For a long time, or at least it seemed, horror films were considered to be beneath serious scrutiny. The problematic politics of such films were all too apparent in the violence brought to bear on women’s bodies in countless slasher films. The racial politics were not much better; the cliche of the black character dying first exists for a reason. Gradually this changed, though, first with such groundbreaking critical studies such  as Carol Glover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film and Robin Wood’s “An Introduction to the American Horror film.”

In the past few years, horror films themselves have changed as well. Most notably Jordan Peele has made three films dealing with our “social demons”: Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022). To talk with us about horror, the films of Jordan Peele,  and how horror can be used to develop our critical understanding of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, we have invited Johanna Isaacson author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror.

In this episode, we reference the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• BORGs (aka, “Blackout Rage Gallons,” the new drinking trend of Gen Z))
• Jordan Peterson‘s “creative” blurb policy
• Chuck Tingle
• North Carolina’s legislative decision to override six governor vetoes
• social reproduction theory
• The Stepford Wives (Film, 1975)
• Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004)
• Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, Chapter 26, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation” 
• Jason Read, “The Principle of Our Negative Solidarity” (The New Inquiry, 2014)
• “the call is coming from inside the house!” (from the 1979 film When A Stronger Calls)
• Karl Marx on the “hidden abode of production” (in Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 6)
•  On the “hidden-er abode of production,” check out Hotel Bar Sessions Season 6, Episode 84 “Abolition of the Family (with Sophie Lewis)”
• Johanna Isaacson, Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror
• The Babadook (Film, 2014)
• Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, Ed. Barry Keith Grant and Richard Lippe (2018)
• “prestige horror”
• origins of the word “monster”
• Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919)
• Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” from Monster Theory, Reading Culture (1996)
•  Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017)
• On the Toby Hooper/Steven Spielberg argument about how to tell the story of the “trees” in Poltergeist (Film, 1982)
• On Rick and Leigh’s scaredy-cat aversion to horror, see our Hotel Bar Sessions Season 5, Episode 69: “Fear”
• horror tropes
• W.E.B. Du Bois on “double consciousness”
• Pearl (Film, 2022)
• Smile (Film, 2022)
• Maria Vishmidt, “Reproductive Realism: Toward a Critical Aesthetics of Gendered Labor” (2018)
• “Lovecraft Country” (HBO series, 2020)
• “Key & Peele” (Comedy Central series, 2012-15)
• Jordan Peele’s film Us (2019)
• Johanna Isaacson, “Beach Blanket Barbarism” (Commune Magazine, 2019)
• The Lost Boys (Film, 1987)
• Killer Clowns from Outer Space (Film, 1988)
• (Bertold) Brechtian “gestus“
• Mark Steven, “Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution” (2022)
• Jordan Peele’s film Nope (2022)
• Jason Read, “Nope’s Social Demons” (Blog of the APA, 2023)
• United Negro College Fund’s commercial “A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste” (1977)
• “Hands Across America” commercial (1986)
• The first film ever, by Eadweard Muybridge, “Race Horse” (1878)
• Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967)
• Also check out Johanna Isaacson’s book The Ballerina and the Bull: Anarchist Utopias in the Age of Finance (2016)

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