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 the anomalous, the luminous, and the numinous.
Episodes
Episode 214 – Fortune's Fools: On Gordon White's Philosophy of Fortune-Telling
It was with heavy hearts that Phil and JF learned of Gordon White's passing. Gordon was a force to be reckoned with: as an author and podcaster on all things occult, he offered unique perspectives and provocative interpretations at every turn. In this episode, your hosts discuss Gordon's thoughts on divination—or fortune-telling, as he preferred to call it...
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Episode 213 – Comics, Surf Rock, and the Weirdness of Time: On Tom Manning's 'Eric'
Tom Manning's 2018 graphic novel Eric is that rarest of gems: the self-published masterpiece. Available only on the author's website, it's the story of a washed-up surf rocker who stumbles into a cosmic conspiracy involving elite cultists, post-apocalyptic cowboys, renegade magicians, and three-eyed djinn. In this episode, Manning's work serves as a shining example of what makes comics such a uni
Episode 212 – Beyond Music and Back Again: On Glenn Gould
The pianist, composer and sound artist Glenn Gould once wrote: "Art on its loftiest mission is scarcely human at all." What becomes of art and humanity when they are allowed to vary independently of one another? Which serves which, and to what end? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Glenn Gould's style and vision of music through the lens of François Girard's memorable 1993 film, Thirty-Two Shor
Episode 211 – You've Always Been the Caretaker: On Kubrick's 'The Shining'
In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Shining. That they are doing this eight years after starting the podcast is weird in itself, so fundamental is Kubrick's "chamber epic" to the modern weird in general, and the hosts' specific interests in particular. Well, as the Overlook Hotel's former caretaker Delbert Grady might put it, consider the s
Special Episode: M.C. Richards's "Wrestling with the Daimonic," read by Phil Ford
We regret that we were unable to release a new episode this week. Episode 211 will drop on Wednesday, April 29, and will be devoted to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a film we have long wanted to revisit in depth. In the meantime, we are pleased to offer Phil’s spirited reading of M. C. Richards’ essay “Wrestling with the Daimonic,” discussed in our previous episode and available only to Patreon m
Episode 210 – Angels & Daimons, with Cristina Campo and M.C. Richards
In this episode, JF and Phil bring together two visionary essays on the daimonic and the imaginal: Cristina Campo’s “On Fairy Tales” and M.C. Richards’s “Wrestling with the Daimonic.” What emerges is a conversation about imagination, personhood, and a world shot through with meaning. Notably, this episode opens with a discussion of what your hosts mean by "imaginal."
Phil’s reading of Richards’s
Episode 209 – At Home in the Labyrinth, with Murakami and Borges
In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Haruki Murakami’s “Cream,” from First Person Singular, alongside Jorge Luis Borges’s classic tale, “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Together, these two stories occasion a meditation on time, perplexity, and the strange possibility that meaning isn't found at the end of the maze, but discovered only in the course of wandering it.
Photo by DMzlC via Wikimedia Comm
Episode 208 – Unbridled Creation: On Kenneth Batcheldor's Theory of the Paranormal
Kenneth Batcheldor was a British clinical psychologist who, during the final two decades of his life, investigated the paranormal through direct experiments in table-turning. The final fruit of that work was an essay, compiled from Batcheldor’s notebooks by Patric Giesler, entitled “Notes on the Elusiveness Problem in Relation to a Radical View of Paranormality.” Published in the Journal of the Am
Episode 207 – Magic Mirror: On J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Fellowship of the Ring'
This is the first of three episodes on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to be released in the course of the next several months. Focusing here on The Fellowship of the Ring, our hosts discuss the first leg of Frodo's journey into darkness, paying special attention to Tolkien's prose style, his modernism, his commitment to a truly magical realism, and his penchant for the weird and the tragic
Episode 206 – On Ken Russell's 'Altered States': Live at Indiana University Bloomington
This episode was recorded before a live audience at Indiana University Cinema as part of Weird Academia, a series of events that brought much high strangeness to Bloomington, Indiana, in January 2026. The discussion followed a screening of Ken Russell’s 1980 cinematic fever dream, Altered States. In it, JF and Phil explore the weird intersection of mysticism, psychedelics, and institutional scienc
Episode 205 – Discipline and Delight: On the Hierophant Card in the Tarot
In this episode of Weird Studies, we turn to the fifth Major Arcanum, the Hierophant, symbolizing tradition, instruction, and the exoteric aspect of spiritual practice. Drawing on Meditations on the Tarot and other sources, we question the easy opposition between tradition and revolution, exploring instead how inherited forms can foster genuine inner growth, and how an interior revolutions may ren
Episode 204 – The Perilous Realm: J.R.R. Tolkien's 'On Fairy Stories'
For Tolkien, fairy stories are not stories about fairies, but stories that take place in Faerie. And in doing so, they make Faerie present. They are not escapist fantasies but disclosures of a real mode of being and invitations to live in that mode. In this episode, Phil and JF explore the great writer’s radical claims about the nature of story, life, and reality.
