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Beneath the romantic avenues of the world’s most famous necropolis lies a history of decay, ritual and spectacle. In this episode, we step away from the tourist maps and navigate Père Lachaise Cemetery by means of Situationist psychogeography. We trace the origins of the cemetery to the 18th-century Parisian hygiene crisis, exploring how its founders used the exhumed bones of Molière and La Fontaine as a macabre marketing stunt to sell burial plots. From there, we conduct a dérive (a drift) through the graves of three phantoms who anchor the dark ecology of the French Weird: Allan Kardec: the founder of Spiritism, whose dolmen-shaped tomb remains a site of active occult devotion; Victor Noir: The martyred journalist whose bronze effigy has transformed into a bizarre fertility shrine; Berthe de Courrière: tyhe occultist, muse, and rumored black magician who blurred the lines between the physical and the spectral. By applying the urban theories of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, we read the cemetery not as a static graveyard, but as a living text—a spatial manifestation of alienation, memory, and the non-human earth. Suggested reading Chtcheglov, Ivan [Gilles Ivain]. "Formulary for a New Urbanism." Libcom.org, 2006, libcom.org/article/formulary-new-urbanism-gilles-ivain. Originally written in 1953. Debord, Guy. "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography." Bureau of Public Secrets, translated by Ken Knabb, 2006, bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm. Originally published in Les Lèvres Nues #6, 1955. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Marxists Internet Archive, 2005, marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm. Originally published in 1967. Debord, Guy. "Theory of the Dérive." Bureau of Public Secrets, translated by Ken Knabb, 2006, bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm. Originally published in Internationale Situationniste #2, 1958. Kardec, Allan. The Spirits' Book. Translated by Anna Blackwell, Colby and Rich, 1875. If you'd like to send French Weird a short voice note, you can do so here

In this episode of French Weird we recall holiday travel to Brittany and explore Korriganed, a 2016 French "docufiction" film by Gaël Bizien that plays like a Celtic The Blair Witch Project. With your host Russell Williams, examine the Korrigan myth through Robert Kirk's 17th-century writing on fairy abductions, bizarre pop-culture crossovers like a 2011 Batman comic set in the Paris catacombs and traditional Breton folk tales of tricksters and night dancers. Finally, we embrace into the weirdness of Arthur Machen’s Welsh fairy horror, tracking an unhinged conspiracy theory from Colin Wilson and the Illuminatus! Trilogy that links Machen's fiction to the Parisian occult underground of the 1880s. Suggested reading Chambers, Robert W. The King in Yellow. Hine, David, et al. Batman Annual (Issues 12.1, 12.2, 28.1, and 28.2). 2011. Hodgson, William Hope. The House on the Borderland. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature (À rebours). Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Là-Bas. Keel, John. The Mothman Prophecies. Kirk, Robert. The Secret Commonwealth. 1692. Reissued by New York Review Books, 2019. Lovecraft, H.P. Essay on Supernatural Fiction. Luzel, François-Marie. The Midnight Washerwoman and Other Tales of Lower Brittany. Translated by Michael Wilson, Princeton University Press, 2023. Machen, Arthur. The White People, The Shining Pyramid, The Red Hand, A Fragment of Life, and Out of the Earth. (Referenced via the Penguin Classics edition edited by S.T. Joshi). Robbe-Grillet, Alain. The Erasers (Les Gommes). Shea, Robert, and Robert Anton Wilson. The Illuminatus! Trilogy. 1975. Wilson, Colin. "The Return of the Lloigor." Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, 1969. Films & Television An American Werewolf in London. Bram Stoker's Dracula. Ghostwatch. Broadcast on BBC One, 1992. Hellier. Created by Karl Pfeiffer, Greg Newkirk and Dana Newkirk, Planet Weird. Korriganed. Directed by Gaël Bizien, 2016. Rabbit Trap. Directed by Bryn Chainey, 2025. The Blair Witch Project. The Borderlands. The Fly. Directed by Kurt Neumann, 1958. The Wicker Man. If you'd like to send French Weird a short voice note, you can do so here

