One Spooked Professor Nathan

In today’s short episode, we dive into horror works themed around holidays. These range from the so-bad-they’re-good flicks like ThanksKilling and Jack Frost to the straight up terrifying Halloween. Surprisingly enough, there are some similarities between the morality tales of horror and the traditional holiday yarn, and modern-day marketing has turned holiday movies, including horror ones, into a thriving business.

In this episode, we take a dive into one of the more mocked and maligned tropes in the horror genre: the black dude dies first. Turns out, this has not often been the case, and the truth is more complicated than you'd expect. White girls tend to outlive everyone, but black men tend to have a better shot of surviving the beginning a movie than common jokes would have you believe.

Folklore is a universal throughout human cultures, and it didn't just die off in the modern age. Indeed, urban legends are an example of just that. Once people began to surge into the digital frontier, modern folklore began to morph into something else. The Creepypasta is the route the scary fable and creepy tale ended up taking. In this lecture, we'll treat the formation of what is today the Creepypasta as a new genre and form of cyber-driven literary movement.

Enjoy a corny, cringe-inducing look at how apocalyptic logs function in storytelling, particularly within the horror genre framed as a fake apocalyptic log.

This episode covers the origins, details, and legacy of the Gothic horror movement, which remains probably the most influential literary movement that shaped the modern horror genre.

There exists in virtually all cultures and storytelling traditions a notion of monsters. They serve many different roles and have taken myriad forms over the generations. In this episode, we look at what those roles and forms are and what they can tell us about the nature of monsters and exactly where they come from.