Andrew Klavans and his guest dissect the video game "Exit 8" and its film adaptation, which explores Japan's declining birthrate through a salary man's pregnancy crisis. They connect the game's liminal spaces to Victorian ghost stories by authors like M.R. James and Sarah Waters, arguing that outsider perspectives fuel the genre's focus on alienation. The discussion evolves into a philosophical debate on whether modern horror reflects supernatural fear or a crisis regarding consciousness and matter, referencing Stephen King and C.S. Lewis before recommending David Mitchell's "Slade House" as a prime example of psychological unease over gore. Ultimately, the episode suggests that contemporary horror serves as a profound inquiry into the soul's relationship with reality. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Cult Classic Logic00:14:28
So many images from Exit 8 come from The Shining, the movie The Shining, the Stanley Kubrick film, where he's going around and around that hotel.
The little boy is bicycling around and around that hotel.
And even the blood that comes pouring out as a tribute to that film, it's obviously an homage because it's shot in exactly the same way.
And so the liminal space, the eerie space, is part of the haunted house.
I mean, just by nature.
Now, see, this is why you're so annoying.
Oh, there must be so many of them.
Sorry, yeah, how much more time do we have last night?
And we're back.
It's claiming on the, hello.
It's claiming on the culture.
Episode two.
We liked doing this so much last time that I actually came, walked out of the computer and into real life.
We're here in person.
It's actually nice to see you.
I never get to see you unless we're working.
As far as I know, I've never seen you before.
This is the first time, in fact.
Oh, there's no relation.
That's right.
Yes.
Well, I'm staying with my mother who lives nearby.
Yeah.
So here we are doing episode two.
Really stoked about it.
It was super fun last time.
It's been awesome to see everybody's reaction.
People seem to really like it.
We kind of lucked out, although this was yours.
Yeah, it's lucked.
Output transcript Out and says, I chose a great movie and it took off and it deserved to take off.
It was really good.
It's been like a sensation.
And so now we immediately want to enter the obscure world where no one will care what was in true classic Clavin fashion.
We're like, great, we're going to have a little bit of momentum.
Let's just destroy it immediately by becoming as niche as we possibly can.
It's the family tradition.
We have a little crest that says, Don't watch us.
I've learned it from the best.
Yeah, exactly.
I grew up being trained to flee as quickly as possible from all mainstream culture.
No, you.
We did pop culture, now we're doing niche culture.
But actually, this isn't really niche.
So, you picked the topic this time, and I had not heard of it before.
So, in that way, it's kind of niche.
It's sort of a cult classic phenomenon.
But really, what we're talking about right now is ghost stories, right?
Scary stories.
And that's not niche at all.
That is like a huge thing.
It's big, it's everything you're up to.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, we're going to talk specifically about this thing called Exit 8, which people may not have heard about.
I don't know.
Some of our viewers who are into video games might know about this because it begins as a video game.
It's what's called a walking simulator.
So in 2023, this game came out on Steam, really small.
You can literally buy it for the cost of a cup of coffee.
It's like four bucks and it probably takes about an hour max to play.
So this is a very, very simple, spare Japanese game.
Concept is you're walking in a Tokyo subway station, or it looks like the Tokyo metro, right?
And the Station just goes around in a loop.
So you keep walking through the same kind of four corridors over and over again.
And the same guy comes back a bunch of times.
You keep passing the same magnetic.
Right, exactly.
And basically, the only thing you have to do is you have to just spot if anything changes each time.
It's called anomalies.
You get this little sign.
If you see an anomaly, turn back immediately.
So it's kind of this just spooky atmospheric thing.
Right.
And it's got like the things that change can be like really over the top.
They can be like terrifying kind of rivers of blood or whatever.
And they can just be like very subtle, little eerie kind of.
Ghostly things.
And so this thing, which you would think was kind of a nothing, like took off and became super popular.
It's available on every video game platform.
And they've now made it into a movie, which is the occasion for our talk.
Which has been a smash around the world and only now is open to you.
Yes.
Really, really interesting.
It went to Cannes, the big film festival.
It won, I think, best poster at Cannes.
Did it?
Yeah, it has a really cool poster.
And they basically taken, I mean, what's really interesting about it is they've taken this video game, which Does not have a story, but does have, does tap into this real excitement about ghost stories and scary stories and Japanese ghost stories in particular.
And they've given it a story, a pretty simple story about a guy who finds himself lost in this sort of eerie subway station right as he's learning that his ex girlfriend is pregnant and he has to make this decision.
Am I going to be the father to this child?
Right.
And that's the setup.
And then they just basically create the video game in movie form.
We do this thing when we.
Do these shows where we don't tell each other what we think.
That's right.
The content is we want to find out in real time.
And I can barely stand it.
Finally, at last, the Christmas dagger to open my presents because I really want to know what did you think of this video game?
Well, really interesting.
The video game I enjoyed.
It's like an hour long.
It was a little repetitive and could get frustrating because every time you make a mistake, you go back to start, essentially.
But as you say, it's an hour long and you'll figure it out pretty much.
But I did enjoy it.
I really like it.
Spooky stuff.
And I don't like horror.
I don't like blood and guts and all that.
We share this, and this is something that, because when we talk about scary stories, horror is also really big right now.
Neither of us is all that into the gore.
I always get actually kind of disappointed and bored.
It doesn't scare me when something gets really bloody, but I just find it like I'm not interested.
And I don't like things jumping out at me.
I mean, my five year old grandson can do that and scare me.
It's not that impressive as a creative act, but I love ghost stories.
And I define a ghost story not, it doesn't have to actually have a ghost in it.
And this is a long tradition.
M. R. James, the great.
The greatest of all British ghost story writers said, you know, that's not the point.
But it does have to have this sense where something cracks through our reality to show us another reality.
And it's just this eerie feeling that you get.
The uncanny.
The uncanny.
That's the perfect word.
The title of one of your books.
Yes, about the ghost story.
Yes.
And the uncanny is it.
And so I like the game.
Yeah.
I want to preface what I say about the movie, and this is not a criticism, but it's just an observation.
It's a small movie.
And it should be, and they made the right decision, but it's kind of like an extended Twilight Zone episode.
It's very, very contained in its story.
But I really liked it for all of that.
I thought it was very creative.
I thought that they put a story in that was not just a good story, it was a fascinating story.
It has different angles, different points of view, and the points of view blend together.
So I was really interested in that.
Problem that they pose, which is a really interesting one for Japan, which on the one hand has this salary man culture where everybody kind of marches in line and works themselves to death.
And they make it about that.
Yeah, and they make it about that.
But the other thing is they're also dying out and they're not having any children.
So the story begins, and this is not giving anything away, this first five minutes of the story, not just with him learning that his girlfriend is pregnant and the word they will never speak, which will it be?
They keep saying, which will it be?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Posting.
Yeah, right.
But also, there's an incident that I won't give away, but it's right at the beginning that asks the question is, does the entire society have room for babies and moms?
So I was really taken with it.
I thought they solved the problem of story writing, and they solved the problem because games don't really have stories.
This one especially doesn't have a story, but it's kind of like a bigger version of the problem that all games have.
And all games, they always say, well, The Last of Us had a wonderful story, but really the story is always the same.
It's we go from here to here and then we shoot things.
Get the objects, get the objects, and kill the thing.
And they solved that by making it.
A human drama, and they also solved a problem that I have dealt with because I wrote a J horror film, the worst J horror film.
I have to say, it's pretty bad.
This is one missed call.
Yeah, yeah, not your finest moment.
But you threw school, as I've been reminding you ever since.
Yeah, exactly.
I've heard of this, actually.
It achieved its telos, actually, perfectly.
But the thing is, Japanese stories normally don't make sense.
When you read the book, The Ring, even you see the film, it's not as well explained as it is in the American version.
That's true of the The Grudge was written by a pal of mine, Stephen Susko, here.
Their storytelling has a logic that's different than ours.
And I think they didn't do that here.
It makes perfect sense.
It's simple, it's straightforward, but the way they tell it makes it elaborate.
So I liked it.
I thought it was a good, really good, small ghost story.
Yeah, interesting.
So I almost had kind of the inverse reaction, I think, a little bit.
Like, I liked both of these things a lot.
Like, I was fascinated by each of them.
We should say, like, yeah, the game's super small.
Is created by this studio called Kotaki Create, which I don't think they've really done anything.
There's a sequel to the game, but I don't think they've done anything else that I know of.
And the writer of the movie has this big challenge.
His name is Genki Kawamura.
I'm probably going to mispronounce all these names.
Genki Kawamura and Kentaro Hirase.
And it stars this guy, Kazumari Ninomiya.
I don't think that any of these people we know in the States, right?
Well, one of them was in a Clint Eastwood film about Iwo Jima.
And he's pretty good, I think.
But so it's this very tight team.
It's a tiny cast.
There's not that many people in it.
