Horror Joy

In this episode of Horror Joy, Brian and Jeff examine Zach Cregger’s 2022 film Barbarian as a haunted house story without the supernatural, arguing the “haunting” comes from misogyny, capitalism, and systemic failure embedded in an Airbnb in decayed Detroit.
They outline the film’s triptych structure—Tess’s uneasy stay with Keith, AJ’s arrival as the absentee landlord facing rape allegations, and an ’80s flashback revealing Frank as the house’s original torturer—framing these men as escalating forms of masculinity.
The discussion connects hidden basement tunnels to epistemic tension and genre concepts like the Terrible Place, monstrous feminine, and Final Girl, noting failures of policing and protection, and interpreting the title Barbarian as critique of domestic invasion and violence.

Brian and Jeff interview horror author Rachel Harrison (The Return, Such Sharp Teeth, So Thirsty, Black Sheep) about the relationship between horror and joy, her writing origin story, and her novel Play Nice.
Harrison describes horror’s joy as catharsis and a safe space for fear, anxiety, and “big feelings,” offering empowerment through survival and, as a writer, control.
She recounts studying screenwriting, moving from LA to New York, working TV jobs, writing short speculative fiction (Bad Dolls), and publishing The Return in 2020.
She discusses finding community—especially through Clay McLeod Chapman and Nat Cassidy—during lockdown and navigating “cafeteria anxiety.” On haunted houses, she emphasizes home as supposed safety, and explores tropes of women not being believed, gaslighting, and emotional abuse, including Play Nice’s book-within-a-book framing.
She previews Kiss, Slay, Replay (Sept. 8), recommends Liz Kerin’s How to Disappear Completely, and praises the Netflix series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.

Jeff and Brian continue their Horror Joy exploration of haunted houses by discussing the 1982 classic Poltergeist.
They ask whether the film functions as a conservative celebration of the nuclear family's resilience or a quasi-Marxist critique of capitalism, unbridled consumerism, and television's pernicious influence on youth.
They discuss the housing development's erasure of history by building over a cemetery without moving the bodies, highlight the implications of downward mobility during the Reagan era, and explore Douglas Keller's scholarship on the film deflecting attention from real-world suffering onto occult figures.
They emphasize the isolating nature of suburban homogeneity and consider the film's messy narrative and contested authorship between Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper.

In this episode of Horror Joy, Jeff talks with author Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold, about the relationship between horror and joy
Sullivan links the joy of horror to subverted expectations, catharsis, and the generative possibilities of horror, especially in books, where meaning is co-created with readers and not all answers need be provided.
Sullivan discusses how his Irish Catholic upbringing functions as an enduring identity that shapes his sense of mystery, belief systems, and worldbuilding, including fragility, debate, and misinterpretation as story engines.
He describes his beginnings as a writer through libraries, early storytelling inspired by Jurassic Park, reading widely, manual labor jobs, and later mentorship in a graduate program with author Miriam Toews.
The conversation turns to The Marigold’s Toronto setting, ecological crisis and wildfires, urban wildlife like raccoons, and the novel’s critique of capitalism, corporate greed, and gig-economy precarity.

Jeff and Brian begin a Horror Joy mini-series on haunted and haunting houses by discussing Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining and the Overlook Hotel as a possibly sentient space.
They ask whether the hotel merely contains ghosts or actively amplifies violence, racism, sexism, and repetition.
They critique the “Indian burial ground” trope, discuss Grady’s claims that Jack has “always been” the caretaker, the final photograph’s time-loop implications, and scholarship on hereditary or cyclical violence.
They emphasize the film’s maze motifs (hedge maze, carpets, corridors) and consider the steadicam and “autonomous camera” as intensifying dread, while noting Dick Hallorann’s disposability and ending with “joy” found in the film’s craft and unsettling images.

References:
Graham Allen. ‘A Mad Image, Chafed by Reality’: Kubrick, the Uncanny and the 4th of July 1921 Photograph in The Shining
F. Brigo & S. C. Igwe & N. L. Bragazzi. Kubrick’s The Shining and the erased myopathic face
Laura Mee. The Shining. Liverpool University Press, 2017
Paul Sunderland. The Autonomous Camera in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining