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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Episodes
35 episodes
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 secre...
34. Nature Horror Wrap-Up
https://youtu.be/y_J-6TTdtzgAlright! 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...
Special Episode: Backrooms (2026)
https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfsoWhat 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 r...
32. Grizzly Man: Are We Responsible for Our Mental Illnesses?
https://youtu.be/cpZRMV7txJUTimothy 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...
31. Out of Darkness
https://youtu.be/9lQHXQcW7_MWhat 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...
30. Annihilation
https://youtu.be/uhvYVd4_Z7IWe 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...
29. Outbreak and The Bay
https://youtu.be/lzFx6_RfhngIn 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 ...
Special Episode: Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix
https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfsoChar 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....
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 reall...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
23. Cabin Fever
Welcome to a cast of reprehensible characters who aren't even lovable enough to hate. These guys not only have no moral compass but they've caught some highly contagious disease in the Appalachian region of North Carolina that causes their outw...
22. Lake Placid
Well, let me tell you, this lake is anything but placid, especially since (spoiler alert) Mrs. Delores Bickerman (Betty White) keeps her big-ass crocodiles in there. And some poor man studying beavers with Brendan Gleeson gets his bottom half e...
21. Deep Blue Sea
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...
20. Anaconda
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...
19. Gremlins
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...
18. Tremors
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 ...
17. Arachnophobia
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...
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 des...
15. The Birds
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...
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 ...
13. Halloween (1978)
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...
12. Sinners
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 ...
11. Queen of the Damned
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...