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For the most part, however, he just talks into a stiff, eerie silence, in a monologue that he seems to ad-lib or summon forth from a macabre collection of fables that exists only in his head. In every episode, his character for the evening relays a tale of Weird fiction — that Lovecraftian horror subgenre that necessitates a confrontation with the cosmos, of some dark expansive evil too vast and horrible to comprehend without descending into madness.

With no frills and no production frippery, Knifepoint’s effectiveness derives partly from its minimalism. Soren Narnia allows the silence to fill your mind with terror. The settings are always crucial to these threadbare stories, with their complete lack of adornment — just a man, a voice, and a journey somewhere very, very scary. One week we might revisit a childhood school where secrets lie buried or explore an abandoned factory with a strange inhabitant. Perhaps we’ll trek to an icy arctic wasteland, visit a town where a horrifying cult has taken over, or find an isolated European convent where no gods dwell.

Our narrators’ levels of reliability and sanity often vary, but Soren Narnia’s masterful storytelling never does. There’s something about the impact of that grave voice reaching into the dark that’s sometimes so frightening it becomes exhilarating. The first time I heard “staircase,” about a disturbing home invasion, the story’s gradually deepening terror had me literally transfixed — physically rooted in place, frozen with fear.

“You live your whole life and then in one second, you learn what it’s like for primal terror to swallow you, mind and body,” the narrator tells us — even as the story he’s in achieves a level of primal terror, in part because of its vivid imagery, in part because of the simplicity of its narration.

The podcast currently consists of 64 stand-alone episodes ranging from 40 to 70 minutes in length. In addition to “staircase,” I’m fond of “rebirth,” “landmark,” “sisters,” “attic,” “legend,” and the recent “I was called Anwen” — though every tale in this collection might wind up in your nightmares. A sampling of Knifepoint’s most popular episodes is also available on YouTube, along with other experimental stand-alone stories. New episodes are released from time to time, whenever Soren Narnia feels like it; a recent story about a most grisly tourist attraction just appeared for Halloween.

Over the years, Knifepoint Horror has gained a small but dedicated fan following, and I think that’s in part because there’s something deeply brave about Knifepoint as a creative exercise. Many of the stories feel as though they’re being spun aloud, impromptu. Soren Narnia’s YouTube channel is full of similar spontaneous storytelling exercises, and he’s said before that he often works from a general outline of the story rather than a full script.

That makes every story in Knifepoint Horror feel like a triumph, a rough diamond of creative expression that dares to speak itself aloud, flaws and all — to exist in the tense space between Soren Narnia’s brain and a judgmental audience steeped in horror tropes. Except somehow, defying all odds, the rough diamond is always brilliant, sparkling in the dark.

Knifepoint Horror can be listened to at this link. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

The horror boom began, more or less, with Michael Myers hacking through a closet door in 1978’s Halloween, and continued with Friday the 13th in 1980. Those franchises had released a combined seven films by the time Freddy came for us in A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. Over the next seven years, Jason, Freddy, and Michael Myers would star in 10 more movies. Quickly, more kid-friendly monsters also began appearing: Gremlins (described by TV Guide as “cynically aimed to draw an audience of small children who would no doubt be terrorized”), Beetlejuice, Garbage Pail Kids, and the assorted terrors running through Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Goosebumps, Tales From the Crypt, Tales from the Darkside, and Are You Afraid of the Dark? Horror bled out of theaters, books, and TV screens in a million ways. According to data provided to Vox by costume retailer Spirit Halloween, the most popular costume in 1984 was Freddy Krueger.

Scary stories for children have an extremely long history. One researcher working at the University of Durham in the UK has been able to trace back early versions of stories like Jack and the Beanstalk, Beauty and the Beast, and Rumpelstiltskin thousands of years using techniques borrowed from the field of biology. These stories, and their descendants from Aesop to the Brothers Grimm, tucked moral lessons inside bloody tales of women lopping off their heels and itinerant tailors snipping off the appendages of little boys who won’t stop sucking their thumbs.

“There are lots of really obvious links between older forms of literature for children like fairy tales and children’s horror,” says Lester. “You see similar themes being worked through that are common in childhood, like learning to be independent, learning to grow up, and dealing with issues with your parents.”

Closer to the modern day, horror as a genre began to take shape in the 1930s, says Josie Torres Barth, a teaching assistant professor of film studies at North Carolina State University.

“Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man are the first time we think of films as being horror films,” she explains. Crucially, the restrictive Hays Code, which dictated the content of films between 1934 and 1968, made sure that these movies were acceptable to everyone, including children. Decades later, these at least marginally kid-safe movies had second lives as TV reruns and matinee fodder aimed at children and teens, and inspired imitations like I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Hollywood producers, says Barth, “realized that they have this great new target market [in teens], and they wanted to get as much money as they can.” Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, monster movies were largely seen as kid stuff.

This all changed with the beginning of more serious and disturbing horror films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist in the late 1960s and into the ’70s, though audiences didn’t always know what they were in for. An infamous article by Roger Ebert immortalized the liminal moment: Attending an early screening of 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, he found his theater was full of “kids, the kind you expect at a Saturday afternoon kiddie matinee.” Ebert, and apparently the children’s parents, had expected something like Creature from the Black Lagoon, not a genre-defining piece of socially conscious, horrifying filmmaking. The youthful audience watched in stunned silence as the movie “stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying.”

Despite exponentially increasing levels of not just violence but nudity and sex, “Horror in the ’80s is still kind of thought of as a medium for teenage boys,” Barth says. The films almost invariably were about teens, and were popular with them, too.

Horror films can serve many deep purposes for teens and children, says Lester. “They can function as a social bonding exercise with peers, and help you work through certain fears and anxieties.” But then again, she says, “It’s also just really fun. It’s fun to be scared!”

“Let’s face it, kids are attracted to what’s taboo,” says artist and writer Scott Shaw, who has contributed several times to Garbage Pail Kids. “My parents would say, ‘Oh, you can’t watch that. That’s too scary for you.’ Well, I’d wait until they fell asleep, and I’d get up and watch it, and it’d scare the shit out of me. And I always felt great about it.”

So what happened to the monster mania of the 1980s? Though ideas about what content is appropriate for children haven’t changed much in the past decades, says Betsy Bozdech, executive editor of ratings and reviews for Common Sense Media, an organization that rates and categorizes what media is appropriate for a child at a given age, parents have become more involved in their offspring’s media consumption.

“It used to be kind of like you just said, ‘Oh, you’re going to go watch a movie over at your friend’s house, okay,’” she says. Now, “a lot of parents are trying to take a more active role in knowing and managing what their kids watch. And we have parental controls, and you can see your kids’ Netflix history, and you could know what they’re watching … I would say that experience, and focus group testing, has probably showed [producers] that parents aren’t really eager for little kids to be scared too early.”

Kids, too, seemed to lose interest in the thrills that became more cheap with each sequel.

“When you’re creating something to make it feel outrageous, it gets old real fast. And after a while, outrageous just becomes mundane. And where do you take it from there?” says Shaw. “I think kids started saying, ‘This is just an imitation of that,’ or, ‘We’ve already seen a character throwing up five times. Why do I really want to see more of this?’”

The teen slasher flicks and screamfests of the 1980s may also have simply grown up along with their audiences. Throughout the 1990s, horror veered in several directions at once. There were self- referential explorations of genre tropes like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and Scream (1996), as well as the rise of pseudo-horror thriller/mysteries about serial killers like Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Seven (1996), as well as some attempts to refocus on the classics of the genre, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Interview With the Vampire (1994), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). Gone, for the most part, was the particular magic of the unreflective slasher flick, and its stranglehold on the public imagination.

Of course, horror hasn’t disappeared as a genre, and neither has a softer, gentler version of it aimed at younger audiences. Since 2012, the monsters in Hotel Transylvania have starred in four movies, a TV show, three graphic novels, and several video games. There have been two Happy Death Day movies, and video games like the survival horror sensation Five Nights at Freddy’s, which currently has nine installments and a planned film adaptation. Tim Burton is remaking The Addams Family, and Rob Zombie is rebooting The Munsters. Then there’s Stranger Things, which is performing a few functions at once; adults are served heaps of nostalgia for the horror of their youth, and today’s teens and children watch it to be scared out of their minds when their parents aren’t looking.

