Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Rotten rails, Pre sakes, drag your fish to the screen.
Welcome to the graveyard where the film screams back your name every cut.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the
[00:00:33] Speaker C: final girl on 6th Avenue podcast. My name is Carolyn Smith Helmer, and I am 6th Avenue's very own Final Girl.
And today I want to talk to you a little bit about cosmic horror.
This is something that I'm not, like, I wouldn't say I'm not passionate about it, because I think there definitely are some pretty magical cosmic horror stories and tellings and films. But, like, it's not something that I typically reach for, but it is one of the more truly terrifying sub genres.
So, yeah, I thought it would be fun. Like, we might talk a little bit about Lovecraft, we might talk a little bit about outer space.
You know, all things as it relates to the cosms, the cosmos, the philosophy of those, and obviously some research.
So let's try a thought experiment for just a second.
Imagine that the planet that you're standing on is completely indifferent to your existence.
It's not hostile. There's no monsters.
A hostile planet would almost be a comfort, because at least that means that you are registered as, like, a target, but I mean, like, truly indifferent. A universe that was never built around your capacity to understand it. And it will go on existing in more or less the. The exact same way, regardless of whether human beings are there to interpret it or not.
So that thought is genuinely disturbing, and it's the entire foundation of the book that we're going to be spending the majority of our hour with.
And this is philosopher Eugene Thacker's in the Dust of this Planet, which was published in 2011, and it is the first volume in his Loose trilogy, sometimes referred to as the Horror of Philosophy.
And this is like, a denser one than some of our past theories. So you'll have to bear with me, because we're going to build the framework for this very carefully, and then we're going to spend the back half of the episode sort of running through a set of films that dramatize exactly this kind of horror.
So, again, cosmic horror, horror of scale.
Horror of a universe that was never asked to be understood by us in the first place.
Yeah.
So I think a good place to start is, who is Eugene Thacker? And what is cosmic pessimism?
Eugene Thacker is a philosopher, not primarily a film scholar or a literary criticism, but his academic training is in the philosophy of biotechnology and networks. Before he pivots with this trilogy into what he calls the horror of philosophy. And that phrase is doing very careful and very deliberate double work.
Because he doesn't just mean philosophy applied to horror as a genre, which is something we've kind of talked about before. And he's actually talking about something closer to horror as a mode of thinking might be philosophy's most honest genre.
And the one place culture actually lets us sit with ideas that pure academic philosophy tends to flinch away from or to sort of explain, you know, into comfort, which, as you know about me, I love the discomfort of things not being explained.
So his starting point is a problem that he traces through the history of philosophy, but that he thinks becomes acute specifically in our current moment, which is the moment of, you know, sort of this catastrophe, if you will, a scale of a sort of planetary crisis and a world that increasingly seems to be on acting on a time scale at a magnitude that, you know, cognitive and human political systems simply weren't built to process. Right. Like his core claim is that philosophy has always been sort of quite quietly been assuming a world for us, as in the world as it's given to human thought and human meaning and human categories, which is obviously very philosophical. If you have ever studied philosophy, this is something that you're pretty familiar with.
But there's also, he argues, a world in itself, which is an older term, right?
The world as it exists, independent of how we perceive or conceptualize it, which is from Kant, and Kant himself argued we could never actually access this directly.
And then Thacker adds a third term, and this is really the engine of the whole book.
There's the world without us.
So we have the world for us, world in itself and the world without us.
So this is not the world as we experience it, and not the pure abstract world in itself of classical philosophy, but the world specifically imagined as if human beings had maybe never existed to think about it at all, and maybe had been subtracted from it entirely.
So the planet continuing without a quote, unquote, we left standing to have a world in the first place.
And that distinction of, you know, world, Earth, planet, in his specific terminology, is worth six sitting with for a second because it's pretty elegant.
World is the world of human meaning and interpretation, okay?
