Capitalism Hates You: Horror film and Marxist theory.

From Get Out to The Babadook to Saint Maud: In his new book, Josh Gooch uses the horror film genre to expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism, drawing connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease. Here, Gooch is joined in conversation with Jo Isaacson. This episode contains spoilers for multiple films (list below).

Joshua Gooch is professor of English at D’Youville University in Buffalo, New York. He is author of Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film; Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity and The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy.

Johanna Isaacson is professor of English at Modesto Junior College and author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror. 

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Sianne Ngai

Michael Löwy / “critical irrealism”

Linda Williams on Psycho, essay in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook

Søren Mau

Nancy Fraser

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Silvia Federici

Amitav Ghosh

Kim Stanley Robinson

Jason W. Moore

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Sophie Lewis

M. E. O’Brien

Kathi Weeks

Lauren Berlant

FILMS DISCUSSED:

Psycho

Dracula

Nosferatu

Candyman

Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell

Joe Lynch’s Mayhem

Robert Eggers’s The Witch

Gillian Wallace Horvat’s I Blame Society

Rose Glass’s Saint Maud

Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook

Ari Aster’s Hereditary

Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Jordan Peele’s Us

Mariame Diallo’s Master

Tim Story’s The Blackening

Timothy Covell’s Blood Conscious

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance

Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
Lamberti Bava’s Demons

The Ring

Jeremy Saulnier’s Murder Party

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Praise for the book:
"Fiercely smart." —Annie McClanahan, author of Dead Pledges

"This is a book not just for fans of horror but for everyone interested in the ways films embed and communicate values, judgments, and affects." —Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, author of Gothic Things

Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film by Joshua Gooch is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.