Episode 161: Monster of the Week (with Emily VanDerWerff)
/Vampires, werewolves, and aliens, oh my! We’re joined this week by the incomparable Emily VanDerWerff to talk about her book, the Monster of the Week genre, and the horror genre. We discover Emily’s love for A Christmas Carol, Emily breaks a cardinal vampire rule, and make a LOT of horror recommendations.
This week, Amanda recommends Jane Harper’s mystery thrillers and Well Met by Jen DeLuca.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about diseases, body horror, death & existentialism, misogyny, environmental destruction, isolationist horror, the horror genre, and possession.
Guest
Emily VanDerWerff is a critic at Vox, author of Monster of the Week (with Zach Handlen), host of the TV history podcast Primetime, and co-creator of the comedy-mystery podcast Arden. Find her on Twitter @tvoti.
Sponsors
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About Us
Spirits was created by Julia Schifini, Amanda McLoughlin and Eric Schneider. We are founding members of Multitude, a production collective of indie audio professionals. Our music is "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0.
Transcript
Amanda: Welcome to Spirit Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world.
It is 2020, and I'm Amanda.
Julia: And I'm Julia.
Amanda: And this is Episode 161, Monster of the Week with Emily VanDerWerff.
Julia: I, one, can't believe we got to talk to Emily. She is a fantastic writer and just a really knowledgeable and overall charismatic and wonderful person.
Amanda: And a podcaster.
Julia: And a podcaster. And, two, I can't believe it's 2020. Oh, my god.
Amanda: I know. I feel like 2019, being my first year of full self employment, I know your second, I guess, Julia, or second and a half.
Julia: Yeah, second and a half. Or like first and a half. I don't remember.
Amanda: I'd remember. Pretty relevant.
Julia: Time is irrelevant.
Amanda: I think, yeah, for both of us, either first or second full year, and time just passes differently when everything is on your shoulders. And it's good, it's bad, it's terrifying, it's wonderful, and I'm up for another year.
Julia: Yeah, and we wouldn't be able to do the kind of things that we do without our wonderful patrons.
Amanda: Truly the only reason that I am not suffering and crying after work every day in a terrible job is because of the support of our patrons. It's true.
Julia: Yeah, it is.
Amanda: So, welcome, Anna, Diamond, Leanne.
Julia: What a great name.
Amanda: Just fill in the blank. So good. Thank you.
Who are you with right now, Julia?
Julia: I'm with our supporting producer level patrons.
Amanda: Ah, so good.
Julia: Phillip, Megan, Deborah, Molly, Skyla, Samantha, Sammy, Neil, Jessica, and Feel Fresh.
Amanda: Who join our Legend level patrons. These are the folks that get a physical gift from us in the mail every dang month: Josie, Kylie, Charlotte, Kylo the Husky, Morgan, Emily, BMEF Scotty, Audra, Chris, Mark, Mr. Folk, Sarah, and Jack Murray.
Julia: What wonderful folks. What good starts to the year is listing off those people's names?
Amanda: They also give me an excuse to go browsing for cute gifts without spending my own money on stuff I don't need, because I have to send them wonderful things that they absolutely do need.
Julia: Yeah, I love when I get Facebook ads, and I'm just like, "The Legend level patrons would love that!"
Amanda: This is it. This is the thing. Speaking of which, you made a delicious and very festive cocktail for this episode, Julia. Could you tell us about it?
Julia: Yeah. For this year, I'm going to recommend that you all make yourself a New Year's cocktail. I'm big fan of the Poinsettia, which is a cocktail made with Cointreau, cranberry juice, and champagne. It's very like ... If my childhood could have made an alcoholic cocktail, it would be this cocktail.
Amanda: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Cointreau is the only liquor that I ever drank when I was home, like when I was 21, visiting home in my last year of college, I would do Cointreau with my dad's bizarre, very strange whiskeys that they kept over the fridge. Unlike some other siblings of mine, never stole liquor from the cabinet, only drank it with my dad, watching reruns of, I don't know, M*A*S*H, late at night.
Julia: Sure. Sounds right. You can serve this as a New Year's Day brunch cocktail. Personally, I like it as a brunch cocktail. It's still light enough and the sourness of the cranberries is really balanced with the Cointreau. Or you could just keep it in your pocket for next year's New Year's Eve.
Amanda: Delicious. I just made cranberry sauce the other day, not because it was Thanksgiving, but because it's delicious.
Julia: Yes.
Amanda: And I think more cranberry year round. That's what I'm here for.
Julia: Yeah. No, I'm all for cranberry full time. I've finally gotten to the point in my life where I will buy myself cranberry juice without it being a luxury.
Amanda: Oh, yeah. 100%.
Julia: Speaking of luxuries and spending your free time doing such luxurious things, Amanda, what are you up to? What are you reading? What are you watching?
Amanda: So I wanted to meet my Good Reads challenge this year, which was reading 40 books, which is fewer than I have in previous years, especially working so much. I wanted to make sure that I did the hobbies that I know I love, which for me, is reading, specifically fiction.
So I'm going to recommend a scary, mystery, detective thriller type thing, which I love, and also a very cute romcom-y, cute book.
Julia: Beautiful. Good balance.
Amanda: Just pick your own adventure, you know?
Julia: Good balance.
Amanda: So on the one hand, I'm going to recommend Jane Harper. She writes detective mystery thrillers, two of which are in a series, and there's also a standalone novel. And they're set in Australia, which is cool for me. I don't think I've ever read an Australian mystery before, and it's just a different landscape, like different customs, different vocabulary, and I really enjoyed it. They're very well written. And, even though, again, it has to do with violence. It doesn't take violence against women as sort of like natural thing in the world.