Whereas Earth is closer to the world in itself and the physical substrate underneath our interpretations, which is still somewhat oriented around the idea of a habitable, like, human relevant globe, but planet. And this is, you know, Thacker's sharpest move, is the world imagined at a scale and from a perspective that simply doesn't care that we're here. It's a rock right in Space that's floating and it was here before us, it's going to be here long after us. And it's entirely unbothered by this, you know, sort of several thousand year blip of human meaning making that happened on its surface.
It's sort of its own body, right? Think about the Earth as its own independent body. It's acting sort of without us already.
So it's not like a, it's not a, a new concept necessarily, but it is one that shapes these arguments.
And he argues that a, you know, a climate catastrophe would genuinely be one of the few cultural experiences that we would have of sort of observing the planet directly.
It's a system operating at a scale and with a logic that exceeds and doesn't particularly care about the human world that's sort of layered on top of it.
And here's why.
This is horror specifically, rather than just bleak environmental philosophy.
Thacker argues that the emotional and cognitive experience of genuinely trying to think the world without us, so not just intellectually acknowledge it as a concept, but to actually try to picture that and sort of like hold it in your mind, produces something close to horror fiction, you know, or what horror fiction has always been trying to describe. It's this sort of a vertigo, a non human orientation, right, that human thought fundamentally isn't built to hold on to for very long because it's uncomfortable and it's easier to sort of allow the thought of a more human centered meaning.
But that flinching and that brief vertigo moment before the flinch is what he calls cosmic pessimism. It's not sadness and it's not exactly nihilism, right? It's not exactly that everything is pointless and that we're all going to die anyway. It's something closer to a kind of philosophical humility that when it's pushed, it's its most extreme, uncomfortable edge.
So with that in mind, let's talk about Lovecraft, Ligotti and the difference between cosmicism and pessimism.
And now if any of this is sounding familiar to you, it's because Thacker is writing in a very direct conversation with HP Lovecraft and specifically with Lovecraft's own term for his philosophy, right, which is cosmicism, the idea expressed across Lovecraft's fiction and his letters that human beings are literally insignificant specks in an uncaring and incomprehensible universe. And that direct sort of contact with the true scale and nature of that universe is so far beyond human cognitive capacity to process that it would simply break the mind that tried to do so.
Lovecraft's monsters, right? We have Cthulhu, of course. The Old Ones, the various cosmic entities that are scattered through his stories, are almost never really the point. The point is what encountering them, or even partially comprehending their scale does to the human mind that encounters them.
And madness in Lovecraft is not a punishment.
It's sort of closer to a natural consequence of a finite system trying to process an input that it was never built to hold.
And I think that's why a lot of people read Lovecraft and kind of think, and I'm guilty of it, too.
It's almost like it's so bizarre and it's so out there and it's so unimaginable that it almost comes across to me as, like, absurd. And I can't even begin to think of,
[00:12:50] Speaker B: like.
[00:12:50] Speaker C: I can't even picture it in my head.
And that makes it extremely terrifying because it's not even trying to, like, explain it into comfort. It's like you can't even get to the part where you explain it yet.
But Thacker takes Lovecraft's fiction extremely seriously, as philosophy, not as a curiosity or as, like a footnote, but as one of the most sustained literary attempts to. To actually think the world without us from the inside. And he draws a really useful, sharp distinction in the book between Lovecraft's cosmicism and what he's calling cosmic pessimism, which he associates more with the horror writer Thomas Ligotti, particularly Ligati's nonfiction philosophical book called the Conspiracy against the Human Race, which was published in 2010.
And he argues, more or less, that consciousness itself was an evolutionary error and that sentience is a trap that forces a being to be aware of its own suffering and its own mortality in a universe that offers no compensation for that awareness.
And the distinction that Thacker draws is roughly this.
Lovecraft's cosmicism is still, in a strange way, oriented around encounter, a human mind meeting something vast and incomprehensible.
And that meeting is the drama. It's the dramatic, narratable event. There's still a we in the story, even if that we gets destroyed by what it encounters.
