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

Listen to the first episode in this series, with Nathan Ballingrud & Sara Maria Griffin talking about The Blob (1988) on AEWCH 327; the second episode with Dan Chaon talking 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple on AEWCH 328; and the third, AEWCH 329 features Sara Gran and Paul Tremblay talking about The Blair Witch Project.

Friends,
The aesthetics of horror, at least in the US, have traditionally overlapped with heavy metal and death metal music. You know what I mean here: dark-clad figures and crazed clowns, bats, black clouds, and thorn-branched fonts. Sometimes they even share imagery, like the band Obituary’s cover for their Cause of Death album and a book of short stories by HP Lovecraft (painted by artist of the fantastique, Michael  Whelan).

I love horror with these aesthetics – but I’m glad another form seems to have opened up too. Sometime in the past 30 years, the horror trope of the final girl – the last surviving character of a horror novel or movie – began to highlight not the scariness of the monster, but the resilience of the monster’s victims.

The trope of the final girl insists on survival in the face of a world of danger. Often dangers that were at first hard to believe, hard to convince people of, and those included (until the final girl became a thing in horror) the expectations and beliefs of the audience.

For me, the final girl shows a shift of footing for horror as metal – immersion in the spectacle of the grotesque and dramatic – to punk: determination to fight back and connect with a force of will that was always there but not always expressed.

Punk rock is more than just survival, however. Its starting point is a knowingness that things are not okay. Punk is music with lyrics about the state of the world, and it has a sound that reveals a world that looks and feels differently than the one we’re told to accept.

It’s also the antithesis to the time spent in so many horror movies, where characters must spend inordinate amounts of time convincing each other that a threat exists. Punk already knows there’s a problem. By the time you get to the show or play the record, you’re in the observation and receiving the sounds of the community, the solution, the alternate reality that we know can exist.

In a horror movie, there’s the monster monster, and there’s the monster that’s people who refuse to believe what is apparent, obvious. The final girl and punk decide to live against both adversaries.

So now that the final girl has created a sort of bridge for us from what I’ll call metal horror to punk rock horror, who is developing punk horror? Who’s pushing it forward?

On this episode – the final in this year’s horror upon horror series, I’ll be talking with an author who does just that about a film that does the same.

KEITH ROSSON is the author of eight books so far, including Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, and his masterwork, Coffin Moon which is one of the most compelling novels I’ve ever read. What a huge surprise for a vampire novel! It is a swift, unstoppable thing. His most recent novel, Crone is about a girl that disappears and a correlating sightings of a strange and threatening witch-like being.

(It’s also the selection for the AEWCH BOOK GROUP fro October! Want to be a part of it? Sign up or upgrade your pledge here.)

Keith and I talk about punk rock and horror and then move into a conversation about Jeremy Saulnier’s 2015 punk rock slasher horror film GREEN ROOM, in which a punk band pisses off a bunch of murderous neo-Nazis and has to figure out how to escape disastrous and confining circumstances.

Punk rock and horror are two of my favorite genres of art – and this episode is my first comingling of the two – I’m so excited to share it with you

CH