Julia: Yeah, as a given, which some authors do do that.
Amanda: And secondly, I really loved Well Met by Jen DaLuca. It's a romcom book, but it takes place at a Renaissance Fair, Julia. What more could you want?
Julia: Hold on. Pulling up my local indie book store's website now to order that. Thank you.
Amanda: It gave me such intense nostalgia for a thing I never experienced. Do you know what I mean?
Julia: Yes. No, I absolutely know what you mean. It's like the first time I ever played Dungeons & Dragons. I was like, "I was meant to play this game, huh? All right."
Amanda: I had a real wave of sadness recently that I did not play D&D before I was 25.
Julia: I get you.
Amanda: And that's actually a really good segue that I didn't plan into our request for you this week, and how to support Multitude. And listen, it's a new year. You've got new podcasts. This is your time to check out the other Multitude shows. And one that Julia and I are both going to be on in 2020 is Join the Party.
Julia: Yeah.
Amanda: This is an improvised storytelling fiction podcast. That means that we sit down every other week and use the rules of Dungeons & Dragons to tell a story. This story is set in a modern world. It is absurd. It is wonderful. It is very close to Julia's and my hearts, and we are going to be starting that in very early March.
But in the meantime, you can catch up on Season 1, you can listen to our after-parties, which teach you how to play D&D and talk about just the world and how to do it, and also all of the bonus content. I did a goat-related caper set at the Met Ball-
Julia: Yes, you did.
Amanda: -This past summer called Goat Party.
Julia: Ga-gah.
Amanda: So lots of stuff to love. Ga-gah.
Julia: Ga-gah. Oh, gosh, yeah. I'm very excited to be joining Join the Party, mostly because I'm very already emotionally invested in my character and I'm going to cry when people meet them.
Amanda: Oh, yeah. It's super exciting, and, of course, there is also Potterless, where our good friend Mike reads the Harry Potter books, but also experiences the broader Harry Potter universe every single week. So, whether it's talking about a theme park, about wizarding, Price is Right, or reviewing the books/movies/rides, it is a wonderful show. There's always snark and hot takes to be had and lots of great guests including all of us here on Multitude and tons of our friends and new friends.
Julia: And, of course, there is also HORSE, which is hosted by Mike and Eric Silver, and I have never really cared about basketball, ever in my entire life, but HORSE is about, not the wins and losses and the stats and all that kind of stuff, but it's about the weird stuff that happens when you create a culture around a sport.
Amanda: Yeah, they have fascinating interviews. They talk about the WNBA, the NBA, all kinds of history about basketball, like the U.S. Men's Olympic Basketball team that went to Germany under Hitler's rule. So there is substance, there is style, there are laughs, there are great contests, and Mike and Eric have a wonderful dynamic.
So check out those Multitude shows by plugging "multitude" into your podcast player, or by going to multitude.productions.
Julia: And I don't want to tease anything that isn't quite announced yet, but I will say that there are more Multitude things that coming in 2020.
Amanda: There sure is, and it's going to be awesome. And the only way that we get to do this and keep doing it is for the support of listeners like you, as my local PBS station used to say.
So genuinely, no matter how much you can or can't support us on Patreon, listening to our shows, telling us that you like them on social media, and recommending them to your friends is just a wonderful thing that we do not take for granted whatsoever, and will help start our 2020 off right.
Julia: Yeah. We appreciate you, and we hope that you go into 2020 with the best vibes possible.
Amanda: And so, without further ado, please enjoy the wonderful episode 161, Monster of the Week with Emily VanDerWerff.
We are so excited to have Emily VanDerWerff on the show today. She is a critic at Vox, a Hilda stan, per your Twitter bio. I thank you, Emily, as am I. The co-creator of Arden and the author of Monsters of the Week, which is a critical companion to the X-Files, and also the host of Prime Time, the Vox TV history podcast.
Welcome, Emily.
Emily: Yes. I do a lot of things apparently.
Amanda: You do.
Emily: I'm so happy to be here.
Julia: Aw, yay. You do a lot of things and they're all shockingly wonderful, every-
Emily: Well, I don't know about that, but I try.
Julia: Well, listen, we don't flatter here on Spirits Podcast. We drink and we tell truth.
Emily: Perfect.
Julia: It's very true, very true.
Amanda: I would love if you could just kind of start by giving your thesis of Monster of the Week as a trope for listeners who might not be familiar with the concept.
Emily: Right. Monster of the Week really, as a idea, first sort of came into public consciousness with the TV Show, the X-Files, where they needed a divide between the episodes that were part of what they called their mythology, which was this weird, long overarching story about aliens and bees and oil and it was really convoluted and complicated. And if you were 15 year old me, you were super into it, and if you were not 15 year old me, you were not super into it.
But then they had all these other episodes, because they did up to 25 episodes a season. So those other episodes were just like Mulder and Scully went to a town and there was a monster and they met the monster and they fought the monster and then the monster escaped. And they started calling those Monster of the Week episodes.
And the name really stuck, and now it's just kind of like, if you have a show that's in sort of genre adjacent, Monster of the Week has become the way you refer to, even like Star Trek Discovery or whatever, they'll have Monster of the Week type episodes.
It's, of course, a spinoff of Case of the Week from the detective procedural, but it really has taken on a life of its own and has just become central to the way we talk about these shows. Hence the title of the book that Zach and I wrote.
Julia: Yeah.
Amanda: You know, I use Monster of the Week to refer to any procedural where that episode doesn't advance in a material way the larger plot, including Elementary on CBS, my favorite TV show, which is like, if that is an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, that should be the Case of the Week.