And Ligotti's pessimism and Thacker's cosmic pessimism more broadly, push just one step further, and it's less interested in this sort of dramatic encounter and more interested in the flat, ongoing, undramatic fact of existing as a conscious being inside an indifferent system, whether or not anything ever appears to confront you with it.
It's less a monster movie and more of a mood More of a baseline philosophical orientation. You could in theory hold all the time whether or not a sort of tentacled God ever shows up.
And this matters for us as film people because it maps onto two genuinely different flavors of cosmic horror on the screen.
I keep, I think keeping them distinct is going to help our, our case studies land better in the latter portion of the episode. And there's Lovecraftian cosmic horror, which is like a film built around a dramatic encounter with something vast and ancient and incomprehensible and usually ending in like, madness or death or transformation.
And then there's something closer to ambient cosmic pessimism, which you know, is a film that doesn't need a specific monster at all.
It instead builds its horror out of scale and indifference and the slow erosion of human, human meaning making as an adequate framework for what is actually happening.
Both are cosmic horror in a loose sense.
They're doing pretty different formal work.
And then there's the problem of demonology and why Thacker talks so much about mysticism.
One thing that surprises people who pick up in the dust of this planet expecting a straightforward sort of film theory adjacent horror book is how much of it's actually spent on medieval and early modern demonology, mysticism and occult philosophy.
Thacker spends real time with figures like the medieval mystics and occult grimoires and demonological treatises, not as historical sort of curiosities, but as some of the only intellectual traditions that ever seriously tried to build a working vocabulary for exactly the kind of non human world without us thinking that he's interested in.
His argument is that historically, when Western philosophy needed language for something that exceeds human categories entirely.
Right? So this would be something that's genuinely outside of the world for us.
It very often reached for demonological or mystical vocabulary because rational, secular philosophical language, built as it is around human comprehension as the baseline, structurally struggles to name something defined precisely by its refusal to be comprehended.
So the demon, the, you know, the entity, the unnamable, those aren't just spooky decorations in older texts. They're doing genuine conceptual labor, gesturing at a category of thing that resists the normal philosophical toolkit.
It's not all that different from, you know, gosh, of Greek and Roman and Norse mythology, right? Like it's not all that different. It's not, it's not all too different from saying that like, oh, like the sun God is angry at us because it's been raining, right? You're just using things that you're not able to comprehend. And of course, at the Time they didn't have, you know, like the science to. To.
And the knowledge and the math to comprehend those things that, you know, came much later. But, like, you attribute. And these societies would attribute the things that they couldn't explain, you know, outright or immediately, to be this, like some sort of unnamable event or this, like, demonic entity that couldn't be tamed or conquered.
And this is why, if you go looking right, Thacker's book has a real sustained interest in black metal music and occult aesthetics, not really as edgy signifiers, but because he sees extreme music and occult symbolism as one of contemporary cultures live sort of ongoing attempts to build effective and symbolic language for cosmic pessimism in more or less the same way medieval demonology was doing that conceptual work centuries earlier.
It's a genuinely unusual move for an academic philosophy book.
And it's part of why in the Dust of this Planet found such an unexpectedly wide audience outside of philosophy departments. You know, horror fans, metal fans, genre film critics found a text that took their aesthetic interests sort of dead seriously as a philosophy rather than a topic that philosophy needed to explain away or look down on. Like, you know, much of philosophy is intended to do to explain something away.
So why did this book get so big? Right. We talked about how it cast sort of a wide array and was not a traditional philosophical book. But there is this one key item, and it includes a moment in the show True Detective.
I don't know if you've ever seen the show True Detective.
I like it.
I think that the first season is the best one.
Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey doesn't really get much better than that, but I thought I should mention it because it's genuinely a fun bit of pop culture trivia.
And it's also relevant to how this book entered wider cultural conversation.
In the Dust of this Planet had an unusual sudden spike in mainstream visibility in, you know, early 2014, when the black and gold cover of the book turned up prominently in a scene of HBO's True Detective season one.
