Against Everyone with Conner Habib

Friends,
The aesthetics of horror, at least in the US, have traditionally overlapped with heavy metal and death metal music. You know what I mean here: dark-clad figures and crazed clowns, bats, black clouds, and thorn-branched fonts. Sometimes they even share imagery, like the band Obituary’s cover for their Cause of Death album and a book of short stories by HP Lovecraft (painted by artist of the fantastique, Michael  Whelan).
I love horror with these aesthetics - but I’m glad another form seems to have opened up too. Sometime in the past 30 years, the horror trope of the final girl - the last surviving character of a horror novel or movie - began to highlight not the scariness of the monster, but the resilience of the monster’s victims.
The trope of the final girl insists on survival in the face of a world of danger. Often dangers that were at first hard to believe, hard to convince people of, and those included (until the final girl became a thing in horror) the expectations and beliefs of the audience.
For me, the final girl shows a shift of footing for horror as metal - immersion in the spectacle of the grotesque and dramatic - to punk: determination to fight back and connect with a force of will that was always there but not always expressed.
Punk rock is more than just survival, however. Its starting point is a knowingness that things are not okay. Punk is music with lyrics about the state of the world, and it has a sound that reveals a world that looks and feels differently than the one we’re told to accept.
It’s also the antithesis to the time spent in so many horror movies, where characters must spend inordinate amounts of time convincing each other that a threat exists. Punk already knows there's a problem. By the time you get to the show or play the record, you’re in the observation and receiving the sounds of the community, the solution, the alternate reality that we know can exist.
In a horror movie, there's the monster monster, and there's the monster of people who refuse to believe what is apparent, obvious. The final girl and punk decides to live against both adversaries.
So now that the final girl has created a sort of bridge for us from what I’ll call metal horror to punk rock horror, who is developing punk horror? Who's pushing it forward?
On this episode - the final in this year’s horror upon horror series, I’ll be talking with an author who does just that about a film that does the same.
KEITH ROSSON is the author of eight books so far, including Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, and his masterwork, Coffin Moon which is one of the most compelling novels I've ever read. What a huge surprise for a vampire novel! It is a swift, unstoppable thing. His most recent novel, Crone is about a girl that disappears and a correlating sightings of a strange and threatening witch-like being.
Keith and I talk about punk rock and horror and then move into a conversation about Jeremy Saulnier's 2015 punk rock slasher horror film GREEN ROOM, in which a punk band pisses off a bunch of murderous neo-Nazis and has to figure out how to escape disastrous and confining circumstances.
Punk rock and horror are two of my favorite genres of art - and this episode is my first comingling of the two - I’m so excited to share it with you
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Six authors.
Four horror movies.
Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib
This is Horror upon Horror.
Friends, I’m sure you know the THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) by now but if not, here’s the plot: three students go out into the woods to make a documentary about local legend of a witch. They’re never seen again. A video is found later of their footage. That’s it.
You probably also know that it wasn’t like other movies when it came out, but was marketed in the most bizarre and convincing ways: missing posters were put out of the three actors that appear in the film (Rei Hance, known in the film as Heather, Donaghue' Michael, C, Williams; and Joshua Leonard); and in fact their IMDB pages listed them as deceased. There was a short documentary about the documentary made, and aired as if it were real. There was all kinds of chatter on the then-burgeoning Internet about what it happened to these three students.
On top of that. it wasn't filmed like other movies, not even found footage ones. The cast themselves were directors of the film, along with the overall directors of the film along with Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, since they filmed the bulk of the movie.
While the characters of the Blair Witch Project were investigating folklore, the actors and producers were also creating it.
In other words, the found footage was actually found footage. The directors did not know what the cast had filmed because they sent them out on missions to film and turn the refults to them later. For instance, they were sent to certain locations to talk to town residents about the legends of the Blair witch and some adjacent murders. The promptings were brilliant. There was, for instance, a actor who was a plant in a diner not spoken to until after the main actors walked around and talked to other unknowing people. The effect is that they were stimulating the idea of witch for everybody else in the diner but not involved.
Later, when the cast members enter the woods to go looking for signs of the witch, they are prompted by the directors to certain sites and cues at those sites, and told to film the whole time. Their moods were intensified by bad weather, long shoots, surprises, coldness and camping. All of it brings out tremendous performances from the three of them.
I went to see the Blair witch project in the theater right when it came out I saw it in Allentown, Pennsylvania was with some friends. We all thought it was real.
The whole movie is tense, horrifying, truly frightening. There are moments when the screen is pitch black, so the entire theater was was pitch black too. And people were screaming.
When it was done -- and I’d never had this experience before nor have had it since -- the entire audience sat in silence until the credits finished rolling.
What a new dimension of horror to be brought into the world!
And it’s one that echoes into our own time, with the difficulty of interpreting what is and what isn’t real on the screens that we face and encounter each day. The Blair Witch Project is the forerunner of DIY projects, of found footage, of the tensions between reality and unreality, of constant surveillance of our most vulnerable moments... So many things were set free into the world by this movie. There was nothing like it at the time, and few films take such great risks to such great effect.
My guests are PAUL TREMBLAY, last on the show on AEWCH 235 (with CJ Leede) and is the author, most recently of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, and also Horror Movie, his most famous novel A Head Full of Ghosts and my favorite novel of his, Disappearance at Devil's Rock.
