Why Horror Still Haunts Us

Summary

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

Episode: Why Horror Still Haunts Us
Date: October 30, 2025
Hosts: Vinson Cunningham (A), Naomi Fry (C), Alexandra Schwartz (B)
Guest: Alex Barasch (D), Editorial Advisor & Horror Enthusiast

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Episode Overview

In this Halloween-timed episode, the Critics at Large team delves into the enduring appeal and cultural function of the horror genre. Guided by editorial advisor (and resident horror aficionado) Alex Barasch, the panel discusses how horror films both reflect and process society’s anxieties, reports back on contemporary horror assignments, draws connections to classic tropes, explores the social context and shifting business of horror, and considers why audiences keep coming back for more.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Relationships to Horror

• The hosts open with anecdotes about Halloween costumes for their children, swiftly pivoting to their own complex (and sometimes ambivalent) relationships to horror movies.
  • Vinson (A): Admits to being a “scaredy cat” and only watches horror occasionally. [02:20]
  • Alex (B): Used to spook herself as a child and has a history of scaring others with campfire stories. [02:27]
  • Naomi (C): Finds the hosts' wholesome Halloween plans at odds with horror’s scary traditions, setting up the episode’s shift from lightheartedness to the genre’s darker appeal.

2. The Business and Cultural Role of Horror

• Naomi introduces the topic with striking statistics: horror films have grossed over $1 billion domestically this year, representing 17% of movie ticket sales—more than drama and comedy combined [03:51].
• Horror is reframed from mere adrenaline rush to a vehicle for expressing and confronting societal fears: “[Horror] has also historically been a way for artists to explore their era’s worst fears, from nuclear proliferation to Satanic panic—but crucially, at a remove.” [03:56]

3. Welcoming the Horror Expert – Alex Barasch

• Alex Barasch joins as a guest, revealing early interests in both “emo classics” (Greek tragedy, Gothic horror) and the pleasure of shared fear: “There is a desire to be scared together rather than scared alone.” [06:06]
• On why horror appeals: “If you completely give yourself over to it … it’s cathartic to be afraid and then to have that as a contained experience.” [07:01]
• Emphasizes that genuine fear and the communal aspect are central to the genre’s impact.

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Horror Assignments: Recent Films as Case Studies

4. The Babadook (2014) – Assigned to Alexandra Schwartz

• Synopsis: Single mother Amelia struggles with her son Samuel, who is haunted by “the Babadook”—a terrifying picture-book monster whose power grows the more you deny him.
• Themes Discussed: Maternal horror, the burdens (and terrors) of motherhood, and the societal lens on women feeling trapped by circumstance.
  • Alex B: “It’s a cult phenomenon… maternal horror… making horror from motherhood and the things you cannot say to or about your child but are maybe thinking. That’s rich terrain psychologically and cinematically.” [11:54]
  • Alex S: Links to feminist film criticism around domestic horror (e.g., “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Exorcist,” and “The Shining”), situating the Babadook amongst movies that serve as analogs for women “trapped in your everyday life in a much bigger system.” [13:06]
  • Listener Mallory’s Memo [14:18]: Expresses sensitivity to recent waves of maternal/child horror after a difficult childbirth, prompting discussion about trauma, vulnerability, and broader social trends (e.g., women’s loss of bodily autonomy, rise in female filmmakers).
  • Vinson (A): “A kid is an extension of your vulnerability into the world... Life is suspenseful enough.” [16:36]

5. Saint Maud (2020) – Assigned to Vinson Cunningham

• Synopsis: A mentally fragile hospice nurse develops a dangerously intense relationship with a dying patient, pursued by visions and religious ecstasy.
  • *Vinson describes the protagonist's disturbing mortifications and growing psychosis, noting the film is “a social cautionary tale about loneliness and untreated mental illness masquerading as religious horror.” [21:45]
  • Suggests horror movies ought to be rated like hot sauce: “how spicy is it?” Ultimately, finds this film “unsettling” but not truly scary—“half a ghost” on his personal scale. [22:10]
  • Alex B: Called “elevated horror”—part of a current trend where horror crosses into prestige cinema. Notes the genre’s shift: “It used to be that horror would be something external that is disrupting a previously idyllic town or life. … [Now,] the bad thing has already happened to you. You already have a trauma at the beginning of the film…that is eating you from the inside or trying to kill you.” [25:02]
  • Vinson: “I am generally more afraid of supernatural things… but another thing I’m very afraid of… is going crazy. It’s one of my biggest fears, that my senses will one day betray me.” [23:03]

6. Weapons (2025) – Assigned to Naomi Fry

• Synopsis: In a Pennsylvania town, children mysteriously disappear at night, leading to a Rashomon-like investigation and the emergence of a supernatural interloper, “Gladys.”
  • Naomi enjoys early “character study of a town” and the slowly unraveling mysteries, but finds the supernatural reveal “a little goofy” and less satisfying than the tension leading up to it. [32:23]
  • Alex B: “The anticipation of the monster is more satisfying than the reveal. The most effective ones keep the force in the background so you can project your anxieties and fears.” [32:28]
  • Compares this to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”—where sympathy for the monster, Leatherface, arises, showcasing horror’s ability to “confront shared condition” and blur victim/monster boundaries. [33:27–34:09]
  • Discussion on Babadook, Gladys, and Megan as “gay icons”—monstrous outsiders embraced as camp or symbols of marginal identity.
  • Alex B highlights the gentrification of horror: as budgets increase (Weapons cost $40M—much higher than traditional genre films) and as prestige filmmakers (example: Jordan Peele, “Get Out”) bring horror into the mainstream. [36:07]
  • Alex S and Alex B warn that gloss and respectability might sap horror’s outsider “charge,” even as it enables higher production values and new forms.

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Listener Memos & Audience Roles

7. Horror’s Psychological & Social Functions

• Memo from Caio [26:01]: Watching horror is “a safe space to be scared, but not too scared… I know it’s safe and fictional.”
  • Alex B: “A horror movie, that’s the genre where the contract between the filmmaker and the audience is the most explicit. You know exactly what it’s gonna do to you.” [27:25]
  • The panel debates whether horror “purges” anxiety or embeds unsettling images (“You can’t shed them. They stay with you.” – Alex S. [52:18]).

8. Signs, Symbols, and the Purge

• Memo from Aiden [41:14]: Enjoys both horror’s sense of cosmic meaning and its striking, lasting imagery: “The idea that everything is sort of an omen, portending a larger plan … horror movies have some of the most iconic and impactful imagery of any movies.”
  • Alex S: “That’s exactly what scares the shit out of me… the idea that everything has meaning.” [42:01]
  • Vinson: “If life were like literature, that is actually horror.” [43:01]
  • The genre gives viewers a sense of order, catharsis, or meaning—albeit a frightening one.

