Weird Studies
Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel host a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality." SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent passions. spectrevisionradio.com linktr.ee/spectrevisionsocial
Episodes
December 10, 2025 • 86 mins
Back in episode 112, Phil and JF devised a gimmick for a show: randomly select one of the many aphorisms in The Book of Probes, a compendium of Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic quips designed by David Carson, and see what happens. It proved lively enough that they’re trying it again nearly a hundred episodes later. The resulting conversation touches the weird across a range of themes: tourism, the two kinds of truth, advertising, Kubri...
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November 26, 2025 • 81 mins
In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic classic, the tale that conjured the fog-shrouded London hellscape that has haunted the modern imagination ever since. Though written as a quick “Christmas crawler” to earn a bit of money, the novella has exerted an incalculable influence on art and literature. It also proved strangely prophetic, anticipating Freud and others who would soon make the fragmentation o...
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November 12, 2025 • 70 mins
In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by independent scholar Peter Bebergal, author of Strange Frequencies, Season of the Witch, and other books on the intersections of culture, religion, and the occult. The topic is Frankenstein—not Guillermo del Toro's latest but James Whale's 1931 talkie along with its 1935 sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, both starring Boris Karloff. The conversation touches on Gnosticism, alchemy, modern t...
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October 31, 2025 • 99 mins
Originally released in 2018 but remixed for your listening pleasure, here's Phil reading Arthur Machen's classic weird tale, "The White People." Happy Halloween!
Machen's "The White People" was discussed all the way back in Weird Studies episode 3.
Earlier this week, JF and Phil joined Conner Habib on his podcast to talk all about horror. It was a great conversation and we hope you'll give it a listen.
Image: Photo of doll fr...
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October 29, 2025 • 87 mins
For their 200th episode, JF and Phil turn their attention to H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” a story foundational not only to modern horror fiction but to the very idea of the Weird. In revisiting this tale of forbidden knowledge and cosmic ambiguity, the hosts reflect on Weird Studies itself as a “slow piecing together of dissociated knowledge” that mirrors the work of Lovecraft’s own bewildered protagonists.
Image by ...
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October 15, 2025 • 75 mins
Photographer and paranormal researcher Shannon Taggart joins JF and Phil to explore the phenomenon that was Michael Jackson. One of the most brilliant and successful musicians of the modern era, Jackson was also a liminal figure sans pareil, a shapeshifter who defied the binary categories through which we order the human world. His art and persona together enacted a transformation that can only be called shamanic.
About Our Gues...
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October 1, 2025 • 79 mins
Since 2020, Phil and JF have been creating an on-again, off-again series on the major trumps, or "arcana," of the tarot. In this episode, they continue the series with a discussion of the second arcanum: the High Priestess, also known as la Papesse, the female pope. One of the most enigmatic and powerful cards in the deck, the High Priestess symbolizes duality, contemplation, and manifestation.
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September 17, 2025 • 70 mins
In a rare surfacing in the contemporary world, JF and Phil discuss a film that has just been released. Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap is psychological horror in the tradition of Repulsion, Jacob’s Ladder, and Angel Heart. But it is more: a metaphysical film exploring the mystery of sound and the Otherworld of Faerie—an excursion into that weird country, so deftly explored by Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, where wonder and terror...
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September 7, 2025 • 2 mins
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September 3, 2025 • 57 mins
We're breaking up our late-summer pause with an audio extra originally recorded for our Patreon supporters. This episode also includes an essay JF wrote on the philosophy of Henri Bergson. A whole course on Bergson's philosophy begins on Weirdosphere later this month.
Weird Studies will be back with a brand-new episode on September 17th.
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August 13, 2025 • 92 mins
Of all the flavors of horror, few are as dreadful as that of being lost in the wilderness. In this episode, JF and Phil revisit The Blair Witch Project, the classic 1999 found-footage film that inspired a thousand imitators. What makes this film so gripping, they argue, is the way it lingers over the subtle stages of disorientation in a hostile place, from blithe denial to devastating gnosis. The Blair Witch Project isn't a ghost s...
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August 6, 2025 • 111 mins
This marks the third year that Weird Studies is honoured to open the Lily Dale Symposium, organized each summer by photographer Shannon Taggart in the upstate New York community famed for its roots in Spiritualism. While J.F. wasn’t able to attend this year, Erik Davis joined Phil on stage for a conversation about the life and work of John Keel, the iconoclastic writer and investigator best known for The Mothman Prophecies. They we...
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July 23, 2025 • 83 mins
In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Meredith Michael—musicologist, podcaster, and Weird Studies production assistant—for a conversation about animal songs. The phrase is intentionally slippery. Are we talking about songs about animals, or songs by animals? Both, as it turns out. Beginning with three very different human compositions—The Beatles’ “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” Hovhaness’s And God...
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July 9, 2025 • 88 mins
How do you become religious? What is a conversion experience? Does it happen all at once or gradually? What's the point of religion, anyway? These are questions that JF (a Catholic) and Phil (a Zennist) have often been asked since starting Weird Studies, and in this episode they attempt some answers.
Image: "Small Candle Flame" by Le Priyavrat, via Wikimedia Commons
Sign up to attend Shannon Taggart's Lily Dale symposium, July 24...
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June 25, 2025 • 73 mins
Phil and JF first explored the mysteries of walking back in episode 59. That episode felt like a mere introduction—a tentative first step on a long and winding path. Now, 133 episodes later, they return to the theme as they prepare to lead a six-week course on the art of walking and its affinity with the Weird. This conversation touches on meditative walking, walking as dventure, psychogeography, wilderness mysticism, and more.
...
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June 18, 2025 • 62 mins
This conversation was originally recorded in August 2024 and released for our Patreon supporters. Weird Studies will be back with a new episode on June 25, 2025.
What is cultural theory? How is philosophy "a preparation for death?"
What sort of planet is Phil Ford from? These burning questions and more
find answers in this free-wheeling conversation, originally exclusive to members of the Weird Studies Patreon.
Learn more abo...
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June 4, 2025 • 46 mins
This special release is a Patreon extra we’re making available to all listeners, in lieu of the official episode originally scheduled for today. As explained in the introduction, we will be back with a full episode later in the month. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this conversation about how art transforms experience, making the mundane mythic, calling images out of the flux of life, and shaping what is in us to think, feel, a...
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May 21, 2025 • 88 mins
Best known as the wife and partner of Timothy Leary, Rosemary
Woodruff was in fact a central figure in the psychedelic movement in her own right—a political radical, underground fugitive, and neglected architect of the counterculture. In this episode, Phil and JF speak with journalist and author Susannah Cahalan about Woodruff Leary’s life and legacy. Cahalan’s new book, The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebel...
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May 7, 2025 • 75 mins
In this episode, JF and Phil paddle into the marshlands of Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 masterpiece The Willows, a tale Lovecraft once called the finest weird story of all time. They explore how a narrative in which almost nothing happens can conjure a cosmic dread more potent than a legion of monsters, and how Blackwood’s genius lies in revealing the spiritual
horror latent in landscape itself. Topics include zones, the limits of hum...
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April 23, 2025 • 95 mins
In this episode, JF and Phil are joined by Jacob G. Foster—sociologist, physicist, and researcher at Indiana University Bloomington and the Santa Fe Institute—for a conversation about their recent collaboration in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Their co-authored essay, “Care of the Dead,” explores how the dead continue to shape our cultures, languages, and ways of being. Together, they discuss t...
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