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 influencer advertisement techniques; and the toxic positivity of constant "self-maximization." An Ikea-like furniture store is built on the past site of a particularly ignominious prison, and the spirit of its warden and his prisoners emerge from within the vast, deliberately disorientating halls of the "Orsk" furniture store to haunt its circulating corridors, which are already haunted by the gaze of capital and consumption. The former prison was one of Jeremy Bentham's infamous "Panopticons." A Panopticon was a prison designed to require minimal guards because the prisoners always had the sense that they were being watched by the guards who were placed in a watch tower in the middle of the prison complex, so that they were able to see the maximal number of cells from their vantage point. The Panopticon serves as a fruitful metaphor throughout the novel as the horror of the ineluctable, internalized gaze of the Lacanian "Big Other," which for horror fans is something like the incubus always speaking from inside of the possessed's head.

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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-school-special BS. The severe compound fracture that one of them gets trying to jump off the chair lift is gnarly but not that interesting either..., until that dude gets eaten by small "wolves" that are probably just regular dogs, which were, perhaps, a responsible fiscal decision given the movie's modest budget. This logistical practicality is a little bit interesting, but only a little, perhaps, because the affordable "wolves" were midsized dogs and kind of cute. 

Being mauled by standard-issue dogs that were painted to look like vicious wolves and shot with some sort of shadowy strobe effect from low angles to make them seem darker and bigger than average-sized, domesticated, well-lit dogs might be interesting, but the camera doesn't show it because we are told not to look at the mauling by the two remaining, vanilla, college kids stuck in a ski lift chair..., presumably because it would be too traumatic to see their best friend eaten alive by the one or two, well-trained but otherwise mediocre dogs that were actually on the set but shot to seem as if they were a wild and multitudinous pack of gigantic, drooling beasts. After the artfully obscured but budgetary, except for whatever was spent on the pricey-sounding, crunchy bone audio used throughout the movie, mauling that we are left to imagine from the two teenagers closed eyes and some random, half-eaten, special-effects department, body parts strewn around in the snow, there's some uninteresting but tense conversation around who was responsible for that dude jumping out of the chair and promptly getting mauled. Later there's some more uninteresting but tense dialog around not touching their frostbitten faces because their noses will fall off if they're not careful. Join us to find out if they're able to resist touching their frost-bitten faces and how the movies manages to add up to something sort of enjoyable to watch even though its not composed of many promising elements. 

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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 called "Third-World," mostly located in the topical regions of the "Global South." The Ruins appears to be located somewhere in the Yucatan because there are Mayan ruins somewhat near by. North Americans feel lured to these "exotic" locations by the relatively cheap, all-inclusive, vacation packages, which are unequally beneficial to the local population depending on how one considers the influx of tourist dollars and the mostly menial job creation that is offered in return. Usually these packages include a few prefabricated excursions into the "strange" lands and ways of the native peoples. This culture-for-sale bargain only really works as long as the tourists remain within the confines of the protected resort even when they are outside of it viewing the local sites. Come find out what happens when a group of vacationers, mostly from around where I grew up on the "Northshore" of Chicago, lets their lust for "authentic" Mayan ruins, ruins well off the beaten path of the resort sanctioned forays, get the better of them.

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"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, that's because he's a high school science teacher who loves his job, unlike any of my high school science teachers, and he wants the next generation to embrace the scientific lifestyle like he has, not like these science-skeptics that we've got nowadays. His best friend Julian, played by John Leguizamo, loves math. He calms himself and other people down by solving math riddles, but as it turns out, math riddles aren't much help against a mysterious plant-based neurotoxin that has the very unscientific property of being able to convince its targets to instantly, but artfully murder themselves. Julian and Elliot try their best to use reason to figure out the patterns of the happening with sophisticated probabilities, which makes for some very unentertaining, shouting-meaningless-statistics-back-and-forth scenes, but to no avail. As it happens, to survive the Happening, just like a groovy 1970's party, all you need is love; albeit, a very lack-luster, and unconvincing love between Julien and Alma Moore, played by Zooey Deschanel, but Deschanel was all the rage back in the mid-oughts, maybe you'll find remember about that enjoyable, and maybe you'll even fall back in love with her cutesy, quirky, spacey ways. I, unfortunately, did not. Come join us for yet another journey into the endless battle between humanity and plant-based neurotoxins that give you novel, theatrical ideas for self-annihilation.

