The Desire of Horror
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.
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The Desire of Horror
Special Episode: Backrooms (2026)
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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.
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