Capitalism Hates You: Horror film and Marxist theory.

Episode Transcript
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Joshua Gooch (00:04):
Fiction offers some fulfillment. It lets us see
things that we didn't know wecould do or be, but it's not the
solution. If you want to live,you have to step outside the
fiction.

Johanna Isaacson (00:15):
You make the point that horror is a form of
culture that satirizes popularculture and the passivity that
DeBoer analyzes. Why do youthink horror in particular is a
genre that has purchase on thiscommon sense?

Hi. I'm Josh Gooch. I teach at DUville
University in Buffalo, New York,and I've just published
Capitalism Hates You, Marxism,and the New Horror Film, from
University of Minnesota Press.

Hi. I'm Jo Isaacson. I am the author of
Stepford Daughters, weapons forfeminists and contemporary
horror. I am privileged tointerview Josh today. I thought
I would start off with aquestion, and we'll kinda keep
rolling with it.
I love the book, and I'm sohappy to find such a kindred
spirit. It's packed withbrilliant insights and readings

(01:02):
near and dear to this oldMarxist feminist horror nerd's
heart. And I noticed that thisis your first book on horror.
Can you say a little bit abouthow you came to the project?

Yeah. I started before the pandemic writing a
lot on the Gothic and itsrelationship to capitalism, and
I had some idea that I was goingto do a nineteenth century,
twentieth century, twenty firstcentury sort of look at the
influence on the theory and theideas. And then the pandemic
hit, and it seemed likeeverything around us was just
screaming, fuck you. And, and itwas very clear that that's what

(01:34):
capitalism felt about us. So atthat point, I shifted gears and
thought, well, you know, maybewe're all gonna die.
I just write the book I wannawrite. So that's what I did, and
I just refocused it aroundhorror now and what it was
telling us about our culture nowand capitalism now.

Awesome. And then the title of the book is
Capitalism Hates You, which Ilove. And many of the chapters
kind of repeat this refrain, andyou've started to answer this.
But I'm curious why this phrasefigures so deeply in the book
serving as a kind of leitmotif.

What I was really thinking about was how much it
seems like everything's arrayedagainst you. Right? And this
feeling that that things are notset up for people to succeed.
And, you know, for a long time,I think I was I was relying
pretty heavily on Lauren Berlantto think about that stuff. But
when I wanted to put it in a amore directly Marxist framework,
I kept coming back to this sensethat it wasn't just that it's

(02:30):
not like it's a feeling that weget in horror, but it's also
it's a way that capitalism seesour needs and the needs of the
environment, the things thatsupport us as as as living
beings as obstacles.
And that that obstacle that wecan we make for it is what makes
it hate us. And so, like, how dowe experience that in our

(02:51):
culture and what does it looklike became sort of the the the
all the big question. So everytime I would come up with some
new set of films I'd wanna thinkabout, you would see, oh, well,
that's that's showing us anotherway in which our ability to
thrive is being thwarted bycapitalism.

Yeah. It definitely feels that way. So
the book begins with theoverarching argument that horror
needs Marxism and ends with theassertion that Marxism needs
horror. Can you expand a littleon this invocation of criticism
of capitalism and the horrorgenre in specific?

If I start with horror, horror now is packed
with social critique. Right? Andit's not like you've gotta go
teasing it out. And coming fromfrom a literary studies
background, you often feel like,oh, I'm gonna find secret.
Right?
The little secret critiquethat's hidden in there. You're
like, no. There's no secret.It's just telling you what it
is. But if you approach thosefilms then as saying like, oh,
well, it's just it's hitting youover the head, or it's it's

(03:54):
doing exactly what I think it'sgonna do.
That's projecting what I wantinto the film. And so what I
really wanted to think aboutwas, well, what's social
critique doing? How does itconnect to what Marxist theory
looks like? How's it different?And and that means that you can
draw, I think, the richness ofour response to this
contemporary moment out ofhorror, but you without reducing

(04:17):
it to Marxist theory.
Marxism is there because ithelps us understand what those
critiques are and grounded inmaterialist analysis. But it's
not to say that, you know, allthese films are are made by
Marxists. I think someone likeJordan Peele would probably not
agree with that at all. Butalso, I think that Marxism needs
horror because horror now is sodifferent. It's got a much more

(04:39):
expansive set of filmmakers.
Our sense of it and what it cando has really changed from the
late nineteen seventies andnineteen eighties, especially in
terms of criticism. And thatmeans that we need to think
critically in more expansiveways than I think some Marxist
theory has gone. Right? I mean,you can crack open some books,

(04:59):
and it feels like we'rebasically in 1960, and we're
still talking about the samefive Germans. And they're all
dudes, and there's no socialreproduction.
There's nothing there's nothingof of that's actually engaged
with the real issues that weconfront in our our world now.
We just have sort of repetitionof the same. And so, you know,

(05:20):
Marxism needs horror because itmeans that we have to think
about black Marxism. We have tothink about racial capitalism.
We have to think about socialreproduction.
We have to think about ecologyand and what the metabolic rift
means for us. All those thingsmean we have to fold it into a
much more full vision of ofMarxism than we've had, I think.

(05:41):
That's not to say I'm the onlyperson doing this, but but I
feel like like it's part of a aneed just to fill in that gap.

Yeah. I mean, I think this book is really
groundbreaking and such alovely, great contribution
because it's just like the titleis like, this is about
capitalism, and then you don'tdo that thing where a lot of
people do, we're adding ongender, adding on race. Like you
understand that capitalism isgender, is race, and it's all

(06:08):
it's all, like, absolutelyintegral to your argument rather
than, like, some little, like,footnote or something. I really
appreciated that. Yeah.

Thank you. It's the thing that, like, really why
I wanted to write the book. Iwas so frustrated with the way
that it's often it feels likepeople keep having the same
arguments. We start from oneplace, and then you just keep,
like, we're gonna add a littlebit here and a little bit there.
And you're like, no.
No. No. What if we just assumeall the grounds of the things
that are actually meaningful andthen we argue from those? And

(06:39):
that's what I decided. This wasthis was the pandemic breakdown
where I thought, oh, well, do Ihave to build it up piece by
piece?
Like, fuck it. We're gonna justdo it. And I I mean, because it
doesn't make sense otherwise.You can't you can make sense of
the world if you have all thesepieces together. But if you
don't, you just wind up in somevery weird places.

Yeah. It's and there's just so much that you
you need to lead with, yeah,what's actually happening on the
ground rather than, like, someidealist fear of Marxist value
theory perfection. You know?That's very true. So at some
point, you make the distinctionbetween horror as therapy and
horror as diagnosis.

(07:19):
Could you say a little bit aboutwhat you meant by that?

Yeah. So what you notice a lot, and I got really
heated up about the use ofevolutionary psychology in some
horror, mostly because I feellike we are not it never engages
with a bad history ofevolutionary psychology and its
strong anti feminist bias andall of those things. But what we

(07:43):
see, I think, in popular cultureand especially in popular
writing about horror is it'ssort of like, well, it's it's a
way that we can work through ourbad feelings. And you can even
see it in some criticalapproaches to horror as a safe
space. Right?
The safe space idea of horrorwhere you you get to see your
your bad stuff worked out, andit's out there on the screen.

(08:04):
And it really does, I think,structure a lot of how people
approach it, and you can find itin all kinds of popular
journalism about horror. It waspopular in the pandemic as a
essay topic. But I think thatwhat horror just does is show us
those fears. It doesn't work itthrough.
It doesn't give us a solution.It reflects them back to us in a
way. It's a a shared socialjudgment, and that if if

(08:27):
something works in a horrorfilm, it's because a lot of
people have decided that theyshare that assessment that this
thing is is scary, that thisthing is wrong or terrifying in
some way, shape, or form. Onceyou see, oh, we share that
judgment. Well, that's adiagnosis, but it doesn't give
you an answer.
If you wanna get an answer, haveto do something. You know? And
if you don't do something, it'snot gonna work itself out in the

(08:49):
film.

No, I totally agree. And I think that a lot of
films are really ambiguous aboutthat. So I feel like that's a
really great role of a Marxistcritic is to kind of steer away
from the trauma. Again, myfriend and I are working on
something right now on liketrauma theory and how, like,
everything is about trauma now,and it becomes very
depoliticizing. But the traumais real.

