Horror Vanguard

Spooky Q&A Volume 1!

Thanks for asking all of those questions! Keep 'em coming! 

DIAL CODE SANTA CLAUS

Our new episode is now live! Let's all go watch the the totally serious Home Alone that came out a year before Home Alone. 

Ep 42 - Arcane Book Club of Horrors Monsters of the Market Chapter 3

We are back in the crypt with another patron exclusive episode. Join us as we dig into chapter 3 of David McNally's Monsters of the Market! 

What did you think of this months chapter? Let us know in the comments down below or over on our Discord server. 

Early Access for Our Episode with Protean Magazine!

Here's your early access for our latest episode! 

Let us know what you think and, if you can, please like, share, and comment to boost our occult podcasting powers! 

BRAND NEW SUPER SECRET SPOOKY EPISODE

Hey ghouls, get your secret HV decoder rings out and dig into this wild new episode. Did you know that Nightmare on Elm Street was inspired by the war in Vietnam? How can we stop cycles of violence and trauma? And can Freddy Krueger be saved? Answers to these questions (might be) in this episode of HV! 

HV Interviews Leila Taylor, Author of Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic Soul

If you like our chat, you can grab a pre-order of Taylor's book here: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/darkly-black-history-and-americas-gothic-soul/

The Real HV All Hallow's Special!

You survived our trick episode, now get ready for the treat!

This Halloween in Depth Super Episode

Deep in the crypts of horror cinema rests a movie so bad that it would take a team of experts decades to extract it. We tackle this movie scene by scene in our most in-depth flimic explication yet! 

Personal Shopper and Gothic Tensions

Defining the Gothic is difficult when it comes to literature, and near impossible when we approach film. The Gothic is an ephemeral form. At once solidified into a concrete and traceable history and diffused through artistic modes as disparate as architecture and music, genres as diverse as romance and horror. Pinning down the Gothic in cinema is a task as fleeting as the flickering frames that flash upon the screen.

Centrally, this difficulty is in the lack of use for a marketable “G...

October Arcane Book Club of Horrors!

Jon and Ash dig into Chapter 2 of McNally's Monsters of the Market! Leave a comment and let us know what you think. 

House, The Beauty of Broken Things

House (1977) is a phantasmagoria of broken things. Actors who never acted, an experimental Writer/Director tasked to clone Jaws, and a menagerie of incomplete special effects all come together in one kaleidoscopic collage that shows off the beauty of the walking wounded. 

We are all broken. Scarred, incomplete, and damaged beyond repair all of us look out unto the world t...

Patron Exclusive bonus episode with Struggle Session!

We are joined by the brilliant hosts of Struggle Session to discuss Scanners, Videodrome, and Cronenberg's lost movie: being on Twitter! 

The Midnight Hour, or, Why isn't this a Better Hocus Pocus?

Seriously, I don’t understand why The Midnight Hour  isn’t a beloved classic alongside the likes of Hocus Pocus and Creepshow. It’s an absurd exercise in camp, teen horror, and it even features a breakout musical number. It’s a feature length Thriller music video. What more is there to want? 

The Midnight Hour has been generally panned. Everyone from local ...

Early access to the sexy sharks episode!

Thanks for supporting the show! 

Der Student Debt von Prag

There are two Der Student von Prag movies. Both are adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson.” One was made in 1913 by noted Nazi film star Paul Wegener. The other was made in 1926 by Henrik Galeen, who fled the Nazis, and stars the spooky Conrad Veidt who not only fled the Nazis, but donated a chunk of his fortune to the war effort against them. Today, we’re talking about the 19...

Creepshow 2019, Ep 3

Spoilers. Forever. 

All Hallow’s Eve

Some kids go tormenting the neighbors on Halloween, but everything is not as it seems. (Insert evil laughter.)

They’re ghosts. The episode does a good job of teasing it without giving it away. I was busy looking for any clues. They had reflections, nobody walked through anything, and their costumes hid any dated clothing or other signs of being phantoms. They only nods were subtle references to this being the “last time” th...

The Love Witch in a World Without Love

The Love Witch was met with both rave reviews and a wealth of critical commentary. There has already been so much said about this film—a film that I totally slept on—so I wanted to try for an angle I haven't seen discussed yet: How do we escape The Love Witch? 

