Ethical Matters: Why Horror has a Hold on Us

Zombies want brains. Vampires want blood. Cannibals want human flesh. All monsters need feeding. Film critic and broadcaster Anna Bogutskaya takes a captivating look at what draws us to the shocks and thrills of horror.

Horror has been embraced by mainstream pop culture more than ever before, with horror characters and aesthetics infecting TV, music videos and even TikTok trends. Yet even with the commercial and critical success of The Babadook, Hereditary, Get Out, The Haunting of Hill House, Yellowjackets and countless other horror films and TV series over the last few years, loving the genre still prompts the question: what’s wrong with you? Implying, of course, that there is something not quite right about the people who make and consume it.

In her Ethical Matters talk, Anna will dispel this notion once and for all by examining how horror responds to and fuels our feelings of fear, anxiety, pain, hunger and power.

Anna Bogutskaya is a critic, author, film programmer and podcaster. As a writer she has contributed to BBC Culture, The Guardian, Little White Lies, MUBI, New Statesman, The Face, LA Review of Books, TimeOut, and Sight & Sound. She publishes the film newsletter Admit One on Substack, produces and hosts the horror film podcast The Final Girls, co-produces and co-hosts Peak TV, and created the horror anthology podcast.

She has written two non-fiction books, Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate (Sourcebooks, 2023) and Feeding the Monster (Faber, 2024), and is working on her third.