(09:12):
Right? It's it's related toactual experience, like you say.
And so I think that distinctionis really, really helpful and is
what separates real criticismfrom, like, just the kind of
puss pieces that are that areout there too. So my next
question, I was thinking about,Sia Nagay. She's a theorist that
both of us are interested in,and you bring up her aesthetic

(09:34):
categories, and the idea thatthe aesthetic categories we
experience are deeply entwinedwith historical conjuncture.
You say that horror fills a gapin contemporary culture. It is
an aesthetic category able toremediate the horrors of our
economic system into somethingpleasurable. And then later you

(09:55):
relate this to Michael Lowy'snotion of critical irrealism,
which is a kind of romanticopposition rather than cold
analysis. And I really like thisbecause I think we Marxists kind
of get reputations of being antipleasure in a way, but you're
kind of, you know, hinting thatthe genre doesn't have to be a

(10:16):
chore or a burden. And so I waswondering why you know, a little
bit more about, like, pleasureand and why you think horror
fills this gap rather than sortof realism or more overtly
activist documentary forms.

Yeah. I mean, it it well, it serves a particular,
I think, function in ourculture, but it's it's strange.
It was important to talk aboutpleasure, I think, because so
much of horror scholarship willtalk about it as being
distinctly unpleasurable, andthat doesn't make any sense of
why it's popular. You know?You're like, oh, well, I love
going to the movies and beinghorribly traumatized.
It's not gonna get people thatdoesn't just from a from a very

(10:53):
vulgar economic analysis doesn'tmake any sense. So, like, why do
you go in and search out theseimages? And I think it makes
sense to treat it as a way ofmaking these things pleasurable,
but pleasurable in the see.Right. And this is where we get
back to that question of horroras diagnosis or horror as
therapy.
Right? It's pleasurable becausewe share the judgment with other

(11:15):
people that this thing is isscary. But it doesn't solve that
problem. It just lets us sharethat judgment together. And
there's some really I I mean, Ireally like Linda Williams on,
on Psycho.
Right? With the she's got allthese photos of of people
responding and thinking abouthow they're responding not just
to the film, but to one another.And one of the things I really
wanted us to think about when wethink about horror is that it's

(11:38):
a collective, genre. I mean,genres are always collective in
a way, but that horror is verymuch a conversation between
audience and creators, andthere's constant movement in
that sphere and between howcritics take it and academia. We
are always informing and andchanging it in a way that is

(11:59):
interesting and exciting andpart of what makes it
pleasurable.

Yeah. I I love that because throughout the
book, you're really focused onthe social rather than the
individual, right, which isvery, you know, Marxist thing to
to be focused on. So that kindof shared judgment is part of
that sociality for sure. Yeah.And speaking of pleasure, I we
should I should probably startbringing in actual films because

(12:23):
people love to hear about that,which I do.
So one of the first films youtalk about is drag me to hell,
which I love as well. And youlead up to this exploration by
bringing up the work of SorenMao and Nancy Fraser. Do you
wanna talk a little bit aboutwhy you wanted to talk about
Drag Me to Hell as a kind ofstarting point?

Yeah. Okay. That's that's great. Well, I mean, I
just talked about, Mao andFrasier because they're the the
people who are, I think, rightnow doing the best work
synthesizing all those differentparts and and working with them
together in a way that's that'snew and exciting. But Drag Me to
Hell is just a great film.
The first two films in the bookare really post financial crisis
films. Right? So there's drag meto hell, which is an immediate

(13:06):
post financial crisis film aboutmortgages and the kinds of moral
choices that people make undercapitalism. And then there's
Mayhem, which is a a much laterfilm but has a a very similar
kind of dynamic. And I wanted tostart with, drag me to hell
because it's such a strangefilm.
Right? It's it it is builtaround a trick, and the trick is

(13:27):
really brilliant. You spend mostof your time being horrified by
what's happening to this awful,awful bank manager. And
everything is is very degrading.It's it's disgusting and
terrifying.
But by the end of the film, yourealize, right. That's fine.
There's a there's a suddenreversal, and that reversal all
hinges on the shift in whether acursed object is a button or a

(13:54):
coin. Right? And it's thatmovement between something
that's a a use value and and arepresentation of value.
And that suddenly reversal ispart of the reversal of the your
your moral judgment, right, ofwhat's going on in the film. And
you realize, oh, that's thewoman who kicked an old lady out
of her house for no reason otherthan she wanted a promotion.
Yeah. Drag her to hell. That'sgreat.

(14:14):
Go for it. And that's that'swhat how the film works. And so
I thought it it really capturedboth the sentiment of the book,
which is, you know, capitalismhates you, but also that sudden
shift in how we understand whatwhat value does. It guides you
and gives you a lot of choicesand encourages you to make
certain kinds of choices, tosucceed under those particular

(14:35):
rules to get more stuff. Andeverything that the the main
character is doing, Christine isdoing in that film, is all about
getting more stuff andsucceeding, but it gets be it
just becomes increasinglygrotesque from murdering her I
think it's her kitten.
Right? And, you know, she'spulling things out of her mouth
all the time. And the the, youknow, the conclusion is she's
digging up this woman's graveand then desecrating the corpse.

(14:58):
And the whole thing is is shotlike this very Sam Raimi, you
know, so, sort of evil deadclimax. But only then do you
realize, oh, she's the demon.
That's the turn. And so gettingthat sense of of both what value
does, how we relate to it, andhow it encourages us to or
incites us to act in certainways and makes those things seem

(15:19):
natural even though they theyreally don't have to be.

Yeah. I totally agree. I love that in
that she's like, you both aresort of, like, experiencing her
awfulness as somebody who just,like like you say, kicked an old
lady out of her house for apromotion, but also the
inevitability and the way she'sbeen dragged into this abstract
system that forces her and anddoesn't make her feel like she

(15:44):
has a choice. And both of thosethings are, like, constantly
happening at once. And I neverreally, I think because I've
read other criticism, but thethe button and the coin thing is
such a Marxist, yeah,distinction between used value
and abstract.
You know? I know. I love that.Yeah. As a kind of weigh in.
So I think we kinda covered myother question about drag me to

(16:07):
hell. And then I thought wecould spend the rest of our time
sort of going through yourchapters and just kinda getting
into some of the categories thatyou thought were most useful to
think about Marxism and horror.And so your first chapter is
called work hates you, which Ilove. The hates you thing just
is endlessly giving, by the way.It's great.

(16:30):
Because definitely, it's thatvisceral thing that horror does
is like and and theinterpolation of the you is
great. But so at one point, yousum up your introduction to that
chapter by writing Marx's theoryof value shows us how work in
capitalism makes up one facet ofa system where domination is
abstract, impersonal, andsocial. So I was wondering if

(16:53):
you can unpack this a bit anddiscuss why this translates into
the idea that work hates you.

I was trying to figure out the best way into
this one, and I'm going to go tosomething very strange. When I
was like 27, I temped for abouta year and a half at a
construction site. Right. Andthere's nothing all that unusual
or oppositional for a lot ofpeople going to work every day

(17:21):
and thinking work sucks. And Iwanted to make that an an a
surprising piece of commonsense.
Right? That you can look at workand say, yeah, work sucks, but
you still go to work, still doall the things that that you
need to do to pay for your meansof subsistence to get, you know,
very Marx y. But to try and andlay out how that stuff operates

(17:45):
in in terms of Marxist theory,this is my my point of entry for
talking about Marxist theory ofvalue and really trying to to
step away from what I see a lotof people using, which is a very
vulgar labor theory of value andthinking that that what value
really comes down to is, youknow, I put my work in, it
immediately constructs value,and then capital steals it from
me. And I wanted to, you know,lay out the the basic concepts

(18:09):
of being forced into a kind ofexchange, so a formal structure,
and a series of rules that thengovern whether or not what you
do gets assessed as valuable bya market exchange system. Right?
And I won't do all thecategories people want. They
they can read the book. But mypoint in doing all that was then

(18:29):
to to link at and look at, like,how that shows up in film, and I
turned to Mayhem, this Joe Lynchfilm from 2017, which is a
really interesting film. I Ifind it kinda cynical, and Joe
Lynch is kind of a strangefilmmaker. But it's a very anti
work film, and it's got a sillyconceit of a rage virus that

(18:49):
causes people to becomeultraviolent.
So that gives you, you know,your basic setup. And then it
our main character is a lawyerwho has argued successfully, I
believe, that anything isallowed or is legal if you are
infected with this virus. Sothis then becomes the conceit
of, well, I can do what I wantif I'm trapped in this
circumstance. So he is insidehis law firm, and it's rage

(19:15):
infected and kills his way tothe top. What I wanted us to
kind of see in that is how much,you know, the idea of the the
rules that govern how we operatein in capitalism, become,
especially now when we areworking in more service oriented
economies.
And then if you're a informationworker, are very much structured
around our knowledge of therules and our ability to

(19:36):
manipulate those rules. And thatthis breeds a kind of cynicism
and opportunism. Right? Iunderstand what I need to do. I
understand how the rulesoperate.
So I can just tweak them overhere. I can leap over there. I
can make changes to get what Iwant. And it's very much what
the film is about. It shows youhow if you're clever enough, you

(19:56):
can manipulate the rules enoughto get what you want even though
work is a, in this film,explicitly cutthroat
environment.

