The Desire of Horror – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Desire of Horror

Charla Ferguson and Martin Essig

Tv & Film

Religion & Spirituality

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/11d. Total Eps: 43

Charla's love of horror movies combine with Marty's love of psychoanalysis and history of religions. This is a review and analysis of horror movies and what they say about desire.

You can purchase a t-shirt here: http://tee.pub/lic/tN64T8XLATU

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Data updated on 02/09/2026

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The Serpent and the Rainbow: More Harm than Good?

Season 3 · Episode 43

Wednesday, September 2, 2026 • Duration 54:05

In a political environment in which racial and cultural stereotypes have been weaponized against our Haitian brothers and sisters, this movie hits a little different. However, it provides a good talking point about how Haiti is imagined in the US. Wes Craven's "The Serpent and the Rainbow," based on the book of the same name by "Wade Davis," hits on two of any of our worse fears, one, being buried alive, and two, losing control over our own bodies. Zombies have long been a metaphor for involuntary servitude, which had its worst expression in chattel slavery, so it is no wonder that Zombies are so closely associated with Haiti and its origins in the domination of the French plantation system over the lives of enslaved Africans. Voodoo is an African derived religion that can both liberate and/or captivate its adherents. It is paradoxically both a symbol of freedom in the Haitian revolution as well as of control from an outside force.

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True Detective S.1, E.4: What would you risk to stab at the Beast himself?

Season 3 · Episode 42

Thursday, August 27, 2026 • Duration 35:08

Rust shows that he's wiling to sacrifice just about anything to get at Reggie Ledoux, including putting his life and the lives of others at great risk. Worth it?

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38. The Evil Dead: Watch Out for Demons!

Season 3 · Episode 41

Monday, August 17, 2026 • Duration 50:45

Watch out for Demons! Nobody knows what they'll do if they get ahold of you or your magical books made out of human skin and written in blood. Demons seem to enjoy racing through the woods in frantic POV tracking shots, and then smashing into Michigan State undergraduates on a wild-party vacation in rundown cabins in the utterly desolate Tennessee backwoods. Demons love to possess people and make them do stupid things with makeup, writing implements, and reel to reel tape recorders because they never seem to realize that if you just let folks alone, they'll debase themselves without any supernatural assistance. Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead" seemed to scratch an itch that emerged around the late 70s / early 80s horror community for extended, slapstick battles between humans and occult forces, and Ashley "Ash" Williams (Bruce Campbell) is the all time champ!

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True Detective season 1, episode 3: Freedom from Sin, Freedom from Self

Season 3 · Episode 40

Wednesday, August 12, 2026 • Duration 37:47

Two types of freedom are on display in this Episode of True Detective, and they may be related. Is the sense of having a self an illusory torture better ended sooner rather than later? Is it the sense of having a self that causes us to fall into sin, or put another way, do we sin because we want to defend the self and acquire what it desires? What if there is no sin in the pursuit of the ultimate end, which is to end life, and thus end the illusion of the self? What is freedom if life is a "flat circle" destined to repeat itself time and again for all of eternity? If there was an escape from this bad infinity, and if there was, wouldn't whatever it takes to get free of it be justified?

This episode is full of moral turpitude and some small gestures of forgiveness, full of the illusions of the false self, but is there actually a true self free of this fallen material world? Or is there nothing behind all of the masks?

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37. The Omen 1976: Why Would the Devil Want a Son?

Season 3 · Episode 39

Tuesday, August 4, 2026 • Duration 01:01:28

In the book of Revelations it is suggested that the Devil rules of the Earth, but only for a time. Revelations is about the overthrow of the rulership of Roman authorities, coded by its anti-Roman writer, John of Patmos, as "Babylon." The infamous number "666" refers specifically to the Roman Emperor Nero, who was a particularly ignominious figure to some early Christian communities, but the idea of Nero's return after his suicide to take back the emperorship comes from the Fifth Sibylline Oracle, which John of Patmos was riffing off in his vision of an evil ruler's return from the sea and subsequent, temporary, earthly reign. However, if Satan had read the apocalypse of John carefully, which one assumes he did, given that Satan is able to quote scriptures so well, Satan would have quickly realized that things don't end great for him. It's difficult to understand why the Devil would be so keen on accelerating the end times since John of Patmos clearly indicates that the Devil gets his ass kicked. Maybe, the Antichrist thinks that the part of John's vision in which he comes from the sea and causes a bunch of mayhem was accurate, but that he could somehow escape the ass-kicking part by having a son who will some day become the president of the United States, as Damien aspires to do. Let's see if we can follow the logic of this 1976, Satanic classic.

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True Detective Season 1, Episode 2: Would We Have Been Better Off not to Have Been Born?

