This Is Your SLASHERLIFE: The Babadook with Johanna Isaacson

This Is Your Afterlife

Johanna Isaacson wrote the freakin' book on The Babadook. It's called Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror, and it's about a bunch of other horror movies too. She kicks off This Is Your Afterlife's FIRST EVER themed series, a run of four episodes in October about horror movies I'm calling This Is Your SLASHERLIFE.

First, I talk to Jo about standard This Is Your Afterlife stuff—hell, the afterlife, memories, her "coma" moment—and then we kick off the SLASHERLIFE series with an in-depth discussion of The Babadook! Hopefully it goes without saying, but there are gonna be spoilers up and down this series.

Content warning: woo woo Marxism, communal luxury, the "manosphere," smoking a bunch of hash, Arches National Park, the grotesque feminine.

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Buy and read Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror!

Catch Johanna live at The Hollywood Theatre in Portland, OR speaking before a screening of The Babadook on October 23 and before a screening of It Follows on October 30 in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater.

Read more of her work at Blind Field Journal: blindfieldjournal.com.

Join her on Facebook in the group she runs, Anti-capitalist feminists who like horror films.

Follow Johanna on Twitter: @StepfordDotter

Subscribe to my newsletter, Definitive Answers, for weekly personal and culture essays, plus music recs! And follow me @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram.

Leave me a voicemail to play on the show: (313) MIST-URA (647-8872).

Thanks to new Associate Producer Sam Welbel!

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Transcript: This Is Your Afterlife on Podscribe

Music = Future: "Use Me" / James Blackshaw: "The Cloud of Unknowing" / Johnnie Frierson: "Miracles"