Weird Studies

Chris Carter's The X-Files is weird on its face: a dramatic series that, from the start, presented itself as more than drama, an exploration of the reality of the paranormal using the tools of fiction, a fantasy posing as reality (or is it the other way around?). Strangely prescient, undeniably zany, and truly "hyperstitious," the series is likely to strike contemporary viewers as equal parts naiv...

The Magician card likely graces more front covers of books on the tarot than any of the other major arcana. In many ways, it symbolizes the tarot itself, or the individual who has mastered the art of manipulating the cards to divine their meanings. Yet, the Magician is a profoundly ambiguous figure. From one perspective, he is the Magus, piercing through the illusions of ceaseless becoming to glim...

One of the great rewards of "weirding" the world is learning that boredom may be a kind of ethical transgression—the world is simply too strange to allow for it, and if you're bored, you're at least partly to blame. Few have put this notion to the test as rigorously as Lionel Snell, whose work as a magician celebrates the wonders of everyday events, from a walk in the park to a moment of car troub...

Earlier this month, Phil and JF recorded a live episode at Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington following a screening of John Carpenter's film In the Mouth of Madness. Carpenter’s cult classic obliterates the boundary between reality and fiction, madness and revelation—an ideal subject for a Weird Studies conversation. In this episode, recorded before a live audience, the hosts explore the fil...

Fairy tales are among the most familiar cultural objects, so familiar that we let our kids play with them unsupervised. At the same time, they are also the most mysterious of artifacts, their heimlich giving way to unheimlich as soon as we give them a closer look and ask ourselves what they are really about. Indeed, these imaginal nomads, which seem to evade all cultural and historical capture, ex...

Comics, like cinema, is an eminently modern medium. And as with cinema, looking closely at it can swiftly acquaint us with the profound weirdness of modernity. Do that in the context of a discussion on Charles Burns' comic masterpiece Black Hole, and you're guaranteed a memorable Weird Studies episode. Black Hole was serialized over ten years beginning in 1995, and first released as a single volum...

Every off-week, listeners who have chosen to support Weird Studies by joining our Patreon at the Listener's Tier get to enjoy a bonus episode. These episodes are different from the flagship show. Less formal and entirely improvised, they offer Phil and JF a different way of exploring the weird in art, philosophy and culture. To tide our listenership over until the next new episode drops on Septemb...

Daphne du Maurier was a prolific English writer of novels, plays, and short stories resonant with what she termed "a sense of unreality." In this episode, JF and Phil discuss her great short story "Don't Look Now," which Nicholas Roeg famously adapted to the screen in 1973 in a film starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Recorded live at Shannon Taggart's Lily Dale Symposium on July 25th,...

Phil and JF are joined by Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford – practicing magicians, podcasters, and co-authors of the newly released Baptist's Head Compendium: Magick as a Path to Enlightenment, a collection of essays and reports from their famous occult blog, The Baptist's Head. Duncan and Alan are accomplished practitioners with deep insights into the nature of magic(k). The conversation touches o...

In this computerized age, we tend to see memory as a purely cerebral faculty. To memorize is to store information away in the brain in such a way as to make it retrievable at a later time. But the old expression "knowing by heart" calls us to a stranger, more embodied and mysterious take on memory. In this episode, Phil and JF endeavour to recite two poems they've learned by heart, as a preamble t...

The Hanged Man is arguably the most enigmatic card in the traditional tarot deck. Divested of any archetypal apparel – he is neither emperor nor fool, but just a man, who happens to be hanging – he gazes back at us with the look of one who harbors a secret. But what sort of secret? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the card that no less august a personage than A.E. Waite, co-creator of the clas...

This week on Weird Studies, Phil and JF explore the intersections of the beautiful and the terrible in art and literature. There is a conventional beauty that calms and placates, and there is a radical beauty which, taking horror’s pale-gloved hand, gives up all pretense to permanence and fixity and joins the danse macabre of our endless becoming. This episode is a preamble to a five-week course o...

