***Horror Joy Fresh Cuts: Whalefall

From a parking lot outside an AMC in Central Pennsylvania, Brian reflects on seeing Brian Duffield’s film adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s Whalefall and traces how a lifelong fascination with deep-water horror, rooted in thalassophobia and shaped by Lovecraft, weird fiction, and eco-weird environmental philosophy, helped inspire the Horror Joy podcast.

Whalefall is a survival and ocean horror fused with family drama with a son, who is grieving a tense relationship with his deceased father, dives for his remains and is swallowed by a whale, forcing a largely silent, claustrophobic struggle for oxygen and escape amid flashbacks and emotional reckoning.

Highlights: Austin Abrams’s performance, the feat of shooting a compelling film that takes place inside of a whale, and a clear ecological perspective.