Spooky Season

Could a centuries-old curse be to blame for the infamous slap between Will Smith and Chris Rock at the Academy Awards? Amanda Kellogg uncovers the long history of a spooky playhouse superstition known as Macbeth’s curse. And: Anna Beecher first encountered the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn to Shudder, as a young kid and was thoroughly frightened. The story haunted her for years and in 2017 she wrote Skin of the Teeth, a play based on that same Grimm’s fairy tale. Later in the show: Halloween and Scream are some of the most blood-curdling, panic-inducing slasher movies. But they’re more than just jump-scares and gore. Jennifer McLawhorn says slasher movies open a window into important social anxieties around gender. Plus: If you can believe it, the first horror movies had no sound. Classics like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari came out in the 1920’s, during the silent film era. Jenny Taylor says the roots of the horror movie genre can be traced back to Germany’s Weimar Republic.