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Six authors. Four horror movies. Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib
This is Horror upon Horror.

Friends,
We all have hidden lives – lives that are secret soil from which yet-unknown consequences are growing.
From the lives of our internal organs, which are working within you right now to the lives that we imagine and fantasize for ourselves yet will not achieve.
The most obvious, and yet in some ways the most hidden life, is that life of death itself.
We carry this death within us every day. The skeleton, the skull, and bones are emblematic of death, and they lurk just below our flesh, washed with fluid and blood every day.

Each of us makes our own deaths the project of our lives. Every step draws us closer, every action has a result, an effect, that shapes the way in which we will change from a living person to a dead one.

Inside all of our choices, there lives death.

The same is true fro the lives of civilizations, which hide away the seeds of their own demise in the flourishes of progress. In apocalypse movies, especially in zombie movies like the 28 Days Later series — in which the world’s population is infected by a virus that knocks the personhood out of each individual, replacing it with rage — we see the living-together of life and death. 

Things fall apart when we see the truth.

In zombie movies, death reveals itself as the coexisting state.

This is most apparent in Nia DaCosta’s 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE, the movie my guest DAN CHAON chose to talk about on this episode.

In Dan’s fiction, hidden away lives lead people down the path to their own doom.

In one of Dan’s most frightening story “The Bees” — from his story collection Stay Awake — a man’s second, secret, hidden family, creeps back into his circumstances and destroys the life he’s built for himself.

In his novel Await Your Reply, a man looks into sinews of conspiracy to figure out where his brother has disappeared to. Of course, to look at sinews is to cut into anatomy, to bleed out. 

In Ill Will, a series of drownings conceals a terrible truth hidden in the life of a family.

And in Chaon’s latest, One of Us – which takes inspiration for its title from the 1930s Todd Browning film, Freaks –  the lives 1915 circus performers are explored, as well as the lives of two children fleeing a murderer who speaks to the dead. The book looks behind the white make up of a frightening clown named Tickly Feather, into the secret language shared by the brother and sister on the run, into the secret motivations of a ringmaster, and more. 

The lives we hide away always whisper to us.
They have their own secret voices. They always ask:
Can your life on the surface the one that everyone knows endure me?
Or will your world end the second I’m revealed?

Enjoy the horror,
CH