounding me with needles and drug me all up with the diseases of evil grew up in hell now I dwell in an Islamic temple I'm fighting a holy war in the mental look deep in my eyes you see visions of death possesses.

The other people who like when I mention in that from that genre are insane clown posse is definitely in that horror core and they have these fans called Juggerows who dress up like the band with like horror facial makeup on to make them look like creepy clowns etc. Juggaloes have even been accused of becoming criminal gangs, et cetera,

sort of interesting genre. Something a bit like goth clowns, something like that, which is an unusual thing to say. I'm arterial slaughter and smugglers. Juggling jugglers. Fault in fact, floppy ditty freaks. I see Fmicope's in the ha.

I break and die, problem shock a day. I'm volunteer and I'm back like a footer bray. And I come with a hat. full of tricks, truck full of fanko, car and full of fat chicks. Fuck you wicked clowns. We'd like to say what's up to the Cobra's ex-minicom. Let me just take it back a little bit to this, to this sort of the colonial argument, because I think if we want to go through our canon of monsters,

the next one that appears would be the zombie, I think. And the zombies are quite interesting because you have different versions of zombies as you go through the 20th century and enter the 21st century, actually. And so the first zombies, the zombie myth comes from voodoo rituals and voodoo rituals and things that grow up in Haiti. But the first sort of zombie monsters, they're not like the zombies that we think of now. They're basically bodies which are animated and controlled by a magician, basically. Magician controls these bodies either dead or sort of undead. They can be sort of living person put into a trance or they can be resurrected bodies, etc.

and they're put to work, basically. It is more or less a direct analogy to slavery, and it grows, and they emerges out of slave societies. Haiti was the first, oh, the only society, which has had a successful slave revolt and overthrown. Their colonial masters, or in fact, the slave-owning masters in the Haitian Revolution, of course. And so basically, it's that idea of,

so there's early 1930s, there's one of the first zombie films, and it's called White Zombie, and it's about a white woman who goes to Haiti and gets become under the power of one of these magicians and she has to be set to work like these other black people who are under his power and it is obviously a fear of that what if we had the loss of autonomy that you can see in either... So we've inflicted on everyone else. And then of course there's the other great strand in that sort of wave of zombies

are zombie uprising which are basically fears around slave revolts, I mean, it's only, you know, in the zombies that we know now, the sort of zombie myth that we operate with now is basically invented by George A. Romero in the film Night of the Living Dead, which is late 60s, isn't it, from like 69, I think. Which is, all of a sudden, there's no magician animating them. In fact, it's a contagion thing. I'm not quite sure what sparked it off, but, you know,

if you get killed by a zombie, then you, you know, you come back as a zombie sort of thing. And in fact, in fact, in Night of the Living Dead, I think the implication is there's a particular meteorite goes past and then all of the dead people rise up and start to kill the living, et cetera, et cetera. The original, the Night of the Living Dead, there's a big theme around race, the protagonist is a black man. And at the end, he gets shot by this posse of sheriffs and southern white fat men with hats on who are patrolling round, shooting. shooting down zombies, et cetera, in a way which really does bring to mind sort of like the horrors of the American South. And he gets shot being mistaken for a zombie. But like the big thing with that early zombie mark two, we'll call it, is they shuffle around.

They're not particularly dangerous. Do you know what I mean? They just shuffle around and you can just run around them if you want to. They only become dangerous if the living can't cooperate, basically. And so all of the zombie films in that Georges Romero sort of set, they're all around people getting into a position of safety in a group. And then that group dynamics breaking up and then putting them all at risk and everybody dies, basically.

So that's in Night of the Living Dead. And then the greatest of all zombie films is Dawn of the Dead from 1978 in which people, the survivors get into a shopping mall, an indulging consumption. And then eventually they fuck it up. and get killed. The zombies in that are obviously us, right? It's all about consumption.

And it's like, why are the zombies wanting to come into the mall? It's because, you know, there's some residue of their habitual behavior, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, it's us. We're the zombies. We're the zombies because we, you know, we're pushed around by consumerism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there's like, there's two different zombies.

And then there's a different way for zombies in the 2010 to which the zombies are fast, etc. perhaps we'll talk about that later. When you guys were talking about this, just conceptually, the idea of fast zombies, I found hilarious. I didn't actually know this was a thing. So, you know, clearly I'm way out of my depth of my zombie knowledge. So you just don't like any vampires and zombies, for example.

No, I mean, I like, like... There are no vampire, no monsters. No, I mean, actually, it's not that at all. And this is why this comes back to the question that I was asking earlier, which is that, you know, talking about whether I can read Frankenstein, you know, I don't find it scary. It's the concept of if I watch something and it's horrifying, well, I don't even know if it's horrifying. If I'm scared, I don't want to watch things or read things that make me scared because I don't enjoy the experience of it. And I especially don't enjoy the experience of it afterwards. So it's not so much that like, do I like vampire? I don't know. know how to engage with like, do I like vampires or monsters? You know what I mean? Like, you know, it's not like, oh my God, I hate Halloween and I have to go to another country when it happens. It's not, it's not that at all. It's just I don't understand the, the attraction

of what it does for human beings. I'm totally happy to talk about the, and engage with the genre and the different monsters, but you're not going to get me to go watch any of this shit afterwards. Having said all of that, I mean, a note on Stephen King is, actually, I have engaged with some Stephen King. I've not read any of his novels specifically because they're horror and I don't want to be horrified or scared rather. But he does have this one book which I have, which is a fantastic book called On Writing, a Memoir of the Craft. And it's not a horror book. It's a book about basically how he has come to be a writer and his tips for writing, which if like me, you know, you've written a novel. It's a fantastic book. Like it's a, it's a Bible

almost. But because, of course, he's a horror writer. What he does is when he breaks down the craft, he actually shows you the, you know, how you can make a sentence horrifying. And that's the stuff that I'm interested in. So I can talk about that. And I'm interested in that because I'm interested in the writing of fiction and how in the craft of writing fiction and how words are put together through sentences and syntax on paper, you can create suspense and drama. And, you know, he writes a few words about that and I find myself sitting like scared, even though he's not talking about something scary. Do you see what I mean? So I'm interested in that architecture, but it's not the same as, you know, it won't make me go read a horror book.

He's also, he's very left-to-wing Stephen King, isn't he? And he's excellent on Twitter. I mean, I'm pretty anti-Twitter, as you guys know, but I will go. on Twitter to watch you guys have a spot or, you know, read Stephen King tweet. I can't believe you're on horror Twitter and you're giving us all this about a bit like horror. I mean, it's an interesting point you're making

because it's an interesting distinction because I would say I'm not particularly, in terms of cinema, like I don't particularly watch or enjoy any sort of generic horror. So I've never particularly like or been interested in monster films. I don't like body horror or, you know, it's sort of extreme.

versions of torture porn. What do you think is the, is the things like, you know, invasion of the body snatchers and that sort of thing? Like, what's going on there? Like, what does that say about the times that we're not able to be laid to rest? Like, things are not final?

Well, invasions of the body snatchers, which is often classified more as science fiction than horror, was this film, I mean, there are several different version remakes of it, I think, but the original version came out in the 50s, and it's the idea that aliens are coming to earth, but they're able to take over people's bodies.

I don't remember if it's ever even made clear, like what? No, no, they basically grow versions of people as pods and then they come and replace the living beings basically. So it's AI then. Yeah, so it's being replaced. And it's generally, I mean, it's rare

as an allegory of anti-communist paranoia. The idea that the aliens are the communists who are taking, who are brainwashing people, and taking them over. And it's coming out of these Cold War fears about the idea that the Soviets are developing these psychological techniques that can hypnotise people and take them over.

But Reds under the bed is the opposite way around. It's not saying that the Reds are alien. They're saying that the Reds are amongst us. That's the point of the division of the body snatches. It's like your mum might have been body snatched. Oh, right. I see. I haven't watched it.

So I see. So people look exactly the same, etc. But they're acting strangely and they have strange beliefs. So it's, oh, so my mum. So one of the classic, one of the horror, the horrific moments in like second wave zombie films, zombie 2.0, as we've been calling it, is when your daughter or your husband dies and then comes back as a zombie and you have to kill your daughter, et cetera, or your husband, the zombie version, you've got to put one in their head. This is the way you kill zombies, but of course. And so it's a similar thing with invasion of the body snatches in that, you know, basically it's the same people.

They look exactly the same, but they're pod people now because they basically have different ideas in their heads and they behave in a different way. And of course, you have to kill them as well. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. So it's sort of, yeah, there's definitely an overlap in that, basically. So it's like the zombies and the aliens, they are not us in the first version. Zombies and the aliens in the sort of like 1950s and 60s.

is they are us all of a sudden, although, you know, an us, which is just an inch to the left or something. I mean, the thing I was going to say before in relation to what Nardi was saying about sort of admiring the craft of King is for me, there is this, there is a set of horror film, classic horror films, which I sort of, I really admire for the extent that they are genuinely unsettling. And I do sort of, I can enjoy watching them in the sense that I'm admiring their craft at unsettling me. I mean, when we were making notes, the classic example for me was Rosemary's baby, Roman Polansky film about a woman finding out that the baby with whom she was pregnant is actually the Antichrist, which then gives way, you know, is the inspiration for things like the O-Men series. And then it's like the Blair Witch Projects, for example. See, I think I've watched Rosemary's baby and I think, I mean, I love Silence of the Lamb.

So, I mean, there we go. that's one. But I don't classify those as horror. So maybe I don't have a wide enough sense of horror. But with Rosemary's baby, it's almost a kind of a creeping dread, but it's a different kind of creeping dread. It's like all these people who were around you and you thought were normal were actually something other than what you think, right? You find out that all the people living in her upper west side building are actually Satanists. But the crucial thing, it is this sort of... We're doing massive spoilers here. Oh shit, we are, relaxed.

We'll just stick a spoiler alert to be kidding. We'll stick a spoiler alert in the text that nobody reads, don't worry. We'll cover ourselves. But I think it does come back to this interesting question and it's like what people are getting out of it. We've talked about the sort of some of the psychological and psychoanalytic sort of explanations and sort of cultural explanations of these things being sort of political, cultural anagreys.

But also we've, as I said when we were a perfect. pairing the show. Like I do also have a theory that to some extent, you know, I mean, part of what's going on in a lot of horror, I think more in, probably more in sort of things with jump scares that make people scream or some sort of body horror and stuff, is that there is almost just this visceral physical reaction to the fact that these images on these plot devices, you know, they make your body produce adrenaline. A lot of people's everyday lives, there isn't a lot of adrenaline. And adrenaline is kind of a heart, gives you a kind of a heart, you know, it gives you kind of a butt. This is the bit that I think I'm really interested in because like men in the

world, a lot of men are under threat from like randomly being beaten up and women feel like under threat from rape. Like I'm not saying every second of your life, but like, I don't know, do people really have lives where they don't have that adrenaline? I don't think most people feel themselves to be under physical threat most of the time. Okay. I don't think they do. And statistically, they're not. Let's be clear. Statistically, like at any any one man or woman is not going, is highly unlikely to suffer. Yeah, but doesn't mean that you don't feel like,

you know, I mean, definitely if you're a woman walking alone at night, there's a reason why there are horror movies around that because it's, we all have that. Like, as a woman, you're experiencing that. If you're a young man, I mean, the threat of, you know, being beaten up or mugged or whatever. I mean, that's a thing.

Like, I don't know. Again, it's different to the statistics around it and like how we behave in the world and what we're wary of. Yeah, well, that's true. I mean, that does sort of come back to Freud's point to some extent about these, there being certain fears which, you know, not on paper. I mean, even that's interesting one.

I mean, the fear of violent crime, with every demographic, like, people are more afraid of violent crime, that they are statistically likely to suffer it. Completely. There's no demographic in which you're actually likely to. I mean, I remember it used to be, I used to have this conversation with people in the 90s because it was like you're far more statistically likely to get back. burgled and suffer any of those crimes. And I would always tell people you should get house insurance.

But back to your original point, the adrenaline comes from the fear. So regardless of the fact of what statistics is going to happen to me, if I'm walking down the street which is darker than I expect it to be or whatever, I'll be like, shit, you know, I'll get my keys out or whatever. And I already will have the adrenaline rush. And I experience that, you know, obviously not all the time, but quite often of being on guard. So because I experience that, I don't

want that in a film. And that's the thing that I'm trying to. Obviously, this is not the only one. Violence is not the only one. But, you know, the being at home and you hear a strange noise downstairs. Like, that happens to a lot of people.

Most people go, like, it's probably nothing. But sometimes you think, shit, and your brain goes to where you've seen a horror movie. Or can we all know those cultural, again, tropes. And statistically, doesn't stand up, but it happens enough to get the adrenaline going. I think you're right, actually. I mean, from that point of view, I'm quite persuasive.

I mean, the Freudian explanation is quite persuasive. I mean, it does sort of match, I feel, like, my own sort of existential experience, that you just, there's some bit of your brain that, like, yeah, if you're alone in the house and you hear a noise, think, oh, that must be a ghost. It's like, I don't believe in ghosts. Like, I really don't think it's a ghost. And that moment doesn't last for more than a fleeting. second. But it is sort of there. Way worse than a ghost is that it's a murderer. Yeah, no,

with me, so it's just a ghost. Like, I mean, the argument that then, like, actually the point of horror fiction is partly just to explore those feelings in a totally controlled way, in a totally safe way. And partly to see the ways in which they can be made fun. Because I do think, I mean, a lot of it, like I keep saying, an awful lot of what we call horror fiction, as I keep saying, is basically just a sort of fantasy fiction, you know, the hero. saves the day you know the problems are resolved you know the fears turn out to be real but not not irrevocable and even in sort of cosmic horror actually I think there's this weird like emotional comfort people get from the idea of learning that oh actually that the whole universe is

controlled by completely inaccessible cosmic forces there's nothing you can do to make the world better so to sit back you know relax have a drink have a beer you know and I just think there is there's a sort of fatal there's a sort of you know there's a sort of pleasure in fatalism, which is more because in some ways it's more relaxing than being told, well, actually, you know, we can make the world better. We're probably going to fail, but there's

enough of a chance that we have to keep trying. Like, even though we're probably going to fail, it's going to be really knackering. But all that does, it does sort of fit with the Freud account, actually. You can have a sort of somewhat politicised version of that as well, which would say that we'll, I mean, a lot

of the time, the fantasy in horror is, well, it is, actually, I haven't really spelled this properly. I think a lot of horror fiction, I think, is a fantasy about problems turning out to have a supernatural source that can be mitigated in some way. And I think people actually enjoy that. It's sort of comforting because it's better than the actual social reality, the actual social reality of which is we live in a society which causes major problems, which is staring human extinction in the face. And that does not have supernatural sources. It has human, political, institutional, economic sources.

We experience them as very, very intractable, like far less tractable than just, like, having to know the right spell, to dispel the demon or something. Facing that reality is really quite difficult a lot of the time. And so a lot of horror fiction, I think, is giving you just the sort of escapism of inhabiting an imagined world in which at least some of the problems we are around are more tractable because they're supernatural, but they're not just subject to incredibly complex social processes

that it feels like it's impossible to intervene in. Yeah, that's all tracks into conspiracy fantasies like QAnon, etc as well. You know, these things which seem horrific are actually quite reassuring because, you know, they're a lot simpler than they would have been if these, you know, if there weren't these agencies controlling the world, even if they are indifferent, huge old ones. etc. But I think like it also works back the other way

doesn't it? So some horror creates non-supernatural monsters by massively exaggerating their instance and I'm thinking of like the whole turn towards horror around serial killers in the 1980s in particular well probably from Psycho

which is earlier than that but then into sort of well sort of slasher films but also you know with Anthony Hopkins in it Silence of the Land. I thank you yeah the Science of the Land there is no supernatural. It's just these horrific, really intelligent serial killers, et cetera, which I think does have a big role in exaggerating and playing up the sort of fear of violent crime beyond its reality, particularly in terms of serial killers. It's incredibly, credibly rare, etc.

You can understand why it happens. There's a whole series of high-profile serial killers from the Yorkshire Ripper on, you know, in the 1980s, late 1970s and into the 1980s. So you can see sort of why it comes about, but it's like they're trying to create a fear of something which doesn't really exist, but not in a supernatural way. But it exists enough. Yes. It exists enough. So nobody hears a story of like some horrific, like, serial killer shit going on

on the news and goes, oh, yeah, whatever. Like, nobody has that emotional reaction. You might be able to rationalize it and be like, well, later with the statistics. But your initial reaction to something like that happening in the real world is that you're horrified. Yeah, it's true. And that's what the genre or parts of the different, you know, fictionalisation of those sorts of stories does, is it plays on that, the fact that you just do have a reaction. Yeah.