There's the guy who gets lost in the subway.
There's the woman who's having the baby.
And then there's this guy who the salary is also in the game, you know.
But the game literally doesn't have a story, it's actually just a mood.
And the thing about it for me, like, I loved it.
I disappeared into this game.
I was so absorbed in it because it has exactly that thing that you're describing.
And I have always loved about video games the way that they, like, Force your imagination out of you, or they invite your imagination.
So, like, video games, as you say, often don't complete their narrative, right?
They leave a lot kind of unspoken around the edges.
And my favorite video game ever, Mega Man X, is really like this.
Like, it takes place, it's a little side scroller, like, shooter game.
It takes place in this very evocative, artistic world of the future and the robots, but they never really quite tell you what's going on.
And so, you're sort of always making up different backstories.
And there's all these, like, part of the gameplay itself is like finding these little secrets, you know?
And that's what this game is.
Exclusively is.
It's like these little things that happen.
Some of them are so, so freaking scary.
I mean, there's a VR version of this game, which I think I would probably be too scared to play.
It's creepy.
It's really creepy.
And you and I have had, you know, we grew up, I grew up, we played video games together all the time.
And we always found like scary games are genuinely scary.
And they can evoke that feeling of the uncanny where somebody is watching you just outside the door.
Right.
And like there is like one of these where like the The door swings open, and there's somebody just like on the other side, kind of looking at you.
So, then the movie, I totally agree with everything that you said about like the way that they gave it a story and made it about something, which is it's it is about the like birth crisis in Japan.
It's about the fact that this salary man culture where you go to you grind yourself to the bone, it's like it's hyper productive.
They're known in Japan for like being these like incredibly skillful workers, they make all this great technology or whatever, but it's like.
None of that has any meaning unless you have a family.
And so the whole point is like you end up just trapped in this loop.
And the only way that he can kind of get out is to sort of crack his own inner soul open and agree.
So all of that I thought was really smart.
I just didn't find it scary.
It was not actually scary.
No, it was.
In fact, the one scene in it that's a horror scene I thought was misplaced.
I thought it was a mistake.
But it was eerie.
And the other problem that it solved, and sometimes I admire this just from a craft point of view, the other problem that it solved is the game is repetitive.
As I say, you get thrown back to start.
You make one mistake, you get thrown back to start.
You know that's going to happen in the movie.
And you think, you've only got about an hour and a half to play that, and they keep it around that length, which is amazing these days.
And there's a couple of cool Easter eggs like the Poster in the station.
This is not true in the game, but in the movie, it's MC Escher, who is this Dutch.
Yes, that's true.
They do that.
And then they also, I didn't realize this until afterward, but there's one song in this movie.
It's in the trailer.
That is Ravel's Bolero.
Ravel was this early 20th century composer who was obsessed with American factories.
He visited America and he thought, wow, the assembly line, it has this really repetitive musical structure.
And that's what the Bolero is about.
So they're obviously thinking a ton about this.
Like the themes of this thing.
But yes, the horror doesn't kind of come together.
And you're right, though, that the game, I mean, look, the thing about games that they have that no other form that we know of have is they immerse you.
They pull you in, the gameplay makes you part of the game.
When your sister and I played Resident Evil 4, which was one of the very first games where things actually jumped out of stagnant scenes, like a door could spring open at you, we were so afraid we kept passing the controller back and forth.
Isn't it your turn to play?
I think it's your turn to play.
Because when you're holding that controller, you are sucked in.
And they don't have that here.
They do create a sense of eeriness with the salary man and certain things that they do with him.
And they avoid almost entirely jump scares, which I just hate.
I really dislike.
So, yeah, it's not the scariest film I ever saw.
But as a Twilight Zone episode, which is what I thought it was, it's pretty powerful and good.
I thought it was a good, small movie.
Yeah, no, it is.
It definitely has every kind of experience that you can have while playing the game somewhere in this movie.
It's like the other thing is that as you, in the game, if you've successfully spotted the.
Anomaly, they call them the difference in the thing that's gone wrong.
Then the level goes up, so you go from platform one to or exit one to exit two to exit three until you get to exit eight, and that's the whole that's the entire plot.
Um, and so they every time you turn the corner, you're like, Am I going to get to this level?
And they do like all this stuff with that, but yeah, the really interesting dimension of it is like this.
Ghosts Haunting Us00:13:07
Way in which horror seems to be, I guess, tapping into or expressing something.
Because that was the smartest thing about the movie, right?
Is to connect our obsession with scary stories with this very current problem of, like, how are we going to carry on our civilization, right?