Upcoming Events
Erik Davis an
Holiday Bonus: Scavengers in the Ruins of Heaven
To tide us over as we prepare for a new season of Weird Studies, here is an "audio extra," originally recorded for our Patreon supporters, wherein we discuss imposter syndrome, the eternal inadequacy of the intellect, the perils of playing with swords, and the role of trust in
creation.
A new episode will drop on Wednesday, January 14th, 2026. Happy New Year to all.
To join our Patreon, go t
Episode 203 – Distant Early Warnings: A Return to Marshall McLuhan's 'Book of Probes'
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
Episode 202 – The Human is Two: On 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'
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
Episode 201 – On James Whale's 'Frankenstein' and 'Bride of Frankenstein,' with Peter Bebergal
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 touch
Halloween Special: A Reading of Arthur Machen's "The White People"
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
Episode 200 – On 'The Call of Cthulhu'
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 be
Episode 199 – On Michael Jackson, with Shannon Taggart
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
Episode 198 – Breaking the Frame: On the High Priestess in the Tarot
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.
Episode 197 - Sounding the Otherworld: On Bryn Chainey's 'Rabbit Trap'
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
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Mid-Break Bonus: On Trust
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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Episode 196 – Lost and Never Found: On 'The Blair Witch Project'
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
Episode 195 – On John Keel: Live at the Lily Dale Symposium, with Erik Davis
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
Episode 194: Animal Songs, with Meredith Michael
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
Episode 193: On Conversion, or Arousing the Bodhi-Mind
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
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Episode 192 - A Dream of Landscape: On Walking
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,
Special Episode: Theory, Philosophy, and Uranus
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 Weir
Special Episode: Myth, History, and Form
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 shap
Episode 191 — The Acid Queen, with Susannah Cahalan
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 Psyche
Episode 190 – Here Be Shrubs: On Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows'
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. Topi
Episode 189: Care of the Dead, with Jacob G. Foster
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
Episode 188: Pioneers of the Untimely: On the Hermit Card in the Tarot
In this continuation of their non-linear journey through the tarot, Phil and JF discuss the ninth Arcanum: the Hermit. Walking through darkness with his lantern and staff, the Hermit invites us to break from the collective and seek a direct relationship with the Real. This is the card of the seeker, the misfit, the sage, and the wanderer. As tends to happen in these tarot episodes, the hosts take
Episode 187: The Affirmation of Imagination: On John Crowley's 'Little, Big,' with Erik Davis
John Crowley’s Little, Big is, at once, a family saga, a fairy tale, an occult thriller, an idyll, a dystopia, as well as a meditation on myth and history, the real and the fantasy, memory and imagination. Little, Big is also a book that JF and Phil have been planning to discuss for as long as Weird Studies has existed. In this episode, they are joined by writer and scholar Erik Davis to explore t
Episode 186: Meeting at the Center: The Wedge, Part Two
In this episode, JF and Phil continue their conversation on the wedge, their figure for the epistemological divide between approaching reality from the heart and exploring it with the mind. As the discussion unfolds, the wedge begins to reveal itself not as a rigid binary but as a spectrum—one that stretches from ultimate thickness to ultimate thinness. Could thinking, then, may be the art of navi
Episode 185: Intuition and Reality: The Wedge, Part One
