GUTTER STUDIES

About GUTTER STUDIES

This is the audio feed for Gutter Studies: a video-essay project exploring the pleasure, history, and meaning of low cinema. gutterstudies.substack.com (https://gutterstudies.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Tom

Category

society & culture · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

29 Jul 2024

Latest episode

14 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

34 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   14 Sept 2026

   The Trouble With “Elevated Horror”

   Starting some time in the last decade or so, we’ve all run into the dreaded phrase “elevated horror.” Sometimes it meant A24. Sometimes it meant horror movies too-obvious in their treatment of grief, trauma, race, motherhood, or family dysfunction. Sometimes it just meant horror movies that critics decided to gush about after looking down on horror for … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe (https://gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   22 Jun 2026

   Jump to the Left, Step to the Right

   For fifty years, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has endured as a midnight ritual. The first thing any fan or critic wants to talk about is the cult following and audience participation elements: the costumes, callbacks, inside jokes, the flying props. And that’s all good fun. But the carnivalesque cult following around the film often impedes the more interesting critical questions we can ask. After all, what is the text of Rocky Horror actually about? And how does that relate to its cult elements or the cultural situation we live in today? My new video essay argues that underneath the fishnets and the floor show, Rocky Horror is a timeless story about sexual politics; specifically, about the cycle of radicalism and reaction that drives so much cultural history. Rocky Horror is about liberation. But it’s also about the price of that “absolute pleasure: the backlash, the violence, the collapse. It’s like a microcosm of the sociopolitical pattern we keep living through, even as we navigate the present transition from the high woke era to the so-called vibe shift. Get full access to GUTTER STUDIES at gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe (https://gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   1 Jun 2026

   Hellraiser Bloodline: The Refuge of Fantasy

   We’ve arrived at the final chapter of Sweet Sweet Suffering ! I’ve long had a soft spot for Hellraiser: Bloodline. It features my favorite cenobite, Angelique, and has always struck me as the franchise at its most narratively ambitious. To this day, Hellraiser: Bloodline has a reputation problem. Pinhead in space, a troubled production, a director who took his name off the film. Critics and fans wrote it off at the time, and it’s been unfairly dismissed ever since. But viewed carefully — and through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis we’ve been using — Bloodline is hugely interesting, in my view, actually completes what the first two films started. Because once you understand the paradox of desire, and once you’ve descended into the system that produces it, a final question naturally follows. If desire can never truly be satisfied, and if the Real underneath it would annihilate us, how do we live with desire at all? The answer, according to Lacan, is fantasy. Not fantasy in the casual sense, but fantasy as a psychological structure: the fragile screen that gives desire a shape, shields us from the traumatic Real behind it, and allows us to keep going, to keep wanting, to keep living. In Bloodline, this idea takes the form of a type of cenobite we haven’t seen before: Angelique. This video concludes the philosophical arc that runs across three Hellraiser films. I’ve been a lifelong fan of these films, and even before I started Gutter Studies I always wanted to sit down and figure out what the series meant to me. These three videos are it. I hope these essays have contributed to your own enjoyment and understanding of these movies, some of the most distinctive and fascinating in all of horror history. Get full access to GUTTER STUDIES at gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe (https://gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 26 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

39

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

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Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.