Like, what and why is it that people find it impossible to kind of come together?
And what I loved about this movie, in terms of what it said about like childbearing and having kids and starting a family, is that it did not.
Place the blame exclusively on the man or on the woman.
No, right.
It was like each one of them, he had to kind of man up, and she also had to make a decision to keep the baby, basically.
And so, and the culture itself was informed against them.
Yes.
So, I guess, like, you mentioned this a little bit.
All through my childhood, you were really into ghost stories.
You and Faith, my sister, right?
Like, used to go to haunted houses in England.
Yes.
That's right.
You're looking for ghosts.
Actually, yeah.
And so, this has been like a major part of your psyche and our psyche for a long time.
It now seems to be a part of the culture in a way that it was not when I was a kid.
This object itself, Exit 8, is part of a trend called Liminal Spaces, which we should just mention because it is a huge thing.
Again, kind of a niche online thing, but currently making its way into the culture.
If you've seen that Back Rooms is coming out at the end of May, this movie.
Always hidden doors, eerie spaces that just don't quite make sense.
Yeah, places that seem abandoned.
There's a book called House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski that is kind of about this.
But The Backrooms, which is now becoming a movie, is really where it enters into online culture.
This is from like 4chan.
When I say 4chan, do you know what that is?
I do.
This is where like Young Clavin explains all of it.
No, no, no.
But so 4chan is, you know, so we have this thing called the internet.
It started with dial up.
It's like you press a button.
Yeah, right, exactly.
And actually crank it with a little leprechaun inside.
No, 4chan is this image board.
People would post kind of, you know, I think it still exists, but it used to be really big.
And somebody just posted a picture of some like yellow wallpaper.
It's interestingly often like an 1980s or 1970s type kind of, or even 90s kind of nostalgic looking abandoned video store.
Or I think the original Backrooms was like a furniture store or something.
And then, yeah, the idea is that this is a liminal space, meaning it's a space in between.
That's the same thing.
But it's not invented by the, you know, I love ghost stories.
I've read, I think, almost every classic ghost story there is.
And the ghost story in England, anyway, where, who, And they do it best.
There's no question about it.
The British do it best.
But it springs up at a certain moment.
It springs up in the Victorian era, right around the middle of the century, right around 1850 or so.
And that's when we both read and loved Tennyson's famous epic poem, In Memoriam, where he laments the death of a college friend for 100 pages of poetry.
And it's Tennyson wrenching himself apart.
Because the new science seems to be disproving the Bible and leaves him questioning whether there's such a thing as eternal life.
This is so different than what I thought.
Yeah, I thought.
Yeah, and at the same time that happens, Dickens writes a Christmas carol where the only real ghost in it is Jacob Marley, and he shows up and he says to Scrooge, Man of the worldly mind, do you believe in me or not?
And this is the moment when the Victorians start to question their faith.
They really have this.
It's a serious problem because soon evolution will come along and all of the things in the Bible will start to be questioned.
And the thing that is most important is do we believe in the spirit?
And suddenly the ghost story from the late Victorian period into the Edwardian period, which is just before World War I and into World War I, becomes huge.
I mean, every M.R. James, you know, every great ghost story writer you can name is part of this.
And I think what's really interesting about this, about the liminal spaces, Is that the question then, as man of the worldly mind, do you believe in the eternal life?
Yes.
The question in this movie, and I think the question that in a lot of ways these new liminal spaces are asking, is do you believe in life during life?
Do you believe in life itself?
And I think the reason for that is actually a positive one.
I think it's a moment in which science and faith are actually moving closer together, not further apart.
And so suddenly the eerie and the unexplainable.
Are here, they're right here.
There's so much in this because, first of all, that's you started so much later in time than I expected you to.
Like, when you just now said, you know, the ghost story really gets going in, yeah, I assumed you were going to be like 1600, like early modern or something, right?
Yeah, um, but but you're right, I mean, there are ghosts, we have ghosts, Japan has an ancient tradition of ghost stories.
Oh, and they're true, they're ancient, no doubt.
There's one from Pliny the Younger, there's like you know, the Odyssey has ghosts in it, so definitely like.
There's always been this idea of the spirit, the avenging spirit, the spirit that's not been buried properly.
Like, all of that is in the bloodstream of the West.
But you're right.
Like, this is a separate thing.
And the Christmas story that Dickens wrote, that is way less well known than Christmas Carol, is called The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain.
I think I'm getting that right.
