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Creature Features In an Anxious Age

How pop culture monsters mythologize our worries about sexuality, nuclear war, race, and the other.

Friday, June 20, 2025, at 8 p.m. EDT

A special presentation by Peter Bebergal
author of Strange Frequencies and Season of the Witch

In the 1970s, the sometimes-garish world of monster-movie pop culture was a comfort, an external expression of grotesquery and strangeness that the culture was feeling inside but had no name for. Rather than making us more afraid, monsters mythologized our own abstract worries about sexuality, nuclear war, race and the other, as well as personifying our collective sense of being untethered from mystery and enchantment. 

Peter's talk will track the changing face of monsters as mythic and literary creatures as our culture’s own lingering unease began to morph, moving from the shadowed myths of the past into the daytime horrors of serial killers and gore. Peter will argue that we need monsters again to learn how to reimagine what frightens us in a way that remythologizes our anxieties and offers a path for re-enchanting our imaginations. Tracking their monstrous footsteps, Peter will guide us as we explore the modern monster in film, television, and comics.

Lecturer Bio

Peter Bebergal writes widely on the speculative and slightly fringe. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, Boing Boing, The Believer, and The Quietus. He is the author of Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural and Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, among others. Bebergal studied religion and culture at Harvard Divinity School. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Cost

Registration is $12 for New Members of Weirdosphere.

The session will be recorded and will be posted in the event space on Weirdosphere after the event concludes. Recordings remain available for registered participants to view on the Weirdosphere platform at their leisure.

Scroll to the bottom of the page for more details.
Address inquiries to [email protected].

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Starting July 3, 2025!

WS102: On Walking

Foot Travel as a Magical & Aesthetic Practice

with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel
hosts of the Weird Studies podcast

Solvitur ambulando (“it is solved in walking”) is one of the great Weird Studies mottos. Some problems can be solved by planning and mapping — getting somewhere high up and surveying the whole landscape at a glance. But some situations call for keeping your feet on the ground and exploring the landscape from the inside: solvitur ambulando. Walking can be a metaphor for doing philosophy at the thin end of the wedge.

But walking isn’t just a metaphor for philosophy. For millennia, walking has been a way of doing philosophy. Aristotle and his followers were known as the Peripatetic school for their habit of philosophizing while strolling around the Lyceum grounds. Nietzsche tells us that we should “put no trust in any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement,” and Thoreau, Rousseau, Kant, and Heidegger (among others) would have agreed. There is not only a philosophy of walking; there is also a walking of philosophy.

And walking isn’t just about thinking. It is also about sensing, feeling, and imagining. Walking is the handmaid of art. It may even be an art in its own right, an act of co-creation in which the soul and earth conspire to bring forth a world — psychogeography. From the beginning of literature, the walk has been a vehicle for enchantment: some of our oldest stories — “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood” — are built around a journey into the unknown. The French Situationists knew this well. For them, the exploratory walk — the dérive, or “drift” — was always a venture into strangeness, even when it threaded through familiar streets. The medieval troubadours spoke of a similar movement, casting the knight’s quest as a form of errancy.

Finally, walking has likely held religious significance for as long as we’ve been upright. In Genesis, to “walk with God,” as Enoch and Noah did, is to live in alignment with the divine. Across cultures, the act of pilgrimage — from the walkabouts of Australian Aboriginal peoples to the Camino de Santiago and the Zen practice of kinhin — stands as a spiritual archetype. To peregrinate is to walk towards a destination while suspending the logic of ends and means. It is to give oneself over to the path — to step, quite literally, into mystery.

A Participatory Experience

More than a disquisition on walking, this course seeks to embody its theme. Having chosen a destination — a deeper understanding of what walking means — J.F. and Phil will proceed without a fixed itinerary, discovering the path through their signature style favoring close reading, exploration, and exchange. Participants are invited to join them in a series of participatory exercises and “event scores” designed to engage thought, feeling, and perception as only walking can. For six weeks, we become the Walking Weird.

Format

The course unfolds over six Lecture Hall sessions, each comprising two 45-minute talks — one by each instructor. A few days after each session, an Office Hours meeting will offer participants the chance to engage directly with J.F. and Phil by asking questions, offering reflections, and sharing “trip reports” drawn from their own experience of the week’s exercise.

Each week brings a new exercise — a prompt or “event score” — inviting participants to explore walking as metaphor, spiritual practice, and embodied inquiry. These exercises lend the course a strong practical dimension, grounding its philosophical and artistic reflections in lived experience.

As with all Weirdosphere offerings, WS102 includes a dedicated feed where instructors and participants can post thoughts, share links, and exchange between lectures.

Schedule

The course begins Thursday, July 3rd, 2025, with the first Lecture Hall session. The first Office Hours session will take place on Sunday, July 6th. Lectures and discussions will continue on Thursdays and Sundays until July 20th, at which point there will be a one-week hiatus to allow interested participants to engage in a more intensive walking practice. Class will reconvene on Thursday, July 31st.

• Thursday Lecture Hall sessions begin at 5 pm PDT / 8 pm EDT and last approximately 90 minutes. These meetings are recorded to allow participants in more distant time zones to attend asynchronously.
  • Lecture Hall dates: July 3rd, 10th, 17th + July 31st, August 7th, 14th.
• Sunday Office Hours sessions begin at 12 pm PDT / 3 pm EDT. This time slot is chosen to allow participants from as many time zones as possible to attend live. Like the lectures, these sessions are recorded.
  • Office hours dates: July 6th, 13th, 20th + August 3rd, 10th & 17th.

Recorded sessions will remain available to registered students after the course is over, in video and audio format.

Readings

From week to week, Phil and J.F. will assign essays, stories, and works in media in view of upcoming discussions. Whenever possible, these will be made available on the course platform. For copyright reasons, students may need to access certain works on their own.

Why Take this Course?

Students will get to:

• Attend six lectures exploring the weirdness of walking from multiple viewpoints and angles.
• Interact with the hosts of Weird Studies and other participants during the six weekly Office Hours held over Zoom.
• Gain permanent access to recordings of the lectures and discussions.
• Post, share, discuss, and exchange direct messages with the instructors and other students on the Weirdosphere platform.
• Become full-fledged members of a growing learning community and enjoy a discount on future Weirdosphere classes by Phil, J.F., and other thinkers of things strange and astonishing.

Cost

Registration is $220 for New Members of Weirdosphere.

Paid members of the Weird Studies Patreon community are also eligible for a discount. Please use the registration link provided on Patreon to get this benefit.

By enrolling, you will automatically become a member of the Weirdosphere learning community and get a discount on future offerings on the platform. Existing Members should enroll from within Weirdosphere to receive this benefit.

 If your circumstances are such that paying full price is an obstacle, please write us at [email protected] to arrange a reduced rate.