9. Trauma and the Evolution of Horror

• Contemporary horror increasingly operates from the premise that trauma has already happened and is internalized, rather than invaded from without. [25:02]
• Alex Barasch maintains that horror remains potent despite predictability and even after repeated exposure: “There are things that don’t faze me… but you never really run out of [anxieties].” [44:34]

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Broader Genre Trends & Social Commentary

10. The Internet as a New Source of Horror

• Alex B. discusses “creepypasta” and the rise of horror born from online folklore (ex: Talk to Me, 2023, “viral challenge” premise)—framing the web as a digital campfire where new forms of scary stories emerge. [46:14]
  • Alex S: Terror is amplified by “blurring the boundary” between fiction and real life—social media and found-footage style horror play on this permeability. [48:23]

11. Horror as a Mirror and Outlet

• Panel reflects on why we seek out horror: as rehearsal for disaster, as psychic preparation, as catharsis, as a way to confront vulnerability and test ourselves. [49:35–51:10]
  • Vinson: “Constructing an extremity is a kind of test of the person… If there is a corollary to now, it’s like, oh, the extreme is possible.” [50:59]
  • Alex S: “You do not shed [the experience]. You do not just excrete them. They stay with you.” [52:18]
  • The act of horror, then, is both an individual and a communal ritual of meaning-making; it acknowledges chaos, anxiety, and vulnerability, organizing dread into narrative.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On being scared together:
  • “There is a desire to be scared together rather than scared alone.” —Alex Barasch (D), [06:06]
• On horror’s appeal:
  • “[Horror is] cathartic to be afraid and then to have that as a contained experience.” —Alex Barasch (D), [07:01]
• On maternal horror:
  • “One of my favorite horror movies of all time is Hereditary. Both of these films [Babadook, Hereditary] have a majestic soliloquy that begins, ‘I am your mother.’ … horror is primal, and family is the most primal thing there is.” —Alex Barasch (D), [17:05]
• On trauma and horror’s evolution:
  • “Now it’s… the bad thing has already happened to you… and that is eating you from the inside.” —Alex Barasch (D), [25:02]
• On empathy for monsters:
  • “When you feel sympathy for the creature… you’re confronting some kind of shared condition. And that is very uncanny because you have to see yourself differently. That’s scary.” —Alex Schwartz (B), [34:33]
• On horror’s audience contract:
  • “A horror movie, that’s the genre where the contract between the filmmaker and the audience is the most explicit. You know exactly what it’s gonna do to you.” —Alex Barasch (D), [27:25]
• On rehearsal for the worst:
  • “Constructing an extremity is a kind of test of the person… If the extreme is possible, how will I respond?” —Vinson Cunningham (A), [50:59]
• On horror’s lingering effect:
  • “When you read a book, when you see a movie… They live on in you. They become part of your own experience.” —Alex Schwartz (B), [52:18]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:51 — Horror’s box office dominance and genre framing
• 05:19 — Introduction of Alex Barasch, horror expert
• 08:32 — The Babadook: maternal horror, feminism, and trauma
• 14:18 — Voicemail (Mallory): Why so much horror about motherhood?
• 19:41 — Assignment 2: Saint Maud—religious horror & mental illness
• 26:01 — Voicemail (Caio): Horror as safe anxiety, audience contract
• 28:22 — Assignment 3: Weapons—a contemporary supernatural mystery
• 32:23 — The problem of monster reveals vs. anticipation
• 33:27 — Sympathy for monsters and the archetype’s evolution
• 36:14 — “Gentrification” of horror, Jordan Peele, and prestige politics
• 41:14 — Voicemail (Aiden): The symbolic meaning & imagery of horror
• 46:14 — Internet horror, “creepypasta,” and evolution of the medium
• 49:35 — Why heightening & supernatural horror, not realism?
• 50:59 — Horror as rehearsal for disaster; horror’s psychological function
• 52:18 — Horror’s lingering, transformative power

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Conclusion

The conversation underscores horror’s resilience and adaptability—it’s a genre that continually reinvents itself to meet the anxieties of the time, whether focused on the inside (personal trauma, mental illness) or the outside (social/political unrest, technological change). Horror’s power lies in its capacity to make the unspeakable visible and, paradoxically, to unite audiences through collective dread. As the panel considers the genre’s increasing mainstream and the evolution of its tropes, they zero in on why horror continues to “haunt us”: because it forces us to grapple, together, with the worst inside and outside ourselves—and because those fears, once manifested, refuse to let us go.

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“It is like living with something and living with a piece of real experience, the worst and the most extreme real experience, and just carrying it with you. [...] Maybe it is totemic, and maybe it’s just, you know, what we all have to go through because we’re alive, and this is the world, and your eyes need to be open a bit to it.” —Alex Schwartz (B), [52:18]

Transcript

[A]

This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham.

[B]

I'm Alex Schwartz.

[C]

And I'm Nomi Frye. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, fellow critics.

[B]

Hello.

[A]

What's up?

[C]

It's been a long weekend.

[B]

It's been festival weekend.

[C]

It's been New Yorker festival weekend. Alex, is. You are a bit hoarse, are you not? We're just warning our listeners I might get hoarse.

[B]

I'm doctoring. We're going to make it through.

[C]

We're going to do it, I believe. I mean, it is getting a little bit colder, a little chillier. Night is falling earlier and earlier. October is careening towards its inevitable end. And with that inevitable end, Halloween.

[B]

What a buildup. Just love it.

[C]

I know.

[A]

Amazing.

[C]

Are you guys dressing up as anything this year? Any costumes in the works?

[A]

We're trying to do matching butterflies in my household.

[C]

That is adorable.

[A]

My little daughter loves butterflies, so. But we'll see. I've done. I mean, I've done nothing, to be clear. And that's usually not Good week of Halloween. Not a great time to shop for Halloween.

[C]

Right. Well, luckily your daughter is quite young, so she won't know the difference.

[A]

Yes, but then she'll look back and be like, you guys.

[C]

Right, Right. Alex, how about yourself?

[B]

My son is the first year, he wanted to choose his own costume and he immediately said pumpkin. And that is adorable that we should all be pumpkins as well. So I think we're gonna be pumpkins.

[C]

Okay. Well, what about you? No.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

I'm not planning anything. But I have to say, you guys, your costumes are sounding pretty darn wholesome, which is lovely because you have young kids. But when we usually think of Halloween, we sometimes think of something slightly less, you know, heartwarming. We might think, in fact, of horror. Exactly. You guys, what has your engagement been with the horror genre? Horror movies in particular?

[A]

It has been very touch and go. It's. Every once in a while I might watch a big horror movie every two years. 3.

[C]

Would you say that you're a scaredy cat, Vincent?

[A]

I would say I'm a scaredy cat.

[C]

Okay. Alex, how about you?