But I have never heard that phrase, and I think that truly marks me as a child of the Internet.
Julia: That's true.
Emily: Yeah, this is really true. There's Case of the Week. House had Disease of the Week. There are all sorts of different spinoffs, and it started with Case of the Week, but Monster of the Week is the one that's had the most resonance because, of course, the kinds of people who talk obsessively about television are also frequently obsessively following science fiction and horror television.
Amanda: Yeah. And it's probably just a me thing, but I think I can recognize and remember a vampire or an alien or a werewolf more than I can recognize polio or whatever the House disease is this week.
Emily: Yeah. Yeah. Polio?
Amanda: Sure.
Emily: Or rickets. It was never scurvy. That was the thing on House. They were always like, "Is it ...?" No, lupus.
Amanda: Lupus.
Emily: Lupus was the thing it never was.
Amanda: It was never lupus. That was Julia's and my huge bonding pop culture property in high school.
Julia: It's true.
Emily: I really don't know why I said scurvy. I feel like I should be fired.
Amanda: No. It was rarely scurvy, either.
Emily: Scurvy.
Julia: I can think of maybe one scurvy episode.
Amanda: So the Monster of the Week genre has obviously grown into something that is much larger than it was when it was just X-Files. Do you have any examples of shows that you think really exemplify the Monster of the Week that are currently running?
Emily: Currently running, that's ... Well, I mean, obviously Supernatural.
Amanda: Yes.
Emily: Supernatural is, I don't know if I'd say the most successful, but just in terms of how long its run, yeah, it's the longest running Monster of the Week show. It has lapped everybody else. It has lapped many of these shows consecutively, like several times. You think about a show like Friends, which ran exactly 100 episodes. And I think Supernatural got to 300.
Amanda: Yeah.
Emily: How on earth is that possible? Even X-Files, kind of the granddaddy of this genre, they got to 202 on their first run, and then they called it quits. That Supernatural will have run 15 years by the time it ends in the Spring is just astonishing to me, especially because they had a planned mythology that was supposed to run five years. And it did.
They just did their original story arc, and then the CW was like, "Do you want to keep going?" And the creator was like, "Not really, but I'll turn it over to this other woman on staff, Sera Gamble." One of my favorite TV writers. And she was like, "Yeah, I'll keep it going." And then they run like 10 seasons beyond their planned end point. For the most part, I don't regularly watch the show anymore, but for the most part, fans seem pretty happy with what's happened since then.
So that, I think, is a show where the Monster of the Week trope showed its sheer elasticity. Actually, it really overlaps nicely with what you folks do on this show, because that is a show that's, like if X-Files was based in weird government conspiracy, Supernatural's based in weird urban legends. They've gotten away from that because of course you do after 300 episodes. What are you guys going to be talking about after 300 episodes, you know?
Amanda: I know, right? I don't even ... I think I'm just going to start revisiting old things, which I'm sure Supernatural has done as well.
Emily: Yeah. Another show that I think does intersecting things with the Monster of the Week trope is The Magicians on Sci-Fi, which is not coincidentally a show run by Sera Gamble. And it is not Monster of the Week in the traditional sense. It's more of a magical problem of the week question. But those problems tend to manifest themselves as monsters or magical creatures that are hard to approach or whatever. And the monsters can be fun or they can be creepy or they can be silly or whatever, but that is a show where it has an incredibly complicated ongoing plot that is almost impossible to follow. But so long as you're tapped into the emotional core of that week's episode, you can ride it out.
So I think The Magicians is another show that's doing interesting things with that trope. And there are lot of other different ones. Sabrina, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix, definitely has its own variations on this trope, but to me, Supernatural is just the clear example of somebody who's done this trope and done it well for a long, long time.
Julia: Yeah.
Amanda: I wasn't aware of that kind of like handing over of the show after an original plot arc had been fulfilled. That's like a Simone Biles level of sticking the landing.
Julia: Yeah.
Emily: Yeah.
Amanda: That must be so hard to pull off.
Emily: Yeah, and I remember hearing they were going to do that and it was like, okay, well, the show's got maybe two years left in it, tops.
Amanda: Yeah.
Emily: And the show was on the verge of cancellation year after year after year, and I guess the CW just needed programming it could sort of slap on and draw a reliable audience. And then it goes on Netflix and becomes a hit on Netflix. And it's not like hugely rated on first run television, but it is a really well performing show. The CW's going to miss it once it's gone.
Amanda: Yeah.
Julia: Yeah.
Emily: But also, 15 years. What a long time to be on any show.
Amanda: Yeah.
Julia: Yeah, that is a commitment for sure.
Emily: Yeah. Yeah.
Amanda: I would love to ask you what you think makes a good monster, and that's a topic I'm sure you could do an entire podcast on. It may be specifically in a Monster of the Week episode. And then also, what are some really fascinating deviations from that norm? Like on AV Club, they posted a excerpt of the X-Files book on Bad Blood, which is one of my favorite episodes as well. And I think there's a really interesting kind of like subversion or inversion of what a monster is supposed to be.
So let's start maybe with the typical and then get into our favorite sort of inversions of that trope.
Emily: Well, I was thinking about the roots of Monster of the Week, and I was going to jokingly say that Grendel was the original Monster of the Week, but he kind of was.
Amanda: Yeah.
Emily: The structure of Beowulf is very similar to a Monster of the Week TV show, where you go from Grendel to Grendel's mom to the dragon. I think I'm missing one in there. But that book, or that poem rather, is a series of episodes that add up to a larger story, and what does that remind you of?
