From Get Out to The Babadook to Saint Maud: In his new book, Josh Gooch uses the horror film genre to expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism, drawing connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease. Here, Gooch is joined in conversation with Jo Isaacson. This episode contains spoilers for multiple films (list below).
Joshua Gooch is professor of English at D’Youville University in Buffalo, New York. He is author of Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film; Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity and The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy.
Johanna Isaacson is professor of English at Modesto Junior College and author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror.
EPISODE REFERENCES:
Sianne Ngai
Michael Löwy / “critical irrealism”
Linda Williams on Psycho, essay in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook
Søren Mau
Nancy Fraser
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
Silvia Federici
Amitav Ghosh
Kim Stanley Robinson
Jason W. Moore
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Sophie Lewis
M. E. O’Brien
Kathi Weeks
Lauren Berlant
FILMS DISCUSSED:
Psycho
Dracula
Nosferatu
Candyman
Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell
Joe Lynch’s Mayhem
Robert Eggers’s The Witch
Gillian Wallace Horvat’s I Blame Society
Rose Glass’s Saint Maud
Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook
Ari Aster’s Hereditary
Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Jordan Peele’s Get Out
Jordan Peele’s Us
Mariame Diallo’s Master
Tim Story’s The Blackening
Timothy Covell’s Blood Conscious
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
Lamberti Bava’s Demons
The Ring
Jeremy Saulnier’s Murder Party
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
Praise for the book:
"Fiercely smart." —Annie McClanahan, author of Dead Pledges
"This is a book not just for fans of horror but for everyone interested in the ways films embed and communicate values, judgments, and affects." —Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, author of Gothic Things
Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film by Joshua Gooch is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.