And that one is really fascinating relative to what you're saying, because, like, that's about a guy who basically makes a deal to erase his memories.
And he's a chemist.
And he says something like, You know, if I had a poison in my blood, I would draw it out, and I have a poison in my mind.
And of course, he realizes that by drawing out his painful memories, he turns himself into a monster, right?
And he has to, and it turns out that the soul is not the same as the body, and your mind's not the same as your blood, and all that.
So it's obviously like really bound up with all of this same kind of concern.
But what you're proposing about, I think, about the liminal spaces is like now the ghosts are kind of like coming back to haunt us or something.
Well, yeah, because like we have this new quantum physics, you know, we have this new thing where things don't quite make sense.
And scientists are starting to say, well, you know, all of this time we made a deal.
We made a deal with the public, basically, that we weren't going to mention consciousness.
We weren't going to mention perception.
We're just going to look at the world as if it were objective.
And they tricked themselves into thinking that.
Objectivity was a real thing, it was the only thing.
And in fact, now they're starting to say, well, you know, if a photon of light can be a wave or a particle, depending on who's looking at it, when, you know, maybe consciousness and material reality are bound together, which is essentially what Genesis tells us that consciousness speaks reality into being.
And so I think a lot of these things, and you know, you sent me some AI things that I played on my show at one point where they're just like, Little stories where somebody shows up for a new job and they tell them the rules of the job.
And it's like at 3 15 in 30 seconds, if the phone rings, don't answer it.
Right, right, right.
Whoa.
Okay.
That's the kind of scary that we both really like.
And it's becoming, I mean, weirdly, AI is kind of good at it because AI also operates in a very closely related concept the uncanny valley, right?
Yes, yeah, very close.
It's like something is a cartoon, that doesn't bother us.
Something is a photograph, that doesn't bother us.
As the kind of artificial starts to approach the human but doesn't quite make it there, that's really eerie.
And yeah, like the kind of these two pictures getting overlaid back on top of one another.
Because your point about science, which is very well taken and is the subject of my book, Light of Mind, Light of the World, is totally apt.
And what that was, that moment of the genesis of science, was actually not supposed to be erasing the spiritual world.
It was just supposed to be severing the two altogether.
And it's true that we eventually forgot about the spiritual world and decided that.
Because science worked so well, there was only matter, right?
But basically, it was like the never the twain shall meet.
This was Descartes, right?
It's like the spirit and the body are kind of like two totally distinct things.
And then what happened with quantum physics is like you realized that that is a useful approximation for a lot of experiences that we have, but it's not a Down to the stud's description of reality.
And so Heisenberg, one of the great forefathers of quantum physics, says basically this is Aristotle's revenge, right?
This is the return of spirit into matter and all of this.
And it's spooky and it's great material.
You know, one of the things that happens in that scene between Marley and Scrooge is when Scrooge says, I don't believe in you because you could just be indigestion.
Marley terrifies him because fear is very convincing.
He just shrieks.
And one of the reasons I think horror is such a big.
Thing is, that it actually does force you to believe in something that's not real or that we think is not real, whether it's a werewolf or something that actually is real, which is the soul.
And the guy who does this really well, and I don't think we should do a thing about ghost stories and fear without mentioning Stephen King because at his best, he is as good as people say he is and deserves the amazing success he's had.
But he does this thing.
He has a short story, the name of which escapes me, but it's called Room Something or Other.
They made it into a bad movie.
One of the things that happens in this is a guy in a haunted room, and every now and again the radio goes on.
Yes.
And all that comes over are numbers, and the numbers make no sense.
And there's something about that that is just frightening.
Like it'll be 7, 236, you know, 14.
And you think, you try to put it together, but you just can't.
And there's something about numbers not making sense that just shatters the entire mathematical idea.
Well, right.
I mean, this is what ghost stories and every time in books are about, right?
Is that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy.
And we find this like, I think C.S. Lewis, who points out that we find death unnatural, we find it kind of incredibly strange and threatening and obviously horrifying that this thing called a human being should expire.
Which, again, even when we tell ourselves we're just made of meat or whatever, it's still.
We know that when we die, something more happens just than that the body ceases to exist.
It's like something is extinguished or seems to vanish from the world.
It's like we know we're all the parts of our body.
Go, right?
All of the atoms disintegrate into the earth.
But where does the other part go?
That's the thing that was kind of what makes the ghost story work.
And this idea that it's not really there just doesn't really hold together in the long run.
The fact, you know, this is one of the things I'm sure you've met Jim Tour, James Tour, the scientist, who talks about the fact that when a cell dies, scientists can't tell what has happened.
