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, overbearing mother; nor a manic, child-like woman who needs a man to take care of her; nor a self-absorbed man unworthy of any woman's devotion. No less than four women (his mother, his sister, and two lovers) vie for the love and attention of the dispassionate Mitch, but Mitch's mother will aways win because he refuses to protect any of those interested in him from the judgement of his mother. Join us for a movie full of bizarre love triangles and a bird's eye view of human relations under the pressures of love.

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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 somehow doesn't seem to belong to us. Its mysterious doings are beyond us because blood, like life, is something that is given without our asking for it, and its many necessary life operations are performed mostly in the darkness outside of our conscious awareness. And when it flows are lost, often by similarly unmanageable circumstances, life is irrevocably lost as well. The vampire's dependence on blood for its strange form of life, if what is undead is in any sense "living," renders the vampire a total dependent on it, which often puts it in situations in which it must face its own impotents. Whatever sinister pact had to be entered into to obtain eternity, the vampire inevitably ends up on the losing end because the conditions for the continuation of un-death are an endless yearning for whatever it is that is in the blood that can't be gotten from it by the ritual transfusion of blood that vampires must perform to feed. They may get to be apex predators wielding uncanny power, but this strength is tempered by the misery of its many limits, not the least of which are extreme loneliness and ennui. Join us as we discuss how these advantages and their limitations are played out in each of the films that we viewed this season.

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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 psychiatrist Dr. Loomis diagnosis him with his professional proclamation that he is "Pure evil!", but what does pure evil want? John Carpenter gives Michael an Oedipal backstory of discovering his sister having sex, but this explanation hardly seems plausible given that he not only murders his sister but becomes a supernatural predator bent on stabbing to death as many sexual active teens as he can get his hands on. When we don't know what the Other's desire is, we are terrified by the endlessness of its possibilities. Speculating about the psychology of psychopaths has been a pastime of our society for sometime now. We are fascinated with them because we wonder about our connection to them. Do we also have immoral and immortal desires?

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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 vampiric relations with artists, especially Black musicians. The story of Black music in America is rich and complex and full of both appropriation and exploitation. The blues especially has had a fascinating journey from the Mississippi Delta to the Northern cities of the Great Black Migration. The originators such as Buddy Guy, whose life story is loosely depicted in the movie, brought it from the Southern Black Church to the Northern Bar and club scene frequented by a mostly White cliental. But Smoke and Stack who are twins, both played by Micheal B. Jordan, are bringing it back along with many unintended consequences to a blessed, but mostly cursed, Southern juke joint for a one night extravaganza like no one has every seen.

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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 had become cool again. He immediately formed a Nu Metal band of his own. A band so devastatingly good that he woke up Akasha, who had been frozen in her own grave-like state for five or so millennia. She couldn't resist making him her Nu Metal king. Come join us for a wild ride with The Queen of the Damned.

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What is more real than real? Why it's the "Hyper-Real" of the cinema. Jean Baudrillard formulated his theory of the Hyper-Real, which is actually the death of "the Real" by simulacrum, in part from a quote from Clockwork Orange, in which the protagonist Alex reflects on how the blood in the screen is better than real blood because its "redder than red," or realer than real in Baudrillard's way of thinking about similacrum. And the contradiction of real, cinematic blood is a useful way to think about Shadow of the Vampire's approach to the Real. The Hollywood phenomenon of a director willing to sacrifice his female lead to get the "real-est" possible performance out of her is taken to an extreme by director FW Murnau, played by John Malkovich. Murnau is even willing to sacrifice the life of his leading lady Greta Schroder, played by Cathrine McCormick, in a pact that he makes with a real vampire Max Schreck, or possibly Nosferatu himself, played by Willem Defoe, to get the most realistic possible performances out of his cast. Shadow of the Vampire plays with the ideal of a performance so real that it crosses the line into the impossible ambiguity of the Hyper-Real. Come join us as we try to discern when extreme authenticity becomes a lie.

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Are these f**king things vampires or infected? Around this time in the early aughts there was a slue of horror movies that straddled the line with science fiction because the monsters no longer had supernatural origins but virological ones. 28 Days Later comes to mind because it featured a zombie apocalypse without any paranormal activity. Vampires have always been liminal creatures, having emerged at the end of the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the Enlightenment. The witch trails were over in Europe when vampires emerged from their graves in the Balkans as undead, hybrid figures somewhere between medical subjects and the occult, which provided enlighten, Protestant, Western Europeans yet another opportunity to gawk at the "primitive" Eastern European proclivities for superstition and Catholicism. But the Van Helsing of I Am Legend, aptly played by the legendary face slapper Will Smith, is no longer versed in the dark arts, but is a modern man of science, working to find the cure for the retrovirus that inadvertently infected the population of New York with a disease that cause its victims to turn pale white, hate the sun, and become considerably less articulate than Bram Stoker's Count Dracula.

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In the small oil town of Barrow in the northern-most region of Alaska there are thirty days of night in the middle of winter. Sounds like a vampire's dream vacation. All the cellphones have mysteriously gone missing, all the dogs have been mercilessly murdered, and someone has destroyed the radio antenna. With no flights in or out for thirty days, it would seem that the residents of Barrow are like fish in a barrel for hungry vampires. And what's even worse is that these vampires are straight nihilists. Is there any hope to be found amidst the godless? Listen and find out.

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Both the 1931 Bela Lugosi version of Dracula and the 1970 Christoper Lee version claim to be sticking to Bram Stoker's original vision. When most of us think of Dracula, we either think of Lugosi or Lee, or their images switch back and forth in our minds. Join us as we discuss how each of them approached Stoker's Transylvanian aristocrat. Stoker's Dracula was an alchemist ubermensch of sorts, who through the dark arts and his undying will managed to unlock the secrets of eternal life, but it was a Faustian bargain in which he became the thrall of his own avarice and need for human blood. The sciences of the late enlightenment also seemed to promise to unlock the vital secrets of mortality. The symbol of the blood transfusion became the centerpiece of Stoker's version as well as all of those adaptions that claim to take Stoker's themes seriously.

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A late 70s miniseries has many features to recommend it. They are normally full of odd bowl haircuts, unnecessarily long establishing shots, and sweat, but this one also includes multiple commercial-break, freeze-frame cuts, long, meaningful stares, and a battle between two mages in a tight 1970's kitchen! Come join us for Tobe Hooper's adaptation of the Stephen King classic "Salem's Lot." The desire of this vampire is to turn a whole town evil. But the house from which he chooses to launch his bid, already has a dastardly history. Let's explore.

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