So the classic version of the Monster of the Week is that the monster reflects something emotionally in the landscape of either the hero or the world or the audience, ideally all three of those things. I think the show that was really good at doing that was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Amanda: Yeah.
Julia: Yeah.
Emily: Where their Monsters of the Week were often metaphors for certain emotions that teenagers go through or young adults go through, and really, when we talk about what makes a good monster, it's that. It's tapped into some primal human emotion that we all fear.
Vampires are probably the most durable and successful monster. Vampires or ghosts. So let's take a look at both of them.
In vampires, there are a lot of different ways to approach the question of what a vampire symbolizes, but the desire for eternal youth, that's a thing we can all relate to. The desire to never die is a thing we can all relate to. And also they're a wonderful metaphor for the powerful who prey upon the powerless, which is a consistent problem throughout human history. So there's a reason the vampire has stuck around.
Similar with ghosts. Ghosts are just basically, we are afraid of death, but we are also afraid of not dying.
Amanda: Right.
Emily: There's both sides of that coin embodied in the ghost, and every single culture on Earth ... That's maybe overstating it. Maybe there are some that don't, but the vast majority of cultures on Earth have a version of the ghost trope, and it differs depending on cultural differences.
But there's a reason that we keep coming back to this idea that your body dies but your spirit is stuck here, and it's because it's both like kind of heartwarming, but also really terrifying to think about. Like, I don't know, if I get stuck in somebody's house after I die and all I can do is move their furniture around to see if they notice, what's that going to be like?
Amanda: I know. I'm so obsessed with the sort of physics of ghosts.
Emily: Yeah.
Amanda: Presuming that ghosts are real, where do they get anchored and why? The same in Harry Potter. Why do you become a ghost how does that happen? Where can you move? I need to know all the answers.
Emily: Yeah. Yeah. I think that, you mentioned the Bad Blood chapter that Zach wrote, which was on AV Club, and I think that one of the things that makes a really different monster or really interesting monster is the level of empathy that the writers and directors and performers playing that monster can bring to that character.
And I do think that is what X-Files did that set it apart from even Buffy. X-Files was terrific at coming up with monsters that, even if you thought they were evil and deserved to be punished or whatever, they had some core to them where you were like, "Oh, I recognize what's human about this. I recognize within myself, the parts of my self, that could twist toward the monstrous if this was some hunger I had or this was some need that I had."
Amanda: Yeah.
Emily: And the best monsters are often just a need or desire that a lot of human beings have that is twisted to a point where we realize how horrible that desire can become if it goes beyond the limits of sort of what's acceptable. And I think X-Files really excelled at that.
But I also think X-Files had a lot of monsters where you just were like, "Yeah, I really sympathize with that person," where they were just very accessible, human people. Probably the classic example is Clyde Bruckman in the Season 3 episode, where it's like he's set up to be the Monster of the Week, but instead he turns out to be sort of the person who helps Mulder and Scully solve the case.
Amanda: Yeah.
Julia: Yeah.
Emily: And his whole thing is he's a psychic that can only see when people will die and how they ... Not when people will die. He will only see how people will die. So there's a real poignancy to this idea, like everybody you see, you get a quick flash of their dying moment, and how horrible would that be?
Amanda: Yeah.
Emily: That's probably the best episode of the show. It's not my favorite, but if you were going to watch one X-Files episode, that would be the one you should watch. It's just a gorgeous piece of television writing because it's so, so tragic, but it keeps this sort of levity of spirit about it that marks it as an X-Files episode.
Amanda: Yeah, the X-Files series in particular is one that I binge watched and only watched once.
Emily: Yeah.
Amanda: So very few episodes really pop out to me like that one, but it is definitely one there that, if I could exemplify what X-Files is, that's definitely one of the episodes I think of.
Julia: Yeah.
Amanda: The other being The Modern Day Prometheus.
Emily: Post-Modern, yeah.
Amanda: Or it was The Post-Modern Prometheus.
Emily: That is-
Amanda: Oh, god.
Emily: I wrote an essay about that in the book. That's one of the ones that I reviewed, and it's the longest essay in the book because that is an episode riddled with issues, riddled with what you would call "problematic content." But there's something so primal and beautiful about it that I can't entirely write it off.
I don't want to get too deep into it and spoil the audience, but in essence, one of the problems with X-Files is it did a lot of body horror, and it did a lot of body horror directed towards women, and that body horror directed towards women tended to take the form of rape/unwanted pregnancies forced upon a woman.
Amanda: Yeah.
Emily: And that's definitely a trope that pops up a lot in horror centered on women. I mean, Rosemary's Baby is probably the classic example.
Amanda: Yeah.
Emily: But it's definitely like the X-Files did it so many times that it kind of became almost callous. And The Post-Modern Prometheus has some of those problems, but it's also got this gorgeous depiction of what it's like to be an outsider in a small town. And I weigh those two things against each other in the essay.
I hope you all buy the book and get to read this essay. But there's a version of it, a less edited, less coherent version of it exists for free on the AV Club, so you could just read that.
But yeah, I'm really fascinated by the way that often monsters dovetail the things that are best about us with the things that are worst about us. And that includes even in a show like the X-Files, where what's good about that show and what's bad about that show are often just right within the same scenes.
Amanda: I'm just sitting here thinking about how true that is, how I'm going to, right after this episode, buy the book and make sure that I can kind of sit with that idea for a little longer. I love about the Clyde Bruckman episode.
To your point earlier, Emily, about the things about the monsters are things we either relate to or kind of worry about ourselves.
Emily: Yeah.
