The Faculty of Horror

Do you wish you could hear the sound of my voice? The ongoing ramblings of my horror addled mind? All in the convenience of your own personal listening device? Well, you're in luck! At the end of 2012 the lovely Andrea "Hellbat" Subissati and I founded The Faculty of Horror podcast. Our goal was to have an analytical and engaging dialogue about all our favourite horror topics. It's as though the coolest papers at a conference have come to life and are talking about horror movies.

Andrea's a good friend of mind and one of the things we initially bonded over was writing about horror films in our post-graduate work. Andrea's Masters thesis was published as the awesome book When There's No More Room in Hell: The Sociology of the Living Dead . While my work in the area dealt with the audience's willingness to believe in the manufactured truth of certain horror films (specifically Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project). The title for that paper was Scare Tactics: The Real and the Live in Contemporary Horror Cinema, which in turn became the inspiration for this blog.

Our first episode went live in January. It was a compare/contrast of Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974) and John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and the birth of the slasher genre. Our second episode is now available and just in time for Valentine's Day deals with Fatal Attraction (1987), Fear (1996), how both films deal with the construct of patriarchy and I reveal how Andrea and I are the real-life Mulder and Scully.

So give it a listen won't you? We're on the Modern Superior network, Podomatic, Facebook and iTunes. You can also reach either myself or Andrea at [email protected] if you have any comments concerns or complaints. We'll be uploading one podcast a month so keep watching the skies.