"The Wedge" is a key concept for Phil and JF. When exploring weird phenomena—from artworks to ghosts, and everything in between—one tends to emphasize one or the other "end" of the event. At the thin end of the Wedge, the focus is on subjective experience: how it felt, what it was like, and its personal significance. At the thick end, the emphasis shifts to what actually happened, independent of h
Special Release: Poltergeists, Fairies, Skeptics, and the Managerial Class
Due to scheduling conflicts and a series of unforeseen events, JF and Phil have had to push the release of the next official episode of Weird Studies back by one week. To tide you over, we're unlocking a bonus episode previously available only to our Patreon supporters. It serves as the perfect preface to Episode 184, which will be released on February 26, 2025. Apologies for the delay, and thanks
Episode 184: On David Lynch
David Lynch passed away on January 15th, 2025, leaving behind a body of work that reshaped the landscape of cinema and television. Few artists have delved as deeply into the strange, the beautiful, and the terrifying as Lynch, and few have had as profound an influence on Weird Studies. His films have long been a touchstone for JF and Phil's discussions on art, philosophy, and the nature of the wei
Episode 183: On Hermann Hesse's 'Siddhartha'
Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is one of the great novels of the twentieth century and a prime example of literature that transforms the deeply personal into something universal. For Phil and JF in this episode, the novel serves as the foundation for a discussion on spiritual journeying, the ideal of enlightenment, and the challenge of living in an ensouled universe.
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Episode 182: Providence of Evil: On Robert Eggers' 'Nosferatu'
In this episode, JF and Phil examine the myth of the vampire through the lens of Robert Eggers' latest film, Nosferatu, a reimagining of F. W. Murnau's German Expressionist masterpiece. Topics covered include the nature of vampires, the symbolism of evil, the implicit theology of Eggers' film (compared with that of Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula), the need for shadow work, as well as the power of
Holiday Bonus: Waiting for the Next Sentence
With the next flagship show set to drop on January 8, 2025, we thought we'd tide you over with this conversation on the art and craft and writing, originally recorded for Listener's Tier patrons on the Weird Studies Patreon.
To join our Patreon community, please visit www.patreon.com/weirdstudies.
To purchase tickets to Phil and JF's winter solstice celebration, happening on Weirdosphere on T
Episode 181: On 'The X Files,' with Meredith Michael
Chris Carter's The X-Files is weird on its face: a dramatic series that, from the start, presented itself as more than drama, an exploration of the reality of the paranormal using the tools of fiction, a fantasy posing as reality (or is it the other way around?). Strangely prescient, undeniably zany, and truly "hyperstitious," the series is likely to strike contemporary viewers as equal parts naiv
Episode 180: The Player: On the Magician Card in the Tarot
The Magician card likely graces more front covers of books on the tarot than any of the other major arcana. In many ways, it symbolizes the tarot itself, or the individual who has mastered the art of manipulating the cards to divine their meanings. Yet, the Magician is a profoundly ambiguous figure. From one perspective, he is the Magus, piercing through the illusions of ceaseless becoming to glim
Episode 179: The Final Frontier, with Lionel Snell
One of the great rewards of "weirding" the world is learning that boredom may be a kind of ethical transgression—the world is simply too strange to allow for it, and if you're bored, you're at least partly to blame. Few have put this notion to the test as rigorously as Lionel Snell, whose work as a magician celebrates the wonders of everyday events, from a walk in the park to a moment of car troub
Episode 178: Edge of Reality: On John Carpenter's 'In the Mouth of Madness'
Earlier this month, Phil and JF recorded a live episode at Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington following a screening of John Carpenter's film In the Mouth of Madness. Carpenter’s cult classic obliterates the boundary between reality and fiction, madness and revelation—an ideal subject for a Weird Studies conversation. In this episode, recorded before a live audience, the hosts explore the fil