Amanda: To me, that episode is saying, "Hey, humans are the only animals cursed with the knowledge of our own death." And that is an extreme example, and it's something where it plays out in knowledge of other people and that makes it a little bit easier to kind of stand out and remove and analyze it. But I'm thinking here like, "Yeah, I don't know what life would be like to live not knowing that I will die one day."
Emily: Yeah.
Amanda: And it invites you to kind of do that. And self consciously, I sort of see it in myself as a "Yeah, man" moment, where I'm like, "Yeah, man, we know we're going to die," but that's what, I don't know, that's what horror, sci-fi, fantasy does for me.
Emily: Right.
Amanda: It gives me a sort of screen upon which to project, Plato style, all of these things swirling within me that are a little bit too bright to look at directly.
Emily: I supposed you could argue that the thing that helped us build human civilization and hastened our demise as a species was that we became aware that we could die. Suddenly, we're like, "Oh, we got to essentially leave." All other species, sort of the way that they escape death is they reproduce. And they don't realize why they're doing that. It's just a primal drive. But we were suddenly like, "Oh, wait. We can die. We better leave things behind. We better create a system that makes it harder to die."
And we did that so well that we killed the planet, so good for us.
Julia: Yeah.
Amanda: Yeah. And capitalist accumulation, colonialism, all of these things, generational wealth. These are all, I think, "Yeah, they're band aids against death," and the illusion that something about you exists after you that isn't giving back, enriching people's lives, like some more kind of like societally minded idea that if you and your immediate descendants can be insulated somehow. I think the urge is that you can be insulated against death, but that's not possible for any of us.
Emily: And yet, if you look at the top horror tropes, like the ones we talked about, ghost, vampire, but also the zombie. They're all warnings against what it is to try to live past death. And it's like we're trying to warn ourselves about ourselves, but are doing a really poor job of it.
I mean, I would love to be a vampire. If there are any vampires listening right now, please, come over. Wait, did I just invite vampires into my house?
Amanda: You did. You broke the cardinal rule there, Emily.
Emily: I just really screwed that all up. But anyway, I would be a vampire. I think it sounds fun. It sounds very glamorous.
Amanda: Have you seen Only Lovers Left Alive?
Emily: Yes, it was back when it came out, so I don't remember it that well, but yeah, I have seen it.
Amanda: Yeah. It was a 2014 film. I mentioned it on the show before, with Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as the protagonist vampires, and I haven't re-watched it since then, so there could be aspects of it that I, today, would not be super in love with, but I loved it so much because it focuses on the sort of decadence and boredom. It's just like day to day living of what it means to be alive for centuries or even millennia.
Emily: Yeah. What We Do in the Shadows is another one.
Amanda: Yeah.
Emily: And that takes it a more comedic point of view, but both the film and the TV show are very interested in like, God, how much would it suck to be alive for centuries upon centuries?" It would not be fun. You would get bored really easily. I get bored if my internet goes out for an hour. Yeah.
Amanda: I know. I think about that often. I just read Jia Tolentino's book, Trick Mirror, a collection of essays about being alive and on the internet, and the sort of reckoning with the sort of momentary terror of being alone without your phone for a moment. Just really echoes that soundless void of death, and even though my brain might not make that connection in the moment, I do know that, any moment that my hand automatically reaches for Twitter when I am idle, waiting for a bus, I'm just like, "Yeah, no, I know I'm going to die one day, brain. Thank you for trying to distract me against that."
Emily: Well, we know what happens to people who don't have the expectation of seeing other people. Even talking about the most hermit like person, the most introverted person, you sort of need that dopamine hit of hearing another human voice, even if it's just outside your window. And that is really fascinating to me, this idea that we are hard wired to want human contact and tech has taken that desire and amped it up to 13, and it's rotted all of our brains.
You're absolutely right. When I misplace my phone for five minutes, I get really desperate in a way that I don't if I misplace my wife. She'll find her way back.
Julia: She's a person. She knows what she's doing.
Amanda: She will eventually.
Julia: I think that brings up a really interesting point about the rise of isolationist horror in recent years, especially with the Lighthouse and stuff, which I'm still blown away by, having seen that like a month ago, month and a half ago. I still think about it every day.
Emily: Yeah.
Amanda: Yeah.
Emily: I really love this boom we have in, I guess you'd say indie horror. I know a lot of people are not huge fans of it, but just for me, those movies have been so meaningful. A lot of them are kind of about transgressions against society. I mean, horror's always about transgressions against society, but these movies tend to be about really rigid communities, often death cults, that are dictated by incredibly specific rules.
And I had this thought after I saw the movie Ready or Not a few months ago, which is a very fun pulpy kind of horror movie where a woman marries into a family and then they try to kill her. And that movie, again, there's a death cult, there's a rich family that's just riding everything down into the grave, and I'm wondering why, in the 2010s, we have all of these movies that have old rich people who just want everybody to die and are dragging everyone off the cliff with them. I don't know what that's about. What psychic need as a society are we expressing through these films?
Julia: Who can say?
Emily: Yeah, exactly.
Amanda: Where on Earth did Jordan Peele get those ideas from?
Julia: Honestly, so good. The turn of comedic horror in recent years, being absolutely horrifying but also hitting ... Because comedy and horror have so many of the same bare bones to them. It's all about the timing, whether or not the result is something horrifying or something funny and positive is just a matter of the genre itself.
So it's really, really nice to see that kind of growth and stuff. And I feel like we're seeing it more, too, in TV and stuff as well.
I was trying to bring us back to Monster of the Week in the TV genre as a whole ...
