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Six authors.
Four horror movies.
Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib

This is Horror upon Horror.

On these episodes, I’ll be thinking through the creation, reading, and viewing of the most vital and visceral art: Horror. And I’ll be doing it with the frightening luminaries of the genre. People who are unafraid to endure the horrific imagination, and able to bring it to you.

On this first episode, I’ll be talking about nostalgia in horror with authors Nathan Ballingrud and Sarah Maria Griffin and then we’ll move onto our discussion of the amoebic violent power of Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of The Blob.

The blob. A form older than vampires but newer in consciousness. It’s outside of time. It’s what’s in the microscope made larger and larger, until it envelops everything in its path with crushing pressure and dissolving acidity.

Unlike other monsters, the blob has no direction, no real personality. It doesn’t want anything. It’s not even hungry; hunger would imply some sort of desire or longing. Instead, it’s drawn to whatever is close and warm, drawn to incorporate it, to grow with the heat of flesh, bone, and blood.

As it gets bigger, it needs more heat, more blood, to keep going.

The blob is the pure inertia of motion.

It can’t be questioned or answer questions. Does it even have senses? Or is it somehow already connected to us, already aware of where we are by some sort of dim awareness of evolutionary memory, pulsing with synchrony to thrum of the fluids in our bodies.

Everyone knows about the blob, but unlike Dracula or werewolves or zombies, not everyone has seen the movie.

In fact, it’s rare that you meet someone who has actually seen the original 1958 classic, The Blob, directed by theme park designer Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr and Christian educator Russel Doughten. It’s absurd but not quite schlocky, innocent but repressed. It also stills feels strange and very new in its own way.

The remake is something entirely different. Funny, brutal,. fast paced, sexual, disgusting.

I love both blobs.

Nondifferentiation is terrifying. Whether it’s death or the shared, awkward tangling of desires and bodies in sexual confusion. 

The Blob is a movie that shows us that togetherness means dissolution, and dissolution is horror. 
The Blob says: when you see what makes us all one… run.

I invited my two guests on because their work also blends elements of nostalgia and brutality. Both have been on the show before: NATHAN BALLINGRUD & SARAH MARIA GRIFFIN.

SARAH MARIA GRIFFIN is the author of the psychic vampire botany horror novel, Eat the Ones You Love, and most recently the gaming-spiritual-danger book, Strange Is the Light. Sarah has been on the show many times (her latest until now was AEWCH 252 where we talked about working as writers) and does an annual tarot reading event for patreon patrons.

NATHAN BALLINGRUD has also been on the show before, last time talking with me and Sara Gran on AEWCH 233 about cruelty in horror. His book of short stories, North American Lake Monsters is one of my very favorite horror collections. And his trilogy of retro future horror, The Lunar Gothic trilogy, begins with the utterly hideous (in the best way possible), The Crypt of the Moon Spider.

And the blob? Well the blob is the blob and nothing else.

I hope you love this first installment of the show. Much more to come in October from HORROR UPON HORROR on Against Everyone with Conner Habib.

CH