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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 running, hard-hitting "Batboy" series. Join us on yet another Appalachian adventure into weirdness. This time we don't run into any of the previous Appalachian troupes, like the questionable jokes of some of the other movies about extreme poverty and a general lack of education, but we really dive into the ultimate Appalachian stereotype of an isolated, inbred, and hostile native population. How will our intrepid Scottish adventures, trapped while spelunking in North Carolina, match up to these feral, humanoid creatures? How will they match up to each other and their own internal rivalries? Listen and find out.

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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 horror and callow, cheap dialog. He certainly loves to use offensive stereotypes for moronic laughs. But there seems to be something here about how we treat people who need our help, especially when whatever they have appears to be communicable. This is yet another example of pre-covid musing about the effects of a super spreader on our social relations. How will we act if the contagion causes our skin to peal, melt, and explode? And what if we're sexy college kids who just want to have sex and drink beer? Listen and find out!

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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. In a tragic turn of events, good-ole, local-boy Brendan has to take a break from comically eating his Twinkies (fat jokes find a way) to pull the beaver researcher out of the water, only to find that his legs are missing and his intestines are falling all over the place, which is, of course, one of the oldest gags in the book. That beaver-researcher guy paid the ultimate price for his love of beavers. But will crocodile-worshipper guy, Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt), trust-fund baby and professor of mythology, have to pay the ultimate price for his love of crocs? His religious beliefs center on swimming with and looking into the eyes of giant, dragon-like reptiles, and his parents have not only equipped him with a useless, advanced degree (one not too far from my own in religious studies), but they've also given him all the latest reptile-enthusiast gear, including a water landing helicopter, bright red, dive suit, and some electronic stuff that lights up and makes pinging noises. Bridget Fonda comes to join the party and contributes some spot-on, Paleontologist-up-from-New-York-City-to-see-if-they-might-be-dealing-with-a-dinosaur-in-the-middle-of-Maine lines, which win over the scuba-certified, fish and wildlife guy (Bill Pullman). Join us to hear about how their improbable love simmers and then catches fire as the lovers navigate both their budding love and the ragtag crew of lovable misfits trying to decide what to do about these big-ass crocodiles that are in the middle of Maine for some f-ing reason.

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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 civilization over the wild. And this alienation has only increased over time as humanity has learned to separate itself from nature through "Pharmakon" (medicine) and "Techne" (technology). The transgressive nature of human progress is, perhaps, captured most famously when Eve partakes and then offers Adam the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. So, perhaps it is fitting that it is a Daughter of Eve (tongue in cheek), Dr. Susan Mcalester, played by Saffron Burrows who is both the initiator and the demise of the "Deep Blue" project. Deep Blue is a controversial genetic engineering effort to find a pharmacological technology for curing Alzheimer's by producing giant Mako sharks for their amazingly reparative brains, which may offer a biological solution to the horrible disease's infamous recalcitrance. But, nature does not like to be violated, especially when it is in the form of a Mako Shark. But, is curing Alzheimer's worth whatever consequences may follow? 

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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 that the movie provides us with John Voight's sleaze ball advice on everything from snake poaching to women. While it's almost unbearable to listen to his offensive "Spanish" accent, you'll love the 1980's video game snakes that Voight gets almost everybody killed trying to capture live. Voight's offensive "Spanish" accent and overly affected slime even turn fun-guy Owen Wilson insane with the weird promise of all the loot they'll get if Wilson will only help him to capture the hyperreal reptile. Come join us for a special time with those two goofballs, as well as J. Lo., Ice Cube, and the amazing hair of 1990's Eric Stoltz.

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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 recounting the time that her idiot father died a gruesome death while trying to climb down the chimney with the family's Christmas booty. The message of this film may seem to have something to do with the grim reality of Christmas for those who are not the beneficiaries of Capitalism's bounties, or it may seem to be about the invasion of foreign products that reeked such havoc on American manufacturing, but probably its about how little Corey Feldman got excited about a grown man's comic book and knocked over some water onto an innocent Mogwai named "Gizmo," which started a plague of highly intelligent Gremlins that nearly destroyed Kingston Falls, and gave Phoebe Cates one more reason to hate Christmas.

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