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. 1D AGO

    31. Out of Darkness

    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

  2. MAY 13

    30. Annihilation

    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 30m

  3. APR 28

    29. Outbreak and The Bay

    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

  4. APR 17

    Special Episode: Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix

    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

  5. APR 15

    27. Frozen

    Three, vanilla, college kids get stuck in a ski lift chair high above some undisclosed, New England slopes, as a winter storm rolls in. While they're up there, they argue about stuff like their bizarre love triangle dynamic, which doesn't really help make being stuck in a ski lift chair for a long-ass time any more interesting since it's some typical teenager, third-wheel, after-school-special BS. The severe compound fracture that one of them gets trying to jump off the chair lift is gnarly but not that interesting either..., until that dude gets eaten by small "wolves" that are probably just regular dogs, which were, perhaps, a responsible fiscal decision given the movie's modest budget. This logistical practicality is a little bit interesting, but only a little, perhaps, because the affordable "wolves" were midsized dogs and kind of cute.  Being mauled by standard-issue dogs that were painted to look like vicious wolves and shot with some sort of shadowy strobe effect from low angles to make them seem darker and bigger than average-sized, domesticated, well-lit dogs might be interesting, but the camera doesn't show it because we are told not to look at the mauling by the two remaining, vanilla, college kids stuck in a ski lift chair..., presumably because it would be too traumatic to see their best friend eaten alive by the one or two, well-trained but otherwise mediocre dogs that were actually on the set but shot to seem as if they were a wild and multitudinous pack of gigantic, drooling beasts. After the artfully obscured but budgetary, except for whatever was spent on the pricey-sounding, crunchy bone audio used throughout the movie, mauling that we are left to imagine from the two teenagers closed eyes and some random, half-eaten, special-effects department, body parts strewn around in the snow, there's some uninteresting but tense conversation around who was responsible for that dude jumping out of the chair and promptly getting mauled. Later there's some more uninteresting but tense dialog around not touching their frostbitten faces because their noses will fall off if they're not careful. Join us to find out if they're able to resist touching their frost-bitten faces and how the movies manages to add up to something sort of enjoyable to watch even though its not composed of many promising elements.  Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

    57 min

  6. MAR 31

    26. The Ruins

    Privileged, White folk on vacation at a Central American resort may be a sort of cliche at this point, but The Ruins' version of this well-worn scenario takes some pretty fun, and perhaps, critical, twists, which seem to challenge the conventional take on this tale as old as the Club Med boom of the 70s and 80s. Tourist dollars have become a necessary evil for many a resort economy in the so called "Third-World," mostly located in the topical regions of the "Global South." The Ruins appears to be located somewhere in the Yucatan because there are Mayan ruins somewhat near by. North Americans feel lured to these "exotic" locations by the relatively cheap, all-inclusive, vacation packages, which are unequally beneficial to the local population depending on how one considers the influx of tourist dollars and the mostly menial job creation that is offered in return. Usually these packages include a few prefabricated excursions into the "strange" lands and ways of the native peoples. This culture-for-sale bargain only really works as long as the tourists remain within the confines of the protected resort even when they are outside of it viewing the local sites. Come find out what happens when a group of vacationers, mostly from around where I grew up on the "Northshore" of Chicago, lets their lust for "authentic" Mayan ruins, ruins well off the beaten path of the resort sanctioned forays, get the better of them. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

    49 min

  7. MAR 17

    25. The Happening

    "The Happening" kind of sounds like there's about to be a groovy 1970's party. Maybe, that's intentional because what happens is like the total opposite of a groovy 1970's party, and M. Night Shyamalan loves the old switcheroo. Elliot Moore, played by Mark Wahlberg, doesn't solve problems like the Happening often, but when he does, he uses science. Perhaps, that's because he's a high school science teacher who loves his job, unlike any of my high school science teachers, and he wants the next generation to embrace the scientific lifestyle like he has, not like these science-skeptics that we've got nowadays. His best friend Julian, played by John Leguizamo, loves math. He calms himself and other people down by solving math riddles, but as it turns out, math riddles aren't much help against a mysterious plant-based neurotoxin that has the very unscientific property of being able to convince its targets to instantly, but artfully murder themselves. Julian and Elliot try their best to use reason to figure out the patterns of the happening with sophisticated probabilities, which makes for some very unentertaining, shouting-meaningless-statistics-back-and-forth scenes, but to no avail. As it happens, to survive the Happening, just like a groovy 1970's party, all you need is love; albeit, a very lack-luster, and unconvincing love between Julien and Alma Moore, played by Zooey Deschanel, but Deschanel was all the rage back in the mid-oughts, maybe you'll find remember about that enjoyable, and maybe you'll even fall back in love with her cutesy, quirky, spacey ways. I, unfortunately, did not. Come join us for yet another journey into the endless battle between humanity and plant-based neurotoxins that give you novel, theatrical ideas for self-annihilation. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

    56 min

  8. MAR 3

    24. The Descent

    We're going down, way down into the underground with an all female cast of characters who desire nothing so much as to be put to the test of extreme situations. Yes, these adventurous ladies love their adrenaline, and oh, boy, are they going to get it. There are things in these uncharted caves that you wouldn't believe, unless you used to read The Sun and are familiar with its long running, hard-hitting "Batboy" series. Join us on yet another Appalachian adventure into weirdness. This time we don't run into any of the previous Appalachian troupes, like the questionable jokes of some of the other movies about extreme poverty and a general lack of education, but we really dive into the ultimate Appalachian stereotype of an isolated, inbred, and hostile native population. How will our intrepid Scottish adventures, trapped while spelunking in North Carolina, match up to these feral, humanoid creatures? How will they match up to each other and their own internal rivalries? Listen and find out. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

    1h 9m
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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
    31
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Desire of Horror
  • Show Website
    The Desire of Horror

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