In this episode of French Weird, host Russell Williams explores the fascinating, myth-laden life and fiction of Franco-British author George Langelaan (1908–1972). Best known as the author of "La Mouche"/"The Fly" (1957), the  short story adapted into David Cronenberg’s iconic 1986 body-horror film, Langelaan lived a life that rivalled his most eccentric fiction. We unpack his World War Two career as a Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent, the bizarre claim that he underwent facial reconstruction surgery as a undercover disguise, his decades spent as an unsuccessful ghost hunter and a legendary anecdote involving occultist Alistair Crowley performing bathroom rituals during a Paris chess tournament.  Beyond "The Fly", we explore Langelaan's 1962 collection Nouvelles de l'Anti-Monde (Out of Time), examining forgotten masterpieces of "time horror", reincarnation, cold war television anxieties, and autonomous chess-playing automata. Suggested reading The images I mention of Langelaan - and a telling of the Crowley anecdote, can be found here: "Les Chesseurs Britanniques de Paris: Part 4 The Beast." The Streatham & Brixton Chess Blog, 26 Feb. 2016, streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.com/2016/02/les-chesseurs-britanniques-de-paris_26.html Works by George Langelaan "La Mouche" ("The Fly") — First published in French in Paris-Match (1957) and translated in Playboy (1957). Nouvelles de l'Antimonde — Short story collection published by Éditions Robert Laffont (1962, reissued 1966 & 2018 by L'Arbre Vengeur). Translated into English as Out of Time (1964). Featured stories include "Récession" ("Recession"), "La Dame d'outre-nulle-part" ("The Woman from Nowhere"), "Le Miracle" ("The Miracle"), "L'autre main" ("The Other Hand"), "Robots pensants" ("Thinking Robots"), and "Temps mort" ("Dead Time"). Un nommé Langdon / Le Masque d'un agent secret — Two-volume war memoirs published by Club des Amis du Livre (1963). Published in English under the titles Memoirs of a Secret Agent, The Masks of War, and Knights of the Floating Silk. Treize Fantômes — Collection of ghost-hunting anecdotes and folklore (1971). Other Books, Anthologies & Publications  Planète magazine, edited by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (with Jacques Mousseau et al)  (1961–1969). Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1960). Promethean Horrors: Classic Stories of Mad Science, ed. Xavier Aldana Reyes (British Library Tales of the Weird, 2019). Danse Macabre: Strange Stories from France, ed. Mike Ashley (British Library Tales of the Weird, 2026). Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère (2020). The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890). Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886). Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818). "Special operations: a hidden chapter in the histories of facial surgery and human enhancement" by Roderick Bailey (Medical Humanities, 2020). "The secret scalpel: plastic surgery for wartime disguise" by Roderick Bailey (The Lancet, 384, 1421-1422) If you'd like to send French Weird a short voice note, you can do so here

In this episode host Russell Williams thinks about Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier's book Le Matin des magiciens (1960), translated into English as The Morning of the Magicians or The Dawn of Magic. This is a book that Colin Wilson described as "a curious hodgepodge", "a series of wild speculations on magic; alchemy, telepathy, prophecy, strange cults, the Great Pyramid, Hitler's astrologers, the Cabala, flying saucers and a thousand other topics". He's not wrong. For more information, visit www.frenchweird.com  Reading list Pauvels, Louis & Berger, Jacques, Le Matin des magiciens, Gallimard, 1960 Purdom, Clayton, "Weird Nonfiction", Los Angeles Review of Books, September 27, 2024, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/weird-nonfiction/ If you'd like to send French Weird a short voice note, you can do so here

In our first deep exploration, French Weird discovers the unexpected Weird in the work of notorious novelist Michel Houellebecq. Our starting point is his devotion to the work of a certain H. P. Lovecraft. For more information, visit www.frenchweird.com  Reading list Houellebecq, Michel. Whatever. Translated by Paul Hammond, Serpent’s Tail, 1998. Houellebecq, Michel. H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. Translated by Dorna Khazeni, Believer Books, 2005. Houellebecq, Michel. Atomised. Translated by Frank Wynne, William Heinemann, 2000. Houellebecq, Michel. The Map and the Territory. Translated by Gavin Bowd, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Houellebecq, Michel. Submission. Translated by Lorin Stein, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. Houellebecq, Michel. Annihilation. Translated by Shaun Whiteside, Picador, 2024. If you'd like to send French Weird a short voice note, you can do so here

This is where it all begins. Your host, Russell Williams, gives an overview of the sort of things you might expect from French Weird. For more information, visit www.frenchweird.com  Forget the accordion music, the cafés and the immaculate boulevards. There is a dark, uncanny and deeply strange texture pervading modern France—and it’s time to investigate. Welcome to French Weird, a podcast dedicated to exploring the counterculture, obscure art and bizarre anomalies of contemporary France. Channeling cultural theory, esoterica and the love of a good book this shows investigates what falls through the cracks of mainstream French culture. We are tracking the liminal spaces, the bizarre subcultures and the beautiful freak-outs from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. What exactly is the French Weird? It is the territory where high philosophy meets the profoundly bizarre. In each episode, we trace the threads of a proudly rational nation simultaneously digesting global weirdness and exporting its own brand of the mysterious. French Weird explores how France's hidden eccentricities reveal the truths about its politics, literature, culture and - maybe even - identity. Subscribe now, download, and join us. When the going gets weird, the pros turn French. If you'd like to send French Weird a short voice note, you can do so here