Rust Cole's philosophical monologues, that is Matthew McConaughey's character, he has these monologues throughout the season about pessimism, about human consciousness as a tragic misstep in evolution and the programmed nature of human meaning making are extremely clearly drawing on the same intellectual lineage that Thacker is working in.
Legati, cosmic pessimism, antinatalist philosophy.
The show never directly adapts Thacker, but the resonance was strong enough and the COVID cameo direct enough that it drove A real surge of general readership toward the book, which is a fairly rare thing to happen to a dense academic philosophy text.
I think I mention this mostly because it's a useful bridge into why this material keeps showing up in prestige genre television and film specifically.
There's clearly a real cultural appetite in the last decade or so for fiction willing to sit with cosmic pessimism rather than resolving it into comfort. And Thacker's work has become one of the most cited philosophical touchstones for critics trying to name what that fiction is actually doing.
Okay, so how do these concepts get applied?
Fair question.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: Let's talk about some case studies.
Let's talk about in the Mouth of Madness, that was directed by John carpenter, released in 1994.
[00:24:51] Speaker C: I want to start here because it's maybe the most direct and self aware Lovecraft pastiche on the list. And it dramatizes the world for us. Collapsing idea almost literally.
Sam Nell plays an insurance investigator sent
[00:25:12] Speaker B: to track down a missing horror novelist whose books, it turns out, are literally reshaping reality for anyone who reads them.
And the film's final descent isn't really about a monster chasing anyone.
It's about the protagonist's entire framework for distinguishing fiction from reality, distinguishing sane from insane and self from world dissolving in real time.
And Carpenter stages this with an escalating formal unreliability.
[00:25:55] Speaker C: Is what we're watching a flashback? Is it a delusion?
Are these actual events? Is this part of a novel that's being read aloud? The film sort of refuses to stabilize that question.
[00:26:09] Speaker B: And that refusal to stabilize is the horror.
This is Thacker's world without us, dramatized as a kind of epistemological collapse.
The human world, the meaning making frame, it simply stops holding.
What about Annihilation? Right. Annihilation is a 2018 film directed by Alex Garland.
Alex Garland, I think, is a mastermind of directing. Also the director of Ex Machina, which we have previously covered on the channel, and Men, which we've also previously covered on the channel.
Garland's adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's novel gives us a genuinely rigorous contemporary example of world without Us horror.
It's about a biologist who joins an expedition into the Shimmer, which is this, like, mysterious zone where an alien presence is refracting and re combing biological matter according to a logic that the film pointedly never explains or translates or even tries to moralize.
This alien entity at the film's climactic center doesn't attack the protagonist so much as mirror her, sort of like in Arrival with Amy Adams.
It's copying her movements in an eerie, silent dance sequence that has no dialogue and no traditional threat structure at all.
It's one of the deepest depictions I can think of of a genuinely non human intelligence encountered on its own terms, refusing to be legible as hostile or benevolent, because those are human categories, right? And human categories don't apply.
The film's tagline could honestly be Thacker's thesis statement. Something can be present, active and utterly transformative without ever being comprehensible within a human world frame.
The 2019 film Color out of Space, directed by Richard Stanley, is another direct Lovecraft adaptation from the 1927 short story following a family whose farm is contaminated by a meteorite that brings with it a color that doesn't exist in the normal visible spectrum, and it slowly warps and merges the family's bodies and minds and the land into something the film's own visual grammar can't stably represent.
Stanley leads hard into practical and garish and almost hallucinatory images and imagery, specifically because Lovecraft's original story insists the color itself is fundamentally undescribable in human terms.
So the film's aesthetic excess is a direct attempt to, like, gesture at something the story explicitly says language and vision can't actually capture.
So think sort of Mary in the black and white room. Mary doesn't have the capacity to explain things that she's never seen before.
If you've seen the most recent backrooms movie, you could also say it's like asking someone to draw and describe a dog when they've never seen or interacted with a dog before.
And that's a really interesting formal problem because how do you film, in this instance, the unfilmable, right, the literally outside human perception of a color without just picking an arbitrary color and calling it a day?