Amanda: I just love horror as a way to teach us about ourselves, even though it's not a thing that I would identify myself as a fan of. And I wonder if anyone else has examples of, I don't know, things that horror movies invite you to think about that might not be right on the tin. I, for example, love Jennifer's Body and I've it from the moment I saw it, before it was ironic, and now people realize that it is really good.
And, for me, this idea that it's exploring relationships between women best friends, it is about women turning violence on men, and kind of inverting that woman as the target, presumed or explicit, of any horror situation, or it follows about shame, about sex, about the ways in which we kind of pass on hurt to others or use others, and intimacy as a way to distract or transmit things we might be carrying within ourselves.
So I don't know. Anyone else have an idea to toss out there for people who might not have really delved into horror yet but are convinced after our rollicking conversation?
Emily: I think we just created so many horror fans, honestly.
Amanda: Yay.
Emily: I actually do have one. Y'all seen the movie Midsommar, which came out this summer?
Amanda: I have not yet.
Julia: I have not yet.
Emily: Okay. All right. That is-
Julia: I know all the spoilers and stuff. I just haven't gotten to see it.
Emily: I will try to not spoil what happens in the movie, but that is a movie about a woman who's used to hanging out with men, who finds a community of female friends, let's say, and finds a-
Amanda: I'm so nervous.
Emily: -Finds a shared purpose with them and an emotional support system that feels lacking in her everyday life. And for some reason, this movie tends to speak to a lot of trans women, and I don't know why that could possibly be, but there are certainly trans women who kind of hate the way that director Ari Aster plays with gender and fucks around with our expectations for genders, but I, as a trans lady, some of my trans lady friends, we talk about that movie in the way that we talk about, I don't know, the first time you read the Bible or something.
I saw that movie at a press screening. It was just like, God, why is this hitting me so hard? And then I listened to the score over and over and over again, and I was like, "Oh, okay. All right. I get this. This is my life story."
And yeah, it's one of my favorite movies ever made and I'm going to watch it again and again and again for the rest of my life. But it speaks to something so elemental about that experience of being disconnected from your community and then finding a community in which you feel connected, which, beyond the trans experience, is a thing, I think, anybody can relate to.
Julia: Totally.
Amanda: Absolutely.
Emily: Also, they're murdering people.
Julia: Hey, always good.
Amanda: Listen, we love a murder.
Julia: We do love a murder on this podcast.
Amanda: Not in real life and I don't condone it, but yeah, I'm so grateful, especially around the more recent couple years and true crime being as popular in podcasting as it is in every other genre, and having more discourse at varying levels of nuance about why crime appeals to women, and learning about crime and kind of showing ourselves that, even in a chosen way, as opposed to just having it inflicted upon us.
Emily: Yeah. Interesting. True crime, you say?
Amanda: You wouldn't know anything about that.
Julia: That's where the real money is.
Emily: Yeah.
Amanda: I cannot wait to hear more, but first, let's grab a refill.
Julia, what better way to start 2020 than by talking about Skillshare, one of our oldest and most loyal sponsors. We love them so much.
Julia: I love Skillshare. I just love learning new things.
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Julia: They have a whole craft section now. I'm so excited about it.
Amanda: They do, so this week I checked out a course called Styling Your Space, Bringing Creativity to Interior Design, by Emily Henderson, because for the holidays, we got a bunch of adorable prints and banners and pendants for our presents, and I want to put them up but in a way, Julia, that is harmonious and adult. So I really enjoyed that.
So this year, if you want to explore new skills, deepen your existing passions, or just get lost in creativity and crafts, do it with Skillshare. What you find might surprise and inspire you.
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Julia: Yeah, again, you can go to skillshare.com/spirits2 and get two free months of premium membership.
Amanda: Thanks, Skillshare.
Julia: Amanda, the holiday season was a little bit rough on me, and I'll admit that I didn't have everything together during the time.
Amanda: You can't be all together all the time, Jules.
Julia: I can't, and so when I forget to go buy groceries for the day or forget last minute that I was going to start making a meal that was going to take now three hours to cook-
Amanda: Or that we're going to go out for New Year's shortly and I need to eat something before going out on a big party night.
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Amanda: Yes, they can!
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Amanda: And Julia, what goes better with a delicious meal at any time of day than an amazing cocktail that you made yourself in your own home?
Julia: Nothing. Nothing goes better than that.
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Julia: We hung out with the folks from Shaker and Spoon at our office warming party, and they brought the ingredients to make Apple Jack cocktails and, oh, my God, I can still taste them.
Amanda: It was so delicious, I gave two different Shaker and Spoon as gifts this holiday season and the recipients were over the moon. It's a great way to try new spirits or to try new ways to enjoy your favorites. So you can actually get $20 off your first box at shakerandspoon.com/creepy. That's a new code because we wanted to change it up for 2020.
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Julia: Thanks, Shaker and Spoon. I look forward to getting my delivery real soon.
Amanda: Absolutely. And now, let's get back to the show.
So we talked a little bit earlier about vampires and ghosts in the Monster of the Week genre, and I've been watching a lot of ... This is going to make me sound like such a dork. I've been re-watching a lot of Charmed on Netflix lately because that was a very informative TV show that I would wake up on the weekends and watch at 10:00 AM because they always had reruns on.
And one of the biggest tropes that they play with in particular, because it's so deep into the lore of the show, is demons. And I would love to talk a little bit about how gender and demons in Monster of the Week shows is played with a lot.
Emily: Interesting. Yeah.
Amanda: Because when you gender the demon more like masculine presenting, it usually tends to be about power and control and more focused on basically domineering and killing women. Ouch. Not great. But then the show plays really hard with any women who are antagonists on the show are extremely sexualized and use that sexuality in order to control men, which goes against whatever the women protagonists on the show are trying to do.
