Hello, my name's Justin McLuhan. I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club. And it's not Shocktober anymore.

So, but we have a Shocktober subject to talk about it.

Yeah, I mean, listen, folks, it's hard doing this podcast every week. Every now and then an idea that was supposed to be the previous week ends up going to the next week because life gets in the way.

This doesn't necessarily have to be a Shocktober episode.

Absolutely not.

That's the thing about this subject, critic Robin Wood, is that we want to do him in Shocktober because probably one of his most famous things

is the work that he wrote about the horror film. Yeah, Robin Wood, he's a critic and a thinker

whose work is vast and multifaceted. He's written on so many things. He's written famous, acclaimed

monographs on Ingmar Bergman, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, as well as such definitive...

I'm trying to figure out what word might be better than that, but, you know, Totemic book says,

Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. I think we thought that maybe if we focused on horror movies,

that might give us a bit of a focus. That's true. But nope, there will be no focus on the episode. We're going to be bouncing all over the place. But let's start at the beginning. Will, where did you learn about Robin Wood? Oh, Robin Wood. I think I learned about him when I was in undergrad. I took Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. And Robin Wood was a Marxist film professor from York University, which is not where I went, but like he loomed large in Toronto.

He's internationally known, but he's one of British-born.

British-born, but did a lot of his mature work living and teaching in Canada.

So Canada feels a claim on him.

And he also started the magazine Cina Action, this long-running, I guess he might call it

like Marxist film journal in Toronto. You know, when you say that Robin Wood is a very

politically minded critic, and he would say that himself, there is a fear of like, oh, no, is it

going to be like Cade Cinema during their very, like, ideological years? And it's, nope, he is very readable. And he's, I'm going to be like Cade Cinema during their very ideological years? And it's, nope, he is

very readable. And he's, I'm going to say this right now, one of the rare critics that you read,

even on films that you're very well versed in, he will bring something new for you to think about.

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