BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:

Hey everyone. You're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. And a warning to listeners - this episode contains frank mentions of sex, sexuality, violence and sexual assault.

Halloween is upon us. And if you are a loyal listener, you know I love horror movies. And to my delight, the genre is having a renaissance. Some say they're cheaper to make; others say they just get butts in seats. But in my opinion, horror is one of the best ways to confront our fears head on. But who gets to be the hero and who is seen as the monster has been speaking volumes lately. We'll get to the monsters later on, but first, I want to talk about the heroes. So we all know the horror genre has rules. The first "Scream" movie lays them out pretty well.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SCREAM")

JAMIE KENNEDY: (As Randy) No. 1 - you can never have sex.

(BOOING)

KENNEDY: (As Randy) Big no-no. Big no-no.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Dead, man.

KENNEDY: (As Randy) Sex equals death.

LUSE: But as time has gone on, the rules have changed. Nowadays, the last one standing, aka the final girl, could be a sex worker, like Maxine in "X," or the final girl could be a final survivor, like Chris in "Get Out." But today, we're going to focus on the Black final girl. My guest today curated a whole film series on the Black final girl and wrote a book on the topic. Her name is Dr. Kinitra Brooks, and she says when a Black woman is the last one standing, she's still got a lot more to fight than some guy in a mask.

Dr. Brooks, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.

KINITRA BROOKS: Hi. Thank you for having me.

LUSE: It's so good to have you. So, Dr. Brooks...

BROOKS: Yes.

LUSE: ...The gender politics of the horror genre in film and TV have always been fraught. Like, throughout the history of these films and TV shows, we've had to watch so much violence enacted upon women. Like, how many slasher flicks begin with the brutal murder of a woman who's, like, running down an alleyway in her underwear, being chased by, you know, a masked man with a big knife? The final girl, in some ways, is counter to that. How would you describe the final girl trope, and when did it first emerge?

BROOKS: The final girl trope actually began with a scholar named Carol Clover, and she came up with the term. And she really begins to examine the concept of the final girl, and she decides and puts forth that Laurie from "Halloween," the Jamie Lee Curtis character, is sort of the quintessential final girl.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HALLOWEEN")

KYLE RICHARDS: (As Linsey) I'm scared.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS: (As Laurie) There's nothing to be scared of.

BRIAN ANDREWS: (As Tommy) Are you sure? How?

CURTIS: (As Laurie) I killed him.

ANDREWS: (As Tommy) But you can't kill the boogeyman.

BROOKS: And the thing about the final girl is - you know, you spoke about the woman running in her underwear and being hacked to death. The final girl has a sort of asexuality or tomboyishness. Her sexuality isn't a lure, right? She isn't committing the sin of being a sexual teenager.

LUSE: Or she's a virgin, and so she's also...

BROOKS: Or she's a virgin.

LUSE: Even if she does come off as very traditionally pretty or feminine, she is not exploring her sexuality with anybody.

BROOKS: No, she is not actively exploring her sexuality with anybody. But also, that there's this sort of fungibility of gender that is happening, right? And what Clover proposes is there's actually a switching of gender as the movie goes on, right? So Laurie is feminine, sort of tomboyish. So she has this potentiality to become more masculine as the movie goes on. And she survives and starts to fight back and stab back and hurt back in ways that push back the monster. The knife is a phallic symbol, and so the monster can now be penetrated.

And one of the reasons this happens is because, for so long, the ideal viewer - what she terms the ideal viewer of horror were white, heterosexual males. So because you have this white male viewer, the protagonist has to be sort of tomboyish. And the protagonist can't be classically feminine and classically sexualized because she is representing this white male viewer, right? So she has to be, as - during their experience, she becomes more masculinized and begins to align with the view of the ideal viewer of horror.

LUSE: Oh, wow.

BROOKS: Right?

LUSE: Wow.

BROOKS: Yeah, so she can't be this pretty girl because, as the protagonist, she is the person you're supposed to meld with and identify with.

LUSE: Wow.

BROOKS: So she talks about gender in these really, really interesting ways in horror. It was revolutionary.

LUSE: I wonder, what purpose do you think the final girl fulfills?

BROOKS: I think the purpose the final girl fulfills is this entree into the cathartic potentiality of horror. And we put ourselves - horror is sort of a controlled trauma exposure, and we openly go into it. Horror reflects our cultural anxieties. And so horror, in its anxiety, also has us face really uncomfortable truths, and one of the uncomfortable truths that horror plays upon is the ever-present danger to women because they are women.

