There are a lot of horror movie podcasts, but Horror Vanguard stands out through its explicitly leftist perspective and its broad definition of "horror" — as well as classics like The Exorcist, Suspiria, and Beetlejuice, the show was also covered the commodity fetishism of In Fabric and Starship Troopers’ horrifying space fascism where “war is necessary to the ongoing functioning of that society” and they argue, quoting Lenin, that “fascism is capitalism in decay.”

Even the holidays can't escape their gaze. Last year Horror Vanguard covered the supernaturally-infused Christmas films, It’s A Wonderful Life and The Muppet Christmas Carol. These ‘technically-horror’ Christmas episodes were a fascinating diversion into the labor issues raised by the films and continued the Horror Vanguard theme of seriously analyzing the horror of capitalism.

Co-hosts Ash and Jon discuss a different horror movie in each episode using a broad range of communist and socialist frameworks, including Marxism, Leninism, and anarcho-communism. Ash and Jon each bring a huge amount of political philosophy and leftist theory to each film, covering issues like labor rights, exploitation of workers, proletarian social revolution, and the power dynamics of bourgeois capitalism and how these issues are represented (or ignored) by horror movies.

Find Horror Vanguard on SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes come out every week.