Episode 177: Riddles in the Dark: On Fairy Tales, Interpretation, and 'Rapunzel'
Fairy tales are among the most familiar cultural objects, so familiar that we let our kids play with them unsupervised. At the same time, they are also the most mysterious of artifacts, their heimlich giving way to unheimlich as soon as we give them a closer look and ask ourselves what they are really about. Indeed, these imaginal nomads, which seem to evade all cultural and historical capture, ex
Episode 176: On Charles Burns' 'Black Hole' and the Medium of Comics
Comics, like cinema, is an eminently modern medium. And as with cinema, looking closely at it can swiftly acquaint us with the profound weirdness of modernity. Do that in the context of a discussion on Charles Burns' comic masterpiece Black Hole, and you're guaranteed a memorable Weird Studies episode. Black Hole was serialized over ten years beginning in 1995, and first released as a single volum
Mid-Break Bonus: The Quiet Earth
Every off-week, listeners who have chosen to support Weird Studies by joining our Patreon at the Listener's Tier get to enjoy a bonus episode. These episodes are different from the flagship show. Less formal and entirely improvised, they offer Phil and JF a different way of exploring the weird in art, philosophy and culture. To tide our listenership over until the next new episode drops on Septemb
Episode 175: Don't Look Now: Live at Lily Dale
Daphne du Maurier was a prolific English writer of novels, plays, and short stories resonant with what she termed "a sense of unreality." In this episode, JF and Phil discuss her great short story "Don't Look Now," which Nicholas Roeg famously adapted to the screen in 1973 in a film starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Recorded live at Shannon Taggart's Lily Dale Symposium on July 25th,
Episode 174: Magick and Enlightenment, with Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford
Phil and JF are joined by Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford – practicing magicians, podcasters, and co-authors of the newly released Baptist's Head Compendium: Magick as a Path to Enlightenment, a collection of essays and reports from their famous occult blog, The Baptist's Head. Duncan and Alan are accomplished practitioners with deep insights into the nature of magic(k). The conversation touches o
Episode 173: By Heart: On Memory, Poetry, and Form
In this computerized age, we tend to see memory as a purely cerebral faculty. To memorize is to store information away in the brain in such a way as to make it retrievable at a later time. But the old expression "knowing by heart" calls us to a stranger, more embodied and mysterious take on memory. In this episode, Phil and JF endeavour to recite two poems they've learned by heart, as a preamble
Episode 172: Head Over Heels: On the Hanged Man of the Tarot
The Hanged Man is arguably the most enigmatic card in the traditional tarot deck. Divested of any archetypal apparel – he is neither emperor nor fool, but just a man, who happens to be hanging – he gazes back at us with the look of one who harbors a secret. But what sort of secret? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the card that no less august a personage than A.E. Waite, co-creator of the clas
Episode 171: The Beauty and the Horror
This week on Weird Studies, Phil and JF explore the intersections of the beautiful and the terrible in art and literature. There is a conventional beauty that calms and placates, and there is a radical beauty which, taking horror’s pale-gloved hand, gives up all pretense to permanence and fixity and joins the danse macabre of our endless becoming. This episode is a preamble to a five-week course o
Episode 170: Art is Another Word for Truth: On Orson Welles's 'F for Fake'
Orson Welles made F for Fake in the early seventies, while still bobbing in the wake of a Pauline Kael essay accusing him of being cinema's greatest fraud. Ostensibly a documentary on the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving (a talented faker in his own right), the film blurs the line between fact and fiction in an effort to explore art's weird entanglement with illus
Episode 169: On Free Expression
The ongoing crackdown on protests at many American universities prompts a discussion on the politics, ethics, and metaphysics of free expression.