LUSE: I also kind of can see, like, there are some final girls in famous movies who have become, in some ways, beacons of white femininity or white feminist icons. But Black women have very different stereotypes attached to us. We are not stereotypically defenseless or thought of in that same way as white women are. The stereotypes attached to us are that we're combative, hyper-aggressive and already tough or even already masculine by "nature," quote-unquote. Taking all of this into account, how has the final girl trope worked for Black women and Black female characters?

BROOKS: Blackness is consistently associated with masculinity, and so Black women aren't constructed as the consistent potential victim that white womanhood is constructed as. When you racialize the final girl as Black, where do you have to go when a Black woman starts off as masculinized?

LUSE: Right.

BROOKS: We can't make her more masculinized, right?

LUSE: If that's the case, then who is, in your opinion, the best encapsulation of a Black final girl who defies those expectations?

BROOKS: Selena from "28 Days Later."

LUSE: Oh.

BROOKS: No questions about it.

LUSE: No questions about it, no questions about it.

(LAUGHTER)

BROOKS: I mean, she kills a man with a machete - no hesitation. She sees that he's infected.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "28 DAYS LATER")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Selena.

(SOUNDBITE OF BLOOD SLOSHING)

BROOKS: There's no, oh, should I? She looks, and then she starts hacking away like she's hacking at a tree for wood. You got to love a woman who's so determined and makes decisions and is decisive. She starts off tomboyish, in very androgynous dress. All you know is that she's human the first time we see her and that she's not infected. And so as the movie progresses, she actually moves to the other side of the spectrum and becomes more feminized. But she becomes more feminized in a way that isn't coded as weak. In the end, she's in a ball gown, right? And she has one of the soldiers threatening to kill her. And Hannah, the young girl that is with her - because at the end of the world, what do you need? Women and girls in which to repopulate the world, right?

LUSE: Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

BROOKS: So they've been kidnapped. And there's the ever-present danger of rape. What you have is - she's fighting for her life. She's fighting for Hannah's life. Hannah's fighting for their lives. And Jim is coming to rescue them both. So now it's not on the individual to survive. It's the group working together and pushing forth this idea that the community itself must survive, not - it's not about the individual.

LUSE: That's very, very different than the idea that, like, there's one final girl who kills them all. It's like there's there's a group of final people. Is that a pattern that you see across Black final girl roles, or is that something that you like particularly about this movie?

BROOKS: That's something that I particularly like about "28 Days Later." Another Black final girl we get is with "Barbarian"...

LUSE: Yes.

BROOKS: ...In where she is the single sole survivor.

LUSE: Yes.

BROOKS: And she is the one that kills the monster.

LUSE: Yes.

BROOKS: And she is the one that is triumphant in the end.

LUSE: Coming up, Dr. Brooks and I discuss the heroine of last year's breakout film "Barbarian" and why she doesn't scratch my Black final girl itch. Plus, what does it mean to expand beyond a final girl?

You brought up "Barbarian" as an example of a Black final girl, which is true. But it starts off with this Black woman who arrives at this Airbnb she's supposed to be staying at in an unfamiliar town. She's obviously gotten in late from the airport or wherever, and she sees that somebody else is already staying in there and - this, like, white guy who's played by a Skarsgard. And if you know anything...

BROOKS: I know.

LUSE: ...About Skarsgard, they're always playing creeps.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BARBARIAN")

BILL SKARSGARD: (As Keith Toshko) I don't know if you've got a great look at this neighborhood, but I don't think you should be out there by yourself.

LUSE: He invites her to stay, and it just blows my mind.

BROOKS: (Laughter).

LUSE: Like, the first moment where she realizes that her rental is already booked...

BROOKS: Yeah.

LUSE: In my mind, as a Black woman, I'm out of there because you come up on your vacation rental at night, and somebody's already in there - you're going back to the airport.

BROOKS: (Laughter).

LUSE: I'm getting in the - I'm not even getting out of the car. But it's a series of decisions like that. She goes into this house. She decides to stay with the guy. She decides to follow this white man down into a basement to try to save him. And that just felt so...

BROOKS: (Laughter).

