The Desire of Horror

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...

Privileged, White folk on vacation at a Central American resort may be a sort of cliche at this point, but The Ruins' version of this well-worn scenario takes some pretty fun, and perhaps, critical, twists, which seem to challenge the conventional take on this tale as old as the Club Med boom of the 70s and 80s. Tourist dollars have become a necessary evil for many a resort economy in the so...

" The Happening " kind of sounds like there's about to be a groovy 1970's party. Maybe, that's intentional because what happens is like the total opposite of a groovy 1970's party, and M. Night Shyamalan loves the old switcheroo. Elliot Moore, played by Mark Wahlberg, doesn't solve problems like the Happening often, but when he does, he uses science. Perhaps, tha...

We're going down, way down into the underground with an all female cast of characters who desire nothing so much as to be put to the test of extreme situations. Yes, these adventurous ladies love their adrenaline, and oh, boy, are they going to get it. There are things in these uncharted caves that you wouldn't believe, unless you used to read The Sun and are familiar with its long runni...

Welcome to a cast of reprehensible characters who aren't even lovable enough to hate. These guys not only have no moral compass but they've caught some highly contagious disease in the Appalachian region of North Carolina that causes their outward appearance to match their inner turpitude. However, there are still things to discuss about this debut of Eli Roth's signature body horro...

Well, let me tell you, this lake is anything but placid, especially since (spoiler alert) Mrs. Delores Bickerman (Betty White) keeps her big-ass crocodiles in there. And some poor man studying beavers with Brendan Gleeson gets his bottom half eaten off by one of them. Also, Brendan Gleeson's "Maine" accent mixes strangely with his Irish Brogue and winds up sounding sort of Southern....

One of the most common and ancient themes of horror is that of human transgression of the "natural" world. In Western Mythology this history of transgression begins with Prometheus's giving to humankind the ambiguous gift of fire, which introduced humanity's first alienation from the natural world as its preference for the "cooked" over the "raw," and for ci...

Forget whatever you think you know about anacondas, you're about to get schooled. Anaconda  starts out with some very brief but essential facts about the Amazonian native, like that anacondas enjoy regurgitating their prey in cat-like play with their food, which is the Chekov's Gun of anaconda facts for this raucous romp into the jungle. And it only gets crazier from there. Thank God tha...

Gremlins is a true Christmas classic. We had Marty's sister Andrea back for this very special Christmas addition of the  Desire of Horror . Although there is much about the film that doesn't make sense, this nonsense makes it all the more madcap and raucous, which is enjoyable for some of the more demented among us. And Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without Phoebe Cates recou...

The concept is sharks under the ground, which is extra terrifying because you can't get away from them by staying out of the water at Amity Island Beach. And these "Graboids," as they are so aptly named, terrorize the small town of "Perfection Nevada" in grand fashion from "The Deep" below its inhabitants' feet. Apparently, Kevin Bacon was at one time embarr...

With so much about immigration in the news as of late, it is hard not to see Arachnophobia  as not somehow in dialog with the issue of middle America's obsession with being taken over by foreign invaders. Its release date was 1990, and immigration as well as relate concerns about the racial make up of America were certainly issues then as they are now, especially for bigots who remain a subst...

The desire of the unknowable other takes on new depths in the impenetrable, black eyes of a shark. Matt Hooper, the marine biologist played by Richard Dreyfuss, waxes poetic about the almost eternal perfection of the shark's form, which was designed by evolution for the singular purpose of hunting. But there is a sort of ambiguous place for the shark at the top of the of sea's food chain...

We're starting the new season off with the genre-defining classic of nature horror, Alfred Hitchcock's  The Birds . This movie may be about the random, inexplicable, violent behavior of birds, but it is also about the random, inexplicable, violent behavior of people as well, especially when they they're in love. Hitchcock can't let one of his film's go without a needy, ove...

Here we go with the vampire wrap up! It's been a bloody first season at the Desire of Horror podcast, and that's how we like it! Blood has always had a central place in the History of Religions. Almost every form of sacrifice, pact, and praise has involved either literal or figurative blood as the primary representative of the mysterious life force that courses through our veins but some...

We are in heaven with this little slice of hell. Charla loves the "pure evil" of the criminally insane. And I love the interior design and clothing choices of the late 1970's. But why does Michael Myers do it? He doesn't ever seem to be satisfied after he murders someone. His Death Drive is an endless repetition of the same. What do psychopaths want out of life? His psychiatris...

We had the great pleasure of welcoming Charla's daughter Michelle on this one.  She brought a lot of great insights into this instant classic. Music is a hellava drug. In the last film  Queen of the Damned  it woke up the first vampire from back in the days of Mesopotamian Uruk. And in this one it wakes up all kinds of stuff both good and bad. The music industry has been known to have vampiri...

This Vampire's origins go all the way back in the Ancient Mesopotamia City of Uruk. And Akasha (Aaliyah) like Lestat (Stuart Townsend) loves music. Lestat had decided the world was too boring to live in any longer, so he laid in a tomb to see if he could die. But then in the late 90's Nu Metal broke through the walls of his sarcophagus and into his heart, and he thought that the world ha...