What is it lost?
What is gone?
And, you know, we are this collection of particles and beings, cells that are living things that are held together.
By the principle.
And by the way, this is something, I throw this in here.
In the one really good Gothic ghost story in the Bible, which is the scene where the guy hangs out in the graveyard because he's possessed by a demon.
And Jesus asks, What's the name of the demon?
And he says, I am Legion.
I sometimes think what he's talking about is that we are all Legion except for the life force.
And what the devil wants to do is deny the existence of the life force.
Disintegrate completely.
Well, this is why the numbers in the King story are so terrible.
Is because they do to really dissolve form and to deny the logos, right?
Because the logos is the thing that threads through it, that gives everything order.
And this is obviously a big Christian idea, but Christians in many ways took it from Greek philosophy and baptized it, right?
This idea that, yeah, if we're all just collections of stuff, then there's no me or you, there's just a big sea of atoms.
But we know that there is this like governing kind of logos.
Well, reason or order that makes a thing a thing.
Yes, yes.
And to truly disintegrate that is satanic.
It's evil and horrifying.
And even just like decay and decomposition is disgusting to us for the same reason.
Like if you see rotting flesh, like you know that you're seeing the work of the disintegrating force.
And that C.S. Lewis story, which I think you mentioned last time about the objective room in that hideous, strange room.
Yeah, yeah, where they take him into this place and it's all designed to like, Thwart his natural impulse to make sense of things, to discern forms.
Beyond Gay or Woman00:04:09
That's right.
The fact that we are made to see the invisible world.
And I think one of the things that really bothers me about modern horror is that so many of these stories, and I think of that film Smile, and there was one called Long Legs or something like that, they have demons in them.
But they have no God, which actually doesn't make sense.
They have this evil.
And one of the things I love about these liminal space stories and these eerie stories.
Is they depend on the consciousness of the observer.
They depend on something in juxtaposition with this eerie thing that only exists essentially in our relationship with the world.
And they do exactly this thing that we're talking about.
Every one of them thwarts just the basic categories of our minds, right?
Like space, right, is one of the ways that we make sense of the world.
Like it's part of the relationship between our mind and the world.
We see things like you're here and I'm here and I'm not over there, right?
Like these are just like really fundamental ones.
One plus one equals two type stuff.
There's something else.
Do I have time to just run out one last time?
Do it.
Yeah, go ahead.
One of the really fascinating things about the ghost story is the huge contributions from women and from gay people.
M.R. James, who I said I think is the greatest of the Victorian, Edwardian ghost story writers, almost certainly gay.
E.F. Benson, who is his second in command, just great stories, stories that you would know because they've almost become urban legends, like the one where you've There's room for one more, whether you're getting in an elevator or a car that's crashing.
I thought that was an urban life.
Yeah, no, he actually wrote that.
Oh, Quietly, openly, yay.
If you look at so many of the ghost stories, one of the best ghost novels written recently was by a lady named Sarah Waters, called The Little Stranger.
And she's a lesbian writer.
I mean, that's what she almost writes about, and that's what the story is about.
And I really have thought about this a lot because of my own fascination with.
Mary Shelley, you mentioned, is not quite a ghost story, but Frankenstein is also a woman kind of inaugurating.
Absolutely.
She invents that.
Oh, the women are endless.
E. Nesbitt, and I won't be able to name off the top magazine.
Any good collection is almost 50% women, which is rare for any genre that's not romantic.
But one of the things I think about this is I think that the position of being a female and the position of being gay is in some ways a position of being estranged, possibly from society, but maybe from your own body.
That in other words, there's a little bit of a separation there.
And I've sometimes thought that the reason that I'm so fascinated by them is that I'm a A Christian, I grew up knowing that I was like a Christian American.
A Christian Jewish Jewish body.
You were trans Christian or whatever.
Trans Christian.
And I think that there is this disconnect that proves the point, that proves that you are something that your body is not, and your body is something that you are not.
Yeah, you're sort of standing at this remove.
The word would be alienation or something.
And there are obviously versions of this experience that don't boil down to being gay or being a woman.
And I think, again, it's.
As you say, it's not so much about horror at that level as it is just about the awareness of the immaterial world, right?
Like the distinction between yourself and the ghost.
Why are ghosts even scary?
Uh huh.
I mean, they should be reassuring in some sense.
Somebody's still there, but I mean, M.R. James said the ghost in his story is one of the rules.
The ghost always had to be malevolent.