Yeah. I love that with your analysis of
Mayhem because it's like it'sclearly like an anti work film,
but it's not clear until youanalyze it. I mean, it's been a
long time since I've seen it,but that why and how it's anti
work. And you I thought youreally made some great
distinctions in your analysis ofit. So you transition from
outlining your key points on whyworks hates you to horror by

(20:29):
saying, domination has been acentral thematic concern for the
genre since the Gothic.
Your example here is Dracula.Can you say a bit about how
Dracula exemplifies thisconcept?

I mean, Dracula is all about work. Right? We've got
professional workers all overit. It's about transcribing and
collecting information. And myfocus in the book is on on
Harker, the the main characterthat we meet.
And he's controlled by his bossfrom a distance. And he then
meets up with Dracula whocontrols people from a distance.
There's this paired psychicpower that goes on. Have you

(21:05):
seen the the the Edgar'sNosferatu?

Mhmm. I was gonna ask. Yeah.

Yeah. So, like, he's taking the the Mernau
Nosferatu. And in that one andand in the Eggers, they keep the
same move, which is to condenseRenfield and Harker's boss into
one character. Right? And sothen you have very directly, oh,
Harker's boss is a form ofsupernatural violent domination

(21:31):
that's directly connected to thecount.
And that that just seems to playout in almost every version of
Dracula that you get from theoriginal Stoker forward in
different forms. I mean, myfavorite still remains, you
know, an old Simpsons episodewhere Homer gets to fantasize
about killing his boss. Youknow, like, because because he's
a vampire. That that idea of thedomination, of course, is coming

(21:53):
all the way back from, theGothic and the sort of violent
patriarchal father, but itbecomes so deeply tied up with
work in the twentieth century.Especially when you look at the
twentieth century adaptations,they be they just become
overbearing, I feel, sometimeswith this connection of work and
domination in Dracula.
The Eggers film, I don't wannaget on a riff, but I had some

(22:15):
real problems with that one.

Yeah. Should talk about it sometime. Yeah. It
just occurred to me as you weretalking that it's always like
Frankenstein gets called, like,the proletarian horror, and
Dracula gets called, like,sexual horror. And they're like
dichotomized that way.
And this is another example ofhow you can never like take work
out of the sex or take sex outof the work. You know, they're

(22:39):
just like they're just kind ofin there.

No, it's right there. And it's so but because
it gets attached to femininework, right, with Mina, that
it's goes right over people'shead.

Yeah. Well, speaking of the feminine, I
loved reading your secondchapter, Love Hates You, since
feminist social reproduction andhorror is near and dear to my
heart. You start the chapter byfocusing on the common sense
that if we love our jobs, wewill never work. In this
chapter, you talk about I blamesociety, the power censor, and
Saint Maude as examples ofhorror that critiques women's

(23:12):
exploitation by their jobs orwomen who are possessed by their
work. As an example, since Iknow that one the best, do you
wanna describe a little about, IBlame Society and how it serves
as an example of this type ofexploitation?

Yeah. I Blame Society is such a great film.
They'll set it up very briefly.We have a woman who is a a
filmmaker, and she at thebeginning of the film is
essentially fired by her agent,she can't get anything funded.
So she returns to a documentaryproject about a little
backhanded compliment shereceived that she would make a
great serial killer.
She gets a a brief offer to puttogether a pitch deck from a

(23:47):
pair of producers. And really,all the producers want is for
her to put her name on it sothey can say that a woman is
producing it. And this becomesher opportunity in her mind to
then prove that she can be agreat filmmaker by completing
her project about being a greatserial killer. And that's just
then what she does. She goes outand she becomes an excellent
serial killer.
And it's a it's a wild movie inin some ways because of that. I

(24:09):
love the way she's bridging factand fiction there, like the use
of the documentary footage fromearlier on and the
fictionalization, there's not astrong differentiation between
the world of the film and ourworld, which makes the the
critique much stronger. But whatshe does throughout is she's
just doing the socialexpectations that she's getting
from the industry. Right? She'senacting those things.

(24:30):
And so it's why it's called IBlame Society. Right? So she's
just doing those things. All ofthose expectations are coming
from the film industry, andit's, you know, hinge on the
strong female lead. I mean,that's so she just keeps coming
up with different ways toportray herself as a strong
female lead, but they're allvery I mean, they're violent and
exploitative.
Right? So she's gotta take hertop off. She's gotta film

(24:52):
herself having sex, and she'sgotta, you know, kill people and
then show her strength. Allthese things that become
representations of strengthaccording to the male producers
that she talked to earlier.That's which, of course, winds
up with her in a selfdestructive spiral where she
can't ever come out of it.
I I I mean, I love what what youhave about her as the the the

(25:15):
smile strike, which I think isis right.

Yeah. I love that it's like a critique of
kinda girl boss feminism andlean in feminism, but also this
anger at the emotional laborthat she's supposed to perform.
So, yeah, as a smile strike. Andthe fact, like you say, that
it's so close to real life thatthe creator and star is playing
Jillian Horvath, who's, youknow, the name of the real

(25:38):
person who's made this, and it'sall a very small budget film.
There's just, like, a lot ofself reflectivity in it.
That's really cool. I'm gladit's getting so much attention.

No. I it needs more attention. I I just love
that turn toward the end whenshe's telling one of her victims
how, you know, she's just sodisappointed that she's so good
at what she does, but she's justnever not getting the
recognition. It's it's such agreat moment.

Just the end when she's, like, chopping up
the guys who hired her andsaying, you wanted a strong
female lead.

That is the ending is is what's so perfect, and
then the spray of blood thatbecomes the title. It's just
great.

So at another point in that chapter, you say,
capitalism uses meaningfulnessto make women's unpaid labor
seem like a natural expressionof their being, which I think is
so well expressed. And I waswondering if you could think of
a moment in the films youdiscussed that really highlights
that experience.

Yeah. That's gotta be Saint Maude. I wasn't sure
how to write this book until Isaw Saint Maude, I thought, oh,
well, that's it. There's thismoment when I mean, Maude is a
carer, and it's it's hard toconvey, I think, to a American
audience what a carer issituationally in the in The UK.
So I'll call her a home healthaide, and maybe that will make
it clear.
Right? She's very, very far downin terms of the health care

(26:53):
hierarchy, and she's so she'snot well paid. She's not in a
great social situation to beginwith. But what gives her work
meaning is this sense of areligious calling, and that
drives her throughout the wholefilm and also another possession
narrative, which drives herinsane. But I think the moment
in that film that has to be itwould be she has a brief

(27:14):
conversation with her patient,right, where she's finally
communicating about God in theway that she wants to.
And it's so powerful for herthat, you know, she's going up
the stairs. She has a sort ofuncontrollable orgasm. And the
way that the the film portraysthis character, I think, is very
much, one of sexual repression.Right? That that her attraction

(27:35):
to this patient, she can'texpress, and therefore, she's
coming up with these alternateways of viewing the world and
thinking about it.
But I think that that sort oflayering of that one layer of
meaning is covering over thisthis other layer where it's
they're happening alongsidewhere it's the meaningfulness of
what she's doing that ispleasurable to her. Right? And

(27:58):
that's that's the the thing thatkeeps her going because
otherwise, it's a terrible job.And without those things to keep
the work going, withoutsomething that makes it
meaningful, it won't happen.

