The Desire of Horror

Charla Ferguson and Martin Essig
  • 5.0 (11)
  • Film Reviews
  • Updated Biweekly

Charla's love of horror movies combine with Marty's love of psychoanalysis and history of religions. This is a review and analysis of horror movies and what they say about desire.   You can purchase a t-shirt here: http://tee.pub/lic/tN64T8XLATU

  1. 5d ago

    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

    1h 9m

  2. Jun 24

    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

    1h 50m

  3. Jun 10

    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

    1h 6m

  4. Jun 9

    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

    1h 10m

  5. May 27

    31. Out of Darkness

    https://youtu.be/9lQHXQcW7_M What is Otherness? Out of Darkness 2022 directed by Andrew Cumming fits into a number of horror categories, but we've decided to do it on our nature horror series. When we were kids back in the 80s, there were two bizarro movies about early hominids, Quest for Fire and the Clan of the Cave Bear. Both have proved to be quite incompatible with more recent paleo-anthropological findings. Many of those fallacies have been cleared up to great effect in Out of Darkness. The two most glaring of these mistakes were that Neanderthals weren't capable of the advanced symbolic behaviors of Homo Sapiens, and that there was no interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals because they were too genetically different to reproduce. Since that time, archeological evidence has shown that Neanderthals did participate in symbolic activities such as art, language, and religious practices, and genetic markers have proved that they did interbreed with Homo Sapiens. Out of Darkness is a story about human immigration and confrontation with the Other, and in true horror fashion, it asks who is the monster when otherness is encountered? As different as Neanderthals were, they were human. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

    1h 15m

  6. May 11

    30. Annihilation

    https://youtu.be/uhvYVd4_Z7I We get deep into the weird genetic refractions of Alex Garland's very loose take on Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Area X seems to be a place of infinite possibilities, except for the possibility of remaining untouched by the mysterious, churning flows of organic codes that produce mixed bodies of unknowable intention. What is the intention of this alien presence in what seems to be a swamp somewhere on the Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico? Maybe, it doesn't have one. Join us as we think about the human proclivity for self-destruction, the ambiguity of identity, and how the intentions of organic bodies arise from the non-intention of inorganic processes. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

    1h 16m

  7. Apr 28

    29. Outbreak and The Bay

    https://youtu.be/lzFx6_Rfhng In this special double feature addition of the Desire of Horror, Marty's sister Andrea joins the duo once again for a discussion of Outbreak (1995) directed by Wolfgang Peterson and The Bay (2012) directed by Barry Levinson. Char presents her wealth of horror movie references while Andrea brings her science background to this special episode. Andrea worked for a company that produced Covid test kits among other medical products during the height of the Covid pandemic. She reports that military escorts were sometimes necessary for transporting these materials as well as other extreme, security measures. As intense as the outbreaks in Outbreak and The Bay were, they were in some ways less intense than the Covid pandemic that they seemed to presage. Andrea gives a scientific analysis of these two movies that were retroactively considered harbingers of what was to come in 2020 from her background in contagious diseases. The main difference between fact and fiction seems to be the far greater fatality numbers of the Covid pandemic than fictional portrayals of pandemics had imagined.  Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

    1h 59m

  8. Apr 17

    Special Episode: Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix

    https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfso Char and I cross over from our normally audio-only Desire of Horror Podcast to produce this Youtube video. We discuss the book Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix. https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfso The book provides a somewhat obvious but nonetheless useful capitalist critique around the concepts of the Professional Managerial Class or corporate speak; Consumer Culture, especially influencer advertisement techniques; and the toxic positivity of constant "self-maximization." An Ikea-like furniture store is built on the past site of a particularly ignominious prison, and the spirit of its warden and his prisoners emerge from within the vast, deliberately disorientating halls of the "Orsk" furniture store to haunt its circulating corridors, which are already haunted by the gaze of capital and consumption. The former prison was one of Jeremy Bentham's infamous "Panopticons." A Panopticon was a prison designed to require minimal guards because the prisoners always had the sense that they were being watched by the guards who were placed in a watch tower in the middle of the prison complex, so that they were able to see the maximal number of cells from their vantage point. The Panopticon serves as a fruitful metaphor throughout the novel as the horror of the ineluctable, internalized gaze of the Lacanian "Big Other," which for horror fans is something like the incubus always speaking from inside of the possessed's head. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

    44 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
11 Ratings

About

Charla's love of horror movies combine with Marty's love of psychoanalysis and history of religions. This is a review and analysis of horror movies and what they say about desire.   You can purchase a t-shirt here: http://tee.pub/lic/tN64T8XLATU

Information

  • Creator
    Charla Ferguson and Martin Essig
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    35
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Desire of Horror
  • Show Website
    The Desire of Horror