The Desire of Horror

Charla Ferguson and Martin Essig

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. 12/01/2025

    16. Jaws

    The desire of the unknowable other takes on new depths in the impenetrable, black eyes of a shark. Matt Hooper, the marine biologist played by Richard Dreyfuss, waxes poetic about the almost eternal perfection of the shark's form, which was designed by evolution for the singular purpose of hunting. But there is a sort of ambiguous place for the shark at the top of the of sea's food chain since the more recent arrival of an even more effective and vicious apex predatory in the form of the human intention. A shark's blank eyes may give no indication of its intentions, but at least they can be inferred from their actions. The human intention is belied by their eyes' deceptive transparency. Even when the human speaks its desire, it remains hidden. Human intention is unknowable both in relation to each other and to themselves. Hidden behind the thin veneer of the Freudian Unconscious, human intention lies in internal contradiction to itself.  Quint, played by Robert Shaw, is insane with his desire to confront the shark. Like Ahab's desire for the White Whale, it is a hidden intention that emerges as a reckless madness that puts the other crew in danger. But the specific contours of his obsession begin to emerge one evening out at sea when Quint recalls in nightmarish details his experience of being torpedoed while aboard the USS Indianapolis after delivering the Atomic Bombs during World War II. The sharks that attacked and killed most of the crew seem to represent the mystery at the heart of the blank violence of the war and especially of those incomprehensible blasts delivered to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider, also must face his own demons presented as a phobia of water but which seem to express his feelings of impotence about the incomprehensible crime of 1970's New York City, which he left to live a simpler, more intentional, island life in the vacation town of Amity. But as Freud taught, whatever is repressed returns with a vengeance until it is faced head on. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

    53 min
  2. 11/04/2025

    14. Vampires Wrap-up

    Here we go with the vampire wrap up! It's been a bloody first season at the Desire of Horror podcast, and that's how we like it! Blood has always had a central place in the History of Religions. Almost every form of sacrifice, pact, and praise has involved either literal or figurative blood as the primary representative of the mysterious life force that courses through our veins but somehow doesn't seem to belong to us. Its mysterious doings are beyond us because blood, like life, is something that is given without our asking for it, and its many necessary life operations are performed mostly in the darkness outside of our conscious awareness. And when it flows are lost, often by similarly unmanageable circumstances, life is irrevocably lost as well. The vampire's dependence on blood for its strange form of life, if what is undead is in any sense "living," renders the vampire a total dependent on it, which often puts it in situations in which it must face its own impotents. Whatever sinister pact had to be entered into to obtain eternity, the vampire inevitably ends up on the losing end because the conditions for the continuation of un-death are an endless yearning for whatever it is that is in the blood that can't be gotten from it by the ritual transfusion of blood that vampires must perform to feed. They may get to be apex predators wielding uncanny power, but this strength is tempered by the misery of its many limits, not the least of which are extreme loneliness and ennui. Join us as we discuss how these advantages and their limitations are played out in each of the films that we viewed this season. Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

    45 min

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