Elliot, George, and - after a delay - myself consider David Lynch's despised and adored masterpiece Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a film as surreal as reality, a Horror film because the world is horror, a text which calculatedly destroys its own context, an uncanny investigation of a world made of selves and languages and co...
2023-11-21 16:27:39 +0000 UTC View PostPart 1 of a consideration of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994). Some of the ideas in this essay were partly developed in conversation with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman.
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John Carpenter’s late - and last - classic In the Mouth of Madness (1994) is famously metafict...
2023-11-11 12:56:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Advance access to a new podcast in which I chat with George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman about John Carpenter's arch, apocalyptic, lovecraftian, metafictional 1994 Horror classic In The Mouth of Madness. Features extensive digressions on Event Horizon, Twin Peaks, and David Lynch more generally. ...
2023-11-08 14:41:28 +0000 UTC View PostOn The Boy (2016)
As a paying member (thank you!) you're getting this review/essay in its first draft form, in advance of publication at Eruditorum.press.
The Boy, a film from 2016, written by Stacey Menear and directed by William Brent Bell, has been largely-forgotte...
2023-10-29 23:55:12 +0000 UTC View PostThis was written some years ago. It remains depressingly relevant.
It is now clear to a great many people that what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the institution and independence of the United States of America was a scandal, a holocaust and a tragedy. The idea is so com...
2023-10-27 15:58:29 +0000 UTC View PostOn the End of the World, the Zombie Apocalypse, and other comforting Bourgeois Fantasies
Say what you like about the zombie apocalypse but at least you don’t have to go to work in the morning.
Zombie movies are about how much fun the zombie apocalypse will be. Shaun of the Dead, Zombielan...
2023-10-25 17:32:23 +0000 UTC View PostOn Possession, Property, and Haunting; on Colonialism, Alienation, and Commodity Fetishism
Part 3 of a Gothic Marxist Consideration of Horror as Capitalist Cultural Production
Possession is one of the key concepts in modern Horror, though Horror shares it with other genres.
The genre of Horror is ge...
2023-10-25 17:28:15 +0000 UTC View PostOn Horror, Women, Patriarchy, and Misogyny
Part 2 of a Gothic Marxist Consideration of Horror as Capitalist Cultural Production
The Conjuring movies are about good and bad women. In the first movie the central antagonist is the spirit of a dead witch who killed her own baby and then herself...
2023-10-25 17:20:43 +0000 UTC View PostOn Horror, Childhood, Memory, and Time
Part 1 of a Gothic Marxist consideration of Horror as Capitalist Cultural Production
In recent years, the mass culture industries have resurrected the 1980s as a stylistic marker, first in Horror with the first film in the two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s ...
2023-10-25 17:17:02 +0000 UTC View Post“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” - The Tempest
Dracula, the novel, and Frankenstein, the novel, have one thing in common: they’re unfilmable. The books are unfilmable for different reasons. It boils down to this: Dracula...
2023-10-25 14:56:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Myself, George, and Elliot continue our Halloween-season tour through the Horror movies that fascinate us with a conversation about 1992's unique and indefinable Candyman, based on a story by the legendary Clive Barker, directed by Bernard Rose, scored by Philip Glass, and starring Tony Todd and Virginia Madsen. &nbs...
2023-10-24 21:54:08 +0000 UTC View PostOkay.
Thanks to fucking Patreon fucking around with a perfectly good system and fucking it all to fucking hell, things have to change here. No longer can we do it the nice, simple, easy way we used to. You pledge $1 and you get access to everything that i make available for patrons only. No no no, far ...
2023-10-24 21:36:13 +0000 UTC View PostA section from an essay I wrote about the TV series Legion:
Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of ‘the Fantastic’ sees the genre bifurcating into the ‘uncanny’ and the ‘marvelous’ according to what happens in a given story. Crudely, the former is when something fantastic is found to be ‘unreal’ wi...
2023-10-24 21:09:17 +0000 UTC View Post
I have read another eerie tale, this time an unfairly neglected late work by the master of the modern ghost story M.R. James.
In the time of Queen Anne, two clerical scholars at Cambridge venture onto the fens by night, hoping to obtain the key to secret diabolical powers from the burial place of a recently execu...
2023-10-09 11:29:14 +0000 UTC View Post"Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois..."
In a few hundred brisk but bristling words, written just after Hitler's assumption of power in Germany, Trotsky displays his characteristic panache in analysing 'National Socialism...
