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Episode 41: On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin

Weird Studies

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The Psychotherapeutic Approach to Horror in Folk Tales

I like that idea of a psychotherapeutic approach or a function. It's interesting to think about these as genres that exist because modernity brings them into being. I'm thinking about fairy tales and how old folk tales often just have a dimension of horror to them. You'll have a story and then suddenly somebody gets their head cut off. That's like a subtext that's always there and seldom talked about. And I wonder if that is something that horror, that quality that just sort of is ambient in a lot of folk tales, sort of becomes separated out and cultivated on its own.

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