Orson Welles made F for Fake in the early seventies, while still bobbing in the wake of a Pauline Kael essay accusing him of being cinema's greatest fraud. Ostensibly a documentary on the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving (a talented faker in his own right), the film blurs the line between fact and fiction in an effort to explore art's weird entanglement with illus...

The ongoing crackdown on protests at many American universities prompts a discussion on the politics, ethics, and metaphysics of free expression. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt des...

There are artists who express the vision of a place, person, or thing so vividly and originally that it sets the bar for all future imaginings. With his four Mad Max films, this is what George Miller did with the image of the Wasteland. No one has been able to capture the stark, raw energy and chaotic beauty of a post-apocalyptic desert quite like Miller. His portrayal not only defines the aesthet...

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was a British painter, poet, and occultist, long identified as a pioneer of the Surrealist movement in the UK. While her work is increasingly recognized for its mystical themes and innovative use of automatic techniques, deeply influenced by her esoteric studies, it also inspired extensive research on its broader cultural and spiritual contexts. Amy Hale, an anthropolo...

In culture and the arts, labeling something you don't like (or don't understand) "pretentious" is the easy way out. It's a conversation killer, implying that any dialogue is pointless, and those who disagree are merely duped by what you've cleverly discerned as a charade. It's akin to cynically revealing that a magic show is all smoke and mirrors—as if creative vision doesn't necessitate a leap of...

"Let the red dawn surmise / What we shall do, / When the blue starlight dies / And all is through." This short poem, an epigraph to "The Yellow Sign," arguably the most memorable tale in Robert W. Chambers' 1895 collection The King in Yellow, encapsulates in four brief lines the affect that drives cosmic horror: the fearful sense of imminent annihilation. In the four stories JF and Phil discuss in...

What is expressionism? A school? A movement? A philosophy? At the end of this episode, Phil and JF agree that it is, above all, a sensibility, one that surfaces periodically in history, punctuating it with occasional bursts of frenetic colour and eruptions of light and shadow. Whenever it appears, expressionism challenges our tendency to divide the world up into neat quadrants: mind and matter, su...

"The Devil's finest ruse," Baudelaire wrote, "is to persuade you that he doesn't exist." In this episode, JF and Phil peer through a buzzing haze of lies, illusions, and mirages, in hopes of catching a glimpse, however brief, of the figure standing at its center. With a focus on the fifteenth major arcanum of the tarot, they try to make sense of this archetype which feels, at once, remotely distan...

In this second of two episodes on "scenes," Phil and JF set their sights on Greenwich Village in the wake of the Second World War. Focusing on two works on the era – Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage and John Cassavetes' Shadows – the conversation further develops the mystique of urban scenes and explores the weirdness of cities. The city, long considered the human artifact par excellence, come...

Listener discretion advised: This episode delves into the disturbing details of the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and may not be suitable for all audiences. Serialized from 1989 to 1996, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell was first released in a single volume in 1999, just as the world was groaning into the present century. This is an important detail, because according to the...

Every off-week, listeners who have chosen to support Weird Studies by joining our Patreon at the Listener's Tier get to enjoy a bonus episode. These episodes are different from the flagship show. Less formal and entirely improvised, they offer Phil and JF a different way of exploring the weird in art, philosophy and culture. To tide our listenership over until the next new episode drops on January...

As a horror movie, John Carpenter's The Thing seems to have it all: amazing practical effects, body horror, psychological drama, Kurt Russell ... Indeed, there is only one element this movie lacks, and that is anything at all corresponding to the titular villain. There is no thing in The Thing! What we have instead is a process, a pattern, a way for which the term "thing" is as good as any other....

Every once in a while, JF and Phil like to do a “song swap.” Each picks a song, and the ensuing conversation locates linkages and correspondences where none was previously thought to exist. In this episode, they are joined by the music scholar Meredith Michael – Weird Studies assistant, and co-host of Cosmophonia, a podcast about music and outer space – to discuss songs by Lili Boulanger, Vienna T...