2023-10-08 20:40:57 +0000 UTC View Post
An audiobook of a short horror story. White explorers meet revolting retribution in Africa. An intriguing text with much to tell us about the morbid, sick, anxious psychology of racism, colonialism, and imperialism.
WARNING: This story, while fascinating and effective as horror, is very racist. ...
2023-10-04 15:25:15 +0000 UTC View Post
George, Elliot, and myself chat about John Carpenter's strange, unique, ominous, thoughtful, undervalued masterpiece Prince of Darkness from 1987. As usual, we get into lots of digressions which you'll hopefully find interesting.
This is not a dream. (It's a podcast.)
2023-10-04 10:46:46 +0000 UTC View PostAn exclusive for my patrons. Another little audiobook, in which I read the 20th century Italian Marxist Ignazio Silone's crystalline delineation of fascism from a book he published in 1934.
Silone, more famous for the anti-fascist novels Bread and Wine and Fontamara, was a co-founder of th...
2023-09-27 16:24:36 +0000 UTC View Post
We're putting Hannibal Digested onto hiatus for a month and doing another Halloween season of four movies through October. Segueing back via Michael Mann's Manhunter from 1986, the first movie to feature Hannibal. We all have complex thoughts about this movie, which makes for an interesting discussion. We al...
2023-09-23 14:42:44 +0000 UTC View Post
We're back, both of us, with a bonus episode to carefully dip our toes back in the brackish, fetid waters of IDSG.
In this episode we talk about In Cold Blood - Truman Capote's book, the 1967 film, the two movies about Capote writing the book, and some other stuff, including alternate theories of the case.
<... 2023-08-25 07:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
As the series kicks into high gear, so does our humble podcast.
In Sorbet, we see Hannibal inspired and hunting for the ingredients for a banquet. In Fromage, Hannibal makes a new friend, and isn't happy about it.
A really fun discussion about two extraordinary episodes of an extraordinary show ...
2023-08-11 21:59:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's one from the vaults, an old episode of now-defunct but fondly remembered podcast Wrong with Authority, featuring myself, Daniel, and our friends James Murphy and Kit Power. On the show, we discussed movies about history and the history they're about, each of us taking turns to host and choose a movie. This ...
2023-07-31 08:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
The meal continues. Two more courses.
2023-07-22 16:10:51 +0000 UTC View Post
George Lea asked me to join him and our mutual friend Rowan Fortune on an episode of George's running series of Lovecraft Retrospectives, and a...
2023-07-14 13:15:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey patrons, here's your exclusive advance access to the next episode of Hannibal Digested, in which I go through every episode of the bizarrely wonderful, gruesome, gothic, hallucinatory, literary TV show Hannibal in the incomparable company of erudite bastards George Daniel Lea and Elliot Chapman. In this show we look...
2023-06-28 14:15:47 +0000 UTC View PostAs promised, here's the first part of the new collaboration between myself, the toothsome George Daniel Lea, and the frankly mouthwatering Elliot Chapman. In this inaugural episode of Hannibal Digested (after last time's preparatory chat about all things lecterian) we look at episodes 1.1 Apéritif & 1.2 Am...
2023-05-26 14:38:03 +0000 UTC View PostWe're back. Daniel and I reconvene for a chat about the coronation of Prince Charles (I know what I mean - listen to the episode) and the defenestration of Tucker Carlson. We also talk a little bit about our recent hiatus, and our imminent return to regular production of episodes.
Enjoy!
2023-05-08 07:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
So, the next stage in the journey for myself, Elliot Chapman, and George Daniel Lea is a podcast series in which we go through the entire Hannibal TV series.
That's the plan anyway.
As with all our previous discussions, the shows will go up at George's YouTube channel but you, my dea...
2023-05-04 23:18:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Dur-dum. Dur-dum. Dum-dum dum-dum dum-dum dum-dum DUM-dum-dum-dum DUM-dum-dum-dum and so on.
Join myself, Kit Power and Elliot Chapman below decks for a great white chat about a great white movie.
Patrons wade in first - the mayor insisted.
2023-04-05 10:24:25 +0000 UTC View Post
George Daniel Lea and I reconvene for a follow-up to our episode about the first two Poltergeist movies. This time we talk about the underrated Poltergeist III and the deservedly forgotten 2015 Poltergeist remake. If the first episode in this series was unrelentingly positive, this one is more ambiguous. We ...
2023-03-30 08:52:28 +0000 UTC View Post