Because I feel like that's what I would do. But the film's answer is overload and mutation and a steadily dissolving sense of bodily and familial coherence.
[00:30:59] Speaker C: It's a pretty faithful cinematic translation of cosmic incomprehensibility.
What about Paul?
[00:31:11] Speaker B: Paul W.S. anderson's Event Horizon. Right. The 1997 film? It's a messier, more mainstream entry, but worth including because its central conceit is almost a literal illustration of Thacker's terminology.
There's a rescue crew that boards a derelict starship that briefly traveled through a dimension the film's character can only describe in horrified fragments of just pure chaos, pure evil, and importantly, the ship's crew
[00:31:46] Speaker C: who made that Trip didn't encounter a monster so much as encountered the world without us, directly, unmediated. And it destroyed them from the inside.
They all turned against each other and against their own bodies.
The film is genre pulp. It's not high philosophy, but its core image, which is a threshold beyond which
[00:32:12] Speaker B: human categories of sanity, morality and bodily integrity stop applying.
That's doing very, very Thackerian work.
Even if the film dresses it up in more conventional slasher in space
[00:32:34] Speaker C: trappings by its back half.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: It's not as absurd as, you know, Jason in Outer Space, but it's.
I don't think anything is more absurd than that.
So. So those are some case studies and films regarding the Lovecraftian encounter.
But what about ambient cosmic pessimism? So let's shift to the other flavor we talked about earlier. These are films that are, like, less interested in a dramatic monster encounter and are more interested in scale and indifference as an ongoing mood and erosion as a mood rather than a single event.
So the Void 2016 film directed by Jeremy Gillespie and Stephen Kostanski.
This one splits the difference nicely. So it's a sort of good bridge.
A siege horror film.
Hooded cultists surrounding a rural hospital escalates into full Lovecraftian body horror imagery by its final act.
All practical effects, which I love, deliberately evoking the aesthetic of 80s creature horror. But underneath the practical effects spectacle, the
[00:34:07] Speaker C: film's actual emotional core is about grief,
[00:34:12] Speaker B: suicide, about characters who have each in different ways already been touched by loss, that it feels so total that it's left them wondering if anything they do matters at all.
So the sort of nihilism and the cults promise that there is a vast indifferent power on the other side that can grant a kind of transcendence. Past human suffering plays a genuinely dark mirror of Thackeray's cosmic pessimism.
Right. What if the indifferent universe isn't something to survive, but something certain grieving, exhausted people might actively want to dissolve into?
We're not going to talk about the relevance that that line of dialogue or discussion may or may not have with the Christian Bible.
Moving on.
Melancholia.
I Love Melancholia 2011 film directed by Lars von Trier.
Lars wrote this film in a, you know, sort of state of depression himself and was actually hospitalized for his depression. And this film is one of the works that came out of such.
Such dark emotional time for him. And Melancholia is not a horror film by genre classification.
[00:35:48] Speaker C: Right.
[00:35:49] Speaker B: But I'd argue it's one of the most rigorous cosmic pessimism films ever made.
And it came out the same year as Thacker's book, which is a fun coincidence.
And Kristen Dunst plays a woman you know in the grip of a severe depression, while there's simultaneously a rogue planet called Melancholia that's approaching the earth on a collision course.
And Von Trier's radical formal choice is to align the depressive character's emotional flatness and eerie calm.
Cuz she's the the most calm person in the whole movie.
I don't think she makes one facial expression the whole time.
This choice is to align her character with the actual literal planetary scale apocalypse that is arriving, while the more conventionally sort of mentally stable characters like Charlotte Gainsbourg around her are spiraling into panic.
And the film's final act stages something close to Thacker's world without us made completely literal and unavoidable.
It's not a metaphorical end of meaning, but the actual physical end of the planet.
Filmed with a strange, hushed, almost ceremonial calm, rather than, you know, the sort of like normal expected Independence Day type,
[00:37:27] Speaker C: you know,
[00:37:31] Speaker B: disaster movie spectacle. It's one of the only films that I can really think of that stages planetary annihilation as something closer to relief
[00:37:43] Speaker C: than terror for at least one of the characters. Right.
