The Good Friends of Jackson Elias

We’re back and we’re here to talk about body horror and… Hang on. Can anyone else smell that? It’s sweet and cloying, and not in a good way. Everything we touch feels moist, which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t warm too. That mushy slurp whenever we lift our shoes isn’t helping either. Maybe it’s related to those little shapes we can see wriggling down there. On the bright side, if we end up vomiting in here, it’s not going to make things any worse.



Main Topic: Disgust and Body Horror



This episode is our exploration of the linked topics of disgust and body horror. We were originally going to cover disgust in our episode about Making Call of Cthulhu Scary, but ran out of time. And body horror has been on our list for some time. It seemed logical to send the two topics through the telepods, melding them into a twitching, mewling hybrid of an episode.



Once again, Mike Mason, the line editor for Call of Cthulhu, joins the discussion and offers his insights. We explore the role of disgust in horror and how we might go about harnassing it in our games. Then, we move on to discussing what makes body horror so effective. Finally, we wrap up the episode by licking the floor under our fridges. It’s tangy!



Researching this topic can really get under one’s skin


Once again, the current lockdown means we recorded this episode remotely. We hope that we’re getting the hang of making this sound all right. It’s far from the biggest problem current circumstances have presented, but it’s still a challenge.



Links



Things we mention in this episode include:




* Paul Ekman



* Basic emotions



* Nattō



* Moral disgust



* Raiders of the Lost Ark



* Leeches



* Nights With Alice Cooper



* News story about a man with a tapeworm in his brain



* Tapeworms








* Body horror



* The Thing



* The Fly



* Re-Animator



* David Cronenberg



* Uncanny valley



* Invasion of the Body Snatchers