Hey, everyone, I’m thelitcritguy. I co-host the horror movie podcast Horror Vanguard, have been a regular guest on Revolutionary Left Radio, and make Youtube videos on culture and aesthetics. I write on horror, capitalism, and cultural criticism (you can read my last piece here https://readpassage.com/the-horror-of-capitalism-squid-game-and-the-gothic-trap-of-debt/)
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Alright, folks, we are at 3 hours and we are going to wrap it up. Thank you to everyone that participated. <3
First off, thank you for being here today! One of the first episodes from RevLeft that I heard was your interview on Gothic Marxism and it opened up a new worldview for me.
If I may ask, what got you into gothic horror and how did you come into radical politics?
Radical politics – a key moment was Occupy! – it retrospect there’s a lot to critique around Occupy (ready Jodi Dean lmao) but the response from the police was a big moment. There were also protests around ten years back in the UK when tuition fees were increased and watching people I know get kettled and charged by police was a radicalizing moment.
Spooky stuff: I remember talking to Andy Sharp (the writer behind the English heretic project) who said that we didn’t get into horror because we wanted to do in-depth political discourse but because horror is cool. I remember watching Alien when I was a teenager, but I’ve been into the dark and macabre for as long as I can remember.
I think a lot about capitalism as cosmic horror and about how just a glimpse of the true shape of this globe spanning monstrosity drives people insane (e.g. Qanon). Are there any anti-capitalist cosmic horror works you would recommend?
I mean, just read Lovecraft obviously, but from a theoretical perspective, you should absolutely read Eugene Thacker’s In The Dust of This Planet, and whilst not being explicitly about cosmic horror Mark Steven’s Splatter Capital is exceptionally useful for theorizing anti-capitalist horror criticism. Beyond that, read Lovecraft and read Lovecraft against himself (also check out his letters to see how he changed his political views pretty drastically)
I’ve read a fair bit of lovecraft including his letter where he talks about understanding the mind of reactionaries having been one himself, definitely a weird dude but not quite the caricature that he often gets portrayed as.
In The Dust of This Planet sounds really cool and I’m definitely gonna check that out that sounds like exactly the sort of concept I was grasping at.
In many ways, Lovecraft stories are about semantic collapse. Everything slips into being indescribable even as we can’t help but try and explain what we are seeing. I guess you need to read Lovecraft against the grain (he’s not inherent leftist obviously) but in the age of the internet, when consciousness can become global and language is something that seems exhausted, why wouldn’t we all be turning into the protagonists of a Lovecraft story, babbling away to ourselves
I’m also thinking Thomas Ligotti’s “The Conspiracy Against The Human Race”, which is not primarily anticapitalist, but gives a very good account of the psychology of cosmic horror. I’ll have to check out " In The Dust Of This Planet"
It’s because horror is extremely good at affective intensity. On HV we say all the time that ‘horror wants to do things to your body’ and a lot of horror’s impact comes from the fact it can in a way bypass the rational part of our mind and evoke those deeper reactions that are physical as much as mental. We might know there’s nothing in the house, but if we have been made into what horror academics call corporeal viewers then those feelings don’t disappear quickly…
