Geez, it’s been a while since we got spooky on the show, hasn’t it? High time we brought back Mike Thorn to talk about how Wes Craven fused meta storytelling and horror in two franchises: A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream. We’ll permeate the membranes of reality, disassemble Craven’s views on horror’s social and political value, and laugh about how Matthew Lillard yells “BOO-GAH” when he imitates a gunshot.
Mike has a terrific new horror novel, Shelter for the Damned, that you can check out in print or e-book format directly through Journalstone, or you can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Walmart.
In this episode, we discuss:
Wes Craven’s philosophy of horror and how he weaves that philosophy into his plots.
The real-life contexts that deepen (and are deepened by) these films.
The value of stories, the value of dreams, the value of horror.
A darn good set of movies — you owe it to yourself to check these all out.
If you’d like to support the show, here’s a link to our Patreon.
Media:
Craven’s characters make their final crossings through the hazy barriers of their realities, passively or forcefully, tragically or heroically.
Works discussed during this episode:
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
Scream (1996)
Scream 2 (1997)
Scream 3 (2000)
Scre4m (2011)
Mike Thorn
Mike Thorn is the author of Darkest Hours and Dreams of Lake Drukka & Exhumation. His debut novel Shelter for the Damned will be released through JournalStone in 2021.
His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies and podcasts, including Dark Moon Digest, The NoSleep Podcast, DarkFuse, Unnerving Magazine, Turn to Ash and Tales to Terrify. His film criticism has been published in MUBI Notebook, The Film Stage, The Seventh Row, Bright Lights Film Journal and Vague Visages.
He completed his M.A. with a major in English literature at the University of Calgary, where he wrote a thesis on epistemophobia in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness.