The Desire of Horror

Let's get into a discussion of S&M's relation to Clive Barker's 1987 "Hellraiser." The "S" part of S&M comes from the infamous Marquis de Sade's masochism, which is the "M" part of S&M. Seems like Sade's lurid tales would be full of endlessly enthralling perversions, but in actuality Sade's debauchery becomes mundane through e...

Rust has a near-death experience in which he travels to the ultimate darkness from which this fallen world arose, but he finds in this void not-nothing but love, a love which he recognizes as that of his deceased daughter and father. This darkness is the twice negated darkness of the Fifth Century mystic Dionysus the Areopagite rather than the pure darkness of absolute nothing. Is Nic Pizzolatto a...

The Devil's Grimoires are the best. To get a signed copy of one of them is every occult book dealer's ultimate fantasy. This movie includes "Easter Eggs" in which Roman Polanski pokes fun at some of his more benighted occult followers. From the time that he made "Rosemary's Baby, many assumed that he was into the occult, a charge which he has always vehemently denied....

What if there really was a secret cabal behind it all? Conspiracy has always been a part of American paranoia since the beginning, but it's gotten out of control lately. Perhaps, it always was. In this penultimate episode of Season One, Pizzolatto goes all in with the ultimate conspiracy theorist's dream. He depicts both the paranoid's nightmare and most cherished dream. Join us as...

Who is Azazel, and why does he love Rolling Stones songs so much? Apparently he thinks that time is on his side, but why? There seems to always be time for Azazel's shenanigans because his special powers are rapid possession and mayhem. He has but one limitation, which can only be understood in terms of "cubits" and one's last, dying breath. Let's see if Denzel Washington...

Marty may have pushed things beyond any possible redemption arch. He continues to cheat on his wife with an very young woman whom he previously sought to protect as an underaged sex worker, beats up his daughter's two teenage "boy-friends," and in an extreme rage, threateningly puts his hands on his wife's throat. What would redemption look like for him? What does redemption lo...

"Hyperstition" is a word invented by Nick Land to describe when something that doesn't exist yet, intervenes from the future in the past to bring itself into being. Land uses "Terminator 2" as an example of how this might happen. In Terminator 2, robots from a future time travel to the past to realize their future selves by effecting the timeline of their creation. Closer...

Nietzsche never said that "Life is a flat circle." But the quote sort of gets attributed to him in this episode. Would Nietzsche have agreed with this sort of pessimism? Nope, but it is illuminative to consider how the misuse of his "Myth of the Eternal Return," demonstrates the shows most basic themes, which seem to align more with the extreme pessimism or even nihilism of Tho...

In a political environment in which racial and cultural stereotypes have been weaponized against our Haitian brothers and sisters, this movie hits a little different. However, it provides a good talking point about how Haiti is imagined in the US. Wes Craven's "The Serpent and the Rainbow," based on the book of the same name by "Wade Davis," hits on two of any of our worse...

Rust shows that he's wiling to sacrifice just about anything to get at Reggie Ledoux, including putting his life and the lives of others at great risk. Worth it? Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

Watch out for Demons! Nobody knows what they'll do if they get ahold of you or your magical books made out of human skin and written in blood. Demons seem to enjoy racing through the woods in frantic POV tracking shots, and then smashing into Michigan State undergraduates on a wild-party vacation in rundown cabins in the utterly desolate Tennessee backwoods. Demons love to possess people and...

Two types of freedom are on display in this Episode of True Detective, and they may be related. Is the sense of having a self an illusory torture better ended sooner rather than later? Is it the sense of having a self that causes us to fall into sin, or put another way, do we sin because we want to defend the self and acquire what it desires? What if there is no sin in the pursuit of the ultimate...

In the book of Revelations it is suggested that the Devil rules of the Earth, but only for a time. Revelations is about the overthrow of the rulership of Roman authorities, coded by its anti-Roman writer, John of Patmos, as "Babylon." The infamous number "666" refers specifically to the Roman Emperor Nero, who was a particularly ignominious figure to some early Christian commun...

In as much as we are "thrown" into the circumstances of our existence, as Heidegger famously put it, we don't seem to have a lot of choice in the matter, or in the facticity of our determinate being. Yet, according to "Death of God" theologian Paul Tillich, it takes a certain amount of "courage to be." For Tillich this courage counts as freely chosen even though...

Caution: In this episode we discussion both the physical and sexual violence of the movie. The "Problem of Evil," which is the irresolvable contradiction between an all-loving, all-powerful God and the suffering of innocence, is what causes most of those who leave Christianity to leave it. Maybe a close second is the general disenchantment that came with the scientific revolution of the...

In True detective Season 1, Episode 1, Nic Pizzolatto, introduces his main themes and the sources of those ideas. The "Cosmic Horror" of HP Lovecraft is central, especially a troupe that Lovecraft borrowed from Robert Chamber's "The King in Yellow (1895)," in which a play containing forbidden knowledge drives any who makes it past the second act mad. The content of this ma...

How much of the Occult is there in the classic 1968 "The Devil Rides Out?" The film was directed by Terence Fisher and the screenplay, based on the Dennis Wheatley novel of the same name was written by Richard Matheson. The film depicts a secret coven of multi-ethnic practitioners of the dark arts, and one curiously knowledgable English aristocrat, the Duke de Richeau played by Christoph...

https://youtu.be/y_J-6TTdtzg Alright! It's the season 2 wrapt up! We covered nature horror this season. The main theme of nature horror is Human Being's alienation from the natural world. Human Beings are biologically a part of nature but distanced from it by the our specialized uses of language, especially the uses of language that allow for symbolic behavior and for the hypothetical sp...

https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfso What about when we choose to remain sick? There is a scene in Backrooms in which the protagonist "Clark," played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, decides to stay in his disease because coming out of it would mean taking responsibility for things that he doesn't feel responsible for, and what's more, giving up on the enjoyment of blaming others. There is an ambi...

https://youtu.be/cpZRMV7txJU Timothy Treadwell was mentally ill, and it led to his death and that of his girlfriend. He compensated for his sense of not being accepted in human society by projecting a persona of the protector of bears. He wasn't liked by the ladies but he believed that if they knew how good he was in the sack that they would have begged him for his company. And this sums up t...

https://youtu.be/AXgrppWd5Vs What is Otherness? Out of Darkness 2022 directed by Andrew Cumming fits into a number of horror categories, but we've decided to do it on our nature horror series. When we were kids back in the 80s, there were two bizarro movies about early hominids, Quest for Fire and the Clan of the Cave Bear. Both have proved to be quite incompatible with more recent paleo-anth...

https://youtu.be/uhvYVd4_Z7I We get deep into the weird genetic refractions of Alex Garland's very loose take on Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Area X seems to be a place of infinite possibilities, except for the possibility of remaining untouched by the mysterious, churning flows of organic codes that produce mixed bodies of unknowable intention. What is the intention of this alien pre...

https://youtu.be/lzFx6_Rfhng In this special double feature addition of the Desire of Horror, Marty's sister Andrea joins the duo once again for a discussion of Outbreak (1995) directed by Wolfgang Peterson and The Bay (2012) directed by Barry Levinson. Char presents her wealth of horror movie references while Andrea brings her science background to this special episode. Andrea worked for a c...

https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfso Char and I cross over from our normally audio-only Desire of Horror Podcast to produce this Youtube video. We discuss the book Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix. https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfso The book provides a somewhat obvious but nonetheless useful capitalist critique around the concepts of the Professional Managerial Class or corporate speak; Consumer Culture, especially...

Three, vanilla, college kids get stuck in a ski lift chair high above some undisclosed, New England slopes, as a winter storm rolls in. While they're up there, they argue about stuff like their bizarre love triangle dynamic, which doesn't really help make being stuck in a ski lift chair for a long-ass time any more interesting since it's some typical teenager, third-wheel, after-sch...