So I'd love to talk about kind of the cliché of that in terms of the Monster of the Week genre.
Emily: Yeah. I love demon stories. I grew up fundamentalist Christian, so of course I love demons stories.
Amanda: Of course.
Emily: The new Charmed is actually pretty good, too, The remake of it, which I really-
Amanda: I watched the first season. I haven't gotten into any of the rest of it. But I'm like, yeah.
Emily: It's not great television.
Amanda: Neither was the original, to be fair.
Emily: Yeah, no, the original was not, either. But it's not great television, but it's certainly entertaining and nicely acted and all of that. Anyway, I'm working on a book. I haven't sold it or anything. My agent doesn't even know I'm working on this book, so I don't know why I'm telling everybody.
Amanda: Listen up.
Emily: I don't know why I'm telling everybody on this show, but I've started working on a book about writing about my favorite horror movies through a lens of sort of what Daniel Ortberg would call a trans-adjacent memoir, writing about the intersection of horror and trans feminine identities because it crops up a lot when you talk to trans women. Horror speaks to us in a way that is different and unusual. And the project kind of started because I was thinking about when I was a hashtag teen, my favorite movie was The Exorcist. And The Exorcist is a movie about a teenage girl whose body is invaded by an unwanted male presence who warps her into a horrifying version of herself.
Amanda: Yeah.
Emily: I was not out to myself at the time. I had no idea what trans meant, but that movie spoke to me, and I wonder why. And that is the thing that I love about demons is they're just kind of an all-purpose ... You can craft a demon that will latch onto literally anything that's bad in humanity. You think about the old Catholic/Christian cosmology of demons, they tended to have demons who are attached to specific sins. So you'd have a big, fat demon and that would be gluttony. And you'd a really hot demon and that would be list. And that was just the way that they sort of thought about the demon issue.
And the more I think about it, the movie Se7en, which doesn't have any demons in it, is a demon movie. It's a movie in which these sins are personified.
I love demons because they're so all-purpose, but also that might be why they struggle a bit compared to vampires and ghosts and some of these other creatures that are a little bit more specific. Also demons certainly aren't directly tied to certain religions, but in our culture, they feel tied to Christianity in a way that they aren't, necessarily, but in a world where Christianity has lost some of its grasp over American society, though you wouldn't know to see it, that feels a little less relevant.
I love demons but I also think their non-specificity is sort of what keeps them from the top of the heap.
Amanda: Yeah, and I think that they lose a little bit of nuance, too. I think, when it comes to people writing demons over, let's say, ghosts or vampires, because they are very much the distilled feeling of the emotion that they're supposed to represent, it feels like most people don't dig deeper than that.
Emily: Yeah.
Amanda: And I think that they lose a little bit of the familiarity that vampires, werewolves, ghosts have to our culture by existing only as stock characters almost.
Emily: Yeah, exactly. A demon can be anything, and that's both really a powerful storytelling tool, but also, it gets a little numbing because it can be anything but it also always has the same goal, which is to find some way to make you do something evil. Sure.
There's a show on TV right now that I think is doing interesting things with this idea, which is CBS's Evil, which is from-
Amanda: I just started it.
Emily: Yeah, which is from the Kings, who made The Good Wife. And it is, for X-Files fans out there, I describe it as a version of the X-Files that is only Darin Morgan episodes.
Amanda: Deep cut.
Emily: It is a little bit much. It's a little hard to take sometimes, but it's definitely ... I think what makes the demon trope work there in a way it hasn't in other Monster of the Week shows is they're specifically asking the question of what causes us to do evil. And one of the answers that they're considering is maybe it's just demons. And I kind of love that, the brazenness of that in a TV show.
Amanda: So optimistic.
Emily: If a TV show in 2019, it's like could we maybe fix the world with just mass exorcism? And the answer is no. It's always on the side of demons probably don't exist, but you never know.
Julia: Oh, man. If we could solve the world with just a mass exorcism, that would be great, honestly.
Emily: Yeah.
Julia: I'm down for it.
Amanda: You know, I think this is why Dr. Faustus, the play, has always really, really fascinated me. I think it is so antithetical to almost all demon representations that we have in contemporary media, where, the plot, a scholar named Faustus wants to learn more than he is allowed to be taught and be the basically smartest person in the world. I'm overstating a little bit. But he is visited by a demon called Mephistopheles, and Faustus conjures him while writing magic and wants to barter his soul for all these abilities.
In the version that I saw at The Globe in London, it was played by Arthur Darvill, who plays a very good kind of meek and subservient servant of the devil. And Mephistopheles doesn't want to be here. Some critics identify him as the representation of the sorrow of being separated from God. But he's there being like, "Faustus, don't do this. It's not good. The devil doesn't want me to tell you this, but you shouldn't do it. It's a bad idea."
Julia: Wow.
Amanda: And the thing is, human beings, we can see the consequences coming at us, and yet, you choose to do it. So having a demon, per your point earlier about demons being representations of the thing that they are tempting you to do, Mephistopheles is the opposite of that. He's like, "No, dawg, you don't want to do this."
And so it's so compelling to see and very poetic and beautiful to see the reasons that that whole trajectory still goes really south.
Emily: Yeah. I was thinking about different representations of ghosts now, because ghosts are my favorite of the famous monsters, and yeah, Christmas Carol is such an interesting representation of it, because they're not really ghosts. They're kind of demons, but also they're doing good, so you can't call them demons. But they do sort of personify different aspects of a thing, which is what I often associate demons with, being closely tied to a certain location or place or thing or person. And that is definitely the case with the ghosts from Christmas Carol. And I just had this thought when you happened to say those words "visited by." Now I'm sort of thinking about what it means that there's that sort of Venn diagram intersection.