[B]

What a long and twisting tale it is, my friends.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

You know, I think if I had to give a one second answer, I'd say, nah, that into horror. But I actually don't think that's true. I have been going back to an early age when I used to make scary faces in the mirror to Terrify myself and would become scared of my own reflection.

[C]

Now that's self alienation.

[B]

I watched some very scary movies. Very early Psycho, memorably at someone's 13th birthday party. But I was actually only 12, and that really messed me up. But I'm also remembering that I once was a great raconteuse of the licked hand. Do you guys know that old story?

[C]

No.

[B]

Okay, well, maybe as a bonus episode, we can have me going on at great length telling it to you. But I used to scare the pants off younger children because this story was told to me at sleepaway camp. It terrified me to my bones.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

And then when I was a caretaker for others, I made it my business to pass on the fear.

[C]

And you were never hired again by the parents.

[B]

Well, maybe I was and maybe I wasn't.

[C]

Okay, a chill is literally running up and down my spine right at this moment. But, you guys. Okay, whatever we might think about horror, and we'll talk about this more in a little bit. Horror movies are inarguably a big business. The domestic box office for horror this year has already exceeded a billion dollars. One billion dollars.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

And it accounts for 17% of movie ticket sales. More than drama, more than comedy combined. Which is kind of crazy, actually. Horror is often dismissed as a genre for thrill seekers. And it's true that jump scares and ominous music raise our adrenaline, right? But horror movies have also historically been a way for artists to explore their era's worst fears, from nuclear proliferation to sat. Panic. Panic. But crucially, at a remove. So today we're gonna talk about all things horror. And since we aren't necessarily horror buffs, or not exactly, we're gonna be calling on someone who is. And he's given us some movies to watch and report back on. And I guess the big question I have for us is, what is the enduring appeal of horror? So that's today on Critics at Large, the horror the hor. Okay, fellow critics, fellow horror aficionados, or horror rookies, as the case may be. As I said before, for this episode, we needed to call in an expert. We can't do this alone. And. Oh, hark, there he is now. Hello there, Alex Barish.

[D]

Hello, hello.

[A]

Oh, my God. Our.

[C]

Our very everything.

[A]

Our everything.

[C]

Alex Barish. His first time on mic with us. But I should note, for those of you who don't listen carefully to our credits at the end of each episode. Alex is our editorial advisor. He is a crucial part of this podcast, but we're so happy to actually have him in the Studio with us for once. Alex, welcome.

[D]

Thank you. I am fittingly both afraid and excited.

[B]

So that's great.

[C]

It's a perfect horror mix.

[D]

Exactly.

[C]

You know, it's a performer horror mix. Alex, you are a lover of horror movies and something of an expert. How did that happen? Like, did you start developing that taste early on?

[D]

Yeah, I don't know if I'm an expert. I do love horror. I have long loved it. I think having friends who were into it from a young age was an important, you know, there is a desire to be scared together rather than scared alone. And at the risk of painting a very emo view of myself as a teenager, the other things I was into at that time were the classics, as in aeschylus and Euripides, 19th century Gothic horror and Shakespearean tragedy. So I think I am also attracted, among other things, to a genuinely tragic or downbeat ending. And I kind of feel like horror has become the home for that in modern culture. And also it's really fun. I think if you completely give yourself over to it. Sometimes it's a campy thing, sometimes it's just cathartic to be afraid and then to have that as a contained experience. But I think it's a very wide ranging genre and I like what it does to me affectively.

[C]

And what does it do to you affectively?

[D]

Oh, I'm afraid. Like, to be clear, I know a lot of people and I think you guys a little bit have this as well where it's like, oh, I don't do horror. I can't do horror. I think there was a time in my life when I was younger where I was like, oh, I'm not afraid at all. Like, this is fine, I can handle it.

[C]

Right.

[D]

Kind of a bravado.

[C]

Sure, sure.

[D]

But once you accept that it's scary and you let it do its work on you and you react to it and you are reacting again with others, I think that's a way more satisfying mode of experiencing it. So I am not unflinching in the face of horror, but I think that letting it act on you is part of the pleasure.

[C]

Yeah. So, Alex, you assign each of us a movie to watch. What was your methodology in this endeavor?

[D]

My highly scientific methodology. Well, we wanted to look for this episode at the kind of past 10, 15 years of horror. So each of your movies are about five years apart. We can trace that chronology in a nice way, I think. And each of them represents something thematically that is or has been significant in horror. So I think it's A way of getting at these broader shifts in the landscape and these things that have preoccupied filmmakers working in this genre for a long time.

[C]

Okay, Alex S. Alex Schwartz, our regular.

[B]

Alex, I'm ready.

[C]

Let's start with you. So, Alex, which movie did Alex B. Assign you?

[B]

I was assigned the Babadook.

[C]

Even the name, even the title sends shivers through my whole body.

[D]

What a good impression.

[A]

Wow. It sounds like a curse intoned in, like, some Italian little village. The Babadook.

[B]

Yeah, it's a great word. It's a great word, and it's a word that I've been saying for years, even though I had never seen the movie before. This movie came out in 2014. So the Babadook is directed by Jennifer Kent, an Australian director, and it stars Essie Davis as a mother who, at the start of the movie, she's on her way to the hospital to give birth. Her husband is driving her. There was a crash. And we are led to understand that her husband is killed as she's going to give birth to their son. And six years later, she lives with said son, whose name in the film is Samuel. He's played by Noah Wiseman. And everything starts going wrong. He's a really difficult kid. He's into weapons and dangerous toys. He's misbehaving at school. People see him as a threat. And his mom, she's struggling to keep up under the burdens and demands of taking care of her kid and working and keeping their lives going. And Samuel fears monsters, and she keeps saying they're not real, don't believe in them, Basically, grow up, move on from this stuff. One night, they read a book together, and the book is called the Babadook. This monster thing has got to stop.

[C]

All right?

[B]

It's just a book. It can't hurt you. And the Babadook has been like, I've never seen it before, but it's been in my mind and imagination because the figure is so distinctive. It's this jaunty, freaky guy who looks kind of like a Gremlin. He's wearing a big stovepipe hat, and his arms are very, like, fussy, like they're out. He has long, intense fingernails. And he also wears short pants, which, as we all know, when you wear short pants after childhood in the Victorian era, something is wrong. So, yeah, Babadook arrives. And the thing about the Babadook is Babadook's here. And the thing about the Babadook.

[D]

And he's here to stay.

[B]

And he's here to stay. Exactly, Alex. Because the Thing about the Babadook is the more you deny him, the more his power grows. So what we got here is a bit of a home invasion. We've got domestic horror, we've got maternal horror. There's blood, there's terror. But most of all, there's fear. It's real fear. And it's scary.

[C]

You felt fear when you watched it?

[B]

Definitely.

