One Spooked Professor

In today’s short episode, we dive into horror works themed around holidays. These range from the so-bad-they’re-good flicks like ThanksKilling and Jack Frost to the straight up terrifying Halloween. Surprisingly enough, there are some similarities between the morality tales of horror and the traditional holiday yarn, and modern-day marketing has turned holiday movies, including horror ones, into a thriving business.

In this episode, we take a dive into one of the more mocked and maligned tropes in the horror genre: the black dude dies first. Turns out, this has not often been the case, and the truth is more complicated than you'd expect. White girls tend to outlive everyone, but black men tend to have a better shot of surviving the beginning a movie than common jokes would have you believe.

Folklore is a universal throughout human cultures, and it didn't just die off in the modern age. Indeed, urban legends are an example of just that. Once people began to surge into the digital frontier, modern folklore began to morph into something else. The Creepypasta is the route the scary fable and creepy tale ended up taking. In this lecture, we'll treat the formation of what is today the Creepypasta as a new genre and form of cyber-driven literary movement.

Enjoy a corny, cringe-inducing look at how apocalyptic logs function in storytelling, particularly within the horror genre framed as a fake apocalyptic log.

This episode covers the origins, details, and legacy of the Gothic horror movement, which remains probably the most influential literary movement that shaped the modern horror genre.

There exists in virtually all cultures and storytelling traditions a notion of monsters. They serve many different roles and have taken myriad forms over the generations. In this episode, we look at what those roles and forms are and what they can tell us about the nature of monsters and exactly where they come from.

Take a dive with me into the genre of the Two Sentence Horror story in order to understand the set up and scare at its most basic level. This is an analysis of the building block of more advanced and complex horror.

Familiarity doesn't just breed contempt. Sometimes what we're most used to, what fills out lives, and what we consider normal is a source for terror that strikes deeper than ghosts, aliens, or some other brand of monster. Let's take a look at how the ordinary can become utterly terrifying.

Take a dive into murder and mayhem in horror as this episode takes a look at how horror stories characterize heroes and villains through violence. Actions demonstrate who we are as people. The same can be said for characters in stories, the more dramatic and meaningful ones even more so. Thus, killers are defined by why they kill, who they kill, and how they kill. Stories that focus on murder and violence live and die by a proper understanding of the narrative functions of character and bloodshed.

Horror stories are the descendants of morality tales, which has shaped the nature of the form and the tropes within deeply. Let's take a dive into how that works.