Friends,
The aesthetics of horror, at least in the US, have traditionally overlapped with heavy metal and death metal music. You know what I mean here: dark-clad figures and crazed clowns, bats, black clouds, and thorn-branched fonts. Sometimes they even share imagery, like the band Obituary’s cover for their Cause of Death album and a book of short stories by HP Lovecraft (painted by artist of the fantastique, Michael Whelan).

I love horror with these aesthetics - but I’m glad another form seems to have opened up too. Sometime in the past 30 years, the horror trope of the final girl - the last surviving character of a horror novel or movie - began to highlight not the scariness of the monster, but the resilience of the monster’s victims.

The trope of the final girl insists on survival in the face of a world of danger. Often dangers that were at first hard to believe, hard to convince people of, and those included (until the final girl became a thing in horror) the expectations and beliefs of the audience.

For me, the final girl shows a shift of footing for horror as metal - immersion in the spectacle of the grotesque and dramatic - to punk: determination to fight back and connect with a force of will that was always there but not always expressed.

Punk rock is more than just survival, however. Its starting point is a knowingness that things are not okay. Punk is music with lyrics about the state of the world, and it has a sound that reveals a world that looks and feels differently than the one we’re told to accept.

It’s also the antithesis to the time spent in so many horror movies, where characters must spend inordinate amounts of time convincing each other that a threat exists. Punk already knows there's a problem. By the time you get to the show or play the record, you’re in the observation and receiving the sounds of the community, the solution, the alternate reality that we know can exist.

In a horror movie, there's the monster monster, and there's the monster of people who refuse to believe what is apparent, obvious. The final girl and punk decides to live against both adversaries.

So now that the final girl has created a sort of bridge for us from what I’ll call metal horror to punk rock horror, who is developing punk horror? Who's pushing it forward?

On this episode - the final in this year’s horror upon horror series, I’ll be talking with an author who does just that about a film that does the same.

KEITH ROSSON is the author of eight books so far, including Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, and his masterwork, Coffin Moon which is one of the most compelling novels I've ever read. What a huge surprise for a vampire novel! It is a swift, unstoppable thing. His most recent novel, Crone is about a girl that disappears and a correlating sightings of a strange and threatening witch-like being.

Keith and I talk about punk rock and horror and then move into a conversation about Jeremy Saulnier's 2015 punk rock slasher horror film GREEN ROOM, in which a punk band pisses off a bunch of murderous neo-Nazis and has to figure out how to escape disastrous and confining circumstances.

Punk rock and horror are two of my favorite genres of art - and this episode is my first comingling of the two - I’m so excited to share it with you

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Six authors. Four horror movies. Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib

This is HORROR UPON HORROR

On these episodes, we'll be thinking through the creation, reading, and viewing of the most vital and visceral art: Horror, and I'll be doing it with the frightening luminaries of the genre. People who are unafraid to endure the horrific imagination, and able to bring it to you.

On this first episode, I’ll be talking about nostalgia in horror with authors Nathan Ballingrud and Sarah Maria Griffin and then we'll move onto our discussion of the amoebic violent power of Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of The Blob.

Unlike other monsters, the blob has no direction, no real personality. It doesn’t want anything. It’s not even hungry; hunger would imply some sort of desire or longing. Instead, it’s drawn to whatever is close and warm, drawn to incorporate it, to grow with the heat of flesh, bone, and blood.

As it gets bigger, it needs more heat, more blood, to keep going.

This is Horror upon Horror. The blob. A form older than vampires but newer in consciousness. It’s outside of time. It’s what was in the microscope made large, larger, until it envelops everything in its path with crushing pressure and dissolving acidity.

The blob is the pure inertia of motion.

NATHAN BALLINGRUD has also been on the show before, last time talking with me and Sara Gran on AEWCH 233 about cruelty in horror. His book of short stories, North American Lake Monsters is one of my very favorite horror collections. And his trilogy of retro future horror, The Lunar Gothic trilogy, begins with the utterly hideous (in the best way possible), The Crypt of the Moon Spider.

SARAH MARIA GRIFFIN⁠ is the author of the psychic vampire botany horror novel, ⁠Eat the Ones You Love⁠, and most recently ⁠Strange Is the Light⁠. Sarah has been on the show many times (her latest until now was ⁠AEWCH 252 ⁠where we talked about working as writers) and does an annual tarot reading event for patreon patrons.

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AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 326: FELIX JOHN TAYLOR on THE LIGHT OF THE HERMETIC ORDER OF THE GOLDEN DAWN

The first time I heard about the Golden Dawn, I was in high school. I was gay, Syrian, reading all the time, shunning sports. My town was filled with neo-Nzis and fundamentalists, celebrated stupidity and football players.