LUSE: ...Not realistic. And, I mean, I was glad that, after everything she went through in the film, that she survived at the end, but her consistently making decisions to put herself in danger - that took me out of the experience of watching the movie. And so I wonder, do you see that depiction as, like, a successful Black final girl or unsuccessful?

BROOKS: I think it's interesting on multiple levels, and we have to break some of this down a bit. First, remember, with her being a Black woman, Black women aren't considered potential victims. So in our lived experience - right? - we recognize and know that Black women are potential victims and sometimes are more vulnerable to victimhood and to violence...

LUSE: Right, right, right.

BROOKS: ...Than white women are, right?

LUSE: Right.

BROOKS: But if you are feeding into the construct that Black women are not potential victims, that Black women are strong and confident in unique ways, and also that Black women are natural care givers in ways that go beyond what's expected of white womanhood, of course she's going to stay there. Of course, she's going to run after and try to save the white guy. Of course, she's going to try to save the world. Of course, she's confident enough to stay and drink with this strange white man because she's not considered a potential victim.

LUSE: It sounds like, at least through the way that you just explained, we're viewing this Black woman protagonist in "Barbarian" through the lens of the, quote-unquote, "ideal" audience member.

BROOKS: But also, this is where her light skin becomes key because white folks still have to be able to easily identify with her. And let's go back to Selena, right? So Selena is a brown skinned, darker-skinned Black woman. And what we have with her is it's not just about saying the group itself survives. This is also a really key way for Danny Boyle, the director, to insert other folks for the ideal viewer to identify with. You have Jim, the Cillian Murphy character, the white guy who is one of the central characters, and you have Hannah, a younger, underage white woman. There are other entrances into this final group that isn't just a darker-skinned Black woman.

You don't have that with "Barbarian." So in a way, for her to be someone that the ideal viewer can identify with, she must be lighter skinned, softer hair, a more approachable Blackness that allows them to identify.

LUSE: Kinitra (laughter).

BROOKS: It's fascinating. People don't - what's...

LUSE: It is fascinating.

BROOKS: You know, it's all of our cultural anxieties, all of our stuff just on the screen and all of those ugly things that society does not acknowledge about itself. It's put there, clear as day on the screen, and they just wrap it up in a monster. That's it.

LUSE: As you mentioned, we're now seeing more and more Black final girls. And horror at its best shows the specific fears of its protagonists - like teens are afraid of their newfound freedom, or young women are afraid of walking alone at night. And sometimes that specificity appears in horror stories with Black protagonists, too, like in the Hulu series "The Other Black Girl." But I have to be honest, I don't know if all of these have been effective at showing the specific fears of Black women. Like, I feel like hair is often a subject in sometimes, like, Black protagonist-led horror, or slavery is another one. And as much as some of those specific fears can be kind of, like, tired or tropey (ph) in and of themselves, and I can be a little over it.

It's also annoying to me when the Black final girl character is unspecific. Like, she doesn't think or behave like how an actual Black woman thinks. You know, as I brought up "Barbarian" as an example, that's a role that could have been played by anybody. It didn't have to be a Black actress. She was making all these decisions, like I said, a Black woman wouldn't make.

BROOKS: I just want to say then the film is doing its job. That's when horror is successful. You are being played the exact way you're supposed to be played because you're identifying with these characters. One, they're angering you because you identify with them, right?

LUSE: Yeah.

BROOKS: And also, you have these expectations of them to act and perform in a certain way because you identify with them.

LUSE: But the thing - OK, so I could see that. But we're clearly at a point now where we've expanded from the final girl into, like, the final victim or the final survivor, the final figure. As you have touched on previously, the idea of who is allowed to be a horror protagonist is expanding. So now these sort of final victims are kind of pushing and redefining the boundaries of the original final girl. How do you see the interpretations of this trope expanding as it becomes more inclusive in the future?

BROOKS: I think there's so much potentiality there. At the end of me writing about the Black final girl, I say, like, please take this structure or framework and apply it to your own identities. With our expanding of the spectrum of gender, we get to have some really interesting takes on who the final girl is and who she could possibly be. I absolutely think it's fascinating. And when you have the ideal viewer changing, then the idea of the other must change as well.

LUSE: Wow. I mean, I'm curious and I'm excited as a horror fan to see how this trope will continue to change, evolve, and expand. Dr. Brooks, thank you so, so much for joining us today. This was so much fun.

