Compare that to now. Mainstream critics line up to praise body horror movies. Intense gore is seen as fun and necessary. If a major horror director left the majority of brutal deaths to the imagination in a film nowadays, they would be shoved off a cliff by horror fans.

Though Cronenberg's 1970s body horror films are widely praised now, the early critical response was not great, with a lot of critics essentially saying that cheap, gross images muted the films' interesting ideas.

"...in the twin mantles of Art and Commerce, and deny any contributing responsibility for the violence, crassness, and sub-literate idiocy that are gradually eroding what we optimistically refer to as our culture."

Another example. Horror critic and historian Bruce Lanier Wright in 1995: "I don't propose to say much more about gore film here...Personally, I'd rather be boiled in owl urine than write about this stuff. The makers of gore movies, predictably, have wrapped themselves..."

"...shock the reader into submission. They indulge in cheap tactics...Yet shock is a visceral experience, a sensory overload from which most of us recover quickly. Great horror fiction is not about shock...it digs beneath our skin and stays with us."

Just to give some examples of what I mean, we have writer and horror critic Douglas E. Winter writing in 1988: "But I question the recent trend toward explicitness in horror fiction...Too many purveyors of the 'gross-out' work from the proposition that the purpose of horror fiction is to..."

This looks great. Too bad I live in the US

So...I actually haven't listened yet. But I read Ocker's book on Salem before I visited for the first time, and I used to read the blog during Halloween season.

Great guest!

To be clear, it's not like I slam my computer shut whenever I see anything politically conservative on social media. But the stuff presented to me immediately over there was just so dumb.

I have quite a few complaints about Bluesky, but the nature of X seems glaringly obvious from my first 5 minutes with a new account.

Equally troubling are the multiple posts around the internet I've seen from people indicating that they regularly rely on the ai summaries for information and find it unnecessary to view search results.

Unfortunately, progressive legal activism organizations consistently ignore religious freedom issues