And yet horror simply doesn’t have the central space in culture it once did. Today, what scares us has changed across the ideological spectrum, says Tara Conley, assistant professor in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Gone, for the most part, is the stranger lurking in the shadows with a glinting machete. Our new boogeymen are closer to home.

“Critical race theory is a boogeyman,” says Conley. “The war on drugs is a boogeyman. These are things that people can pinpoint and identify and connect to things they’re concerned about morally.”

“There’s recent studies around Facebook and Instagram and their impact on young girls’ perceptions of their bodies. That’s real and observable. Black girls and the disproportionate care roles they’ve been taking on during the pandemic. But for most folks, it’s harder to wrap their brains around things that are happening every day that we should probably be paying a little more attention to as a society,” says Conley.

Today, the dystopic reality of our lives is scarier than a few creeps who lurk in our dreams. And that’s definitely not for kids.

Chris Chafin covers the business of culture for publications including Rolling Stone, Vulture, and the BBC. He also hosts a movie podcast.

Big Oil’s big secrets about its climate change activities may begin to unravel in any paperwork committee staff can get their hands on. For 40 years, the oil industry has worked to delay and obstruct policies that would hurt the profitability of its products, even when their own scientists warned that burning fossil fuels would cause climate change. Thousands of pages of documents in the public record — obtained through lawsuits, leaks, and undercover videos — patch together a portrait of how the oil industry has fostered climate change denial.

The Oversight committee requested additional documents dating back to 2015, but so far witnesses “have failed to adequately comply with the Committee’s request,” according to a statement by Democratic lawmakers. When reached for comment, an API spokesperson countered that the group has been actively working to comply “and has already produced thousands of pages responsive to their request.”

After nearly five hours of questioning, House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) closed the hearing by announcing she would issue subpoenas for the documents the committee did not receive, saying it had received only financial reports, social media posts, and press releases that were already publicly available. Maloney called for detailed funding information, board memos, and senior executive communications to help the committee “understand their payments to shadow groups and to over 150 public relations companies and advertisements on social media, payments that today’s witnesses seem intent on continuing.”

“I do not take this step lightly,” Maloney added, saying that the committee’s goal is to “get to the bottom of the oil industry’s disinformation campaign, and with these subpoenas we will.” 

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Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) speaks during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on October 28, 2021.

Climate activists hope that this moment could be an inflection point for accountability in the oil industry, similar to when Congress investigated other industries that have profited from misleading the public, including tobacco, asbestos, and lead companies. “There’s ongoing pressure to get these companies to fess up in one way or the other, or pay up,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the advocacy research group Climate Investigations Center, who has collected his own database of oil documents. “How and when that comes, and how much they can do to blunt that, is the drama that’s playing out this week.”

What secrets are oil companies still keeping from the public? There are at least five key areas Congress can dig into to discover the truth about Big Oil’s activities on climate change. The documents Democrats are after could also paint a fuller, more recent picture of the oil industry’s own climate change goals. Some purport to aim for net-zero emissions in the coming decades, but they could turn out to be hot air.

How much has the oil industry spent trying to undermine climate legislation?

In the words of one ExxonMobil lobbyist, the company has worked with “shadow groups” against early efforts to regulate the fossil fuel industry.

In June, the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace published a video of then-lobbyist Keith McCoy speaking on what he thought was a recruiting call. “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes,” McCoy said. “Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.” McCoy no longer works for ExxonMobil.

Similarly candid admissions about oil’s attitude toward climate action may lurk in their internal records.

Oil companies are finally promising to change, but how much of their climate commitments are just greenwashing?

According to McCoy, the ExxonMobil lobbyist in Greenpeace’s exposé, the company had also been feigning support for a carbon tax, a policy that would increase the cost of fossil fuels to reduce demand.

“Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans, and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that. But it gives us a talking point that we can say, ‘Well, what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax,’” McCoy said.

There are other ways oil companies have inflated their records on climate, a tactic known as greenwashing. As of December 2019, the world’s five biggest oil companies had spent a combined $3.6 billion in advertising over the previous 30 years. One of Exxon’s recent marketing pushes has been in promoting its investments in research for using algae for car fuel. Someone who watches these ads might assume Exxon spends a significant portion of its budget on algae, when it accounted for 0.2 percent of its refining capacity.

Despite the rhetoric, the oil industry seems likely to stay true to its core products. As BP America CEO David Lawler said in the hearing, “This doesn’t mean BP is getting out of the oil and gas business.”

Who is calling the shots for the politicians and groups that deny climate change?

Astroturfing is the “practice of creating an illusion of public support for a cause,” according to the environmental news outlet Grist. Instead of expressing skepticism of climate science or promoting controversial policies directly, oil companies and their allies have spent big sums on other organizations that promote its priorities.

One example is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has received more than $1.7 million from Exxon and its affiliates before the company left the council in 2018. ALEC has helped reverse renewable portfolio standards and plastic bag bans by pushing model legislation in states. Between 1998 and 2014, Exxon also led corporate donors in giving almost $31 million to special interest groups that promote climate change denial.

This is only a small glimpse into the grants Big Oil has given to third-party groups. The public doesn’t yet know what, exactly, the grants were for.

How much current polarization on climate change can be traced back to early disinformation campaigns by the industry?

In 2015, the LA Times and Inside Climate News published separate investigations showing that scientists in the oil industry had urged companies to consider how its products were fueling global warming via internal memos dating all the way back to the 1960s. Instead of heeding these calls, Exxon worked with other top oil companies to form a coalition that would sink a binding global climate agreement in 1998, according to documents.

From the LA Times:

How did one of the world’s largest oil companies, a leader in climate research, become one of its biggest public skeptics?

The answer, gleaned from a trove of archived company documents and the recollections of former employees, is that Exxon, now known as Exxon Mobil, feared a growing public consensus would lead to financially burdensome policies.

What are the end goals of Big Oil’s enormous marketing push?

One of the mysteries of the oil industry is the type of work it contracts out to consulting and public relations groups, which have helped Big Oil craft a benevolent public image.

Davies, of the Climate Investigations Center, wonders what the oil industry deems a PR “success.” “Who’s measuring the success of these ads? You’re spending millions of dollars on these ads, how do you measure the win?” he added.

Shedding light on the PR world’s activities could pressure the biggest firms to consider severing their ties with oil giants.

The efforts of oil companies to market themselves also loom large in a growing number of lawsuits alleging malfeasance. Rep. Ro Khanna said Thursday’s hearing is likely just the first part of a series getting to the bottom of oil industry campaigns, with a second focused on the PR industry’s role working with oil companies.

“We have a huge amount of documentation going back 40 years,” said Harvard history of science professor Naomi Oreskes ahead of the hearing, during a call with the progressive group Our Revolution.

On Thursday, the company executives claimed their position reflects the overwhelming scientific consensus that fossil fuels cause climate change. But the industry has not focused on climate-friendly policy in its lobbying.

The four oil companies present at the hearing, along with API, have spent nearly $453 million combined to lobby the federal government in the past decade, according to an analysis released Thursday by Democrats on the House Oversight committee. The analysis suggests the industry has been far more concerned with protecting tax breaks for fossil fuels than it has protecting the planet.

For example, the industry has publicly said it supports the Paris climate agreement, but in the halls of Congress, it lobbied on the matter only eight times out of 4,597 lobbying examples in the analysis. The industry devoted more than half its time lobbying on tax-related issues.

“I don’t think we really need more research … on what these companies have done, and the way they have misrepresented the truth, the facts, and continue to propagate dangerous practices,” Oreskes said on the Our Revolution call. But she thinks the hearing can help the public realize this. “We’ve been lied to … we have work to do to really get that message out.”

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