Horror Joy

From a parking lot outside an AMC in Central Pennsylvania, Brian reflects on seeing Brian Duffield’s film adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s Whalefall and traces how a lifelong fascination with deep-water horror, rooted in thalassophobia and shaped by Lovecraft, weird fiction, and eco-weird environmental philosophy, helped inspire the Horror Joy podcast.
Whalefall is a survival and ocean horror fused with family drama with a son, who is grieving a tense relationship with his deceased father, dives for his remains and is swallowed by a whale, forcing a largely silent, claustrophobic struggle for oxygen and escape amid flashbacks and emotional reckoning.
Highlights: Austin Abrams’s performance, the feat of shooting a compelling film that takes place inside of a whale, and a clear ecological perspective.

Brian and Jeff interview USA Today bestselling author Luke Dumas about horror’s link to joy, his path into the genre, and his novel Nothing Tastes as Good.
Dumas describes early horror influences with his father, writing seriously since high school, and how Edinburgh inspired his first horror novel.
In discussing Nothing Tastes as Good, he cites Stephen King’s Thinner, his experience growing up fat, and the fatphobic cultural discourse around GLP-1 drugs as key inspirations, aiming to depict the systemic horror of living in a fatphobic society.
He addresses weaponized “health” language, gym shame, social media’s superficial acceptance, and autobiographical family dynamics.
Dumas critiques unfaithful casting in new Carrie adaptations, previews his 2027 zoo-set thriller We Don’t Call Them Cages, and recommends the film Obsession for its emotional, tragic horror.
Find more from Luke here: https://www.lukedumas.com/
Check out our previous Meet Your Maker episode with Briana N. Cox, author of Indigent
Spotify
Apple Podcast
And Check out our ongoing Series on Witches
The Witch (Eggers 2015)
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (Ovredal, 2016)
Spotify
Apple Podcasts

From an AMC parking lot in Central Pennsylvania, Brian offers an immediate take on Other Mommy (a James Wan-produced Blumhouse/Atomic Monster film, retitled from Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House) with mixed expectations due to the cast (Jessica Chastain, Jay Duplass, and child actor Arabella Clarke) and skepticism toward Blumhouse style.
Brian praises the acting—especially Clarke’s balance of innocence and fear and Chastain’s multiple character work—but argues that the film becomes a jump-scare mechanism that breaks suspension of disbelief, particularly in act two, as parents repeatedly leave a threatened child alone.
While the first act’s setup and monster intrigue work, the mythology feels mishandled, the characters’ “conversion” to the supernatural happens too early, and by the third act the monster and logic feel silly; they also note an “icky” use of Dichen Lachman and faint anti-abortion undertones, though a ball-pit sequence effectively taps parental anxiety.

Check out our other Fresh Cut Episodes wherever you get podcasts
Resident Evil
Resident Evil (Stale Slice Edition)
Backrooms

***WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD***
Brian and Jeff cut deep into the 2016 film The Autopsy of Jane Doe as part of their witch-themed Horror Joy series.
Set almost entirely in a Virginia morgue, the film follows father-son coroners Tommy (Brian Cox) and Austin Tilden (Emile Hirsch) as an unidentified, externally pristine corpse becomes a mystery that unravels through forensic clues, escalating eerie events, and a reversal of the “mad scientist” trope as rational method fails.
The hosts read the film through themes of women’s bodies as objects, inside/outside violence, sexual abuse and persecution, the male gaze, and revenge, suggesting Jane Doe becomes what society projected onto her through torture.
They examine the morgue as a gothic, possessed space, question why Emma dies, and analyze the film’s turn to Leviticus 20:27 and problematic Bible translation/authority.
They end by praising the minimalist “mystery box” structure, performances (including Olwen Kelly), and rewatch value.
Come for the horror, stay for the joy!

Brian reunites with author Brianna N. Cox to discuss her March release, Indigent, after earlier conversations about Sinners and Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory.
Cox frames horror as a genre of empathy and connection that makes taboo fears communal and cathartic, and she compares horror and romance as “go big or go home” forms driven by intense emotion and physicality.
She explains Indigent as a “worm vampire” novel that invokes vampire tropes without explicit vampirism, using cannibalistic, vampire-adjacent monsters to explore consumption, addiction, and late-stage capitalism among impoverished characters.
The title references “medically indigent” patients and foregrounds U.S. healthcare trauma and distrust across a diverse ensemble cast.
Cox argues horror is inherently political, shaped by social anxieties, and discusses double standards around AI controversies.
She highlights BIPOC Vampire Day charity work and notes Indigent’s dual-narrated audiobook release in October via Simon & Schuster.
Briana N. Cox
Briana on Threads