Of all the flavors of horror, few are as dreadful as that of being lost in the wilderness. In this episode, JF and Phil revisit The Blair Witch Project, the classic 1999 found-footage film that inspired a thousand imitators. What makes this film so gripping, they argue, is the way it lingers over the subtle stages of disorientation in a hostile place, from blithe denial to devastating gnosis. The Blair Witch Project isn't a ghost story so much as a work of cosmic horror. Ultimately, the woods themselves—vast, indifferent, inescapable—are the monster.

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Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.

References

Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez (dirs.), The Blair Witch Project

Gus Van Sant (dir.), Gerry

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

Weird Studies, Episode 195 on John Keel

Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention

Georgio De Chirico, Italian artist

Arthur Machen, The White People

Jack Zipes, literary scholar

Weird Studies, Episode 150 on Arthur Machen's “A Fragment of Life”

“Schizophonia”

Stanislav Lem, Solaris

Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Solaris

Beyond Yacht Rock Podcast 

Shirley Clarke (dir.), The Connection

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image

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This marks the third year that Weird Studies is honoured to open the Lily Dale Symposium, organized each summer by photographer Shannon Taggart in the upstate New York community famed for its roots in Spiritualism. While J.F. wasn’t able to attend this year, Erik Davis joined Phil on stage for a conversation about the life and work of John Keel, the iconoclastic writer and investigator best known for The Mothman Prophecies. They were later joined by Keel’s friend, the writer and musician Doug Skinner, for a candid discussion of Keel’s legacy and style.

If you enjoy Weird Studies, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Upper-tier goodies include exclusive writings, regular bonus episodes, and monthly hangouts with JF and Phil.

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In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Meredith Michael—musicologist, podcaster, and Weird Studies production assistant—for a conversation about animal songs. The phrase is intentionally slippery. Are we talking about songs about animals, or songs by animals? Both, as it turns out. Beginning with three very different human compositions—The Beatles’ “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” Hovhaness’s And God Created the Great Whales, and Björk’s “Human Behavior”—the hosts discuss the roles animals play in human music, mythology, and mind. Along the way, they touch on Pink Floyd, the Beatles' trip to India, heroin addiction, the indeterminacy of singing and screaming, the messiness of inter-species communication, the discovery of whale song, the problem of (not) projecting humanness onto animals, the Book of Genesis, and the porous boundary between the human and non-human worlds. All that (and more) for two of the songs! Phil’s pick will be explored in a forthcoming episode.

Meredith Michael is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the Indiana

References

Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”

Pink Floyd, Animals

Neko Case, "People Got a Lotta Nerve"

The Beatles, "Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and my Monkey"

Gavin Steingo, Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music beyond Humanity

Little Richard, "Long Tall Sally"  

Alan Hovhaness, And God Created Great Whales

Roger Payne, Songs of the Humpback Whale

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time

Weird Studies, Episode 181 on “The X Files”

Kate Altizer, Piano Dogs and Whale Theaters: Paranoid Relations and Affect with Nowhere to Go in the Study of Nonhuman Animals and Music 

David Rothenberg, Thousand Mile Songs

Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug

King James Bible 

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Leonard Nimoy (dir.), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature

George Crumb, Vox Balaenae  

Terrence Malick (dir.), The Tree of Life

Image by Navin75, via Wikimedia Commons

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How do you become religious? What is a conversion experience? Does it happen all at once or gradually? What's the point of religion, anyway? These are questions that JF (a Catholic) and Phil (a Zennist) have often been asked since starting Weird Studies, and in this episode they attempt some answers.

Image: "Small Candle Flame" by Le Priyavrat, via Wikimedia Commons

Sign up to attend Shannon Taggart's Lily Dale symposium, July 24-26

REFERENCES

Ross Douthat, Believe  

Dogen, Shobogenzo  

New Atheism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism 

Weird Studies, Episode 99 on “Wild, Wild Country”

William James, Varieties of Religious Experience  

George Steiner, Real Presences

Patrick Curry, Art and Enchantment

Max Picard, The Flight from God

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

Richard Wagner, Ring Cycle

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

Weird Studies, Episode 183 on “Siddhartha”

Charles Sanders Peirce, American philosopher

Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”  

Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot

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Phil and JF first explored the mysteries of walking back in episode 59. That episode felt like a mere introduction—a tentative first step on a long and winding path. Now, 133 episodes later, they return to the theme as they prepare to lead a six-week course on the art of walking and its affinity with the Weird. This conversation touches on meditative walking, walking as dventure, psychogeography, wilderness mysticism, and more.