I get that.
Because in a lot of ways, when you have a story where the ghost, like in the sixth sense, Is not essentially malevolent.
There's something too pat about it.
There's something like, because you're asking this question is this thing real?
Is it me?
Is it separate from me?
Does it do me harm?
And when you get an answer, sometimes in the great ghost stories, you don't really know what the answer is.
I think that maybe getting an answer is beside the point to something.
The Eerie Story Answer00:09:16
Well, right.
I mean, like these, again, these liminal spaces, it's really interesting how they kind of fit into, because I'm very inclined to see, like, I'm really interested in things that are new, right?
Like, I'm interested.
And this is kind of the liminal space is kind of a new thing.
It's like a new variant on this.
And I think, like, it's very plausible what you're saying about it as a kind of product of the new scientific age.
But also, right, like, it does fit into this thing where it's like, in Exit 8, for example, you turn a corner and you're back around where you started from, right?
Or, like, in House of Leaves, you open, it starts out, they realize that the house is like, An inch larger inside than it is on the outside.
Yeah, which is really creepy.
It's so good.
It's like an actual jump scare in a book, which is really hard to do.
But yeah, like, It does always kind of end up being something has gone wrong that makes a ghost story.
Something's gone wrong.
And you know, this liminal space thing is kind of inherent in the ghost story.
It's not invented, it's not a modern thing.
I mean, in one of the classic ghost novels, The Haunting of Hill House, made into a terrific 1960s black and white movie called The Haunting.
You can't confuse it with the remake of the movie.
And it was really bad on Netflix.
Yeah, I didn't watch that.
But the one in the 1960s, something, that's by Shirley Jackson.
But that's the house.
The doors keep closing.
You open the doors and they shut again.
The halls are all a little bit offbeat.
And of course, so many images from Exit 8 come from The Shining, the movie The Shining, the Stanley Kubrick film, where he's going around and around that hotel.
The little boy is bicycling around and around that hotel.
And even the blood that comes pointing out as a tribute to that film, it's obviously an homage because it's shot in exactly the same way.
The wave breaks in exactly the same way.
And so the liminal space, the eerie space, is part of.
The haunted house.
I mean, just by nature.
Now, see, this is why you're so annoying.
Because the FO, there must be so many.
How many more times do we have left?
This is the part of the show that's just therapy for me, where I explain to the audience what it was like to grow up with you.
Because we had, there was this show Lost that was really interesting back in the day.
Not quite a ghost story, more of like an eerie, uncanny story.
But, you know, mom and I got really into Lost.
And you watched the first like three episodes and you were like, There's about five different ways that this can end.
Two ways.
Right.
It was like every episode, it was like one fewer.
You were like, because you have spent your life writing these stories and you know kind of the forms of them and like every possible crevice of this genre.
And mom and I were like, no, like this is kind of different.
And of course, you were right.
And of course, they had no idea how to end it.
And you were like, you stopped watching it halfway through.
And similarly with this, it's like, you know, you know, this genre back to front.
And so all of it, Kind of occupies like some place in that generic world.
Whereas I feel like this is such a product of the moment that I grew up in, right?
This like internet kind of wandering through the abandoned movie theater.
I mean, another object in this genre is like Five Nights at Freddy's, right?
Which is about being in a basically a Chuck E. Cheese's that has become haunted.
So I guess like just to close us out here, right?
Like it seems to me like we are.
The theme of this discussion has been that we are working out some kind of problem with these horror stories.
What I liked about the movie Exodate is that it really attacked bluntly, put its finger on what the problem is, which is this alienation from our spiritual selves, our inability to integrate our souls with our bodies.
This takes the shape of people aren't having babies.
I think the one thing that is new, it is changed, is before.
When in the Victorian Edwardian ghost story, the question is, is there something there?
Yes.
The question now is really that's because science and faith seem to be at odds.
But now I think science and faith are coming together, and that's even scarier still in some way that the supernatural and the natural are actually just one thing.
Yeah, they are as one.
Okay, well, that actually is like kind of profound.
So I think we can wrap up our Exit 8 discussion and turn to.
Stuff we like.
So at the end of this scene, or at the end of this scene, at the end of every episode, we want to do just things in this kind, in the genre that we're discussing that we happen to both really enjoy.
So in preparation for this, I went on.
I thought, you know, I know so many ghost stories.
Let me recommend.
I've done it on my show, but I thought, let me recommend some of the best ghost stories.
So I typed in best ghost stories.
And one of the first things that came up was a video by me.
