Podcasts
Lady Scientists and a Mutant Bear in Alex Garland’s ‘Annihilation’ [Horror Queers Podcast]
Refraction action.
After closing out April with a look at the hagsploitation classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, we kicked off May with a deathly serious look at Gus Van Sant’s pseudo-Columbine adaptation Elephant. Now we continue the month with a look at Alex Garland’s dense and trippy 2018 film Annihilation.
Annihilation sees Lena (Natalie Portman), a biologist and former soldier, join a mission to uncover what happened to her husband (Oscar Isaac) inside Area X — a sinister and mysterious phenomenon that is expanding across the American coastline. Alongside a team of four other women comprised of paramedic Anya (Gina Rodriguez), physicist Josie (Tessa Thompson), psychologist Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and geomorphologist Cass (Tuva Novotny), Lena discovers a world of mutated landscapes and creatures, as dangerous as it is beautiful, that threatens both their lives and their sanity.
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Episode 231: Annihilation (2018)
Get ready to mutate because we’re heading into the weird, wonderful and terrifying world of Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018)! Joining us for the conversation are Alma and Dalia of the Nightmare on 5th Street podcast!
Join us as we try our best to analyze this admittedly dense film, with discussions on how it works as an adaptation, the casting controversy, the likability of certain characters and (of course) that weird as hell climax.
Plus: refraction action, horrifying mutated bears, cancer metaphors and one giant soap bubble.
Cross out Annihilation!
Coming up on Wednesday: We’re checking out the ridiculous camp of the 1994 dinosaur romance Tammy and the T-Rex!
P.S. Subscribe to our Patreon for more than 243 hours of additional content! This month we’re going all in on Evil Dead with an episode on Evil Dead Rise, our thoughts on the whole Evil Dead franchise, and an audio commentary on the original 1981 film. Plus: we’ll have episodes on Amazon Prime’s queer as fuck Dead Ringers series, and the Lulu Wilson-starring The Wrath of Becky.
It’s always a cruel summer, but 2026 is about to get crueler.
To blow off steam, the Losers hit the road to visit all the towns in Stephen King’s Dominion. Derry, Castle Rock, Ludlow, Boulder, the list goes on. They’ve got miles to drive and so many (scary) sights to see. At the end of the day, though, they have to ask themselves: Which one’s the best? And, more importantly, what does “best” mean in this context?
Stream the episode below. PayDays and Nozz-a-La, optional. For further adventures, join the Club over long days and pleasant nights via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RadioPublic, Acast, Google Podcasts, and RSS. You can also unlock hundreds of hours of content in The Barrens (Patreon).