Amanda: Yeah.
Emily: Demons are part of morality tales generally, where you learn about how you're supposed to behave and how you're not supposed to behave, so maybe there's something to that.
Amanda: I think, if I can extrapolate off of that a little bit more, now that you've framed that in my mind, all I can think of in my mind is the story of Job.
Julia: Go in, girl. Go in.
Amanda: And are the spirits in Christmas Carol just acting as the role of the adversary in the story of Job?
Emily: Yeah. I think that's ... Yeah, the idea that they're good spirits, but they're framed as ghosts, which we tend to think of as at least scary, if not malicious. Sometimes they are malicious, but most of the time they're spooky and we don't like them.
And yet, Scrooge makes friends with these ghosts. Scrooge and these ghosts are tight. I love that idea of ... I realize that the creative reason for them to be ghosts because Christmas ghost stories used to be very popular, and Dickens was like, "I'll write a Christmas ghost story." But, yeah, there's sort of this resonance with other types of horror within A Christmas Carol.
And my favorite adaptations of that story always are more horror specific.
Amanda: Yeah. I'm obsessed with this idea of a demon wearing a ghost skin because demons are the most shifting and adaptable of the big five ... We have to come up with some kind of copyrighted phrase to describe these major monsters. Just the idea that they would put on a trope that you expect or have some preconceived notions about is dastardly and very demonic.
Emily: Yeah. Yeah. It is. You look behind a lot of these monsters and you find something like a demon lurking there, but the monsters that have really taken off are the ones who gain that specificity that demons lack.
So there's this kind of, especially in our Western culture where Christianity was so dominant for so long, there's a kind of give and take between all of these different archetypes. There's weird Venn diagram intersections where we find that they kind of overlap, and now I just want to see a ghost vampire.
Julia: Ooh.
Amanda: Oh, yeah. And I think a ghost with an agenda is also really fascinating. I guess that is the definition of a haunting if we're going to ...
Emily: Yeah.
Amanda: I'll submit it to Webster's. But so many ghosts so often, especially in popular understandings and the stories we get from our listeners for the hometown urban legend specials, where the ghost is just ... you can't scry or divine their purpose. They cause chaos, and so, from my empathetic brain, I want to say, "What suffering are you undergoing that you're doing this?"
But sometimes I don't know. It feels like the monster that has the least, I don't know, broadly understandable motive.
Emily: Yeah, because it's always like ... That's the nice thing about a ghost is they have kind of the same problem as demons, but in a different way, which is they're very specific in terms of we know what they are, we know what they do, we know where they come from. But also, then, you reach out to their motivations and it's literally just always the question is you're going to die and you're going to leave something undone. What are you not doing now that might cause you to come back as a ghost? That answer is so specific to every single individual outside of figures like the Christmas Carol ghosts, which are, again, demons in ghosts' clothing.
Amanda: So cool. I'm going to be thinking about this all day, maybe all year.
Julia: Until we get to talk about the Christmas Carol again, December 2020.
Amanda: Exactly.
Emily: Yes, December 2020.
Amanda: Planning for it. Mark it down.
Julia: We're already scheduling you for it, Emily.
Emily: So hopefully the world is still here.
Julia: Hopefully. Fingers crossed.
Amanda: Listen, if we're all there together, we will talk about ghosts and make merry.
Emily: I literally just signed a deal for a project that will come out in 2024.
Amanda: Oh, my God.
Emily: And I'm like, will the world still be around in 2024? Prob not.
Amanda: Hopefully they pay you in advance.
Emily: I will never have to do this, so yeah.
Julia: Your contract as if the world won't be here in five years.
Emily: Yeah.
Julia: And if it comes to it, you'll figure it out.
Emily: Yeah.
Amanda: Emily VanDerWerff, thank you so much for joining us to talk about everything that I love and stuff that I could continue talking about for the rest of time.
Emily: Hey, it was so great to be here. Do you need me to plug stuff?
Julia: Yes.
Amanda: You're welcome to.
Emily: Okay. Since it's January 1st, you can go and check out the feed for my podcast, Arden. It is a true crime ... I always call it a true crime parody. I don't know that that's specifically true. But it is a true crime show where it's fictional cases that we solve every season. But they're simultaneously based on real true crime cases and Shakespeare plays, and our Season 2 is about to launch, and we probably have some goodies up on the feed for you to listen to. So check out Arden on the podcatcher of your choice.
Prime Time is also available on podcatchers. The first season is about the intersection of the presidency and television. We should know soon if we get to make a second season.
I also have this long running interview show called I Think You're Interesting that is available on podcatchers everywhere, and it was just me talking to people I thought were interesting.
You can buy Monsters of the Week in bookstores. You can find my writing on vox.com, and you can find my Twitter at T-V-O-T-I. That's twitter.com/tvoti.
Amanda: Strongly endorse a following with you and your wife on Twitter.
Emily: Oh, yeah.
Amanda: Y'all are truly [goals 00:54:23].
Emily: She's a delight. She's a delight, isn't she?
Amanda: Absolutely.
Julia: And I love that she doesn't read your Twitter at all.
Amanda: It's so heartwarming. As a fellow internet creator, half of an internet creator couple, I appreciate the strong divide.
Beautiful. Emily, thank you. And listeners, if you are visited by a demon wearing the skin of a ghost, stay calm and just remember ...
Julia: Stay creepy.
Amanda: Stay cool.