[C]

Okay, so it freaked you out.

[B]

It totally freaked me out. Okay, I'm gonna ask Alex why you assigned me this, but I suspect. May I please speculate? May I speculate? May I rampantly speculate? I mean, it's about a mother and a son.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

I have a son. He's not 6 and he's not haunted as far as I know, but give it time. Yes, exactly right.

[C]

There's still time. That is one of the scary. I mean, not. He's gonna be fine. But I just mean, that is. No, but just when the specific genre of horror intersects with your own moment in life, I think it's particularly scary.

[B]

Well, Alex, why did you assign this movie to me?

[D]

You are correct that biographical overlap was a factor. I also, I mean, the Babadook was a cult phenomen when it was released. And I feel it's an example of, as you said, maternal horror, which is this huge subgenre and kind of an interesting subversion of that. You know, this goes all the way back to Rosemary's Baby. But I think this movie is doing something interesting because you have both the kind of monstrous mother and the possibly cursed child. It's working within the subgenre and the tropes, but it's doing something different with them. And again, yeah, making horror from motherhood and the burdens of motherhood and the things that you cannot say to or about your child but are maybe thinking. And I find that to be very rich terrain psychologically and cinematically.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's right. And it's very interesting what you're saying about these two tropes. You know, there's a new book out called Scream with me by this Columbia professor, Eleanor Johnson. And its subtitle is Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism, 1968-1980.

[C]

Uh huh.

[B]

And I was thinking about it in connection with something like the Babadook, because basically Johnson is arguing. She's looking at movies like Rosemary's Baby, which you just mentioned, Alex and the Exorcist and the Shining. These are three movies I. I actually really like.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And she's making an argument about a time when American feminism is starting to come into its own. And women are starting to realize that they need to take collective power to change the political system in which they live and are essentially imprisoned by. And these domestic horror movies provide a lens into that, a lens into the experience, the mundane experience of being trapped in your everyday life in a much bigger system that you can't resist. And it puts this very fine point on it.

[D]

This is one of the things that horror can do, is to take something that's already there and is maybe not talked about and show it at an extreme and literalize it and externalize it in a way where you do actually have to grapple with it. And you get to see it and you get to understand that other people are also afraid of this thing or experiencing this thing. And that becomes a lens through which to have those conversations. And that's really interesting and powerful when done well.

[C]

Yeah, guys, we in the last couple of weeks solicited voicemails from our listeners about the question of horror. And there was one memo that spoke specifically to this question of maternal horror. So I think I'm gonna queue up this memo right now and then we can talk about it a little bit.

[B]

Cool.

[C]

Hi, critics, this is Mallory from dc. So I used to be an obsessive horror fan. New horror movies could not come out.

[B]

Fast enough for me, even the bad ones.

[C]

But lately, for like, the past two or three years, I have not been able to stomach horror at all. It seems like lately I'm coming across.

[B]

Similar tropes or themes in horror movies.

[C]

So, like, a lot of monstrous pregnancies.

[B]

Babies sired by the devil, possessed kids, kids in danger.

[C]

And I'm kind of wondering if it's just me, is it because I went through a difficult childbirth and now have a young kid who's happy and healthy, by the way, that I'm just seeing all of these things all the time now, or is it really more ubiquitous lately? So I'm just curious what your take is on this. What are these stories trying to process for us collectively or subconsciously right now?

[A]

First of all, great to hear that your kid is happy and healthy. That's a beautiful thing.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Shout out to them. I think that often growing up is figured in the popular imagination or maybe just the American imagination. I don't know. As a process of putting on more and more armor, that you grow a personality, you gain some sort of financial foothold, et cetera, et cetera, and become more and more yourself, when, as it actually happens, the more you live, the more vulnerabilities you are. Aware of the more surface area it seems that you have on your body for possible harm. And then, of course, you know, a kid is an extension of your vulnerability into the world. And so I do think that that can go in two different ways. You might, to your point, Alex B. Want that experience literalized and externalized as something that you can therefore look at. And maybe, you know, almost in the way of the sort of, like, if I watch it, then maybe I feel strangely, like, protected from it. But I can also see the opposite response of, like, I don't need to be reminded of that right now.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Life is suspenseful enough.

[D]

Right. You're feeling it powerfully either way, and it's how you want to engage with that or not. But I do. I mean, as we were talking about, this goes back decades and further. I mean, you could go to Medea or something, and, you know, the monstrous mother in Maternal Horrors has always been with us. But I do think it is because horror is about the unspeakable and the unspoken. And one of. Probably my favorite horror movie of all time is Hereditary.

[C]

Ari Aster's Hereditary.

[D]

Ari Aster's Hereditary, yes. Both of these films have a majestic soliloquy that begins, I am your mother. And, you know, I think we keep coming back to this because fear is primal and horror is primal, and family is the most primal thing there is. Like, these are the parts that we're grappling with all the time.

[B]

When I hear your question, Mallory, if I may just speak to you directly. We talked about this, you know, when we talked about the substance, which I think is relevant here as well. We talked about the loss of control that women have over their bodies in general, but especially since the Dobbs decision. That may be one reason why we're seeing more horror around this topic. I think another reason and a better reason why we're seeing more horror around this topic is that there are simply more female filmmakers than there used to be. And that has changed pretty recently in terms of volume. So that may be a reason. And it may be, Mallory, because you've become sensitized to these things through your experience. And that's interesting. So I hear you.

[D]

I mean, half the drama of the Babadook is like, will she have childcare? Like, who's gonna look after the kid? Where's she gonna go? How's she gonna get to work?

[B]

Exactly. The childcare thing. Yeah. Is very, very real. It's. And when the system starts unraveling and there isn't much of a system to begin With It's a nightmare.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

It's a horror show. We're going to take a quick break now, but when we're back, we'll share Vincent's horror assignment and mine. This is critics at Large from the New Yorker.

[B]

Hi, I'm Tyler Foggatt, a senior editor at the New Yorker and one of the hosts of the Political Scene podcast. A lot of people are justifiably freaked out right now, and I think that it's our job at the Political Scene to encourage people to stop and think about the particular news stories that are actually incredibly significant in this moment by having these really deep conversations with writers where we actually get into the weeds of what is going on right now and about the damage that is being done. It's not resistance in the activist sense, but I think it is resistance in the sense that we are resisting the feeling of being overwhelmed by chaos. Join me and my colleagues David Remnick, Evan Osnos, Jane Mayer, and Susan Glaser on the Political Scene podcast from the New Yorker. New episodes drop three times a week, available wherever you get your podcasts.

[C]

Okay, guys, we are now going to move on to Vincent, who was also assigned a movie by Alex B. Vincent. Which movie were you assigned?