References

Weird Studies, Episode 59 on Walking

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

Kinhin, walking meditation

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

Randonautica, walking app

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

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This conversation was originally recorded in August 2024 and released for our Patreon supporters. Weird Studies will be back with a new episode on June 25, 2025.

What is cultural theory? How is philosophy "a preparation for death?"

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This special release is a Patreon extra we’re making available to all listeners, in lieu of the official episode originally scheduled for today. As explained in the introduction, we will be back with a full episode later in the month. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this conversation about how art transforms experience, making the mundane mythic, calling images out of the flux of life, and shaping what is in us to think, feel, and live.

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Best known as the wife and partner of Timothy Leary, Rosemary

Susannah Cahalan is the New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire, a memoir about her experience with autoimmune encephalitis. Her second book, The Great Pretender, which investigated a seminal study in the history of mental health care and diagnosis, was shortlisted for the the Royal Society's 2020 Science Book Prize. She lives in New Jersey with her family.

Photo from the Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection at UCLA, via Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

Susannah Cahalan, The Acid Queen

Weird Studies, Episode 189 with Jacob Foster

Marion Woodman, Canadian feminist author

Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & '70s

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Eric Davis, TechGnosis

Lutz Dammbeck, The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet

Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography

Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay

Blanche Hoschedé Monet, French painter

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

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In this episode, JF and Phil paddle into the marshlands of Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 masterpiece The Willows, a tale Lovecraft once called the finest weird story of all time. They explore how a narrative in which almost nothing happens can conjure a cosmic dread more potent than a legion of monsters, and how Blackwood’s genius lies in revealing the spiritual

Photo by Derek Dye, via Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows”  

Weird Studies, Episode 55 on “The Wendigo”  

SCTV

Algernon Blackwood, “The Psychology of Places” in The Lure of the Unknown

Weird Studies, Episodes 14 and 15 on Stalker

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

Sue Clifford and Angela King, England in Particular

Michael Dames, Pagans Progress

J. G. Ballard, English fiction author

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In this episode, JF and Phil are joined by Jacob G. Foster—sociologist, physicist, and researcher at Indiana University Bloomington and the Santa Fe Institute—for a conversation about their recent collaboration in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Their co-authored essay, “Care of the Dead,” explores how the dead continue to shape our cultures, languages, and ways of being. Together, they discuss the process of writing the piece and what it means to say that the dead are not gone—that they persist, and that they make claims on the living.

The article is available here: https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/154/1/166/127931/Care-of-the-Dead-Ancestors-Traditions-amp-the-Life

**References**

[Peter Kingsley,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kingsley) English writer 

Weird Studies, [Episode 98 on “Taboo”]) https://www.weirdstudies.com/98) 

John Berger, “12 Theses on the Economy of the Dead” in _[Hold Everything Dear](12 Theses on the Economy of the Dead)_ 

Bernard Koch, Daniele Silvestro, and Jacob Foster, ["The Evolutionary Dynamics of Cultural Change”](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/659bt_v1) 

Gilbert Simondon, _[Imagination and Invention](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781517914455)_ 

William Gibson, _[Neuromancer](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780441007462)_ 

[Phlogiston theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory) 

George Orwell, _[1984](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780451524935)_ 

HP Lovecraft, [“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cdw.aspx) 

Weird Studies, [Episode 187 on “Little, Big”](https://www.weirdstudies.com/187) 

[John Dee,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee) English occultist 

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, _[The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780195320992)_ 

Robert Harrison, _[The Dominion of the Dead](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780226317939)_ 

Gilles Deleuze, _[Bergsonism](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780942299076)_ 

Elizabeth LeGuin, _[Boccherini’s Body](https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780520240179)_ 

Elizabeth LeGuin, [“Cello and Bow thinking”](http://www.echo.ucla.edu/cello-and-bow-thinking-baccherinis-cello-sonata-in-eb-minor-faouri-catalogo/) 

Johannes Brahms, _Handel Variations_ 

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