The Love Witch is the tragic story of Elaine, a witch who has been psychologically abused and can only see the worl...

Episode Early Access!

Jon interviews author Richard Seymour about his new book The Twittering Machine 

YouTube of Terror!

“There are more horror movies on YouTube, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your box office.” -Shakespeare, probably

YouTube is loaded with horror movies. There are literally more than I can ever watch. There is even a playlist of 660 free horror movies currently available for free on the site. (Oh, come on! Someone send them 6 more movies!) YouTube, however, has incredibly ...

The Worst Witch: A Heathen’s Curse

I didn’t intend to watch Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse and The Worst Witch back to back. I also didn’t indent to fall behind on the essay part of this movie marathon of madness, but, as it turns out, both were very fortunate occurrences. 

Hagazussa is the story of Albrun, an accused witch living in the...

Ghoul Logs and the Continued Abstraction of Everything We Love and Hold Dear

I spent Saturday watching approximately eleven hours of Ghoul Logs. Not a horror movie proper, but a riff on the Yule Log tradition. It was amazing and my new ASMR is now just footage of spooky ambience wailing away in the background while write, sleep, and make sacrifices to forgotten gods. But, to be honest, I'm not sure how much of that eleven hours was spent actually watching anythi...

Georges Méliès and the Gothic Advent of Cinema

Cinema is the Gothic mode of art. Still images arranged as the simulacra of movement, ageless, timeless, and haunting. Each image its own Picture of Dorian Grey. The business of making motion pictures is the business of creating ghosts.

Georges Méliès was one of these founding conjurers. A conjurer is an appropriate title here for Méliès cut his teeth on the 1800’s stage magic scene in France and England. It was tricks like 2019-10-06 19:22:59 +0000 UTC View Post

Creepshow (2019) Episode 2

Spoilers, but you already knew that.

Bad Wolf Down

What can I say besides Anti-fascist Werewolves. 

The plot is simple, but with that simplicity there is total beauty. A group of allied soldiers become trapped behind enemy lines when a traitor locks them in a cell of an abandoned rural jail. Our heroes are locked in the cell with a French woman who just so happens to be a werewolf. In exchange for a silver cross which she will use to end her cursed existe...

Why Do We Keep Falling in Love with Fish?

Warning. You might want some tunes while reading this one. 

While contemplating the vastness and strange condition that we, as humans, spend our lives under, Huey Lewis and the News correctly identified love as “The power that makes the world go ‘round.” Love is a curious, and some might say capricious, condition. Not really an emotion as much as it is a heady draught of humanity’s finest. W...

Early Access! Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part II

Kicking off the spooky season with more content than is reasonable. Here is part II of our episode with J. G. Michael. 

Creepshow 2019 Episode 1

Creepshow 2019 isn’t really a reboot. It’s not a remake of the original movies nor is it full of the same calculated commercial value as the Marvel films. The original Creepshow movies, the original in 1982, the sequel in 1987 and the one everyone forgets from 2007, were anthology movies. Some loose elements form a frame narrative around our undead, EC Comics throwback host, The Creep, but each story stands on i...

Hallo-SCREAM Scare-A-thon 2019!

I watch. I write. YOU SCREAM!

Greetings ghouls, 

It's your ghost, Ash! This October, I’m doing a spooky movie marathon. Each day, I’ll be watching and writing about a horror movie I’ve never seen—with a few twists thrown in—and writing it up. Here's the schedule:

October 1st - Creepshow (2019), Episode 1

October 2nd - 2019-10-02 05:37:42 +0000 UTC View Post

Arcane Book Club of Horrors - Monsters of the Market: Chapter 1!

Your bonus episode is here! Time to get spoooky. What did you think of the first chapter of this book? 

EARLY ACCESS TO OUR LONGEST EPISODE EVER!

We had such a good conversation with J. G. Michael of Parallax Views that we had to split it into two episodes. Get ready for us to lock chainsaws with Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation! 

Tales from the Creept

Hello phantoms, 

It's your ghost, I mean apologetic producer, Ash! The last two weeks I've missed the deadline for the early access to episodes. I've been SWAMPED with accursed content writing. Which is good for me, but hell on my schedule. Thank you for bearing with me as I balance growing this show with, you know, being able to buy food. (spooky food.) 

Your early access to episodes will resume this Wednesday with our first two part episode! Get ready for us to revisit...