[A]

I was assigned the chronicle of Loosening Mental Acuity increasing religious devotion. That is the 2020 film St. Maud, which was the debut film, which was directed and also written by Rose Glass. We meet Maude at the very beginning of the movie. She's a kind of a hospice nurse working one on one with a former dancer named Amanda who is dying. And we find early on that Maude has all of these signs of, like, incredibly deep and a sort of unnerving religious devotion.

[C]

Dear God, your presence graces the air.

[B]

And soon everyone will see you.

[A]

When you pray, do you get a response?

[C]

Oh, it's like he's physically in me.

[A]

We see her doing really strange things. Like, you know, she puts nails into her shoes and she steps onto them. Like, you know, the kind of, like, mortification of the flesh that we associate with certain, like, sort of intensely devoted saints. And then we start to see visual phenomena of, you know, there's a flashback to a moment of her doing, like, chest compressions, which we realize she's had a bad experience with a client in her former life and PTSD as part of her problem. At one point, we hear the voice of God as she's in her room asking him what to do. That voice is probably the scariest thing that happens in the movie. It's like these Gods get up. And there are these subtitles that are like. You've always known that life is a game and now is time to redeem yourself. What should I do? She says, Satan knows what should I do? But it's supposed to. But she thinks it's God. But it sounds. You know, Everybody knows Satan talks like this, you know, and it's like.

[D]

And he's.

[A]

You've always known what to do. Anyway, really what it is is a kind of social cautionary tale about loneliness and untreated mental illness masquerading as religious horror. Um, I think that horror movies. This is one something that occurred to me. I think that horror movies should be labeled like hot sauce. How spicy is it?

[C]

Yeah, right.

[A]

How scary is it?

[B]

Yeah, but everyone's gonna disagree.

[A]

To whom exactly? That's right. But I just think.

[C]

So it's gonna be like three ghosts. Three little.

[A]

Exactly.

[C]

Icons would be like the really scary.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

So spicy.

[B]

So if it's four ghosts, how many ghosts are given this?

[A]

This is Texas Pete. It is not that scary.

[B]

Half a ghost.

[A]

Happily to me. Half a ghost. It was half a ghost. Yeah. It was not that scary to me. Although it was very unsettling. I am generally more afraid of sort of supernatural things than I am of. I dated someone and we saw five of the saw movies. I could watch that for no reason all day long.

[B]

I could. Crazy to me.

[A]

Whatever. You want to chainsaw somebody's limb off, it doesn't do nothing for me. There's like something riveting and, you know, cringing. But I'm afraid of dreaming.

[C]

Wrong.

[A]

And another thing I'm very afraid of, to St. Maud's credit is I'm afraid of going crazy.

[C]

Oh, me too.

[A]

It's one of my biggest fears. That my senses will one day betray me.

[C]

Exactly.

[A]

And that I will be experienc that are actually utterly isolating and lead me further and further and further away from the community of other people. And that is precisely what is happening to Maude. And so using the language, the lexicon of horror to portray that process, I thought was really smart. I would watch it again. But I also did feel that I would be able to go to sleep, which is always what I'm worried about when I watch a horror movie. Alex. Bea, please tell me why. Why?

[D]

St. Maud, I'm actually taking this as a win because you had specifically requested religious horror. You said you'd be open to that.

[A]

Yes, sir.

[D]

You had also said you may not be ready for hereditary or some of the more occult, you know, Intense scares. So I was trying to modulate accordingly and pick something that is in that zone. Because that is, again, a rich tradition in this genre.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

It's also an A24 horror film. And they have been one of the big engines of this kind of new wave of horror that we've seen in the last 15 years. So that felt relevant. It signals this shift that's happening. You know, it used to be the case that, you know, there were great horror films, but there were also the kind of slashers and the schlockier stuff, and they used to be kind of quarantined from each other. And now it's like horror can be prestige as well. And this is a very, like, visually striking kind of. People hate this term, and I kind of also hate it. But elevated horror, like.

[A]

That's right.

[D]

So it's something in that zone, and that felt like something we should touch on. I'm glad you weren't scared. But this also means the next thing I recommend to you is going to.

[A]

Be, well, yeah, you know, to Alky's.

[D]

Point, like, three ghosts.

[C]

Three ghosts.

[A]

It depends on what bothers you. You know, it was a reminder, though, of, like, you know, from the Exorcist on this situation of the sort of religious encounter also sort of precisely between two people, that there's, like, you know, whether it's the power of Christ compels you or whatever, but that we would call this, like, a big trope of the genre, Right?

[D]

Absolutely.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Yeah. That goes back decades, if not, you know, centuries, depending on how you're defining yourself. And I liked your point about how the PTSD is part of her problem. And I think that also speaks to something that's happening in horror increasingly. I don't want to make sweeping generalizations, but I feel like in the past, the horror would be something external that is disrupting a previously idyllic town or life. And now this is true of the Babadook as well. There's a lot more of the bad thing has already happened to you. You already have a trauma at the beginning of the film or even before the film begins, and then that is eating you from the inside or trying to kill you. And you have to grasp it feels very. You know, one of our former colleagues, Parul Segal, wrote this piece about the trauma plot, and I feel that that is working in horror as well, you know, to varying degrees of success. But it's an interesting shift.

[C]

We have another voice memo from one of our listeners. This is Kayo. I think it would be Interesting to play it at this juncture.

[D]

Hi, critics at large. My name is Caio. I have been putting some thoughts on why is that that I feel so comfortable and excited watching horror movies.

[A]

And I think one of the reasons.

[D]

Is in real life I would struggle with health anxiety and other kinds of anxiety. And somehow watching horror movies provides me this safe space to be scared, but not too scared.

[A]

Being able to enjoy the excitement of.

[D]

The unknown and not being controlled, but.

[A]

Within a framework that, you know, I.

[D]

Know it's safe and fictional.

[B]

Yeah, this makes sense to me. I mean, I hear this a lot, that you can kind of live these feelings and these experiences. You can feel fear by watching horror, but of course, you're safely in your own home or you're in the theater, you're gonna leave. I'm thinking more about my own experience with horror and what has changed. And I definitely think that when I was younger, I just had a much greater permeability between what I saw and what I was living and a possibility that was introduced to me on screen, then lived with me. And that was terrifying. It did not feel safe. It did not. And in a way, it was the purest way to encounter films like these because it did not feel that these experiences would be confined to the screen.

[D]

But I do think I was talking to a producer recently and she said something really struck me. She's made horror films. She's made other kinds of films as well. But she said, like a horror movie, that's the genre where the contract between the filmmaker and the audience is the most explicit. You know exactly what it's gonna do to you. They know exactly how they wanna make you feel. They are actively thinking, I want to scare you at this point in the story. And you are actively entering that and saying, I'm prepared to be scared.

[C]

Right.

[D]

And I think that that kind of contract, that handshake, is very interesting. And it's probably part of the pleasure that this listener is getting out of it.

