30. Annihilation

Nihilism? Satanism? or Something Else? True Detective Season 1: Episode One

In True detective Season 1, Episode 1, Nic Pizzolatto, introduces his main themes and the sources of those ideas. The "Cosmic Horror" of HP Lovecraft is central, especially a troupe that Lovecraft borrowed from Robert Chamber's "The King in Yellow (1895)," in which a play containing forbidden knowledge drives any who makes it past the second act mad. The content of this maddening, esoteric information is never reveled to the readers of Cosmic Horror as a rule, presumably because it would drive them mad too, or possibly because it can't be put into words, but only gestured at, as Lovecraft often did with his bizarre concoctions of incomprehensible but weirdly thrilling analogies and mixed up metaphors containing multiple, usually unrelated animal, insect, elemental, and eidetic regions and portions, similes which hid as much as they revealed. Episode 1 is titled "The Long Bright Dark," which is a reference to the radiant or "supersaturated" darkness at the heart of both the alchemical "nigredo" and the beatific vision of Christian esotericism, particularly as articulated by the father of Christian Mysticism, Pseudo-Dionysuis, whose dark vision of Plotinus's "One" formed the paradox of twice negated nothingness that the Christian Mystic Meister Eckhart taught about when he preached that God revealed Himself by hiding more deeply in his infinite depths. The great apocalypse of Cosmic Horror is nothing, as is that of Christian mysticism, but the devil is in the details. Let's follow Pizzolatto's theology to see if it winds up in the ultimate meaninglessness of the absolute nil or in the mystical nothingingness of the love the grounds being unconditionally. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

35. The Devil Rides Out

How much of the Occult is there in the classic 1968 "The Devil Rides Out?" The film was directed by Terence Fisher and the screenplay, based on the Dennis Wheatley novel of the same name was written by Richard Matheson. The film depicts a secret coven of multi-ethnic practitioners of the dark arts, and one curiously knowledgable English aristocrat, the Duke de Richeau played by Christopher Lee, who is trying to thwart them. Occult practices have a long history going back at least 11,500 years to ancient Mesopotamia in the West, but modern esotericism involves a heady combination of Greek Magical papyri, mystery cults, Egyptology, Sumerian cuneiform, Hermes Trismegistus, numerology, holy symmetry, alchemy, Angelology, Demonology, mysticism and much more. Let's take a look at the movie that set the template for some of the Occult classics that followed in the late 60's and 70's. https://youtu.be/PntMFVOh_9g Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

34. Nature Horror Wrap-Up

https://youtu.be/y_J-6TTdtzg Alright! It's the season 2 wrapt up! We covered nature horror this season. The main theme of nature horror is Human Being's alienation from the natural world. Human Beings are biologically a part of nature but distanced from it by the our specialized uses of language, especially the uses of language that allow for symbolic behavior and for the hypothetical speculations of the subjunctive, which allow us access to the virtual probability spaces of the imaginal. This season we covered, The Birds, Jaws, Arachnophobia, Tremors, Gremlins, Anaconda, Deep Blue Sea, Lake Placid, Cabin Fever, The Descent, The Happening, The Ruins, Frozen, Outbreak, The Bay, Annihilation, Out of Darkness, and Grizzly Man. Each of these movies has its unique take on our precarious relation to the natural world from which we come. Come join us as we consider each of these works. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

Special Episode: Backrooms (2026)

https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfso What about when we choose to remain sick? There is a scene in Backrooms in which the protagonist "Clark," played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, decides to stay in his disease because coming out of it would mean taking responsibility for things that he doesn't feel responsible for, and what's more, giving up on the enjoyment of blaming others. There is an ambiguity about who or what is responsible where mental illness is concerned. Is environment, genetics, or something else to blame? Regardless, the conundrum is that often with mental disorders, nothing can change unless the sufferer takes responsibility for what he is not responsible for. Clark's therapist Mary, played by Renate Reinsve, realizes too late that she has gone in to Clark's psychosis too far to rescue him, and that she has put herself into great danger. Her mistake was her misunderstanding that she was crossing the line with a truly sick person not entirely to rescue him, but more because she still had an unresolved desire to save her now-dead, mentally ill mother. Horror often deals with the psychological mazes that we trap ourself in. The terror is the built in ambiguity of these interior, dream-like spaces, which is the ambiguity of the monstrous other's connection to oneself. Good horror asks the question as to where the evil lays in such a way as to show how implicated in what we would prefer to see as the outside Other we are. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

32. Grizzly Man: Are We Responsible for Our Mental Illnesses?

https://youtu.be/cpZRMV7txJU Timothy Treadwell was mentally ill, and it led to his death and that of his girlfriend. He compensated for his sense of not being accepted in human society by projecting a persona of the protector of bears. He wasn't liked by the ladies but he believed that if they knew how good he was in the sack that they would have begged him for his company. And this sums up the lack of recognition that Treadwell projects onto the bears who would have loved nothing more than simply to be left alone to live theirs lives in the "simple enjoyment of being bears," as Herzog put it. How much should we hold someone responsible for his mental illness? There is something strange about asking someone to be responsible for something that he is not responsible for, but this seems to be the only way that anyone ever gets better from the determinate psychological conditions that often develop from a childhood that one did not chose. How responsible was Treadwell for the death of two bears, his girlfriend, and himself given the clearly psychotic state that directly lead to the tragedy depicted in Grizzly Man. And how much responsibility does a "documentarian" director like Herzog bear for said depiction, which was a depiction of a man's depiction of himself as a embattled hero, a sort of play acting that he was willing to die for? Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram