"This is Horror Joy. We're your hosts. I'm Brian Onishi."

"And Jeff Stoyanoff. We're two professors, celebrating the intellectual and emotional joys of horror."

So goes the opening to an episode of Horror Joy, the eldritch brainchild of Onishi ('16 Ph.D.) and his colleague Stoyanoff.

What started as after-hours theorizing between two professors quickly transformed into a show about horror's appeal and the philosophies that drive it.

"We're trying to map the line between an accessible, fun conversation about horror and some kind of accessible, academic take on horror," Onishi says.

A Chilling Idea

Before there was horror, Onishi was fascinated by another topic.

Several years after completing his undergrad degree in California, Onishi moved to Pittsburgh to pursue his master's. As a Southern California native, he was still adjusting to Pennsylvania's frigid climate. One day, Onishi started on the cold walk to his apartment from the bus and began to think about the intersection between nature and philosophy.

"I was thinking, 'How can we experience the environment, and especially climate change, at a phenomenological level — through our bodies, our experiences and our perceptions?'"

Phenomenology, as he put it, is the philosophy of how the world presents itself to us and how we experience it firsthand.

"I think of it as a philosophy of meaning," he says. "It's investigating the way that meaning is made in the world, but also the project of phenomenology is to uncover how the world just shows up to us."

The field generally rejects the idea that everything can be absolutely analyzed and objectively understood, as held by modern science. This inspired Onishi to narrow in on environmental philosophy studies for his doctoral degree.

"I just started looking around at places that were doing environmental philosophy and found UNT."

The idea that the natural world is something humans experience without full comprehension has significant overlap with narrative themes in horror media. Especially the subgenre of Weird Fiction, which takes horror, sci-fi and fantasy and adds a twist of the surreal. Onishi started to dig deeper into horror media and ask whether it harbored a deeper wonder, a hidden fascination with the world. This became a running theme in his academic work, where he uses Weird Fiction to illustrate these philosophical questions.

Testing, One, Two, Squee!

After he completed his Ph.D. at UNT, Onishi went on to work at Seattle University, followed by Penn State Altoona, where he is currently an associate professor of philosophy. It was there that he met Stoyanoff and they decided to take their analyses of the bizarre and put them out into the world via podcasting. From there, Horror Joy was born.

"It allowed us a chance to have these conversations for the sake of the conversations," he says.

Onishi says the readership for academic texts can be quite niche. Horror media isn't unlike the academic humanities in that sense. A podcast format allowed him and Stoyanoff to offer their thoughts to broader audiences and take a step toward making critical debate interesting and accessible to a listenership.

"I started thinking about horror and how it's perceived, in many ways, as full of people who have sinister thoughts about bodies being broken and people being murdered and stabbed."

But in truth, the more authors he met, the more he found people who thoughtfully and sincerely considered what they were writing, who found a sense of wonder, recognition and catharsis in the strange and the otherworldly, even if it might be seen as initially "weird" or off-putting. In this way, horror might be seen as occupying a similar niche as punk rock does in music.

"You watch something like Weapons or Sinners, there's an incredible amount of depth to those stories," says Onishi. "I think that the stigma around horror is unfounded and I hope that people continue to find it, and that the treatment of it as a serious storytelling genre continues."

He says having author Paul Tremblay on the show was a highlight of the podcast, along with fellow alum Stephen Graham Jones ('96 M.A.).

"Jones is insightful, very knowledgeable about horror, and the conversation we had with him was really, really incredible. There's been so many people we talked to that I just absolutely loved."