[C]

So it's kind of like almost like the movie itself is a trigger warning or like the trigger warning is implicit in the genre.

[B]

It's a tr.

[C]

Yeah, it's a trigger.

[D]

It's a true guarantee.

[C]

Well, maybe not guaranteed.

[B]

Yeah, you're pissed if you don't get tricky.

[D]

It might be half a ghost and.

[C]

Then half a ghost. Half a ghost.

[A]

Half a ghost in scariness, to me, not in quality. I actually think it's a great movie. I really liked it. So thank you, Alex.

[D]

You're welcome.

[C]

Okay, guys. So the movie I was assigned was Weapons, which came out earlier this year. And I had been hearing about it a lot this past few months, did really well in the box office. Was also, you know, mostly beloved by critics. I mean, I generally enjoyed it. So let me just set it out for people who haven't seen it. So this is a movie that came out earlier this year. It was written and directed by Zach Kreger, who also directed Barbarian, which came out in 2022 and was, you know, similarly kind of a surprise relative hit. And I would say it's kind of a combination of a mystery and a supernatural horror movie. Most of it is a mystery. So we're talking about kind of a small suburban town in Pennsylvania. One morning, the town wakes up.

[D]

Every other class had all their kids.

[B]

But Mrs. Gandy's room was totally empty. And do you know why?

[D]

Because the night before, at 2:17 in.

[B]

The morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs and into.

[D]

The dark.

[B]

And they never came back.

[C]

So this is a big mystery. Right? And the way the movie is set, it is split up sort of like a bit of a Rashomon style, I guess, between several different characters in the movie. One of them is the teacher, these children's teacher, played by Julia Garner, who is kind of ostracized by the town following the disappearance of the kids. They're like, she must know something. Another one is kind of her off and on lover who's a policeman in the town, has his own problems, you know. So this is less kind of horror and more of kind of like a local mystery, let's say. Right. And kind of a character study of a town. Obviously, something is wrong with this town, you know, but it is kind of what appears to be a placid community that has been infected in some sense, from without. So most of the movie is this. And I like this a lot, actually. I thought it was well acted. I thought it was very evenly paced in a very satisfying way. But then there comes a moment when the yarn that is pulled tight needs to kind of be frayed a little bit in order to start getting some answers. And that's when the supernatural element comes in. I'm not gonna spoil this, but it has to do with a character that comes to town, comes from without and is kind of an interloper. And it's a woman named Gladys who is very, I would say, like, you know, suspiciously Jewish coded.

[D]

Oh, interesting.

[C]

I would say it's a very wide bred, very kind of WASPy town. And this woman is very like, you know, she's older. She has kind of, like a weird, like, orange wig.

[D]

But she's also giving Pennywise, like, she dresses like a clown.

[C]

It's somewhere between, like, scary Pennywise the.

[B]

Murder clown from it.

[C]

Right. It's somewhere between kind of like a freaky, scary clown with, like, a bright orange wig and, like, an old Jewish woman. Okay, I said what I said. Okay.

[B]

Sounds like that's at least two and a half ghosts.

[C]

I mean, there was something I found and Alex B. I'm eager to hear what you say about this from your perspective as someone who has more experience with the genre than myself. But the last half hour of the movie, it turns into another movie, and it kind of unravels the whole plot in a way that, because it's supernatural, has its own different logic. That felt to me a little, and maybe not as satisfying as it could be. I will say I enjoyed it. I think it's a pretty good movie. But I had some questions about the kind of climax, so to speak.

[D]

Yeah. I will go on the record saying I think the end of Weapons is so goofy.

[C]

Yeah, it's a little goofy.

[D]

And this is. I mean, this is something that happens not infrequently in horror. I often feel the anticipation of the monster is more satisfying than the reveal of the monster. And the most effective ones kind of keep that force in the background and they limit your exposure so that you can project your own anxieties and fears onto this creature. And I thought we spent way too much time with Gladys for her to be an effective force of.

[C]

Yeah, I was like, okay, I get it.

[D]

Yes, you get it quite quickly.

[C]

I get it quite quickly.

[B]

May I ask something about Gladys, please? So I don't really know much about this Gladys. You know, I haven't seen Weapons, but one thing that you make me think of is I do think there's sometimes a thing in horror films where you come around to sympathizing in a very bizarre way with the terrifying element in the Babadook. This is a big part of it. But in preparation for this episode, I watched for the first time the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

[C]

What a great movie.

[B]

A fantastic movie.

[C]

Now, that's scary.

[B]

It's very scary. But guess who I feel some sympathy for?

[D]

Leatherface.

[B]

Poor Leatherface.

[C]

Well, it's like the monster in Frankenstein. Of course, you feel bad for him because he's rejected something.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

Poor Leatherface is basically forced to do all this killing for his mean daddy figure and his demented brother, and he has to do all the clubbing and all the. And all the knifing and all the garrotting. And you sort of feel sad for poor Leatherface, even as you absolutely don't want that guy to be running after you in the woods. You don't. No one wants.

[C]

With a saw.

[B]

With the titular chainsaw. You don't want that anywhere near you.

[D]

With the eponymous chainsaw.

[B]

Yes, it's that. It's that I thought, you know, Nomi, you were talking before about. And Alex, you were talking too, about the difference between the trope of the haunting element or the terrifying element coming from without versus from within. And I think when you feel sympathy for the creature, for the killer, for poor old Leatherface, you're confronting some kind of shared condition. And that is very uncanny because you have to see yourself differently. That's scary. That's really scary.

[C]

It's scary.

[D]

And, yeah, I mean, to your point about identification with the other or embrace of the other, it's interesting that both the Babadook and Gladys have become like memes. People have embraced them totally. There is this kind of quasi ironic support for both of these figures. I don't really get it with Gladys, which I guess makes me a bad gay, but, you know, it's like, oh.

[A]

Has she become camp?

[D]

She's become a gay icon, I'm told.

[B]

As was the Babadook.

[D]

As was the Babadook before.

[A]

Not unlike Megan, Right?

[D]

Yes, Megan as well.

[C]

A bit of a diva because she does what she wants and she kills with impunity.

[D]

And that's what we look for in the gay community. We do.

[B]

We do.

[C]

We. As a part of the gay community.

[D]

Yes, As a known ally. Yeah, as a. But it's. Yeah. I mean, I chose Weapons because, as you gestured at in your introduction of it, it was kind of the big horror release of 2025 and also maybe indicates where the genre is going a bit. A lot of these other films you've been talking about are very, very low budget, like $2 million. This was, I mean, as you said, still modest, but just shy of $40 million or something like that. 40, which is sizable for horror. And it has a cast that, you know, like, you recognize these people. It's kind of a joke. But also, the Blumhouse model for a long time was like, Blumhouse is like a major producer of horror. Over the past 15 years, they did Paranormal Activity, they did Insidious, they did get out, which we can get to. But part of their model is the fewest number of speaking roles possible, the fewest number of extras. Possible, like it's really keep it low budget, keep these relatively unknown casts. And in this instance it's like again, horror is becoming kind of glossier.

