Imagining the Digital Afterlife

We recently did a call-out to our listeners, asking you to tell us what movies or shows not only scared you, but stuck with you for years. Even hardcore horror fans sometimes have that one trope or subgenre they can’t handle. In previous episodes, I talk with Rob Hanton, Brandee Iampietro, Michelle Dwyer, Adam Bennington, Maje Adams, and Jonathan Stark about the sneaky demons, haunted mirrors, and chemical mutations that took hold in their minds, and why they haven’t been able to shake them off.

Stephen King is often described as a master of horror, but I talked with fans and experts who believe that King is not actually a horror writer. Caroline Bicks (author of Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King), Neil McRobert of the podcast Talking Scared and Kim C. of the podcast The Year of Underrated Stephen King discuss the essential ingredients in his stories besides the scares, from the psychological demons of his characters to the isolation of living in a small town. We also explore how King meticulously crafts language, why so many film adaptations have missed the mark, and his impact on pop culture.

With all the talk about rogue AI potentially ending civilization, it’s hard not to think of The Matrix. When there are stories about people falling in love with ChatGPT, it’s hard not to think of movies like Her. But it’s possible that science fiction isn’t the best prism to understand AI right now – even if it feels like we’re living in a sci-fi story. Some experts are using ancient mythology instead. I talk with Berkeley researcher and author Nina Beguš, journalist and author Vanessa Chang, and Truman State University professors Amy Norgard and Josh Nudell how myths like Pygmalion or Pandora reflect primal human desires and fears that have an effect on the development of AI. I also talk with audio journalist Rebecca Nolan about her experience trying to bring her father back from the underworld as a chatbot.

When sci-fi movies take a big swing in depicting futuristic fashion, sometimes they end up creating iconic outfits and other times they create fashion which looks laughably outdated in a few years. I’ve became fascinated by three fashion designers whose work took center stage in sci-fi films and transcended the films themselves. I talk with fashion historians and authors Raissa Bretaña and Thèresa Winge about the influence of Paco Rabanne on Barbarella, the work of Jean-Paul Gaultier on The Fifth Element and the way Alexander McQueen was influenced by dystopian sci-fi, which informed the McQueen style in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Each of these collaborations left a lasting impact on cinema and fashion, from the runway to the shopping mall.

I’m a little obsessed with Widow's Bay. It’s a horror-comedy series on Apple TV set on a fictional island off the coast of Massachusetts. The island isn’t as famous as Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket -- for good reason. Widow's Bay is cursed by a demonic entity. The show is nominated for 19 Emmy Awards, including Best Comedy, and I talked with their Emmy nominated production designer, Steve Arnold. We discuss the careful worldbuilding needed to blend horror and comedy, real and fake history, and subtle references to Jaws, The Fog, Halloween, The Shining, Carrie, and other works by Stephen King. We also look at why some of the props on the show became viral hits, like a set of creepy fake board games.