Watch AMC Visionaries: Eli Roth's History of Horrors

The pursuit of knowledge can lead us down dark paths. Our quest to understand the workings of the universe has taken us from caves to cities, from the desert to the Moon. But it has also sickened our bodies and the planet, given us weapons of mass destruction and the surveillance state, and, most recently, created the poison candy of the Internet, which has completely disrupted how we live and how we think.

It started with Black Christmas. Bob Clark's groundbreaking slasher film took the then-shocking notion of setting a sorority bloodbath at Christmastime, offering a dark contrast to the joy of the holiday season. Halloween came a few years later, and its success spawned a slew of holiday-themed horror movies. The idea still catches fire every decade or so, retooled for new generations of viewers.

The bigger they come, the harder they fall. And when it comes to human civilizations, the modern world is as big and populous as it has ever been, so when the fall comes, it will be spectacular. The collapse of the Roman Empire was followed by roughly a thousand years of hard times for the human race. The collapse of the modern world will likely be even more traumatic. But as history tells us and horror movies confirm, humans can survive just about anything, including world wars, global plagues, mass famines, and, maybe, a zombie apocalypse. The ones who make it through may be the horror fans who have absorbed the lessons taught by end-of-the-world spectaculars like World War Z, Train to Busan, Zombieland, War of the Worlds, I Am Legend, The Omega Man, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The World's End and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

What's the downside of having psychic powers? The idea of being able to read minds or manipulate objects without moving a muscle is an attractive fantasy. But what if those powers showed you things you wished you hadn't seen? What if people wanted to exploit your gift for their own sinister ends? Worse than that: what if someone with psychic abilities turned their powers against you? Movies about psychics play on the ego of our species - humans rose to the top thanks to their large, multilayered brains - but they also exploit our insecurities. We understand little about cognition and the nature of free will, and we know we're just a brain tumor away from radical personality shifts and psychotic behavior. The fear of psychic powers gone wrong is the fear of our own turbulent minds. This episode features a wide range of psychic films made by superstar creators, including David Cronenberg's Scanners and The Dead Zone, Mike Flanagan's thrilling adaptation of Stephen King's Doctor Sleep, Brian DePalma's The Fury, Sam Raimi's The Gift, Peter Jackson's The Frighteners and Tim Burton's horror/comedy masterpiece Beetlejuice.

There were two kinds of people in 2020 and 2021: those who watched movies about infectious diseases, and those who did not. Horror fans tend to fall into the first category, because that's a major appeal of the genre: it is both a cathartic release for our worst fears (things are bad, but it could be worse - look what happened to Gwyneth Paltrow in Contagion) and a way of rehearsing for real-life nightmares. This episode covers the spectrum of frightening infection scenarios, ranging from reality-based films (Outbreak, Contagion and 12 Monkeys) to surreal plagues (Shivers, Rabid and The Masque of the Red Death), horrific zombie outbreaks ([REC] and Pontypool) to space-born pathogens (The Andromeda Strain and Color Out of Space). Our fear of infection runs deep. But as these films and real life show us, so does the human capacity for survival.

Everyone knows horror sequels suck. Or do they? Fans of films like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Psycho II, The First Purge, Bride of Chucky, Scream 2 and Gremlins 2: The New Batch say sometimes sequels are as good or even better than the originals.