[B]

Do you think that could be something unfortunate? Because the outsider status of horror, I think is part of its appeal also.

[D]

Yes.

[B]

The sense that it's frowned upon or looked down upon or considered to be just totally, you know, outre can give it some real charge.

[D]

Yeah, I mean that's part of what I've enjoyed about it historically. Two of the three filmmakers that we've talked about here of first time filmmakers and Zach Craigsit's only his second film. So these are people who are new and ascendant and trying something. And I think often that low budget frees you up. You can be kind of experimental, you can try different things. There's a transgression that's almost built into the premise. And I do worry a bit if it becomes this very polished, expensive prestige, prestige thing where you can't afford to take as many risks because you need people to show up. It does risk losing something, but you can still get great movies out of it.

[B]

We're worried about the gentrification of horror.

[D]

We are worried about gentrification.

[C]

Well, AI is gonna solve all of.

[A]

This in this connection. Do we blame. Is Jordan Peele like the first gentrifier? Is he the figure that we would say, Thus began the sort of polishing up of horror, at least in the current era.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Is get out ground zero for why horror is now Bed Stuy?

[B]

What a claim.

[D]

Huge claim. I find it hard to identify ground zero. I do think get out was a breakout hit in a way that maybe even they were not expecting it to be.

[A]

Yes, it was huge.

[D]

It was huge.

[A]

And still a reference point.

[D]

People are always a reference point.

[A]

Get out 4x, it's still right.

[D]

And I do think it has spawned a resurgence in the kind of social horror this like political commentary within horror. Some of that great, some of it less great.

[A]

Yes.

[D]

And I do think, yeah, you can trace the lineage to something like weapons in a way because there is this social dimension. I think the iconography of like a school shooting is certainly present in weapons. You see the anxiety of these parents and the concern about their kids and.

[B]

Yeah, just stand up for get out. And you know, I am pro get.

[D]

Out, to be clear.

[C]

Such a great movie. Such a great movie.

[B]

So get out was made for four and a half million dollars and you know, it wasn't bringing these huge budgets to bear. And this gloss that we're talking about I saw get out in the the. So I got the full experience of everybody freaking out together and also laughing together. And the combination, you know, those are two, of course, like laughter and screaming are these two involuntary responses that if you have them in a movie, then you've absolutely reached your goal of making people feel things viscerally.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And for everybody to be united in those feelings was. It's one of the best experiences I've had at the movies.

[D]

Yes, absolutely. So I think Jordan Peele innocent, but studios trying to replicate Jordan Peele's success. Not innocent. Innocent.

[A]

A very important distinction.

[B]

Sounds fair.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Horror has always been a way for filmmakers to explore the anxieties of their time. So what do these contemporary horror films have to say about what ails us? That's in a minute on Critics at Large from the New Yorker.

[B]

What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.

[D]

I want a shark that.

[B]

That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me.

[C]

Me.

[B]

One day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[C]

Okay, you guys, so we've been talking about horror and we have been going over the various assignments that Alex Barrett has given us so kindly and thinking about what each of them might mean for the genre right now. And I think now we want to talk a little bit more broadly. Open it up to see what horror is doing for us as a genre. But before we do that, I think it would be great to start with another voicemail from a listener named Aiden.

[D]

So I'm a pretty much lifelong horror fan. I think the things I like about it as a genre is the sort of Sense of meaning. It imposes on the world the idea that everything is sort of an omen, pretending some larger plan or tragedy or something like that. The other thing I like about it is the imagery. I feel like horror movies have some of the most, like, iconic and impactful imagery of any movies. Whether it's like the missile crashing through the ceiling of the apartment building in under the Shadow, or the derelict spaceship and Alien, I just feel like it sticks with you. The imagery is beautiful and really impactful.

[B]

Okay, Aiden. That's exactly what scares the shit out of me about horror movies.

[C]

That you can't get rid of the imagery once it gets stuck in your head.

[B]

Not the imagery. That point is really well taken. And I love Alien also. No, the everything having meaning and the idea that a symbol and there's meaning and something is happening. I wanted to believe it.

[C]

I'm a freaking man.

[A]

Yeah, it's so interesting you said that. Because everything meaning something is literally the worldview into which I was born and which I have always had and is.

[C]

Like, the reason you mean a religious worldview or.

[A]

I mean, downstream from religion is sort of an exegetical way of looking at life. And I think from that comes my interest in literature. And therefore, maybe horror is the thing that says or reminds you that, like, the symbol can be a bad one. It can be, as Aiden says in Omen. I remember walking with a friend past a corner, and there was, like, pickles around in some, like, a perfect semicircle and some, like, chicken feet. And my friend was like, oh, no, no, somebody did a root here. Somebody did some sort of, you know.

[C]

Like a ritual hoodoo.

[A]

Ritual practice, whatever, whatever. I need for us to cross the street. And I was like, oh, shit. I don't even know what it is that I believe, but now I believe it. And I would like to cross the street, too. That there were just, like, signs everywhere. Aiden just opened something up for me. If life were like literature, that is actually horror.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, it's fascinating also, because a world of signs. There are different genre implications. It could be horror. It could also be thriller. It could also be paranoia. You know, all those elements may be combined in something like horror. I think of our contemporary. We live in a world of conspiracy theory and conspiracy, but also conspiracy theory, where everything links up and there's a paranoid way of looking and thinking about reality. And so is it purging? I think what Aiden is suggesting or what I'm taking from what he said is that there can be something purging to go through the experience. To have all the signs come out, to have the worst happen, to just pass through it. And then, of course, the movie ends.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And you're left with life.

[A]

In all its unsymbolic chaos, you know?

[B]

Alex, can I ask you a question, please? You know, you were talking before about your own responses to horror.

[A]

Mm.

[B]

The more you see, do those responses change? Like, do you become immune? Do you build immunity? And therefore you're looking for greater thrills and terrors?

[D]

This is an interesting question. I don't think you build. Or at least I don't think I have built immunity. I think, as we've been talking about, there are things that don't faze me. I'm not as troubled by. Just go for the sake of go. And I think also an interesting thing about horror is that, again, we're working with these tropes all of the time, and people are iterating on them constantly and trying to do something different with them and using horror as a mode of expressing kind of innumerable ills and anxieties. And you never really run out of those things. I mean, I don't think I will ever be immune to what it can do and how it can work on you.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Do you think there are certain points in time in which we need horror more? And is now one of those times?