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Episode 168: Visions of the Wasteland: On George Miller's 'Mad Max' Films
There are artists who express the vision of a place, person, or thing so vividly and originally that it sets the bar for all future imaginings. With his four Mad Max films, this is what George Miller did with the image of the Wasteland. No one has been able to capture the stark, raw energy and chaotic beauty of a post-apocalyptic desert quite like Miller. His portrayal not only defines the aesthet
Episode 167: The Hand of Ithell, with Amy Hale
Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was a British painter, poet, and occultist, long identified as a pioneer of the Surrealist movement in the UK. While her work is increasingly recognized for its mystical themes and innovative use of automatic techniques, deeply influenced by her esoteric studies, it also inspired extensive research on its broader cultural and spiritual contexts. Amy Hale, an anthropolo
Episode 166: Make Believe: On the Power of Pretentiousness
In culture and the arts, labeling something you don't like (or don't understand) "pretentious" is the easy way out. It's a conversation killer, implying that any dialogue is pointless, and those who disagree are merely duped by what you've cleverly discerned as a charade. It's akin to cynically revealing that a magic show is all smoke and mirrors—as if creative vision doesn't necessitate a leap of
Episode 165: Tatters of the King: On Robert Chambers' 'The King in Yellow'
"Let the red dawn surmise / What we shall do, / When the blue starlight dies / And all is through." This short poem, an epigraph to "The Yellow Sign," arguably the most memorable tale in Robert W. Chambers' 1895 collection The King in Yellow, encapsulates in four brief lines the affect that drives cosmic horror: the fearful sense of imminent annihilation. In the four stories JF and Phil discuss in
Episode 164: Towards a Weird Materialism: On Expressionism in Cinema
What is expressionism? A school? A movement? A philosophy? At the end of this episode, Phil and JF agree that it is, above all, a sensibility, one that surfaces periodically in history, punctuating it with occasional bursts of frenetic colour and eruptions of light and shadow. Whenever it appears, expressionism challenges our tendency to divide the world up into neat quadrants: mind and matter, su
Episode 163: The Source of All Abysses: On the Devil Card in the Tarot
"The Devil's finest ruse," Baudelaire wrote, "is to persuade you that he doesn't exist." In this episode, JF and Phil peer through a buzzing haze of lies, illusions, and mirages, in hopes of catching a glimpse, however brief, of the figure standing at its center. With a focus on the fifteenth major arcanum of the tarot, they try to make sense of this archetype which feels, at once, remotely distan
Episode 162: The Incarnation of Meaning: Greenwich Village After the War
In this second of two episodes on "scenes," Phil and JF set their sights on Greenwich Village in the wake of the Second World War. Focusing on two works on the era – Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage and John Cassavetes' Shadows – the conversation further develops the mystique of urban scenes and explores the weirdness of cities. The city, long considered the human artifact par excellence, come
Episode 161: Scene of the Crime: On Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's 'From Hell'
Listener discretion advised: This episode delves into the disturbing details of the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and may not be suitable for all audiences.
Serialized from 1989 to 1996, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell was first released in a single volume in 1999, just as the world was groaning into the present century. This is an important detail, because according to th
Mid-Hiatus Bonus: On Horror and the Retail Experience
Every off-week, listeners who have chosen to support Weird Studies by joining our Patreon at the Listener's Tier get to enjoy a bonus episode. These episodes are different from the flagship show. Less formal and entirely improvised, they offer Phil and JF a different way of exploring the weird in art, philosophy and culture. To tide our listenership over until the next new episode drops on January
Episode 160: The Way of All Flesh: On John Carpenter's 'The Thing'
As a horror movie, John Carpenter's The Thing seems to have it all: amazing practical effects, body horror, psychological drama, Kurt Russell ... Indeed, there is only one element this movie lacks, and that is anything at all corresponding to the titular villain. There is no thing in The Thing! What we have instead is a process, a pattern, a way for which the term "thing" is as good as any other.
Episode 159: Three Songs, with Meredith Michael
Every once in a while, JF and Phil like to do a “song swap.” Each picks a song, and the ensuing conversation locates linkages and correspondences where none was previously thought to exist. In this episode, they are joined by the music scholar Meredith Michael – Weird Studies assistant, and co-host of Cosmophonia, a podcast about music and outer space – to discuss songs by Lili Boulanger, Vienna T
Episode 158: As Above, So Below: On Plato's 'Timaeus'
In this episode of Weird Studies, we delve into the mysterious depths of Plato's Timaeus, one of the foundational texts of our civilization. In his characteristic brilliance, Plato blends cosmology and metaphysics, anatomy and politics to tell a creation story that rivals the most fantastical mythologies, yet he does it while remaining grounded in a philosophical rigor that announces a radically n
Episode 157: Long Live the New Flesh: On David Cronenberg's 'Videodrome'
"Death to Videodrome! Long live the New Flesh!"