BROOKS: Thank you. It's been wonderful being here.

LUSE: That was Dr. Kinitra Brooks - scholar, and Audrey and John Leslie endowed chair of literary studies at Michigan State University.

Now that we've discussed the hero in horror, I want to switch gears and take on the monster. And there's one kind of monster in particular that I think gets a bad rap - the horny hag.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LUSE: A heads up to listeners - this segment contains frank mentions of sex, sexuality, violence and sexual assault.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LUSE: We just talked about women as the hero in horror. But what about when they're the monster?

(SOUNDBITE OF MONSTER GROWLING)

LUSE: There's this trope that I absolutely cannot stand but I see everywhere - the horny hag. And to be clear, I would never, ever refer to an older woman as a hag in real life. We're just talking about the hag as a stereotype in horror. You know her. She's an old woman who is either naked and scary or actively horny and scary. And what I don't know is why either of those things is supposed to be scary. And my guest doesn't either.

GRETCHEN FELKER-MARTIN: I don't find that frightening. It doesn't disturb me. I mean, you know, maybe it's different because as a lesbian, older women have a very different place in our community.

LUSE: That's horror writer and critic Gretchen Felker-Martin.

FELKER-MARTIN: But I don't even think that's it. I just don't think the idea of old people being horny is very scary (laughter).

LUSE: I agree with Gretchen. And yet the horny hag can be found all over horror. In our previous segment, we talked about the movie "Barbarian." That's got a hag. She's old, naked and forcing a man to breastfeed in a way we're supposed to see as both sexual and motherly. The horny hag can also be found in the film "X," where she really, really wants to get laid. And after she's turned on by her husband and her young, sexy houseguests, she gets stabby (ph).

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "X")

MIA GOTH: (As Maxine, crying) That woman was in my bed touching me.

LUSE: Horny hags are also in "Midsommar," "It Chapter Two" and back in the day, "The Shining." But in real life, your average person is not afraid of old women. I imagine that very few people live in fear that an older woman is going to spontaneously try to have sex with them or go on a killing spree. So what is all this about? Why is the horny hag the monster? I talked with Gretchen about what's behind the hag and what it says about our attitudes towards older women.

Gretchen, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.

FELKER-MARTIN: Oh, thank you, Brittany. I'm so excited to be here.

LUSE: I'm so excited to have you. To start things off, though, both "Barbarian" and "X" have older women or hags as their monsters, like the literal monsters of these films.

FELKER-MARTIN: Right.

LUSE: But in both of these movies, the film is trying to evoke some kind of, like, sexual repulsion around these hags.

FELKER-MARTIN: Yep.

LUSE: What is happening here with all of that? Like, what are these films trying to do with that kind of horror?

FELKER-MARTIN: Anything that we consider repulsive winds up in horror and often nowhere else. It's a pressure gasket for sort of our national imagination. When we watch horror films, we're in the theater because we want to see our fears and our anxieties sublimated into some form we can understand. What the hag provides is a sublimation of our fear of aging - first, our own aging, the idea that we will continue on but mired in a body that is physically failing us. And we'll have to reconcile our personhood, which is continuous throughout our lives. You know, I'm not a different person as a 35-year-old than I was as a 22-year-old. I'm a lot less stupid, I hope, but (laughter)...

LUSE: Same - I'm also 35, and I'm definitely sharper now (laughter).

FELKER-MARTIN: Yeah, yeah. There's that fear that it's playing on. The other major factor at play - our discomfort with our mothers and the older women in our lives, our feelings of guilt toward them. I don't think that there is much debate to be had that Americans do not value older women. A lot of older people wind up in care facilities. So what do you have? You have this phantom in your mind, this knowledge that you are failing the person who raised you, that you are not meeting their needs, that they're out there suffering. And of course, there's also the primal fear that your mother, the person who bore you and nursed you and loved you and raised you, will grow too old to do those things. It's also something that we feel a lot of revulsion towards. Our mother is supposed to take care of us. The idea of dealing with our mother in an abject state where she has desperate needs, it's scary.

LUSE: Something else that you said to my producer, Liam, before you and I talked today was really interesting to me. You also mentioned that there's, like, a fear of retribution that's beneath some of the killing hags in these movies because there's, like, some older women in these movies that are stabbing and killing and murdering and stuff like that, you know? And you mentioned that, like, murderous urge is a form of retribution for what we've done to these women culturally. Tell me more about that.

