Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Love and Monsters,” on the inescapable bond between romance and horror, with Joshua Barton, scholar of horror and lecturer in English at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Romance and horror might seem like opposite genres, but they share a deep emotional core, and the combination of them has captivated audiences across time and culture.

Come to Richmond’s Triple Crossing-Fulton taproom to hear this strange relationship discussed by Joshua Barton, who has earned a big following among Profs and Pints fans with his past talks on cryptids, American horror, and Christmas ghosts.

He’ll explore the undeniable and unsettling intersection of romance and horror and examine how and why love and fear intensify each other and combined to create tension, drive narratives, and explore human vulnerability.

We’ll look at works that have blended passion and terror, including Gothic literature like the vampire novella Carmilla and modern films like Spring and Crimson Peak. We’ll study the fine line between obsession and adoration running through Stephen King’s “I Know What You Need,” Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction, and the timeless The Phantom of the Opera. We’ll discuss the seeds of monstrous love that were planted with Beauty and the Beast and Creature from the Black Lagoon and bloom ferociously in works like Twilight and The Shape of Water. Through it all, we’ll find the threads of otherness and the taboo that intertwine horror, love, and reflections on identity.

Join us for a journey through storytelling that combines the grotesque and the scintillating as we uncover why romance and horror are a match made in the dark. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)