[D]

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, this goes to the point that Alex S. Was making about this being a moment of conspiracy and paranoia and uncertainty and fear for a lot of people. And I think it does, you know, for some audiences, not for all, have a kind of therapeutic function. I think we've seen a resurgence of social horror. You know, we talked a bit about Get Out. And I think the social horror that we've seen is indicative of needing to purge something and people being receptive to that. I also think, like, Internet horror is a whole other subgenre that we haven't even talked about. And that feels very like we have to figure out what's going on.

[C]

Yeah. Let's chat for a little bit, because when we were prepping for this episode, you told us that you started your horror journey online, and we were like, online? What's that?

[D]

Having never logged onto the Internet.

[C]

Right. No, but specifically horror online. Like, what shapes might that take? What was it for you and what is happening with that right now?

[D]

Yeah, I mean, that is a whole subculture unto itself. I was not on 4chan. I need to clarify. But, like, you know, but that is like the cesspool of the Internet. There's a whole tradition of. It's called creepypasta, which is kind of like Internet folklore. It's like. I mean, as you were saying, Alex, about the stories that you learned at sleepaway camp and then you're telling them to others. It's like that in virtual form, you know.

[A]

Oh, really?

[D]

It's these stories that are evolving over time. They're kind of communally shaped. There are found footage vlogs on YouTube that are sort of purporting to be documents of real life, but also with this supernatural twist.

[A]

It sounds very Blair Witch.

[D]

It is very Blair Witch.

[B]

So is it very Blair Witch?

[D]

It's very Blair Witch.

[B]

Another film that I was too afraid of to watch at the time and therefore have never seen.

[D]

It's a great film.

[A]

That was one of those. The early ones that really made me so scared that it made me averse to horror for a couple years after.

[D]

Yeah, it's a great film, I think. But yes, very scary.

[A]

Yes.

[D]

Partly because it was marketed as this really happened. Like, they didn't have the actors show up to the premiere. It was very. They're trying to blur the lines as much as possible. A lot of the dialogue is improvised. It feels like it could happen to four friends in the woods. And a lot of this stuff online is of a similar ilk. And then, you know, I think it's interesting that a lot of the filmmakers we're seeing now coming up began as YouTubers or began online. Like, I'm thinking of the Filippoo brothers, who were YouTubers and are now making horror movies. Their first movie, Talk to Me, was a huge sensation. And the kind of organizing principle of that is this viral challenge. You know, it's these teenagers at a house party. They have this cursed hand and you say, talk to me. To the hand, and then they get possessed.

[C]

Talk to me.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[D]

What the fuck?

[C]

What was that? I don't know, man. It's different every time.

[B]

You didn't do it right.

[D]

But they understand the kind of pollens of the Internet and what teenagers would do to impress each other or scare each other. And they're drawing on that.

[B]

Well, that's brilliant.

[D]

It is.

[B]

I'm scared. And I do remember that I saw the preview and it scared me because it's that blurring of the boundary between. It's exactly. It's the permeability, the current way.

[C]

Permeability, yes.

[D]

And I think what we were talking about earlier of horror being low budget, it's quick turnaround. It can be very responsive to the anxieties of the moment in a way that I don't think is true of many other genres. And it has incentive to say, okay, what is going on in the ID of society right now? What can we peel back and reveal and have a reaction to in that way?

[C]

So, guys, we've established that this is happening. That is the kind of transmutation of real actual worries, whether political, social, you know, what have you into supernatural stories.

[B]

Or just terrifying stories.

[C]

Or just terrifying stories.

[B]

You don't have to be a ghost to be a killer.

[D]

It's true.

[C]

It's true. What do you think is the value of that? Rather than just kind of like making up a realistic story about shit that's disturbing, that's happening in your life? Why the heightening? Or what is the value of the heightening?

[A]

It does seem to me to be that kind of warding away is the heightening is just kind of what's the most extreme thing that can happen? And really what it is is throwing yourself into a drama from a stable place, saying, between the extremity and my quotidian life, there is a real thing that could happen. And throwing myself into the sort of complex negotiation between self and situation. I was thinking about this while we were prepping for this episode. I was like, how did I try to scare myself when I was a kid without a movie? And what it was was like sometimes, you know, in my 10, 11, 12, early, when your mom starts to. I'm going to this thing, you're fine, here's the food. Da, da, da, da. You know, as it got later into the night when she was supposed to come home, or if it was like a few minutes after she came home, I would start to play out what I would do if she didn't. If somebody called me and told me, your mom's never coming home, something happened. I used to think about this all the time. I would ideate about what if the worst thing happened and how would I almost as a way to either ward off the situation or assure myself that I could actually function in the situation. That the. Constructing an extremity is a kind of test of the person. That even though I'm not embarked on that adventure yet, I gotta prepare. If there is a corollary to now, it's like, oh, the extreme is possible.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

How do I fit in? What does my feeble apparatus? How will it respond?

[C]

Will I rise to the occasion?

[A]

Can I do it?

[B]

Yeah. That's so interesting. Vincent and I relate to that a lot. As an imaginative kid who could let different scenarios spin out.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And of course, the difference is that you're not gathering them and structuring them into art. And so they grow bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think horror is such an interesting unstable genre because I think one thing you could say about it is something we've said and something one of our callers said. You know, okay, it allows you to organize these things, it allows you to process them, it allows you to go through the experience, and then the experience is capped and it ends. But also, when you read a book, when you see a movie, when something affects you, when you hear a song, they live on in you. They become part of your own experience. You do not shed them. You do not just, you know, excrete them. They stay with you. And I think that the power of horror is also that it's too tidy to say, oh, it lets us go through it and put it away in a little box. I think it is like living with something and living with a piece of real experience, the worst and the most extreme real experience, and just carrying it with you. And maybe that in itself is totemic and maybe it's just, you know, what we all have to go through because we're alive and this is the world and your eyes need to be open a bit to it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, that's the reason why I had to scare those kids with the hand.

[C]

You tell yourself that you gave them a gift. Yeah. You gave them a gift. And, you know, Alex B. It was a gift to have you here with us.

[D]

It was a gift to be here. Thank you.

[C]

Thank you so much for coming and teaching us about horror and that life.

[D]

Yes.

[C]

This has been critics at large. This week's episode was produced by Michelle o'. Brien. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and he was also our guest today. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Condonest's head of global audio is Chris Ben. Alexis Quadrado composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from James Yost with mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at [e-mail] critics. Next week on the show, it's the one and only Padma Lakshmi. We talk to Padma about taste and how she's shaped her own through food, fashion and culture. It was a great conversation live on stage at the New Yorker Festival, and we can't wait to share it with you.

[B]

It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at White House Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.

[D]

I know there's going to be a twist one day. A massive twist at every level of the criminal justice system. There's been a cover up in this case.

[B]

I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from in the Dark and the New Yorker. Find it now in the in the Dark podcast feed.

[C]

From prx.