FELKER-MARTIN: So, yeah, absolutely. I think that we have tremendous cultural guilt about the way that in all sorts of ways, large and small, we strip them of their humanity by erasing them from our stories, by pushing them physically out of our lives and into seclusion, by denying them agency. And whenever this kind of systemic injustice happens, there's always an anxiety in the perpetrators that it will be evened out, that somehow the oppressed will exact retribution from you. I think we're very afraid of what we've done to old women, that they exist to us as kind of a record of all the suffering in our culture. And once you no longer want to make love to them or once they are no longer a resource to be extracted, then you have to confront what your desires have done to them.

LUSE: The idea of extraction is so major. Is there something else beneath all of that too? Like, we've got the sexual fear. We've got the fear that the mother or mother figure will no longer be there to carry you. But I wonder if there's, like, something else that maybe even I'm not thinking of right now.

FELKER-MARTIN: I think more generally, there's also a tremendous fear of an undesirable woman with sexual agency, the idea that people who control the sexual economy could be subject to the whims of someone who is assumed to have no value in that economy. I think, culturally, we're very afraid of women coming back for their pound of flesh.

LUSE: Sorry, you shocked me just now.

(LAUGHTER)

LUSE: You shocked me just now. Can you say more about what is scary about women having needs? You talked about part of that, which is there's, like, a guilt maybe attached to it.

FELKER-MARTIN: Right.

LUSE: But I think that there's more there than just guilt.

FELKER-MARTIN: I agree with you. I think it is deeper than that. I think it is more complicated than that - to men, especially. Dan O'Bannon's screenplay for "Alien," the 1979 Ridley Scott movie - what this movie does is recontextualize our cultural ideas about rape and forced pregnancy and apply them to anyone and everyone. Suddenly, this is not something that only women have to walk around imagining. Suddenly, there is this sort of third gender, this monstrous intruder that can do the same thing to men. It can inflict itself on them, impregnate them, force them to carry its offspring to term even if it kills them. And the hag shows up to fulfill sort of a similar purpose. Sexual assault is also a very common experience for men, and I think that those images are ways for them to externalize and process those experiences. It's mostly men's anxieties that we see in horror.

LUSE: D***.

FELKER-MARTIN: I mean, like all film, it's dominated by men. And so we are, to an extent, trapped in there blind with them.

LUSE: Wow.

FELKER-MARTIN: The hag has no need for men. She might take something from them, but they aren't a partner. They aren't an equal. They don't have her knowledge.

LUSE: That undermines, like, one of the main tenets of traditional masculinity...

FELKER-MARTIN: Yep.

LUSE: ...Is providing and having the things and doling them out and controlling resources and withholding and giving and taking. And if you can't do that, are you even a man?

FELKER-MARTIN: Right. And, you know, at the most basic level, everything has been taken off the table. You can't even impregnate these figures. That can no longer happen.

LUSE: Right.

FELKER-MARTIN: They can't be controlled or coerced in that way.

LUSE: I'm sorry. You're blowing my mind right now because I'm just thinking about, like - it's like that "Beautiful Mind" moment...

FELKER-MARTIN: (Laughter).

LUSE: ...Where, like, all the facts and figures are coming together.

Something else that you brought up when you talked to my producer, Liam, is this idea of an inverted pregnancy fear. Talk to me more about that.

FELKER-MARTIN: So here's my 2 cents on this - your mother brings you into the world when you are at your weakest, your least capable, your most ignorant. You have no conception of reality around you. The hag is waiting at the other end.

LUSE: Of your life?

FELKER-MARTIN: Yes. She's waiting to take you back into that same dark.

LUSE: Like, a woman brought you into this world, and another one's going to take you out.

FELKER-MARTIN: Right. And she'll make you powerless.

LUSE: Dang.

FELKER-MARTIN: She will expose your ignorance and your weakness and un-person you.

LUSE: Something else I've been thinking about with all this is how aging is thought of across different cultures. Like, I'm Black. I'm American. I don't usually think of older Black women as hags. I really thought about this. I tried to think about this. And there are certainly examples of older Black women playing witches. Like, sometimes I think about like the film, like, "Eve's Bayou," right? And Diahann Carroll is playing...

FELKER-MARTIN: Great movie.

