I just revived my old iPod touch that I haven’t used since ~2013 after believing it to be dead dead for years and oh my god it’s like opening up an old time capsule. There are photos of me and my friends that I haven’t seen in years, taken in an old high school building that doesn’t exist anymore. I have games that are no longer downloadable on the app store. It’s running iOS 5 with the original skeuomorphism app icons. I still have the youtube app. My contacts app is full of maiden names and deadnames. The music app has songs I haven’t heard in almost a decade but still remember all the lyrics to. A daily alarm set for 5:30 AM (god I can’t believe I had to wake up that early in high school) and another set to 11:11 PM to remind me to make a wish. Reminders to finish homework assignments, or to write my application essay for the university I ended up attending, and one marking the release date for the final episode of Cabin Pressure. The last thing I googled was “how to draw people hugging”.
Possibly the strangest thing is that the tumblr app still opens, but it’s stuck in a permanent snapshot of 2013 where it won’t show me any new posts no matter how many times I refresh. My dash is full of old BBC Sherlock posts from long-lost mutuals who have either since deactivated or got unfollowed or changed urls so many times that I don’t even recognize them. Lady Gaga and Game of Thrones are the top trends. My profile shows my previous url and icon, with only 43 followers. I feel like a time traveler
changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.
I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.
Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.
No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.
But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?
Is it just me or does some of your new work seem ai generated? At the very least the composition seems a bit artificial. I’ve noticed that with a lot of artists not just you so I was wondering.