Episode 171 - The Folklore and Mythology Behind Winter Horror

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Hour podcast. My name is Abby Branker and I am sitting here with Alan Kudan. Hello. And today we are talking about the intersection of winter and horror.

Not to be confused with holiday horror, which happens during the winter, often. Certainly. This is about snow, it's about ice, it's about being freezing cold, avalanches, hypothermia, survival, snow mythology and folklore, it's about all of those things.

And the lesser known, snow poisoning. And snow poisoning. going to be a four-part series. Today we're going to start by covering ancient mythology and folklore. We're also going to cover real-life snow tragedies, isolation, monsters, and of course how all of these

like influenced horror in its many forms. In this series we're going to talk about everything from the scariest winter horror films ever made to mythology, folklore, and real-life tragedies from different cultures around the globe. And some winter horror movies that may not be the scariest movie ever made, but they're still pretty fun.

Yeah, absolutely. Or they're really dumb and I still watch them. Alan's been watching a lot of movies. I have.

That's always fun. This is a great topic to do now because it lines up with the seasons and I have lots of time to watch movies because just like the temperature outside my career is very frozen during this type of year.

There's not much happening in the film industry. There's some seasonality to your busy schedule. bit of hibernation, if you will. Yeah, which is great. An interesting thing just happened, because before this, we were recording this new Patreon project that we're starting, which

is sending out quarterly tarot mailers for folks who participate. So it's essentially, I pull a card for each person, I do a video about what the card means, but there's this larger theme, and there's actually this newspaper that I've made that kind of has articles and poems and stories and all these different things from different

sources on that theme. The theme is winter for this first one and it's so fascinating because I bought this deck of cards, winter theme tarot cards to kick this off and to send to everybody. And through the research of today's episode I had found some of these like new deities and goddesses and gods of different cultures and some of those were actually referenced in that

deck which I had never ever heard of before researching this episode. So it was one of one of those like little small world moments for me today where I was like, wow, all of these themes are colliding. But let's get into our sources today.

We have a Smithsonian magazine article by Dennis Zoptig. The winter solstice begins a season of storytelling and ceremony. A mythopedia article by Gregory Wright on Caliq. An article by Elizabeth Thabowale from oldfolklore.com.

The Blizzard Spirit of the Inuit. The Iroquois and the Legends of the First Snowfall. an article from Native American mythology worldwide. And I used Wikipedia quite a bit

because here's the thing about researching some of these mythologies and kind of like bits of folklore. There's often not academic sources on them or there can be in their like really dense textbooks

and things like that that I don't have direct access to. There's a lot of blog coverage. And so a lot of the stuff that we're gonna talk about today is kind of like blog coverage cross-checked

with Wikipedia, things like that. So just acknowledging that I'm not a historian or an expert in all these cultures, but we're going to do our best to kind of represent

what we have unearthed through research. As a macro, what's your favorite thing you've learned while doing this research? The thing that I found most interesting

is that there's a lot of deities across different cultures that personify winter and explain parts of the season or even the landscape. And so, oh, this is happening

And that's why it's snowing. Also kind of this overarching theme of winter being necessary to protect the earth and let the earth rebuild for spring. So sometimes like winter is obviously a harsh season, especially for early humans, you

know, and ancient humans that didn't have the luxuries of heating and electricity and cars and things like that. So some of it certainly is, okay, there's like fear in winter and there's this cruelty of winter.

But a lot of it was kind of positive or neutral. And it seems like that's kind of because there was this rebirth that they thought was happening and that without this blanket protection of snow, the earth wouldn't be fertile in spring.

It was like a necessary step, which I thought was kind of, I don't know, it was new information to me. Now, you're definitely onto something. So if you want to get all zen about it.

Sure. Years ago, when I first got into bonsai, All, you know, my whole first batch of trees died because I was growing them indoors.

You know, I'd grow lamps, I was doing all these things and it wasn't until I was a bit, you know, it wasn't until I basically lost most of my trees, all but one, that I learned that most trees need to winter.

It's a key part in the growth cycle. When nutrients are abundant, it gets lots of sun, the temperature is nice. It grows, grows, grows.

It tries to do as much as it can. But then when the winter comes, the tree freezes and it retracts all its nutrients deep into itself and it uses this as a time to basically muster its forces,

to get all its nutrients ready to go for the next growth cycle. And so I didn't really understand why that was gonna be necessary.

It seems like without winter, great, it can just grow all the time. But then it's just like a person, it burns out. It just stretches itself too thin.

It tries to grow too much. It doesn't take the time to really center itself and then the tree dies unless you have a tropical tree which is climatized to growing year round. But I just thought that was kind of like a beautiful thing where you look at winters

being something that needs to be survived.