Episode 147: Masquerade | The Phantom of the Opera, Aesthetic Philosophy & Romanticism

Put on your mask, close your eyes, and surrender to your darkest dreams. That’s right, we’re covering the longest running Broadway musical in history, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 mega-hit The Phantom of the Opera. We’’ll analyze the angel of music himself, the love triangle at the show’s core, and symbolism in the opera house through the lens of aesthetic philosophy and mythology—From Edmund Burke’s description of beauty and the sublime to Neoplatonism and the evolution of art-making. Is Phantom a great romance or a piece of gothic horror? All this and more on the Midnight Myth.

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Episode 142: Modern Prometheus | Doctor Who, Gothic Horror & The Year Without a Summer

TARDIS time! We’re hopping in the big blue box with our favorite time-traveling superhero and her fam. A new season of Doctor Who has just wrapped on the BBC, and we have tons to say about it. In this episode, we’ll analyze one episode in particular of Series 12, and that’s Episode 8: The Haunting of Villa Diodati. The Doctor and her companions visit Lake Geneva in 1816 to witness one of the most famous gatherings in literary history—that dark and stormy night when Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Doctor William John Polidori, Claire Clairmont, and Lord Byron were shut indoors and decided to tell ghost stories. It’s the eve that Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein, and that also helped birth the literary vampire genre. Did we mention there was a Cyberman present?

We’ll discuss the historical context of the Year Without a Summer, the psychology of horror, and the larger-than-life personalities of Lord Byron and the Shelley’s. Is the Doctor a Byronic hero? Why are the Romantics so obsessed with the titan Prometheus of Greek mythology? And how do time travel and sci-fi mix with the horror genre? All that and more in this week’s discussion.

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Episode 78: O Captain! My Captain!

This week on the Midnight Myth Podcast, we look to the film Dead Poets Society, the lessons it hopes to teach, and the new significance it has taken on in the years since the death of its star, Robin Williams. We examine the themes that his character John Keating recognizes and hopes to impart to his students: carpe diem! Gather ye rosebuds while ye may! Sound thy barbaric yawp. We recognize that our perspective has shifted when we watch this film. We are, in a way, looking down from standing atop our desks, watching for the signs, trying to understand why a great talent, great artist, and great man would take his own life. We follow that question into the characters of DPS, who must ask themselves the same. We wonder what’s most important—the art or the artist? The legacy or the life?