You know. Yeah, you have the horror, which makes you completely be unable to properly calculate the risks involved. There's basically no risk of that happening to you or so remote that it's not no risk. Yeah, but it's so remote that, you know, it's not something you have to worry about, whereas there's lots of actual risks, like you're walking down the street or crossing the road, which are really quite high risks, do you know what I mean? Are serial killers different from slashes?

Yeah, so basically they have a big trend in the 1980s, probably into the 1990s. It is this growth of like the slasher films, etc. And also like films which are basically, horror films which are basically set in suburbia. So they come inside the house. It's like perhaps the classic horror film of that is the early 80s film. Poultergeist, where it's really, really explicitly set in suburbia.

You know, it's a really domestic setting, et cetera. And then this poltergeist is haunting the house because it's buried on an ancient burial ground, et cetera, and all these sorts of things. And then the sort of slasher things, such as Halloween is the classic John Carpenter's, Halloween is the classic slasher film. But Halloween's really odd, because that's a world in which they're basically no parents. It's just like young teenagers, et cetera. They're the ones who basically have to die and have to deal with this thing, et cetera,

etc etc so it is that like the house we can't just stay in the house because the house is then the arena for this new wave of horror yeah i mean those slasher films it's almost impossible not to have like a Freudian interpretation that you know the slasher is like the avenging super ego who is punishing the punishing the adolescent for having breached you know breached parental authority yeah i mean the classic thing is if you see if you see a young couple having sex in the slasher film they're the next to go basically Yeah, quite right too, I think. Okay.

We surely can't talk about horror in music without mentioning Black Sabbath who are the heavy metal band who really invented the idea of having this deliberately pseudo-Satanic imagery in their name and on their album sleeves and stuff. And I think by common consent,

their classic divinative track is 1970. I think it's from 1970 from the second album this track, Paranoid. Obviously a lot of horror is about the experience of paranoia. It's a song sort of about the feeling that you're going mad, which is the theme of a lot of horror fiction. But also, you know, this track, in many ways this is the track

that defines heavy metal as a distinctive genre as something that's different from the kind of heavy blues-based rock of there, also from Birmingham contemporaries, Led Zeppelin, for example. we've done this little bit of a history of monsters and the monstrous and horror fiction and horror films if we looked around at like the prevalent horror films and horror fiction of the time what does that tell us about our own contemporary fears and how that works out well i mean the most obvious the most sort of obvious example of a really interesting film in the horror idiom recently I guess is Get Out, which is a film about racism,

which uses the sort of horror idiom to explore themes around racism. In fact, that's a really good link to the point you made earlier, actually, Nadia, because the film starts with a young black man being really spooked out walking through a white neighbourhood, going, oh, fucking hell, I'm going to get, you know, I'm going to get harassed, and then he sees a car pull up, just go, nope, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not having that.

and then he gets attacked by the person in the car and dragged into the car and later becomes hypnotised anyway, we won't get into that. But it's that, it's a little bit like, you know, the fear of women have walking down the streets, the fear young black American. The everyday fears. Yeah, these are everyday fears. That's the starting point of which the film takes off. And then there's a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff, isn't there?

Things like 28 days later or apocalyptic, things like children of men. Yeah. the contemporary sort of zombie TV and that, that's much more to do with a post-apocalyptic. I mean, this is a super interesting question as in like what are the current fears. I mean, I feel like we, you know, we intellectualize this stuff and think about it a lot. But I'm not sure what is the fear of the nation in the states that we're in? Because it necessitates a certain kind of consciousness about where we are And the whole part of the phenomenon of, you know, the age that we're living in is that everyone is kind of stripped of the ability to think outside the box because everyone's struggling so hard to, you know, stay afloat in 22 Britain.

So I just wonder, you know, for example, I would think that the next generation of horror films would be about canceling the future, like what happens when the future is cancelled. but I don't think we're there yet in terms of like a public consciousness about how bad conditions are as an era. Well, I mean, if we expand it beyond horror films, I mean, one of the big tropes at the moment are like multiple, you know, multiple universe films, do you know what I mean? Is that film everything, everywhere, all at once and all these sorts of stuff and Marvel films are all about that, these multiple universes.