Season 3 · Episode 38

Monday, July 27, 2026 • Duration 34:10

In as much as we are "thrown" into the circumstances of our existence, as Heidegger famously put it, we don't seem to have a lot of choice in the matter, or in the facticity of our determinate being. Yet, according to "Death of God" theologian Paul Tillich, it takes a certain amount of "courage to be." For Tillich this courage counts as freely chosen even though the rest of being has already been determined by the situation into which we have been thrown. Meaninglessness and death seem to follow more obviously from our unnatural awareness of the evil state of affairs in which conscious being finds itself. Rust Cole famously asserts along with Sophocles that, "It would have been better not to have been born." Nietzsche's famous counter argument is contained in his "Doctrine of the Eternal Return," which is read pessimistically in True Detective as the "Flat Circle." Nietzsche taught like Tillich that our freedom is found in the choice of whether or not to embrace the determinations of our given being or to passively fall into nihilism. For these thinkers being required an active, creative resist to meaningless, which is why "to-be" was an act of intense courage. Cole's "Antinatalism" holds that life is not good, and so the promise of the flat circle is the torture of an eternal return of what is essentially evil.

https://youtu.be/XgU1RmNNsZg

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36. The Exorcist: Is the Desire of Horror Despair?

Season 3 · Episode 37

Monday, July 20, 2026 • Duration 01:29:50

Caution: In this episode we discussion both the physical and sexual violence of the movie.

The "Problem of Evil," which is the irresolvable contradiction between an all-loving, all-powerful God and the suffering of innocence, is what causes most of those who leave Christianity to leave it. Maybe a close second is the general disenchantment that came with the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment. William Peter Blatty took on both scientism and hopelessness in his novel and screen play of the Exorcist. Who is the Devil and why does he desire our despair? There are so many reasons to lose faith that it doesn't seem that there's much more for the Devil to do. If hope is the department of religion, then how do the religious keep it? Let's discuss.

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True Detective Season 1, Episode 1: Nihilism, Satanism, or Something Else?

Season 3 · Episode 36

Tuesday, July 14, 2026 • Duration 28:27

In True detective Season 1, Episode 1, Nic Pizzolatto, introduces his main themes and the sources of those ideas. The "Cosmic Horror" of HP Lovecraft is central, especially a troupe that Lovecraft borrowed from Robert Chamber's "The King in Yellow (1895)," in which a play containing forbidden knowledge drives any who makes it past the second act mad. The content of this maddening, esoteric information is never reveled to the readers of Cosmic Horror as a rule, presumably because it would drive them mad too, or possibly because it can't be put into words, but only gestured at, as Lovecraft often did with his bizarre concoctions of incomprehensible but weirdly thrilling analogies and mixed up metaphors containing multiple, usually unrelated animal, insect, elemental, and eidetic regions and portions, similes which hid as much as they revealed. Episode 1 is titled "The Long Bright Dark," which is a reference to the radiant or "supersaturated" darkness at the heart of both the alchemical "nigredo" and the beatific vision of Christian esotericism, particularly as articulated by the father of Christian Mysticism, Pseudo-Dionysuis, whose dark vision of Plotinus's "One" formed the paradox of twice negated nothingness that the Christian Mystic Meister Eckhart taught about when he preached that God revealed Himself by hiding more deeply in his infinite depths. The great apocalypse of Cosmic Horror is nothing, as is that of Christian mysticism, but the devil is in the details. Let's follow Pizzolatto's theology to see if it winds up in the ultimate meaninglessness of the absolute nil or in the mystical nothingingness of the love the grounds being unconditionally.

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35. The Devil Rides Out

Season 3 · Episode 35

Wednesday, July 8, 2026 • Duration 01:08:33

How much of the Occult is there in the classic 1968 "The Devil Rides Out?" The film was directed by Terence Fisher and the screenplay, based on the Dennis Wheatley novel of the same name was written by Richard Matheson. The film depicts a secret coven of multi-ethnic practitioners of the dark arts, and one curiously knowledgable English aristocrat, the Duke de Richeau played by Christopher Lee, who is trying to thwart them. Occult practices have a long history going back at least 11,500 years to ancient Mesopotamia in the West, but modern esotericism involves a heady combination of Greek Magical papyri, mystery cults, Egyptology, Sumerian cuneiform, Hermes Trismegistus, numerology, holy symmetry, alchemy, Angelology, Demonology, mysticism and much more. Let's take a look at the movie that set the template for some of the Occult classics that followed in the late 60's and 70's.

https://youtu.be/PntMFVOh_9g

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34. Nature Horror Wrap-Up

Season 2 · Episode 34

Wednesday, June 24, 2026 • Duration 01:49:33

https://youtu.be/y_J-6TTdtzg

Alright! It's the season 2 wrapt up! We covered nature horror this season. The main theme of nature horror is Human Being's alienation from the natural world. Human Beings are biologically a part of nature but distanced from it by the our specialized uses of language, especially the uses of language that allow for symbolic behavior and for the hypothetical speculations of the subjunctive, which allow us access to the virtual probability spaces of the imaginal. This season we covered, The Birds, Jaws, Arachnophobia, Tremors, Gremlins, Anaconda, Deep Blue Sea, Lake Placid, Cabin Fever, The Descent, The Happening, The Ruins, Frozen, Outbreak, The Bay, Annihilation, Out of Darkness, and Grizzly Man. Each of these movies has its unique take on our precarious relation to the natural world from which we come. Come join us as we consider each of these works.

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The Desire of Horror – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Desire of Horror – Details, episodes & analysis

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