One of the most common and ancient themes of horror is that of human transgression of the "natural" world. In Western Mythology this history of transgression begins with Prometheus's giving to humankind the ambiguous gift of fire, which introdu...

Forget whatever you think you know about anacondas, you're about to get schooled. Anaconda starts out with some very brief but essential facts about the Amazonian native, like that anacondas enjoy regurgitating their prey in cat-l...

Gremlins is a true Christmas classic. We had Marty's sister Andrea back for this very special Christmas addition of the Desire of Horror. Although there is much about the film that doesn't make sense, this nonsense makes it all th...

The concept is sharks under the ground, which is extra terrifying because you can't get away from them by staying out of the water at Amity Island Beach. And these "Graboids," as they are so aptly named, terrorize the small town of "Perfection ...

With so much about immigration in the news as of late, it is hard not to see Arachnophobia  as not somehow in dialog with the issue of middle America's obsession with being taken over by foreign invaders. Its release date was 1990...

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 des...

We're starting the new season off with the genre-defining classic of nature horror, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. This movie may be about the random, inexplicable, violent behavior of birds, but it is also about the random, inexpl...

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 ...

We are in heaven with this little slice of hell. Charla loves the "pure evil" of the criminally insane. And I love the interior design and clothing choices of the late 1970's. But why does Michael Myers do it? He doesn't ever seem to be satisfi...

We had the great pleasure of welcoming Charla's daughter Michelle on this one.  She brought a lot of great insights into this instant classic. Music is a hellava drug. In the last film Queen of the Damned it woke up the ...

This Vampire's origins go all the way back in the Ancient Mesopotamia City of Uruk. And Akasha (Aaliyah) like Lestat (Stuart Townsend) loves music. Lestat had decided the world was too boring to live in any longer, so he laid in a tomb to see i...

What is more real than real? Why it's the "Hyper-Real" of the cinema. Jean Baudrillard formulated his theory of the Hyper-Real, which is actually the death of "the Real" by simulacrum, in part from a quote from Clockwork Orange, in whi...

Are these f**king things vampires or infected? Around this time in the early aughts there was a slue of horror movies that straddled the line with science fiction because the monsters no longer had supernatural origins but virological ones.

In the small oil town of Barrow in the northern-most region of Alaska there are thirty days of night in the middle of winter. Sounds like a vampire's dream vacation. All the cellphones have mysteriously gone missing, all the dogs have been merc...

Both the 1931 Bela Lugosi version of Dracula and the 1970 Christoper Lee version claim to be sticking to Bram Stoker's original vision. When most of us think of Dracula, we either think of Lugosi or Lee, or their images switch back and forth in...

A late 70s miniseries has many features to recommend it. They are normally full of odd bowl haircuts, unnecessarily long establishing shots, and sweat, but this one also includes multiple commercial-break, freeze-frame cuts, long, meaningful st...

This was a difficult but rewarding episode to do. Some less brave, or possible less foolhardy, commentators might've stayed away from the Swedish, modern-day classic Let the Right One In and its American remake, Let Me In, 

One of Charla's top five of all time! We got to lighten up and have a little fun on this one. It's got the two Coreys, a town split between punks and deadbeat hippies, and lots of pastel shirts with shoulder pads! Come and reminisce the 80's wi...

One of my favorites of all time! Coppola's over the top extravagance at its best. Charla likes it okay. Join us as we discuss Coppola's lush depiction of vampiric desire.

Louis doesn't know how to be a vampire, so he goes to Paris to find out. What can we learn about the desire of the vampire from Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire? Anne Rice portrayed the difficulty of being a vampire as the all too ...

Nosferatu 1922 originally came into being because Bram Stoker wouldn't come off the rights to Dracula. Dracula's aristocratic suavity was transmuted into Count Orlok's impish vulgarity to avoid a lawsuit. But the desire of both were fo...