Yeah. And I love that just so much horror
now is showing the refusal toembrace what's meaningful
completely in order to show itsexploitation. Like, you know,
those moments that are just sostartling and like the Babadook
in Hereditary where a characteris just like tells their kid
they basically hate them ortries to kill their kid, you

(28:31):
know, which is obviously they dolove their kid, but it's just
like, I can't let the fact thatthis bond is supposed to be
everything to me exploit meanymore. Right? And and it just
shows these really taboo momentsof, like, you know, that kind of
refusal in really interestingways.
My next question, you look atthe relationship of the theories

(28:52):
of Marxist feminists such asSilvia Federici and Mario Rosa
Dalla Costa to Wallerstein, asthey advance the argument that
capitalist appropriation ofwomen's unpaid labor is akin to
ongoing primitive accumulation,the violent expropriation of
people, land, and resources.This comparison helped seventies
feminists understand women'sunwaged labor, but in both of

(29:16):
our work, we extend thiscomparison to waged labor. So
can you flesh out why you feelthis still applies maybe in
relation to Saint Maude? I wasthinking about writing about
that one too, so I was so gladyou did that one because it
didn't make it into my book.But, where violence and
feminized care work are soclosely aligned.

Yeah. Oh, I'm curious what what you're
thinking. My sense of how thisworks is that the unwaged nature
of the argument in the seventiesis all about building an
argument in relationship to avery specific historical
problem, right, the housewife.And even in, like, Della Costa,
she starts talking about peopleworking outside the home and the

(29:55):
need for that is supplementaland the ways in which that's
more likely than not to getrecaptured by capitalist
exploitation. So, like, it'spresent in there, but they don't
wanna lean too hard on itbecause the focus is on the
naturalization of theappropriation of unwaged work.
And I think it's important forus to continue to talk about
that in relationship to wagedwork because anything that's

(30:16):
treated as gendered or feminizedin especially in American
culture is devalued for thatreason. Right? It makes it so
that you can pay it far less.And Saint Maude is the the
perfect example of this whereshe's living in a one room flat.
And, you know, in the historicalcontext of this, waged care
workers in The UK had their paycut and cut and cut.

(30:37):
She appears to work for aprivate health care company, but
most people would be working fora public company and making
very, very little money. And herher existence really represents
that sort of loss of economicstatus. And it's it's even sort
of highlighted from thebeginning of the film where we
see her working as a nurse.Right? A nurse is decently paid.
And she she gives that upbecause of something that goes

(30:59):
wrong, but she then replaces herpay with her belief in God.
Right? So the meaning then takesit over. And this this allows
her to keep working, but it alsojustifies not getting paid as
much.

Yeah. Yeah. And I it's really interesting
how some contemporary films,they'll stage the whole
housewife Betty Friedan horrorthing of, like, suffering inside
their house with their child andtheir kind of housework, but
then recognize like in theBabadook that she's also a care
worker, right? And her wagedwork, unlike the Betty Friedan

(31:34):
thing of like, oh, once you getout of the house and you have
waged work, all thisnaturalized, degraded work will
be gone and you'll be valued insociety. And yet there's just
like an absolute parallelbetween the care work she does
outside and inside the house.
The call that's coming frominside the house has spread like
a virus.

There's, like, this weird not weird, but, like,
a very small cycle of cuckoohorror. There's, the one where
it's just a suburban house thatpeople can't ex escape. You can
look that one up. There's cuckoohatching. Right?
Like, where where that sort ofmotif keeps coming back. And
it's interesting that it's it'spersistently the cuckoo as the
way of of thinking about that.

Yeah. I was thinking about cuckoo the other
day. It's very cyclical toalmost like Jean Diehlmann or
something like that. Right?Like, that kind of, like,
repetition rather than theforward thrusting of these sort
of narratives too, and and andlike a lot of sort of feminist
experimental film as well.
And so then your next chapter iscalled nature hates you, and you

(32:36):
cite Amitav Ghosh who arguesthat fiction hasn't engaged with
climate change because most ofits representational strategies
aren't up to the task. Youinterpret this to mean that
realist stories aren't equippedto represent environmental
realities. So I was wonderingwhy you thought that. So why do
you think horror is a moreappropriate genre?

Yeah. I guess I would say the problem with
realism that I was trying to getfrom Ghosh was simply that when
it confronts climate change,climate change takes place on
nonhuman scales and nonhumantemporalities. Right? It's not
that realism can't show usdifferent kinds of things like
that. You know, we get realistapproaches maybe in something
like Kim Stanley Robinson'sMinistry for the Future.

(33:19):
Right? It's fairly realist. Butit also has to he's confronting
lots of problems about timecompression. Right? So when when
Robinson wants to really dealwith climate change in an
earlier book like The Red Marsand The Mars trilogy, he's got
to then make his main characterslive for hundreds of years.
Right? Because he can't dealwith that that amount of time.
And and even then, he'scompressing things. And horror

(33:41):
is able to do that, in variousways with different supernatural
elements, whereas, you know, inscience fiction, they'll they'll
go with made up science ythings. So we have lots of I
mean, I didn't I didn't spendnearly enough time on quite
questionable choices of theWendigo to represent this and
some troubling stuff.

(34:04):
But different uses ofsupernatural figures to capture
the past and its effects on thepresent and also to think about
scale. What's bigger than human?What's smaller than human?
That's why I wanted to focus Imean, I spent most of my time in
in that chapter on fungal horrorbecause fungus is is a way of
thinking both big and small.Right?
And it lets it lets thefilmmakers get down to those

(34:25):
sort of very tiny, tiny,micrological levels, get those
little experimental art filmdocumentary shots of spores
leaping into the air, and thenbig shots at the forest and and
trying to get people to imaginethe mycorrhizal mat that runs
through a vast area, somethingthat that takes you outside of

(34:45):
those kinds of human scales.Horror lets you do that in a way
that I think realism, it hitssome walls with, and or at least
it it gives us ways to imagineit in a way that realism doesn't
want to.

Yeah. I totally agree with that, and I
love that in your book. I mean,I feel like that's been talked
about from a Marxist perspectivewith sort of cognitive mapping
and with, like, Robin Woodtalking about, like, horror and
its relation to the unconsciousor, you know, getting past,
like, sensors in in ways thatrealist film can't do, but I've
never heard it really talkedabout in relation to

(35:19):
environmental, like, horrorspecifically. So I thought that
was a really great move. So forthe listener, can you break down
some of the key concepts youmobilize in nature hates you,
such as appropriation, the fourcheaps, dispossession, and the
metabolic rifts?
That's just a big question.Yeah.

It's it's I would focus on appropriation because
it's kind of the thing thatlinks everything together. When
I finished the book, I realizedthat I had one major insight in
terms of how I think aboutMarxism, which is that
capitalism isn't just a systemof exploitation of labor, but
it's a system of appropriation.And those two things work side
by side. And so theappropriation of unwaged labor,
which is central to socialreproduction theory, that that

(35:59):
matters there, but it's alsocentral to how we engage with
the environment. And so theappropriation of unpaid for
resources or underpaid forresources.
Right? And that is a way of sortof dealing with what Jason Moore
calls the four cheaps. I madesure I wrote them down because I
always get it slightly wrong.Labor power, food, energy, and

(36:20):
raw materials. And if you thinkabout capitalism as being driven
by the search for those cheapthings, and that means cheap
labor or not unpaid for labor offood, cheap energy, this makes
sense of a lot of what we weconfront.
And then exploitation happensalongside it when it starts
running out of things it caneasily take. And if we see those

(36:42):
things working together, then,like, okay, now we actually have
a pretty good sense of whatcapitalism looks like and how it
works. If we just think aboutexploitation, we don't. So
appropriation, I think of, isthe big thread that runs
throughout the whole book andhopefully connects things for
people.

Yeah. And again, kind of underscores why
we have to talk about theenvironment and women and race,
because these are the thingsthat are considered natural raw
materials that are brought inwith this kind of violence.
Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah. So you have a chapter called The
Neighborhood Hates You. And Iwas wondering why you thought
the neighborhood is central tothe new black horror from a
Marxist perspective and some howit some of your key concepts
such as gentrification, unevendevelopment, white flight,
deindustrialization. Again,like, those are big things that
people can read the book for,but more maybe more just overall

(37:32):
of, like, the the importance foryou of the neighborhood.