I guess it's already out there.
So I decided instead what I'd like is to talk about an obscure but highly praised.
It was a bestseller when it came out, but I will bet that nobody watching this has read it.
And it's a liminal space ghost story.
And I brought it with me just so I would.
Oh, yeah, I'm so excited.
Okay, props.
Yeah.
It is called Slade House by David Mitchell.
Never heard of it.
You've never heard of it.
Nope.
Got great reviews.
Gillian Flynn, who wrote Gone Girl, has a wonderful quote on the back in the Washington Post.
Just about everybody gave it terrific, terrific reviews.
I don't know why I picked it up.
I guess sometimes I just go in and see a ghost story and I'll buy it.
But it is.
Spooky.
It's not horror.
It is just eerie.
It has an actual story that is eerie in itself.
And it's just about a house that every now and again, every few years, someone discovers it in the middle of London and what happens there.
And it's all liminal spaces.
It's David Mitchell and it's called Slade House.
And I really recommend it highly.
That's great.
If you haven't read it, which I'm sure you should definitely have not.
All right, go ahead.
I've never heard of that before.
So I will definitely actually check that out.
I am, as I mentioned, I'm staying at your.
At your house while we do this.
And I walked upstairs, and mom had put a novel that she likes on the bed that I'm sleeping on.
And she said, This is the equivalent of an after dinner mint on your pillow for the Clavin household.
I found some book that she likes.
So this is what we do.
Explains your entire personality.
Right.
It's like, I have no other personality than that.
Okay.
So I have something that you put me onto when I was probably in high school.
And that is a ghost story for Christmas.
It doesn't have to be Christmas.
Yeah.
To enjoy this.
One of the things we didn't quite talk about is that the ghost story really is an oral tradition first.
M.R. James, whom you mentioned in Cambridge, used to.
Just first tell his students these stories and then write them down.
Going back even further, like in Japan, I didn't know this, but as I was looking up kind of their ghost story tradition, which is very rich, apparently they used to do this thing where they would all get together and they would tell 100 ghost stories.
They would light 100 candles and they would tell 100 ghost stories and you would blow out the candle after you.
And it was like a test of your courage among the samurai.
So this is kind of like, I think, part of the tradition.
It's like we're all together.
Why is it that we?
We do this at Christmas.
Well, Christmas is when the space between worlds becomes thin, right?
It's like this contact is finally made between the spirit and the flesh.
And that's very beautiful, of course, but it's also very eerie and it's really cozy and fun and spooky to get together.
And so, at the end of our Christmas, wonderful Christmas celebrations, we all used to crowd together and watch these adaptations made by the BBC from 1971 to 8.
This is another one.
Most by M.R. James.
Most of them.
Yeah, five out of six, I think, by M.R. James.
And in fact, so.
You can't.
This is another one we have to be careful that you're not getting the remake because I can't speak for it.
There's a later version of this.
I have no idea.
It's nowhere near as good.
Okay.
I sort of figured it wasn't.
But the one that I love best is actually not part of the core series.
It was earlier.
And this is also M.R. James.
It's the Whistle and I'll Come to you, Minecraft.
Is this the black and white one?
Yes.
It's so good.
The guy who played Marley.
I was talking about, like, again, if people are not into horror, it's like, you know, just to be clear, like, we are also really not into like gory horror.
And there's nothing in this.
Nothing happens in this.
But it is so.
Terrifying.
It was like one shot of something really scary.
When we first moved to England, everybody went to bed on Christmas Eve, our first Christmas Eve, and I just turned on the TV because I never sleep.
And a ghost story for Christmas was on.
I thought, I've died and gone to heaven.
This isn't heaven now.
Yeah, but they're all pretty good.
And the last one is by Dickens, to your point.
It's The Signalman.
The Signalman, yeah, which is a good one.
I actually can't remember it also.
I need to rewatch it.
Yeah.
They also have incredible rewatch value, which is very important.
Yes.
And the guy who plays the lead in Whistle and I'll Come To You is the guy who plays Marley in our favorite.
Version of a Christmas carol.
He is.
He shows up if you watch that version.
Hoodern.
Hoodern.
And if you, yes, and if you watch, if you get a DVD of the 1951 Alistair Sim Christmas carol, which I think is just called Scrooge, he shows up as an older man and like introduces it in this very plummy British accent.
So he's like the spirit, he's the spirit of Christmas past, it turns out.
Okay, great.
Well, this has been really fun.
Really interesting.
Yeah.
Excuse to Talk Culture00:00:44
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