This week is NOW’s Haunted Toronto issue, shedding light on the city’s spookiest sites, and one of the ways you can experience the package is as an audio tour, with Enzo DiMatteo’s hideous historical notes delivered by Toronto horror authorities Andrea Subissati and Alexandra West.
West is the author of Films Of The New French Extremity and The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle: Final Girls And New Hollywood Formula; Subissati is the editor of Rue Morgue magazine. And why did we ask them to be our narrators? Because we really like their podcast, Faculty Of Horror – which released its 100th episode this month.
“I feel like for some, 100 episodes doesn’t sound like a lot if like you’re doing weekly or biweekly episodes,” West says on the latest episode of the NOW What podcast. “But Faculty Of Horror is a monthly podcast just simply due to the fact that Andrea and I both have day jobs. Each episode takes a lot of time to research and edit and do all that other fun stuff that goes into it. So we’ve been at it almost nine years, and we kind of hit this milestone. It’s a little wild to think about.”
“We launched in December of 2012,” Subissati says. “We were just recording on a Rock Band USB mic on my laptop. I would edit it poorly [laughter], it sounded like garbage all the time – and now eight years and 100 episodes later, the world has changed and podcasting has changed. The role of women in podcasting has changed. The conversation has changed around movies. It’s been a really exciting time to be in on that medium.”
How have things changed, exactly?
“We avoided the word ‘feminist’ because it was not a popular word in the worlds of podcasting [and] horror at the time,” Subissati says. “We were like, ‘Well, you know, we’re not out here with any agenda or anything like that, we’re just a couple of chicks who believe in equality and like to talk about horror films!’ Whoops, that’s a feminist podcast. And since then, we’ve embraced it. The conversations changed, but for the most part, we’re still doing what we set out to do from the start.”
“Andrea and I started this podcast as a way to carve out a little bit of space for ourselves in the horror community,” West says. “I know I certainly didn’t feel totally welcome in this film space as a wannabe journalist or anything like that, it felt like there was a lot of barriers to access. We both have academic backgrounds, which is kind of why we [called the podcast] Faculty Of Horror and we both read our MAs in various horror topics. It’s not about whether a film is good or bad; that’s not what we’re interested in talking about. We’re interested in having conversations about the themes [of a film], the reception, our reaction to it. We might throw in some shaping opinions about it, but I think it’s more about sharing tools for a different way to discuss films.”
And if you’re looking for an entry point to the podcast, West recommends one from earlier this year.
“One of the episodes I’m actually most proud of [was] on Twilight,” she says. “It was a really big conversation about that film and that movement that I hadn’t really engaged with before, and that totally surprised me.”
“Remember how I used to always say that when I was ready to commit career suicide, I would defend Twilight?” Subissati asks.
(“Yup,” West replies.)
“There’s a certain point where expertise and that kind of dude-bro nerdy snobbery can really stand in your way, and so I’m also really proud of that Twilight episode,” Subissati continues. “I’m proud that we dealt with it on our terms and respectfully – but at the same time, it’s not something that I could put in Rue Morgue. It’s not something I’d want to put out on social media. The Faculty Of Horror has become a really cherished outlet for me to talk about films in a way that I feel like I can’t elsewhere. And it’s really liberating.”
Listen to the entire conversation in the latest episode of the NOW What podcast, available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or playable directly below:
NOW What is NOW’s weekly news and culture podcast. New episodes are released every Friday.