Yeah. The neighborhood is the more that I
thought about the book, the moreI could see how there are cycles
and sort of subcycles. And newblack horror seems to me like
that first cycle, and I thinkwe're coming out of it,
especially with sinners, wasvery much about making space
inside the genre for blackcreators. Right? And so the
focus is very much on literallyspace and the policing of genre

(37:59):
space and the policing ofphysical space, which become
then sort of pairs so that somuch of those films are about
making black art.
I mean, Sinners, Coogler's filmis all about making black art
too, but it's in a differentway. It doesn't use space in
quite the same way as, like, GetOut or Us. But the the problem,
it's interesting to see it sortof develop across different

(38:20):
films. So thinking about that islike a real problem for the
creators and things that they'renavigating, and making such
amazing films with and how thatrelates to uneven development of
the environment, like what getsgentrified, what gets left
behind or abandoned. Right?
Ruth Wilson Gilmore's organizedabandonment. Right? It's a

(38:41):
really important component ofwhat you see. And think about
how well there are spaces thatare clearly defined in these
films as white spaces and nonwhite spaces. And that's part of
the uneven development ofcapitalism, which is then, for
all of these films, tightlylinked to what it means to make
black art.

Yeah. And I think so much is reversing the
history of horror where it'slike a white enclave threatened
by the dark other and justshowing who is really unsafe in
those spaces of whiteness, youknow, which, you know, Get Out
starts so well and, like, setsthe tone for for so much of it.
And, obviously, Get Out is theseminal work, and I love how you

(39:23):
analyze Chris's photos in thatfilm. You say, these photos
serve as meta commentary on theuse of black suffering as art,
but they can also help us thinkabout the connection between
urban disinvestment, thesuburbs, gentrification in the
urban core. It's interestingbecause the racial undertone in
horror movies taking place inthe suburbs have historically

(39:46):
been about fear of the racialother.
I guess I kinda just said thatwith notable exceptions like the
people under the stairs. Can yougive some examples from films in
the new Black horror genre thatturned this trope in
conventional horror around?

Yeah. We've we've got Get Out. We've got Us.
Master is in the in the inthere. But I was thinking about
some other ones that weren't inthe chapter.
Like, The Blackening, Imentioned briefly, but that's
premised on the rural areas asbeing outside, basically just
stepping into a purely whitespace. And there's an an I guess
we'd call this a Blacks Innhorror film because it's it's

(40:19):
made by a white filmmaker, afilm called Blood Conscious.
It's a serious version of theblackening, if that makes sense.
So, like, same set of problems,same set of issues where you've
got a clearly defined you know,we're going on vacation in the
country. The country is a verywhite space, and everything is
wrong about being there andbeing in danger.

(40:43):
You know? But then I I think Imentioned I I didn't do anything
with nanny because I wasn'tquite sure how to slot it into
that, but the employer's housein nanny is very much that sort
of dangerous space. It's veryclearly defined as that sort of
dangerous space. And I didn'ttalk about his house, but the
entire setting is basically thehorror and danger of it. And the
white social workers who keepneeding to come into the house

(41:06):
are themselves like this sort ofmajor threat and what sets off
all of their, I think, traumareally in that film.

Yeah. I know. It's just such a brilliant
needed intervention, and all ofthose do that in such different
ways. You know? There's just,like, endless room for expansion
of the genre, it feels like.
You mentioned the role of copsin new black horror, as in
Candyman and Get Out. How docops figure in these films, and
how do they tie into the notionthat the neighborhood hates you?

Right. So for the filmmakers, this is all post
Black Lives Matter. We've gotthe immediate reference to
Trayvon Martin in the opening ofGet Out, and it just builds from
there through these films.There's a strong, I would say,
Afro pessimist current that runsthrough, especially Jordan
Peele's films and the films thathe's connected to. The way that
I'm reading this in relationshipto uneven development is that
the police are the shock troopsof capital.

(41:56):
They define who gets to be whereand whether you should be there
or not. And we see this over andover again, in terms of they're
literally policing space. Theystop Chris as he's going into
the white suburbs. They show upat the end, and you you don't
even have to have the theoriginal ending of Get Out to
get the implication of thepolice lights showing up when
he's in the road. In Candyman,it's the same issue.

(42:18):
We have the police heavily,present in Cabrini Green because
they want to seize that land andgentrify it. They weren't there
when they might have actuallybeen needed. So that's a
persistent feature, and it's aninteresting way that the
politics and social analysis ofthe creators, I don't wanna say
completely reinforces the kindof reading I'm making, but it's

(42:39):
not antithetical to it. I thinkwhat makes Peele unique is that
he started in comedy and thatthe structure of horror and
comedy are so closely related.They're strongly formal.
They have to follow a certainform and understand the form in
order to have their effects.Right? But they also need to
have some kind of comment orconnection to the broader world
in order to have impact. I'mtrying to think of what the most

(43:00):
famous Key and Peele thing mightbe, and it'd be something like
the Obama anger translator. Itconnected to something that was
very obvious to people and thencould land as a joke, they could
use it over and over again.
In the same way, I think that hesort of understands that you
need to have a strong contextand connection to what's
happening in the world, but alsoa clear sense of form to make

(43:20):
that context land meaningfullyand then an orchestration of it
so that it has a proper effect.To my mind, that's why he's been
so successful is a strongunderstanding of the form and
the need to connect thingsformally in that way. It's
different than what we see otherpeople doing. And even if you
pardon me, wants to just talkabout Sinners for a while, but,
like, Sinners is not a horrorfilm in some ways. Right?

(43:42):
It's not organized in a astandard horror film narrative
structure. It fits into it insome ways, but it's not
orchestrated in the same way.And that's really interesting to
me. It's doing something else,and it's aiming for something
else, I think.

Yeah. No. Peel's stuff is so deliberately
shaped, and that's why his Nopeis really interesting because
he's such a master of form. Andthen he's able to riff on the
form because he just has all thebeats so, like, completely
structured in this way.

I could suddenly make a make a Spielberg movie
Yes. Out of a horror movie.Right?

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Because he's just so
steeped in genre in thisbrilliant way. Just as an aside,
I noticed that in this, theneighborhood hates you and other
chapters, you find the termelevated horror useful as a
category.
So I was wondering how youthought the term helps us think
about new horror and what youthought about criticisms that it
may create, like, elitisthierarchies within the genre.

Yeah. I I mean, I used elevated horror because
that's a term that people have,but I think of it as a term that
is going to keep changing overtime. At this point, I see
people online using elevatedhorror to describe very
specifically Babadook stylefilms. Take any real element,
make it into a metaphor forgrief, riff on it from there.
But my use of it was much morefocused on the idea of a

(44:59):
production cycle that'sessentially, I think, started
with The Babadook or maybe alittle bit before, depending on
how you wanna think about whogot funding.
The success of The Babadook, TheWitch, Hereditary, that those
started a particular productioncycle of art horror films that
were aimed for a broaderaudience and that were
specifically positioned in themarket to be not gross horror.

(45:22):
Right? That there was a way thatand it it's not about my
assertion that that there's goodand bad horror, but that the the
marketing was this wasrespectable and that respectable
audiences could go and see it.And it's not like, you know,
you're going to watch zombie.There's no sense that you're
appealing to people who aregonna go see a Folchie film when
you are going to see hereditary.
You're not expecting to getgross out horror in that way

(45:43):
from an elevated horror film. Ithink you had a question here
about the substance. And, like,I think that's why why people,
like, really freaked out aboutcertain parts of the substance
because it's done in a veryformal way. We've got those
very, very structured framings,the way it starts, the way it
ends. Even the shots inside theapartment are highly formalist
that give you a sense of, thisis art horror.
This is real cinema. And thensuddenly, it's just excreting

(46:06):
body parts and shooting bloodeverywhere, and people don't
know what to make of that. Andyou're like, that's part of the
genre. Like, no. No.
That's that's not my genre. I'mI'm here for an art film that
makes special social commentaryon things I care about. You're
like, yeah. And it's it's ahorror film. So that, I think,
is important to see is how thethat sort of production cycle

(46:27):
moved and changed, and then whatwe're seeing is new sort of
subgenres or or genres asthey're coming out.
Right? So new black horrordoesn't exist without the
elevated cycle. Right? Peel, Ithink, gets, in some ways, a
bump out of the success of thoseother horror movies, but then
creates this new thing that isnow autonomous in its own way,
and people look at it in its ownway. Same the same sense of,
like, the Babadook has movedthrough that and now given us a

(46:49):
lot of films of a similar style,but we're getting all these
kinds of offshoots and subgenresthat are coming out of what
would have been that productioncycle in the twenty tens.