LUSE: ...this witch - great movie - and she's playing this witch. But even though she's playing a witch who is scary, she also knows the truth of what's going on.

FELKER-MARTIN: Right.

LUSE: She's somebody who has these insights that are really valued. And I think that, like, even, like, when it comes to taking care of older family members and things like that and family responsibilities - how we think about older people - that - like, I can both observe in the wider culture and in mainstream American culture that, like, as a society, we do not value older women - older people - but we don't value older women. But I can also see that, like, within my own culture, that it doesn't shake out the same way. And - I don't know. There's, like, a different lens to what you do with older people and what their role is in society and in the family that does feel different than what I see often explored in the horror movies that we're talking about.

FELKER-MARTIN: Absolutely. You know, it's funny because, even in white-dominated cinema, the same viewpoint persists. You don't see older Black women cast as that decrepit hag figure nearly as much because a lot of our stereotypical images of Black women were cemented before the Civil War. And, you know, older Black women are traditionally comforting and earthy and wise and homey, and there's just a whole variety of horrible, dehumanizing things...

LUSE: A cornucopia, yes. Yeah.

FELKER-MARTIN: ...That get heaped on older Black women. You do see them as as magical, but they're much more likely to be helpful or...

LUSE: Yeah.

FELKER-MARTIN: ...Sort of ambiguous...

LUSE: Yeah.

FELKER-MARTIN: ...Rather than monstrous.

LUSE: Now that you bring that up, that kind of, in itself, is a commentary on what kind of people white-dominated cinema sees as having agency.

FELKER-MARTIN: Right.

LUSE: So it sounds like, with a older white hag, it's like, I don't want to give you anything. I don't want to acknowledge you. But I am afraid that I do see that you are a human being.

(LAUGHTER)

LUSE: Whereas, like, if you don't see someone as human - like, in the case of, you know, an older Black woman - you don't feel any guilt around taking from them. Like, that idea of retribution doesn't apply if you don't think you've done anything wrong.

FELKER-MARTIN: I think that's exactly it.

LUSE: You know, we watch these movies, and obviously they're just movies, but is there a way that these representations of older women flavor how we treat them in real life?

FELKER-MARTIN: I tend to think that the reverse is true. We represent them this way in movies because of the way they're treated in real life. That said, that's not something I can prove.

LUSE: (Laughter).

FELKER-MARTIN: It's not really something anyone can prove. It's like when "Birth Of A Nation" premiered - this appalling, monstrous, hateful film about the Ku Klux Klan. That same year, enrollment in the Klan spiked sharply. Many scholars attribute it to the film, but I have yet to see a movie that could turn people into a Nazi overnight. Maybe it gave them the idea to enroll in a club for how horrible they were, but did it instill those things in them itself? No, they were already there.

LUSE: One more thing I'll say - I kind of hope to be a horny old person...

FELKER-MARTIN: (Laughter).

LUSE: ...You know what I mean? It's like, why isn't that a goal (laughter)? Like...

FELKER-MARTIN: Yeah. No, I mean, I would like to have that with my loved ones when I'm old and my body is no longer functioning like it does now.

LUSE: Yeah. It's like, you know, I mean, it's like - you're like, I live long enough. I'm still feeling good, feeling myself. I'm feeling like, you know, I want to connect with other people. I think that's a gift.

Gretchen, it was so great to talk to you. This was so invigorating. I can't even tell you. I really enjoyed this conversation.

FELKER-MARTIN: I feel absolutely the same, Brittany. Thank you so much for having me on.

LUSE: Thanks again to horror writer and critic Gretchen Felker-Martin. Her latest novel, "Manhunt," is out now.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LUSE: This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...

ALEXIS WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Alexis Williams.

LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.

LUSE: This episode was edited by...

JESSICA PLACZEK, BYLINE: Jessica Placzek.

BILAL QURESHI, BYLINE: Bilal Qureshi.

LUSE: Engineering support came from...

STACEY ABBOTT, BYLINE: Stacey Abbott.

PHIL EDFORS, BYLINE: Phil Edfors.

TRE WATSON, BYLINE: Tre Watson.

LUSE: Our executive producer is...

VERALYN WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Veralyn Williams.

LUSE: Our VP of programming is...

YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.

LUSE: Our senior VP of programming is...

ANYA GRUNDMANN, BYLINE: Anya Grundmann.

LUSE: All right. That's all for this episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Talk soon.

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