But I think that whole multiverse trope in fiction is, is, does relate, doesn't it? Because it's about, if only there was another universe that we could go to a fresh universe. It's about the sense of a future we all wanted having been denied us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally, yeah.

So it was that, then there's the sort of like post-apocalyptic sort of stuff. But then, you know, get out on the rest of Jordan Peel's films such as us and Nope is the most recent one. They're all post-B-LM movies, basically. And it's post-that version of, we're having to now sort of incorporate new audiences on new voices basically who bring a

different sort of perspective on what the horrors of the time are and that that goes into this other sort of attempt to to sort of like reverse the sort of horror tropes around things like race although us is much more about class I think actually because it's about the hidden abode of production sort of thing. One of the reason why I posted a lot apocalyptic imagery is so prevalent in a lot of contemporary screen fiction. I mean, it's not a new thing. It's been around since the 70s when the fear of not only nuclear war, as we often say, but actually the fear of ecological devastation was already coming into people's minds.

And I think one of the reasons is, you know, I mean, one of the features of horror and it's consistent with the way we've been talking about it, consistent with the psychoanalytic way of talking about it, is there is a, there is a blurry line between fantasy and genuine fears. I mean, you know, there is this term in psychoanalysis, the paranoid fantasy. You know, you, and this is important for understanding a lot of conspiracy theory. You believe something to be true, you believe it to be true, even though it's horrible, because, but that somehow, believing that horrible thing to be true gives you a way of mastering it

or feeling that you understand it or getting to grips with it in a way which you couldn't do otherwise. And if you're not being able to is worse than believing some horrible thing about it. For me, post-apocalyptic imagery and apocalyptic imagery is so popular in contemporary culture, partly because, you know, it's a part of contemporary discourse around the ecological crisis, this fantasy, I think is a fantasy that where we're heading is like the total breakdown of capitalist civilization. So we're going to be living in mad max or, you know, sixth century Britain or something like that. then where all the institutions are broken down. And I think that's just, I've said this before,

I think when we had the XR episode, I mean, to me that is basically a displacement because people don't want to face up to what is the real horror of where we are currently headed, which is not London underwater, because they'll put up, they'll figure out some way to stop London getting underwater. Well, you know, the real horror of where we're heading is

just mass death across the equatorial regions of the world, across the southern hemisphere in sub-zaharan Africa and southern Asia and us just sitting there watching it on screens like being told we can't do anything about it. That is where we are directly heading. It's literally what is happening. What's happened in Pakistan this year and how little it's been talked about in British media. That is literally what's happening. And for me, the idea that our own civilizations are about to collapse is a classic example of that paranoid fantasy. and it is a displacement in a way. It's a way of allowing ourselves to experience

a certain kind of affective displeasure imagining a possible scenario, but it is a way of looking away from the actual, the real horror of our inability to prevent the greatest moral catastrophe in the history of humanity. I think that works actually about why we might see the emergence of some of these monsters from the colonial era, if you want, like zombies, etc.

that TV series The Walking Dead, you know, it's a Western, basically. It's a Western in which the world is depopulated. You know, Westerns are about, you know, depopulating, like a genocidal depopulation. Both Westerns, I say, and post-apocalyptic stories, they are fantasies about the simplification of social life, is always my take on them.

That by some event, either going out to the West or civilization collapsing, puts us in a situation, where suddenly social life has been massively reduced in its complexity because a lot of it has been destroyed. And one of the big problems that we've got in the 21st century is social life has become so complex that lots of people just can't get to grips with it. They can't cognitively map it.

They can't understand it. They don't know how to act effectively as democratic subjects in such a complex situation. So this fantasy of it all just being wiped away and being reduced to feeding your family and fighting the zombies It's something people really like on some level they won, I think. That's a nice point, actually. It sets up a nice parallel between the two dominant forms of contemporary horror, right? Because if apocalyptic horror is about the sort of fantasies about trying to simplify the world,

remove populations to simplify the world, then that sort of Jordan Peel and what we might call race crafting and fiction goes the opposite way. It's about complexifying a world, adding new voices, basically, adding new voices and incorporating the fears of young black men into the field of horror. The acid side is the side which tries to complexify society and express life to its fullest. I don't know. Thank you.