Totally. My friend and I have been thinking
about this, and it's sort ofinteresting how it started out
also, like, lot of them hadthese kind of political
allegories that were prettyimportant to a lot of us. You
know, I definitely have mostlyhave written about a lot of
these films because they're sopoliticized, but they're sort of
like the cycle kind of hasgotten exhausted and devolved in
certain ways into this justbrand of a set of vibes in

(47:21):
certain ways. And so we'rebrainstorming, writing something
about this, and we just saw theThunderbolts trailer has this
thing trying to advertise it asa A24 movie, which is just like
really. It's kind of like it'snow quantified and marketed in

(47:42):
this particular way.
That's sort of aside, but it's aMarxist issue, I think, in in an
interesting way. But thesubstance really pushed back on
that, I think. And that's likeyou say, that's why it hit
people where it hurts. So I Ireally like that. So I really
like your point in your nextchapter, commodities hate you,
that pushes against the ideathat all culture is commodified

(48:03):
and thus, for Marxist, hasnothing to say.
At one point in grad school, Ibecame kind of frustrated with
this reading of Guy Debord'sSociety of the Spectacle that
flattened, like, culture, allculture into ideology. But you
make the point that horror is aform of culture that satirizes
popular culture and thepassivity that DeBoer analyzes.
So if mass culture is the commonsense of capitalism, then

(48:25):
cultural analysis and satirecould help us understand and
criticize commodification. Whydo you think horror in
particular is a genre that haspurchase on this common sense?
Is there an example of a filmthat specifically targets mass
culture that you can think of?
And I guess I keep asking thesame question about why this
genre, but it's just endlesslyfascinating to me.

So, like, this is the the chapter where I think I
talk about the cult film themost. Right? And it's I think
it's really helpful to thinkabout horror's relationship to
the cult film because it doesappeal to us and to an audience
that is distinct or separatedfrom mass culture in a way. And
so one of the things I find mostfrustrating about not just this
deboard, but also adorno esquereadings of of culture is that

(49:07):
question of, like, where do westand? Right?
Well, can we stand outside andlook? And you're like, well, I
mean, I'm standing right here. Idon't know. What do you want?
That you're inside and outside,and that the cult film really
understands that.
And in some ways, that can be toits detriment. Right? I mean,
that's one of the reasons whysome cult films are just Gonzo
weirdness, and the the wholepoint of that is to make you
feel like, well, this isdifferent and therefore not,

(49:29):
what other people will like. Butwhen we see the sort of long
history of horror, especiallyRomero's Night of the Living
Dead, as appealing to us for itsoppositional nature that it at
least gave creators a place tomake somewhat oppositional art.
Whether it was fullyoppositional or not doesn't
really matter.
It's that it was able to standoutside enough to say, right,

(49:52):
not this. Even if it knows thatit's also that too. I mean,
Demons knows what it is. It'smaking fun of the response to
horror film as somehow going todegrade and turn you into
monsters. It never thinks thatyou're going to watch the movie
and then get scared because I'mgonna become a demon too.
Whereas the ring, that's thewhole point. You're probably,

(50:12):
oh, maybe maybe it'stransmedial. Maybe it'll get me.
But there's no payoff in that.It says, look.
Dumb people think you're gonnawatch this movie and then start
wandering around like a zombie.It understands that that's your
relationship to it. And so Ithink horror, especially that
kind of horror, is important forthinking about how it can be
oppositional. And it's a kindthat I think, especially with,

(50:33):
like, the elevated art horrorstuff, often doesn't show up.
Right?
You watch an Eggers film, and hedoesn't care about that. He's
not gonna do anything like that.But if you you know, the
substance is gonna give ussomething like that. And so
seeing where those kinds oftransitions between older forms
of horror is kind of is is funright now.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It made me think of, you
know, all the films that kindahave a fun horror satire of
somebody watching a horror film.And even, like, Gremlins does
this.
It's like so it can be kind of alow culture too.

I I've been trying to get my my nine year old to
watch Gremlins. He's not willingto do it yet. I mean, that's the
end of murder party too is, youknow, he's he's gone through
some sort of horrific murderparty, and then he comes home
and to relax, he turns on ahorror film. Right? It's it's a
it's a persistent feature of thecomedic satirical comedy horror.
Yeah.

Yeah. Definitely. I watched that movie
because of your book, and I wasso glad I did. It was really
funny.

That's a good one. Yeah.

So just because I know we're getting a
little bit towards the end, wecan go to the last chapter. I
just wanted to say, of course,as a feminist horror scholar, I
was drawn to your chapter, thefamily hates you, where you work
with family abolition theoristswhose writing I really admire,
such as Sophie Lewis, EmmyO'Brien, and Kathy Weeks. You
can tell even from the name thatfamily abolition is going to be

(51:56):
a really controversial concept.So can you say a little about
why that category is useful toyou and and maybe why it's
controversial?

Yeah. I mean, I always think about Sophie Lewis'
sort of throwaway line, abolishthe family? What the fuck?
Right? And that's very much thebut but the the reason it
matters is it that the nuclearfamily for capitalism is a way
of appropriating care.
Right? It's a way of cutting offhow care gets not just made, but
but circulated, like, who whoyou get to care for and why. So

(52:27):
as a Marxist, to think throughwhat a better world would look
like, it would have to involvenot having privatized care, not
making the family the structurethat is where care exists. The
basis of it, I think, reallycomes down to that somewhat old
timey idea of the public andprivate spheres. Right?
That there's a sphere that isfor care and that's outside the

(52:47):
world of business and a sphereof business. And the very idea
that those things could beseparated in that way is why you
need to abolish the family.That's I mean, that's that's the
the basis for me, and it's thereason why I I used it
throughout the book.

Yeah. It's a really important category for me
too. And it's just like thefears around it. It's just like,
oh, you know, in capitalism, thefamily is the last bastion of
intimacy and care and privacyand all these things. But that
comes with so many strings,right?
Like, you can only have this ifyou play your proper role in the
family. You can only have thisif, you know, you live by your

(53:25):
parents' values. So if you'relike a queer kid, you you don't
get that family care. Or or ifyou don't have a romantic
relationship, you know, youdon't get that care. So that's
really with Sophie and Emmy andKathy, all their work is to kind
of show that exclusiveness thatthey want more care, not less,
you know, kind of thing.
Exactly. And I think a lot ofthe films that you look at I

(53:47):
mean, I was thinking we couldtalk about hereditary a little
bit in that regard since it'ssomething that we both write
about. So why would that in thatchapter, why do you think that
film is a example of familyabolition? And could you talk
specifically also, I loved thisidea, I didn't think about it
before, of the cults inHereditary and other horror
films as a concept that youfound important in this chapter.

There's a lot about cults in this, mostly
because I found that every timeI was looking at a horror film
about the family, there werecults. Just far more cults than
you would expect. And myargument is that the cult is a
kind of bizarro capitalistversion of the family. Right?
It's the public sphere made intoa family.
It predates upon people. And thereason why I thought Hereditary

(54:33):
fit best into this chapter wasbecause of the way that the
family is wholly structured byoutside forces. Right? We the
the beginning of the film isanother one of those things
where I wish I had moreopportunity to teach horror
films because I think if I showthis to my students just
offhand, they would freak thehell out. But that opening scene

(54:56):
when we you know, he does thislong push in onto a doll's
house, which is one of Annie'sminiatures, and then it becomes,
Peter and his father, Steven,getting ready for the morning.
You know, how do people makesense of that shot when they
first see the movie? Right? Itonly makes sense when you get to
the end and you've got anothersort of paired shot it comes out
and it's again in a sort ofdiorama. And you realize, oh,

(55:20):
okay. Well, they've been usedlike dolls and manipulated by
the cult the whole time.
They're not the family is aconstruction of the cult. It's
not something that is natural tothem. And that's that to me is
why it was was a a good fit forfamily abolition because once
you see the family as aconstruction that's meant to do
something for somebody else, notfor you. Right? We always think

(55:41):
of the families are the the waythat we get care.
But you're like, well, what ifthat structure is really about
doing something for someone elseand isn't really about our care
at all? That suddenly shifts howyou think about the family
entirely. And the cult needsthat family because it wants to
take their bodies and use themfor their their own purposes. So
it it draws all those sort ofcomponents together. But, yeah,

(56:01):
I would be curious, like I mean,I I had one great semester when
I taught Psycho, and I had onestudent who absolutely did not
see it coming, and she screamedat the top of her lungs.
I was just never seen anythinglike that. I'm like so so being
able to ask them, like, did younotice the opening of the film?
And I think they just would not.You just zone out and let it go
and say, like, oh, that was afun little shot. Sure.