[00:37:47] Speaker B: Which is about as close as narrative cinema gets to dramatizing Ligotti's argument that consciousness itself might be the actual burden, not its absence.
In the endless 2017 film directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, there's two brothers, former members of a UFO death cult, and they return to the commune that they escaped two years previously, only to discover that time, causality and physical space around the commune are looping and warping according to a vast, unexplained non human presence that also never fully appears on the screen and is never explained. Just fair warning. But what's really effective here is that is the film's insistence on this sort of like ambiguity on scale.
Is this presence a God or an alien intelligence? Is it a physical phenomenon?
The film deliberately never lets you settle on an answer. And the character's attempts to like, bargain with and understand and escape it all fail in various almost mundane ways. Rather than a single dramatic confrontation.
That mundane and semi domesticated ongoing relationship to an incomprehensible cosmic presence is closer to Thacker's ambient cosmic pessimism than anything else is on the list.
Because the horror isn't a single encounter. It's a permanent low grade condition that the characters have been living inside of for years already, without ever maybe Even being conscious of it, but certainly without ever naming it.
Lastly, we're going to talk about a genuinely radical and divisive film and entry into this list.
2022 film directed by Kyle Edward Ball, called Sky Skinamarink.
Skinamarink is one of the greatest horror films of our time, and I would argue, the most scared. I have been watching a film in over a decade.
It's shot largely in, like, almost total darkness and it has a static.
The camera is mostly static, but in other, you know, instances it's barely moving because sometimes it does have to move.
And it follows these two small children whose house, over the course of the film appears to slowly be losing doors and windows and eventually its parents, who are replaced by an unseen and almost barely audible presence that sort of issues distorted commands from off screen.
[00:41:31] Speaker C: This is one of those films that, like, if you were lucky to see it in a theater, to have the
[00:41:36] Speaker B: theater sound system, you were incredibly lucky.
[00:41:41] Speaker C: I was not.
[00:41:43] Speaker B: And I was not able to see it in the theater.
So I watched it with my Bose over the ear headphones to, like, really try to get the full immersive sound experience. Like, I don't think that I could have gotten that in any other environment other than a theater.
And. Wow.
If you want a film that does nothing but make your heart race, I recommend, I think you have to be in a certain mood to watch it because a lot of the time there's really nothing happening. But that's what makes it so frightening because you don't know why there's nothing happening and you don't know if there's
[00:42:22] Speaker C: something that's going to, like, pop out
[00:42:24] Speaker B: and be a jump scare for you. Like it. You just don't know.
There's essentially no plot in the conventional sense. And, like, there's almost nothing that's ever really shown directly.
It's sort of built on almost entirely empty space and this, like, grainy texture and a child's eye and their, you know, inability to, like, process or narrate what's actually happening. Like, how do you explain to someone else that there's no more doors in your house or there's no more windows in your house, or that your parents are gone and have been replaced with something else.
And I'd argue that this is one of the purest attempts in recent horror cinema to fully represent a world without us collapse from the inside. Because it happens in the house. It's a film that strips away every tool that cinema normally uses to build
[00:43:30] Speaker C: a legible human world for its Audience
[00:43:35] Speaker B: like, you know, clear space and clear causality and clear character psychology. It just leaves you sitting in the resulting void or the world that you see on the screen. And whether or not that makes for a satisfying 90 minutes is genuinely contested among fans and critics. But as a formal experiment in dramatizing exactly the kind of non human orientation that Thacker describes, it might be the most rigorous film on today's list, and honestly is my favorite of the list.
Please give it a try. If you've never seen it genuinely, if you sit through the first 30 minutes and you're not intrigued at all, you can write me a nasty email.
[00:44:17] Speaker C: So you're probably thinking at this point, is this just nihilism with extra steps like, what are the limits of the framework?
So I just want to spend a few minutes being a little critical here because I do think it's worth it and because Thacker himself is pretty upfront in the book about the limits of what he's doing.
