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The Healing Power Of Horror

The logo for Embodied, which features a person with brown skin wearing yellow pants, a white shirt and white glasses pulling back a starry curtain of the silhouette of a person that is roughly twice as large as the person in yellow pants. The word "Embodied" is at the top with the WUNC logo directly underneath it and the PRX logo in the bottom righthand corner of the illustration. All of the text is in white, and the background of the illustration is light blue.

Good horror films and novels are entertaining, but research shows they can also be a tool for healing. An award-winning author shares the art of crafting horror stories about real-life traumas.

Black horror writer Tananarive Due fell in love with the spectacle of horror when she was a little kid. But it was only after she was well into her horror writing career that she discovered that the genre can provide not just entertainment but healing.

Tananarive talks to host Anita Rao about why she believes horror can help folks process real-world fears and trauma, using her most recent award-winning book “The Reformatory” as a case study.

Tananarive Due is an educator and the author of several horror novels. Her most recent novel is “The Reformatory.”

Read the transcript

Kaia Findlay is the lead producer of Embodied, WUNC's weekly podcast and radio show about sex, relationships and health. Kaia first joined the WUNC team in 2020 as a producer for The State of Things.
Anita Rao is an award-winning journalist, host, creator, and executive editor of "Embodied," a weekly radio show and podcast about sex, relationships & health.
Amanda Magnus is the executive producer of Embodied, a weekly radio show and podcast about sex, relationships and health. She has also worked on other WUNC shows including Tested and CREEP.