I wanted to feel something like power in a disempowering place, so I went to Brentano’s and found the most startling magic book there. On its cover was a person drawing a pentagram of crackling blue light with a wand. In it, instructions on making magical tools and spellcasting. And in its title, the word magick was written with a K. In contrast to the hell of school, the book represented an academy of magic. I found there allusions to The Golden Dawn, a group from almost a century prior, with secrets of not just power, but antiquity and the cosmos.

But they also seemed rigid, too elaborate and hierarchical. Plus I didn't like their most infamous member, Aleister Crowley, so I turned away from them. As I deepened my interests in occultism into adulthood, my pursuit of esoteric christianity, particularly the work of Rudolf Steiner, I steered clear.

I've become more sympathetic over time to the Golden Dawn. That doesn't mean I'm going to wade into their rituals, but that a real re-assessment has occurred. So this episodes’s guest, librarian and scholar FELIX JOHN TAYLOR ’s beautiful book, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Magic Arts and the Occult Revival was a great find for me. In it, he gives a portrait of the Golden Dawn through its key members and its art. A picture emerges of not just a magickal group, but an art and social movement, working to redefine morality for the sake of inclusiveness and creativity. After all, Crowley fell in love with a drag queen at a gay bar in 1897. Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter influenced the group. So did Steiner, for that matter! W.B. Yeats brought his Golden Dawn work to revitalize Irish identity.

I’m so happy you’ll be joining me and Felix John Taylor in this reappraisal.

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Friends, I've been doing this podcast for over eight years and one thing I've noticed since the beginning: guests always want to talk about spirituality. I know, I know, it's self-selecting. I'M the one who wants to talk about it. Sure, that's true. But also, everyone is EXCITED to discuss it when I bring it up. It's like it's on the tip of everyone's tongues and has been for a decade. Now, it's starting to be fully pronounced, like a spell shouted into the air.

I’m sure you’ve seen it too: whether it’s the convergence of witchcraft and feminism, the popularization of political wellness which has ritual components, the appearance of crystals in the Los Angeles mayoral race, the conspiratorial intimations about black magick during lockdowns... People have been trying to interpret the world through a spiritual lens that religion doesn't seem up to - but the political realm has so overwhelmed people’s perceptions that instead of being TRANSFORMED by spiritual encounter, they're merely grafting it onto already-established, politicized worldviews.

This includes political pundits and secularized media ridiculing spiritual perspectives as a distraction from their failure to scrutinize 60 hour work weeks, economic bamboozling, or outdated attitudes about gender.

I've done my best to mediate this, because I could see it all coming (not bragging, promise, you can hear me discuss it on early episodes!). I’ve tried to occupy a sort of cultural position that was largely held in the past by de-witchers, fairy doctors, alchemical scientists and more, people who separated what's true and false when it came to spiritual paths, critiques, and pursuits. They constituted a whole classes of laborers people largely disappeared by the materialist, academic, and professional world.

But we can’t wait any longer, we need experts in this field. An expert I trust and appreciate so deeply on these matters is Thomas Waters, lecturer in history at Imperial College London (and AEWCH 98 guest)

So we talk together about magick’s role today, and the new magickal realm we find ourselves in.

I’m so excited to share this episode with you.

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buy Magick: Decoding the Visual Culture of Spells, Illusions and Psychic Powers by Thomas Waters from an indie bookshop

buy Cursed BritainA History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times by Thomas Waters from an indie bookshop

I talk with intellectual historian, A.J.A. WOODS , author of the excellent and very readable The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West on to the show to discuss all this.

In their book, A.J.A. traces the great movement of blaming everything good and bad - from trans liberation to sexual abuse, from religious plurality to totalizing Satanism, from fighting state violence to supporting gulags - on something called cultural Marxism.

If it sounds incoherent, that’s because coherence is not really the point. The illusion of coherence is. And the illusion is created by noise and density.

I have my own shaky relationship to the Frankfurt School, and I'm so happy to share this exploration with you in hopes that it will inspire you to rethink and/or revisit these philosophers.

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Friends, “The hour is late. It is time for unwanted guests to leave.”
That's a line from this episode's guest, MITCH HOROWITZ, in his latest book, Esoterika: Formulas Against the False Self.

The book as I see it, is a book of ethics. And its central question is: how do you navigate who you are and what your ethics are when you touch the continuously transformative fires of spiritual pursuits?

In that sense, it is a book for anyone exploring their spirituality.

In it, Mitch traces his own inner (and outer) conflicts with spiritual maxims. Particular to Mitch is the conundrum of: How do I get what I want, yet retain my integrity? What do I do when there's a conflict? And where does magic come in?

This is a great discussion and one where we navigate our own tensions of belief and disbelief; will and surrender.

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