A fair critique of cosmic pessimism as a framework, and one Thacker more or less anticipates, is that it can shade very easily into a kind of intellectualized nihilism that lets you off the hook, doesn't really hold you accountable from actually engaging with anything.
If the universe is fundamentally indifferent and human meaning making is fundamentally inadequate, why bother with ethics or politics or relationships or really with anything?
And Thacker's response, as far as I can tell from the text, really isn't a robust ethical program. He's pretty explicitly not trying to build one. He's more interested in cosmic pessimism as a kind of honest philosophical posture, a corrective right to what he sees as an overconfident human centered strain running through most of Western philosophy than as a program for actually living.
And whether that's a satisfying place to land is genuinely up for debate.
And I think it's worth naming that some critics of the book find its refusal to build outward from the pessimism into anything constructive is a real limitation rather than a stylistic choice.
But I'd also gently sort of push back on how neatly this framework maps onto every film that we've just discussed. There's a real risk whenever you've got a hot theoretical lens of like, over fitting films to it that are doing other things also, like Melancholia, for instance,
[00:46:43] Speaker B: is also very directly about clinical depression as a lived, specific psychological experience, not just an allegory for cosmic pessimism. And I don't want us to flatten that specificity in service of a Tidy, theoretical through line. The theory illuminates something real in these films. It doesn't really explain them fully and it shouldn't be. The only lens that we bring to any of you should never watch any film solely through one lens.
Take the things that speak to you and leave the things that don't.
It's not life or death, right? You know, film is supposed to be enjoyed.
[00:47:26] Speaker C: It's a form of entertainment.
So why does any of this matter practically for how we watch horror?
I mean, I think that Thacker gives us a genuinely useful vocabulary for a specific, specific flavor of dread that a lot of the best cosmic and folk horror is reaching for. Think the Witch that our usual toolkit of the uncanny abjection and grief as
[00:47:57] Speaker B: a monster really doesn't cover.
Not every horror film is about a repressed personal or familial trauma returning in monstrous form. Some of the most unsettling films working today aren't about anything that intimate at all. They're about scale.
[00:48:15] Speaker C: They're about a universe or a planet or a system or, you know, something that was never oriented around us. And the genuine vertigo of trying to hold that thought steady in your mind for longer than a few seconds because it's uncomfortable, but it's also.
It's also something that you're almost barely able to really comprehend. And I think there's something almost weirdly clarifying about films that are willing to sit in that vertigo without rushing to resolve it into either false comfort or cheap nihilism.
Not every horror film needs to hand you your humanity back safely at the end.
Some of the best ones are just honest about how a small place that humanity actually occupies, and there's a strange kind of relief, or at least a strange kind of respect in filming, you know, filming a film willing to say that plainly rather than pretending otherwise.
So, yeah, that's. That's my thoughts, of course. I'll. I'll link, you know, my sources in the show notes if you want to explore a little bit more.
[00:49:35] Speaker B: I'm not sure what the next episode will entail, but I sort of like this philosophical relationship with horror.
[00:49:45] Speaker C: So we'll see what I come up with next time. But anyhow, thank you for spending time in the void with me.
I, of course, before I let you go, need to take a second to remind you that the final girl on 6th Avenue is part of the Morbidly Beautiful network. Morbidly Beautiful is your home for horror. So if you love horror in any way, shape or form, then you are welcome with us at morbidlybeautiful.com you can find my podcast and many others like it, as well as insightful film reviews and so much more. So head on over to morbidlybeautiful.com to check it all out. Show us some love.
You can find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, it would mean the world to me if you left me a five star review and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. For any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions or requests, you can email me at finalgirl on6mail.com or you can send me a message on Instagram @finalgirl on 6. Thank you so much for listening.
Never Forget that I'm 6th Avenue's very own final Girl.
[00:50:55] Speaker A: Face Drag your face to the scre welcome to the graveyard where the film screams back your name Every cut, every shadow you dissect the dark in flame.