(56:23):
It doesn't mean anything. Andthen you realize, oh, this is
this is the structure of thefilm.

Yeah. And, like, the way that the cult of
the family is serving capital,if that's like the cult leaders,
it externalizes all the carethat it should pay for, right?
That it should support onto thefamily and then blames the
family for failing when it can'treproduce itself. And somehow
we're supposed to, like you weresaying before, find the family

(56:50):
so meaningful that we can't seeall that externalization of care
by the state or by the forms of,you know, the bosses who profit
from the family's unpaid labor,right? Like that that is made
invisible by that familyidealization kind of thing.
So all these moments of, like,in hereditary, I'm talking about
screaming at the top of herlens, Tony Collette's, like non

(57:13):
naturalist kind of ways ofscreaming and kind of showing
her agony, like in ways that arejust beyond any kind of realism,
like denaturalize that familycare in really interesting ways,
I thought.

It it makes the the family into more constructed
roles. Right? And you see themas variations of her miniatures.
But also, I think it lets us seethat you have real experiences
inside that constructed role.Right?
So it's not like you aren'texperiencing care or love inside

(57:47):
some of these relationships ifyou have access to them, but
that it doesn't change theconstructedness of it or the
fact that that constructednessof it is destructive to you. And
that's that's the part that Ithink family abolition gets at
very well, which is, sure, if ifyou if it works for you and you
feel like you're getting all thecare you need, that doesn't mean

(58:08):
that it's not cutting you offfrom other forms of care. It
means that you're trapped insidethis little space, this little
dollhouse.

Yeah. And I think it makes sense what you
were saying earlier that youstarted with Lauren Berlant as
thinking about this because thethe idea of cruel optimism is
really woven throughout yourwhole book of just, you know,
the thing that makes you able tolive is also killing you. That's
like only the horror genre couldreally show that duality of

(58:38):
experience. Right?

Yeah. I mean, because she she does it so well
with the Dardenne brothers. Eventhere when she's talking about
and I love the Dardenne's, butshe has to put them into genre
context to make it sensible. Andyou're like, well, okay. So the
genre really does matter for howwe understand our experience of
that cruel optimism.

So at one point, you make a distinction
between current and older horrorfilms concerning the family
that, in earlier cycles, thefamily terrifies because someone
can't perform their familialrole. Films like Psycho, The Bad
Seed, Carrie, and The Shiningare cautionary tales of bad
children, bad mothers, and badfathers. In elevated family

(59:20):
horror, the family's terrorscome not from the failures of
individual family members tofulfill their roles, but from
the family's patriarchal andheterosexual norms. And I just
was wondering if you couldelaborate that a little bit,
what a particular contrast mightbe between an older and a newer
film.

Alright. Let me try to do this with The Shining
and Hereditary. Maybe it'llwork. But, I mean, The Shining
is Jack's just an assholefather. Right?
That's his deal. And I I thinkthat's and that's also and
that's this is the Kubrick film.Right? And this is one of the
reasons why King hated the film.Because in the book, Jack is a a
caring father who's possessed byhis alcoholism, and he's
conflicted and all of thesethings.

(59:59):
And in in Kubrick's film, he'sjust a dick. He's a dick who
wants to drink. And so hisinability to act in a caring
role is really the crux of thewhole film. And you so his his
and his dissolution and violencejust express what kind of person
he is and his inability to be afather. Right?

(01:00:20):
Whereas in hereditary, no one isstruggling against a defined
role, I don't think. Right? Theroles are there, and the roles
are destructive purely becausethey are roles. Right? Tony
Colette, as the mother, isdestroyed by what the

(01:00:41):
expectations of motherhood anddaughterhood are in that plot.
The same way that Peter is, Ithink, sort of really destroyed
by his sense of hisresponsibilities to his sister
and to his parents. Like,everyone is psychically and
physically attacked by the rolesthat they have in the family.
And that's not the same thing asbeing unable to be a good

(01:01:02):
mother. Right? And I it'sinteresting that when I think
about some of the ways thatnewspaper reviews would write
about hereditary, we often oftenabout, like, well, is she can
she feel like a good mother andso on and so forth?
That's I don't think is reallythe issue in that film at all.
It's that the the family itselfis the problem and not whether
the individuals in the familyare a problem.

Johanna Isaacson (01:01:24):
Yeah. That's such a great distinction. I love
that because you're meant to,like, be afraid of Jack in The
Shining, but you're meant to beafraid of your own inability to
perform in hereditary. Like,very much in and and and, all
the characters have learned thelessons of like second wave

(01:01:44):
feminism, like, you know, Anniehas a job, her husband is
sensitive and a psychologist andis like trying to be very
caring. And even thougheverybody's learned all those
lessons, they still can't do it,you know.

Joshua Gooch (01:01:58):
And the way that Astra does it by saturating the
whole frame with possiblethreat. Right? So, like,
eventually moving Annie into thebackground and having her run
around. Let me tell you, I Ican't get a good shot of that to
save my life off of a screencapture. But it makes it clear
that, like, the enclosure of thefamily is actually like, it's
the enclosure of the frame andthat sense of the structure
itself being trapped and anddemobilizing because you're in

(01:02:20):
the family, not because you'renot able to be the right kind of
family member.

Yeah. I love that. And the use of melodrama
too, of, like, thatclaustrophobia that felt in
melodrama is really interesting.So your final chapter has the
title Feelings Hate You andconcerns therapeutic narratives
and horror. And as I was saying,this was really helpful to me
because I'm working on somethingrelated.
But, I thought in this regard,it would be interesting for us

(01:02:48):
to talk about the Babadook. Soin my book, I read the ending of
that film in light of the familyabolition argument that you made
in your previous chapter. Inthat context, I thought the
sustained presence of theBabadook was the acknowledgment
of ambivalence and fear towardsmotherhood. But I found your
perspective on the film equallyconvincing where you read the
ending as a form of capitalistrealism, a sort of valorization

(01:03:12):
of therapeutic narrativizing andthe management of what Sian
Nagai calls ugly feelings. Sowas wondering if you could say a
little bit about your reading ofThe Babadook and how it
exemplifies your argument inthat chapter.

So, I mean, I think your reading of the film
is entirely right for the film.What I wound up doing was trying
to think about it as a film in alarger cycle, and it's in the
larger cycle that it becomesreally weird. Jennifer Kent is
making that argument, and it'sdrawing on a host of of feminist
theory and history. But that itprovides us with a particular

(01:03:46):
kind of narrative form that alot of people have now turned
into, or, you know, use a fancyMarxist term reified. Right?
Like, it's become this sort ofnarrative form that people can
now just pick up and use willynilly and often unrelated to
feminist concerns. Right? Youcan see it's it's grounded in
ideas from the women's film andfrom melodrama, but it's it's

(01:04:08):
now disconnected from it. Andthat that idea is that the
Babadook gives us that abilityto say, look, we've got an ear
real element. Right?
The Babadook. It gives us a away of metaphorizing a
particular set of feelings andthen of by by making them
physical, giving you somethingto then struggle against and

(01:04:29):
overcome. And then you can tellthe story of your overcoming of
your bad feelings or learning tomanage your bad feelings, and
this becomes a a lovely sort ofnarrative arc. And it's
something that's threadedthroughout twenty first century
self help. So I really drew on alot of scholarship about self
help and the way that thatparticular way of telling a

(01:04:51):
story, which I think is not Idon't think that's what Kent's
going for, but it it gave ussomething that resonated with
other things in our culture thatthen became very useful for
filmmakers, both because TheBabadook succeeded financially
and because it's a it's areadily replicated kind of
story.
And so then it becomes thiscycle of therapeutic horror

(01:05:13):
where people confront their badfeelings, they overcome them.
And I yeah, I they're notthey're not terribly interesting
in some ways. And so I reallywas trying to deal with the fact
that there's this there's a lotof them. And they're not all
bad, but they are all kind ofthe same. And after you've seen
a couple, you start thinking,oh, is this so is that the oh,

(01:05:34):
it's a metaphor for grief.
Okay. You can see how that goes.Okay.

Yeah. Almost every film that comes out seems
to be doing that. Even filmslike they'll have really
interesting, like, visualthings, but we were thinking
about, like, long legs andcuckoo. They're good, but they
just like, what do they add upto other than ex expelling grief
or working through grief, yeah,in this way? You know?
At least with Babadook, shebrings in all these social

(01:06:01):
questions, you know? But thethose, like, kind of seem to
exclude, you know, thosequestions in a way.

