Against Everyone with Conner Habib

On this episode. I’ll be talking about the spiritual state of the world with the creator and host of the HERMITIX PODCAST, podcast host and creator JAMES ELLIS.
Talking about the constitutive forces working through all the cultural, political and economic things going on in the world today is no easy feat.
And it brings special danger when talking about what’s coming. Predictions that come from prophecy can lead to a dense, spiritual error. For example, see spiritual author, teacher, and practitioner Alan Chapman on episode 383 of the Guru Viking Podcast. Speaking with host Steve James, he recounts the prediction and prophecy he made about a terrible event in September, which he publicly warned others about. The events didn't come to pass. The interview is powerful and bracing, largely because Steve is patient and Alan is vulnerable. He looks into the potency of spiritual error, the error in this case not being receiving the intensity of the vision he had, but rather reporting it and formulating a prediction based on it. I respect Alan's work (he's has been on this show too - on AEWCH 241 with Duncan Barford and then later, offering a New Year reflection on AEWCH 312), and his honesty offers its own potency which I think most spiritual "teachers" would learn so much from.
I’ve addressed a lot of the pitfalls of this sort of thing and other spiritual challenges on AEWCH 231 where I talk about true and false spiritual paths. But let me state directly here that when we go into the future for pictures, the spiritual pictures what we encounter will be fixed; and fixed pictures can only (or almost only) be offered to by spiritual forces that are not interested in human freedom. That’s not to say that those pictures are always wrong but that when they are fixed, they are not open to human directive.
This is, by the way, a big problem for a lot of astrologers, for example end up being anti-human because they make fixed predictions. (Not all of them of course!)
So when I do an episode like this one with James, where we’re giving a picture of what’s happening spiritually, and also think about where it’s all heading, it's really important to do all that and leave human freedom intact, and the ability for human beings to change anything at any moment.
Total liberation is always available, and so is development.
I recorded this episode of just before the elections in the US. I certainly don’t want to designate US representative politics as some giant sign of change in the world.
But that feeling that things are changing can show us what is possible in each of our hearts.
The outward picture tells us about something inwardly available that can truly be brought into the world.
I do hope that this spiritual state of the world is something I do with James each year.
Until then, look for me on Hermitix in an upcoming episode! You can also check out James's "school," the Hermitage, here and listen to us talking on Hermitix back in July.
To the present, the future coming towards us, and the past we're creating,

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.
&
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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