The Desire of Horror

"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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 wome...

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 fa...

The concept is sharks under the ground, which is extra terrifying because you can't get away from them by staying out of the water at Amity Island Beach. And these "Graboids," as they are so aptly named, terrorize the small town of "Perfection Nevada" in grand fashion from "The Deep" below its inhabitants' feet. Apparently, Kevin Bacon was at one time embarrassed about his role in this horror-comedy, but now that it has become a "cult classic," he's thinks fondly of this fun little flick. Not...

With so much about immigration in the news as of late, it is hard not to see Arachnophobia as not somehow in dialog with the issue of middle America's obsession with being taken over by foreign invaders. Its release date was 1990, and immigration as well as relate concerns about the racial make up of America were certainly issues then as they are now, especially for bigots who remain a substantial portion of the American population. A particularly vicious breed of spider is accidentally...

The desire of the unknowable other takes on new depths in the impenetrable, black eyes of a shark. Matt Hooper, the marine biologist played by Richard Dreyfuss, waxes poetic about the almost eternal perfection of the shark's form, which was designed by evolution for the singular purpose of hunting. But there is a sort of ambiguous place for the shark at the top of the of sea's food chain since the more recent arrival of an even more effective and vicious apex predatory in the form of the huma...

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...

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 somethin...

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? ...

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...

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...

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 thin...

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 wer...

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...

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 ...

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 h...