I've been trying to figure out what to do with
Perkins films, and my best guessat this point would be a highly
personal reading about hisrelationship to his father.
Like, I mean, everything else iskind of they really resist a lot
of that kind of reading for thatreason, and then they just rely
on this pretty paltry sense ofof trauma or remediation of
trauma.

Yeah. And I love that you ended up thinking
about that in some ways, eventhose films that are
depoliticized, if we kind ofbring Marxism to them, we can
still find really interestingways to look at that symptomatic
city. Right. You know, of justlike because that that itself is
a feature of capitalistideology. Right.
Of, like, the trauma narrativein an interesting way.

Yeah. The way I talk about it is managing your
feelings. Right? And so, like,this idea of, well, we can now
see what our bad feelings are,and then we can learn to manage
them. And this is kind of a Iwanna say it's a trick, but it
was my attempt to deal with thefact that people keep talking
about horror as therapy.
If we now have a very explicitlytherapeutic take on what horror
narrative could be, and ifpeople read it that way, if they

(01:07:10):
experience it that way, and thestorytellers are telling you
that this is what the story'sabout, well, at that stage,
gotta say, why are you doingthat? It doesn't it doesn't make
a lot of sense that everyoneneeds this many trauma
narratives. But I think it makesa lot of sense if you say, well,
the the world we live in isreally depressing, and it's
unpleasant, and we need some wayto learn to manage that. Okay.
Well, let's let's try this.
We'll say this is a good way tolearn to manage how bad you

(01:07:32):
feel.

Yeah. Almost propaganda. And it's sort of
interesting because I was just,like, looking at the history of
trauma therapy, and it's justsomething that starts out very
politicized with, like, women'sconsciousness raising groups or
Vietnam veterans working throughPTSD that was very linked to,
like, political things thathappened to them. And then it
just goes into, like, the Oprahtalk show circuit. You know?

(01:07:57):
Just, like, working out a wayto, yeah, like, externalize and
individualize feelings anddetach them from their political
sort of collective origins. Ithink we're getting close again,
but my last ish question wasthat you looked at we're all
going to the world's fair inthis light as a critical
purchase rather than going deepinto therapeutic narrative. So I

(01:08:20):
was wondering if you coulddescribe a little bit about the
critical work that that film isdoing.

Yeah, this is probably my favorite film in the
book. And it's critical work isthat it takes the idea that
horror can be therapeutic andthen just attacks it from every
conceivable angle. So we've gotour main character who is
depressed and looking for socialconnection, starting trying to
play this horror game online,which she's hoping is going to

(01:08:48):
change her life and make her newfriends and give her social
connection. And instead, it justgives her access to a lot of
ugly negative feelings, exposesher to some potentially
dangerous people and reallyleaves everything unresolved.
Right?
It she gets to see what's badand then can't deal with it. You

(01:09:13):
just confront it. You're like,oh, that is a problem. What I
liked about it is that it leavesso much undecided and it keeps
forcing us to say, how do wewant to interpret this? Why do
we want to interpret it thatway?
And what does that mean abouthow we expect the narrative and
horror? What do we think it'sgoing to give us? Right? It's

(01:09:34):
like it holds out this hope ofprocessing or solving an issue
when instead it lets us see theissue, but it leaves us entirely
to our own devices to decidewhat we're gonna do about it.
And that's what I like about itas a film.
Right? Instead of saying, hey,we got through the badness. Look
at that. We've learned to manageit. It's like, no.

(01:09:56):
This sucks. You're gonna have todo something about it. I had
finished the book before, I Sawthe TV Glow came out. But when I
got back the page proofs, I hadto put in a little bit about it
because it really does sort ofdraw this film together for me.
Right?
It's very much, I think, a transnarrative in that way in that it
says, you know, fiction offerssome kinds of fulfillment. It

(01:10:20):
lets us see things that wedidn't know we could do or be,
but it's not the solution. Youcan't live inside the fiction.
The fiction isn't reality foryou. And so if you want to live,
you have to step outside thefiction.
And and that's what I reallylove about the film.

Oh, I so agree with you. And I just think,
yeah, both of those films usedimpressionistic kind of horror
tropes and evocativeness to letus, yeah, explore those problems
without telling us andoverexplaining, which was one of
the things I really didn't likeabout the new Nosferatu. There
was just so much overexplainingand slotting you into one

(01:10:59):
particular narrative way, whichalways ends up being those
trauma narratives because thoseare the those are our given
narratives. Right? So just justby not overexplaining, film can
do incredibly much moreinteresting work.
Yeah.

I feel like you could probably tie
overexplaining to long sequenceshots in Hollywood film. Because
the moment you watch just thefirst five minutes of Nosferatu,
I thought, oh, shit. This isgonna be terrible. Like,
suddenly, the camera's movingeverywhere. We're in and I this
is my my horrible past as aVictorianist.
I just looked at the costumesite. This is in 1890. Oh, no.

(01:11:34):
This is eighteen thirties. Whatare you guys doing?
And it was all downhill fromthere.

I would be curious what you're working on
now.

Yeah. Right now, I've got a couple of sort of
horror projects percolating, andone of them is about regional
horror. And so the idea was tolook at how horror captures in
profilmic spaces politicaleconomic changes. And my my
focus was the place where I grewup. I'm from Sonoma County.

(01:12:05):
There's a far too long history.You go all the way back to
Hitchcock filming in Santa Rosa,and then I wrapped up with
Scream. Probably could have gonefurther. But you can get a sense
of, like, this shift from arural regional economy that's
very much focused on marketproduce and to a a highly
gentrified white culture that'sbuilt around tourism and wine

(01:12:28):
and and how those thingsintersect with the ways that you
the kinds of stories that horrortold for those spaces. And it
was always fun to kind of findthe weird intermediate points.
Right? So, like, Cujo is shot inthat area. Yeah. I mean, get
interesting sort of sort ofcontext for how those those
things worked. It was fun forme, at least.
The problem was I realized thatthere is not a lot of great

(01:12:51):
regional history about thedifferent parts of California.
So you're just going through alot of California history and
trying to dig up little parts.And then the other piece I'm
working on right now, which isprobably more likely to be
finished, is a book oncontemporary multicultural
popular horror. So working onwriters like Stephen Kramm

(01:13:12):
Jones, Celine Moreno Garcia,Victor Laval. And so so thinking
about the kinds of questionsthat have come up in the book
and thinking about howspecifically writers are dealing
with the same kinds of concerns,but and this is the the sort of
key difference.
I'm I'm still futzing with it,but trying to make connections

(01:13:36):
between film adaptations andfilm narratives and the ways
that people are telling stories.Right? Like how literature moves
into film and back again asopposed to thinking about like,
okay, adaptation. And again, tooliterary in my my my starting

(01:13:56):
point, but we almost always getbook, film, book, film. And with
these, it's very clear that filmis part of the culture, and you
have to know these films inorder for them to make sense.
You can't read Stephen GrahamJones if you don't know
slashers. Yeah. You'll be you'llbe very angry if you do. I don't
know. So it's more moreinteresting to think about,

(01:14:16):
like, how horror is atransmedial genre, and that's
sort of what I'm thinking of forfor the the next book project.
What are you working on?

That's awesome. Well, I just finished a
book on whatever happened tobaby Jane and thinking about the
sort of psycho bitty genre andsort of feminism and aging,
especially it ended up weirdlybecoming a kind of manifesto on
what it's like to get old as aGen X person and how the gender
non essentialism and the rage inthose films, in baby Jane

(01:14:49):
especially, has been kind ofadapted by queer people and be
kind of taken back in a similarway by aging women. So that was
a fun project. And then I'mright now actually working on a
book on Sisters by DiPalma forthis series called Time Codes,
where you write a chapter forevery minute of the film. It's

(01:15:09):
not very short chapters, but,it's also a fun kind of
experimental project andthinking about feminism and the
complex relationship of feminismto DiPalma sisters in this way.

That's great.

Well, it was so great to chat with you and I
love the book. So thank you somuch for reaching out to me to
do this. This is It

was wonderful, and it's a pleasure to meet you.
Thanks a lot. All right. Thankyou.

Narrator (01:15:35):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book CapitalismHates You, Marxism against a New
Horror Film by Joshua Gooch isavailable from University of
Minnesota Press. Thank you forlistening.

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