It was perhaps inevitable that the modern Weird, driven as it is to swallow all things, would sooner or later veer into the realm of political sloganeering without losing any of its unknowable essence. David Cronenberg's 1983 film Videodrome is more than a masterwork of body horror: it is a study in technopolitics, a meditation on the complex weave
Episode 156: The Only Possible End: On Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History'
There are works of weird fiction that dispense their strangeness so subtly that many readers never pick up on it, books that allow themselves to be pass for mundane, the better to haunt us after we put them down. Donna Tartt's debut novel The Secret History, published in 1992, is such a work. On the surface, it is a brilliant, yet completely naturalistic, telling of the lead-up and aftermath of a
Episode 155: Dispatches From the Inside: On Planet Weird's 'The Unbinding'
One of the most surprising aspects of paranormal experience is how often it takes on a storylike form, unfolding exactly as you would expect it to in, say, a Hollywood horror film. Viewers of Karl Pfeiffer's film The Unbinding will get a sense of this in the early sequences of Greg and Dana Newkirk's latest occult adventure. The haunting comes on strong and takes rather familiar forms. But the alm
Episode 154: Into the Night Land, with Erik Davis
William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land is without a doubt one of the weirdest entries in the annals of weird fiction. Set in the earth's distant future, after the sun has gone out and the planet has been cleaved in two by an unspecified disaster, a telepathic scientist dons his armour and weapons to brave the monster-haunted yet strangely monotonous wastes that engirdle the massive pyramid in which
Episode 153: Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot
Even learned commentators on the tarot are likely to point out at the fourteenth major arcana, Temperance, is a bit of a boring card. At least, it comes off as dull until you look at it closely, as JF and Phil do in this episode. What they find is that the Temperance card is actually a diagram, a kind of blueprint for a celestial machine that underlies human technology, beckoning us to restore eve
Summer Bonus #2: Art and AI
In this bonus episode, originally released on July 26th on the Weird Studies Patreon, Phil and JF explore a few ways in which artificial intelligence will impact the arts. The podcast returns with a new official episode on September 13th. Enjoy.
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Summer Bonus: On Affectation, with a Special Announcement
A bonus offering to break up the summer hiatus, this episode contains a conversation on the virtues of affectation originally available only to third- and fourth-tier members of the Weird Studies Patreon ("Putting on the Bow-Tie," Apr 5, 2023). The episode opens with a short piece on JF's upcoming Nura Learning course, Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, starting on September 12th. Enjoy.
Episode 152: The Science of Things Spiritual: Live in Lily Dale
On the last week of July, 2023, Phil and JF were delighted to speak at Shannon Taggart's Science of Things Spiritual Symposium in Lily Dale, the nerve centre of the Spiritualist movement. As speakers, your hosts were part of an inspiring lineup of scholars, artists, and researchers committed to exploring the borderlands of art, science, religion, and the paranormal. They also had the honour of lau
Episode 151: The Real and the Possible: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, with Jacob G. Foster
In The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson predicted the rise of a new form of knowledge building, a direly needed alternative to the Wissenshaft of standard science and scholarship. He called it Wissenskunst, "the play of knowledge in a world of serious data processors." Wissenskunst is pretty much what JF and Phil have been aspiring to do on Weird St
Episode 150: Sacramental Reality: On Arthur Machen's "A Fragment of Life"
"A Fragement of Life" opens with Mr. Darnell waking up from a dream and going down to breakfast, where it is described that "before he sat down to his fried bacon he kissed his wife seriously and dutifully." He then proceeds to take the tram to visit a friend, with whom he has a long and tedious conversation about plants, clothes, kids, and how best to spend ten pounds. The story continues on in t
Episode 149: Song Swap: On Judee Sill's 'The Kiss' and Wilco's 'Jesus, Etc.'
Occasionally, JF and Phil do a song swap. Each host chooses a song he loves and shares it with the other, and then they record an episode on it. This time, JF chose to discuss "Jesus, Etc." from Wilco's 2001 album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Phil picked Judee Sill's ethereal "The Kiss," from Heart Food (1973). It was in the zone of Time, in all its strangeness, that the two songs began to resonate
Episode 148: Mythos of the Moment: On 'Twin Peaks,' Season 3
David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks has been a touchstone of Weird Studies since the podcast's inception. Back in 2018, Phil and JF recorded Episode 1: Garmonbozia while still reeling from the series' third season, which aired on Showtime the year before. Now, in preparation for their upcoming course on Twin Peaks, they watched the third season again and recorded this episode. Their conversati