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SARA GRAN was last on the show on AEWCH 233 (with Nathan Ballingrud) and is the author of what is recognized as one of the most terrifying horror novels of all time, Come Closer. She's also the author of the incredible occult-horror-detective story, The Book of the Most Precious Substance.

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AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 328: HORROR UPON HORROR PT 2 - DAN CHAON on HIDDEN LIVES and 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE
Six authors. Four horror movies. Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib. This is Horror upon Horror.
Friends, we all have hidden lives. From the lives of our internal organs, which are working within you right now, to the lives that we imagine and fantasize for ourselves yet will not achieve. The most obvious, and yet in some ways the most hidden life, is that life of death itself.
We carry this death within us every day. The skeleton which lurks just beneath our flesh, washed by fluids and blood each day, is death's emblem.
And each of us makes our own deaths the project of our lives. Every step draws us closer, every action has a result, an effect, that shapes the way in which we will change from a living person to a dead one.
Inside all of our choices, there lives death.
The same is true fro the lives of civilizations, which hide away the seeds of their own demise in the flourishes of progress. In apocalypse movies, death reveals itself as the coexisting state. This is most apparent in Nia DaCosta's 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE, the movie my guest DAN CHAON chose to talk about on this episode.
In Dan's fiction, hidden away lives lead people down the path to their own doom. In his frightening story “The Bees" in which a man’s second, secret, hidden family, creeps back into his circumstances and destroys the life he’s built for himself. In his novel Await Your Reply, in which a man looks into sinews of conspiracy to figure out where his brother has disappeared to. Of course, to look at sinews is to cut into anatomy, to bleed out.  And in Chaon’s latest, One of Us (which takes inspiration for its title from the 1930s Todd Browning film, Freaks)  the lives 1915 circus performers are explored, as well as the lives of two children fleeing a murderer who speaks to the dead.
The lives we hide away always whisper to us. They have their own secret voices that ask:
Can your surface-life endure me? Or will your world end the second I’m revealed?
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Six authors. Four horror movies. Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib
This is HORROR UPON HORROR
On these episodes, we'll be thinking through the creation, reading, and viewing of the most vital and visceral art: Horror, and I'll be doing it with the frightening luminaries of the genre. People who are unafraid to endure the horrific imagination, and able to bring it to you.
On this first episode, I’ll be talking about nostalgia in horror with authors Nathan Ballingrud and Sarah Maria Griffin and then we'll move onto our discussion of the amoebic violent power of Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of The Blob.
Unlike other monsters, the blob has no direction, no real personality. It doesn’t want anything. It’s not even hungry; hunger would imply some sort of desire or longing. Instead, it’s drawn to whatever is close and warm, drawn to incorporate it, to grow with the heat of flesh, bone, and blood.
As it gets bigger, it needs more heat, more blood, to keep going.
This is Horror upon Horror. The blob. A form older than vampires but newer in consciousness. It’s outside of time. It’s what was in the microscope made large, larger, until it envelops everything in its path with crushing pressure and dissolving acidity.
The blob is the pure inertia of motion.
NATHAN BALLINGRUD has also been on the show before, last time talking with me and Sara Gran on AEWCH 233 about cruelty in horror. His book of short stories, North American Lake Monsters is one of my very favorite horror collections. And his trilogy of retro future horror, The Lunar Gothic trilogy, begins with the utterly hideous (in the best way possible), The Crypt of the Moon Spider.
SARAH MARIA GRIFFIN⁠ is the author of the psychic vampire botany horror novel, ⁠Eat the Ones You Love⁠, and most recently ⁠Strange Is the Light⁠. Sarah has been on the show many times (her latest until now was ⁠AEWCH 252 ⁠where we talked about working as writers) and does an annual tarot reading event for patreon patrons.
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AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 326: FELIX JOHN TAYLOR on THE LIGHT OF THE HERMETIC ORDER OF THE GOLDEN DAWN
The first time I heard about the Golden Dawn, I was in high school. I was gay, Syrian, reading all the time, shunning sports. My town was filled with neo-Nzis and fundamentalists, celebrated stupidity and football players.
I wanted to feel something like power in a disempowering place, so I went to Brentano’s and found the most startling magic book there. On its cover was a person drawing a pentagram of crackling blue light with a wand. In it, instructions on making magical tools and spellcasting. And in its title, the word magick was written with a K. In contrast to the hell of school, the book represented an academy of magic. I found there allusions to The Golden Dawn, a group from almost a century prior, with secrets of not just power, but antiquity and the cosmos.
But they also seemed rigid, too elaborate and hierarchical. Plus I didn't like their most infamous member, Aleister Crowley, so I turned away from them. As I deepened my interests in occultism into adulthood, my pursuit of esoteric christianity, particularly the work of Rudolf Steiner, I steered clear.
I've become more sympathetic over time to the Golden Dawn. That doesn't mean I'm going to wade into their rituals, but that a real re-assessment has occurred. So this episodes’s guest, librarian and scholar FELIX JOHN TAYLOR ’s beautiful book, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Magic Arts and the Occult Revival was a great find for me. In it, he gives a portrait of the Golden Dawn through its key members and its art. A picture emerges of not just a magickal group, but an art and social movement, working to redefine morality for the sake of inclusiveness and creativity. After all, Crowley fell in love with a drag queen at a gay bar in 1897. Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter influenced the group. So did Steiner, for that matter! W.B. Yeats brought his Golden Dawn work to revitalize Irish identity.
I’m so happy you’ll be joining me and Felix John Taylor in this reappraisal.
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