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. 6h ago

    True Detective Season 1, Episode 2

    In as much as we are "thrown" into the circumstances of our existence, as Heidegger famously put it, we don't seem to have a lot of choice in the matter, or in the facticity of our determinate being. Yet, according to "Death of God" theologian Paul Tillich, it takes a certain amount of "courage to be." For Tillich this courage counts as freely chosen even though the rest of being has already been determined by the situation into which we have been thrown. Meaninglessness and death seem to follow more obviously from our unnatural awareness of the evil state of affairs in which conscious being finds itself. Rust Cole famously asserts along with Sophocles that, "It would have been better not to have been born." Nietzsche's famous counter argument is contained in his "Doctrine of the Eternal Return," which is read pessimistically in True Detective as the "Flat Circle." Nietzsche taught like Tillich that our freedom is found in the choice of whether or not to embrace the determinations of our given being or to passively fall into nihilism. For these thinkers being required an active, creative resist to meaningless, which is why "to-be" was an act of intense courage. Cole's "Antinatalism" holds that life is not good, and so the promise of the flat circle is the torture of an eternal return of what is essentially evil. https://youtu.be/XgU1RmNNsZg Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

  2. Jul 20

    Desiring Despair: The Desire of Horror: The Exorcist

    Caution: In this episode we discussion both the physical and sexual violence of the movie. The "Problem of Evil," which is the irresolvable contradiction between an all-loving, all-powerful God and the suffering of innocence, is what causes most of those who leave Christianity to leave it. Maybe a close second is the general disenchantment that came with the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment. William Peter Blatty took on both scientism and hopelessness in his novel and screen play of the Exorcist. Who is the Devil and why does he desire our despair? There are so many reasons to lose faith that it doesn't seem that there's much more for the Devil to do. If hope is the department of religion, then how do the religious keep it? Let's discuss. https://youtu.be/4hIlOr-AQHQ https://youtu.be/6GMS2AW3faQ Follow us @thedesireofhorrorpodcast: Instagram

  3. Jul 14

    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

  4. Jul 8

    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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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

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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
    38
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Desire of Horror
  • Show Website
    The Desire of Horror

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