#is there not horror in obsession with something inherently disturbing?

[fiendishartist2]

"petscop isnt horror" guys when webhorror doesn't have distorted faces:

[french-toast-enjoyer]

Venom essay baybey!!!!

as promised, here's my essay on symbrock as a dynamic! thank you to my contributors @symbiotic-slime

@bridoesotherjunk

@x-jean

@cannibalhellhound

@funkycave

@eddiebrockx

@bloodyaliens and @shiningstardan for helping me gather resources and testimony! the paper is a bit amateur but i hope it's an okay read! please let me know if I forgot to tag you!

Symbrock– or, A Complex Love Affair Between Parasite and Host   

23 April, 2024

Abstract

An investigation into “Symbrock,” or the bizarre emotional relationship between Eddie Brock– a struggling journalist and Spider-Man villain– and Venom– the parasitic alien symbiote that lives in Eddie’s body. Herein will discuss the themes, appeal, and complicated nature of the dynamic. This is a dissertation, this is an analytical dissection, but above all, this is a love story.

Keywords: Symbrock. portmanteau of “symbiote” and “Brock.”

In the fall of 2018, Venom had his individual film debut to millions of Spider-Man fans and  casual movie-goers. The movie was critically panned. Fans of Spider-Man and critics of pop culture media united to declare that they hated the "buddy cop" direction that writers Kelly Marcel and Ruben Fliesher  had taken the character of Venom. Many believed that Marcel (most known for screen adapting Fifty Shades of Grey) wasted the film's grizzly horror potential exploring the getting-together of Eddie and Venom. The majority had spoken, the movie had failed. So why was the fandom exploding? Within days, there were threads, blog posts, and video essays, all delving into a new obsession with this chummy characterization of Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote. Intrigued by it, turned on by it, and desperate for more content of it, this mysterious fan base began to go through nearly forty years of lore for more of the duo they loved. What they found changed the perception of Venom as a character. Venom historians, fans, and even comic writers declared that Eddie Brock and the symbiote were in love. But the question remains, why these two? What was the evidence, what was the response, and why did this relationship appeal to the queer audience it'd captured? In short, why had Venom become a queer icon?

Symbrock– or, A Complex Love Affair Between Parasite and Host   

When “I” became “We”

There is groundwork to lay in regards to proving the nature of this dynamic, and it begins with understanding what binds the two physically and spiritually, requiring readers to go back to the beginning. 

While originally brought together by a mutual hatred of Spider-Man (read, The Amazing Spider-Man #300, 1988) the earliest example of a deeper bond between Brock and Venom comes to us in Venom: The Hunger (1996). Within the comic itself, Eddie Brock and Venom’s dynamic is threatened by the symbiote’s cannibalistic desires, which Eddie can not cope with. 

   If we blur our eyes and look at The Hunger, we see a story about Eddie coming to terms with the inherent violence and needs of Venom. Specifically, he sees how the symbiote needs a chemical compound called phenethylamine to survive– a fact that often leads him to eat human brains to get his fix. A trait that disturbs Brock so much that it drives the symbiote away, leaving the man without powers. In a straightforward manner, the story follows Eddie's journey to accept this hunger in order to remain bonded to Venom. In the final pages of the comic, Eddie brings the symbiote a vial of phenethylamine, as well as promises to share his own. The two reunite to create something stronger once again. From a distance, it's an exploration into what binds the two physically, but it’s not a fair one. Upon closer inspection, The Hunger is much more than a story of compromise. 

The deep eroticism of Venom, to most, begins with the very chemical that the symbiote subsists on. For the purposes of Eddie and Venom's connection, it's important to know that phenethylamine is chemically similar to phenylethylamine– commonly referred to as “the love hormone.” According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), when concentrated, the compound has similar effects on the brain to amphetamines. Broadly, it is considered a “feel-good” chemical, and is associated with sensations of intense euphoria and gratification due to its releases of dopamine. (read: NIH). Including a chemical associated with love, sex, and even chocolate is obviously an intentional decision on the writer's part. There are thousands of compounds that comic creators had to choose from. Fear hormones, rage hormones, all things that could've related more to the brutal nature of Venom as a villain.

But the writer, Len Kaminski, chose love. And so was born Venom’s obsession with the chemical, leading him to chase it in all its forms, from human brains and nerve endings– to, as seen in the last panels of The Hunger, a heart-shaped box of chocolates, which the symbiote says is a great source of phenethylamine. There it is, a scientific explanation of why Venom feeds on love. But even with this justification of the phenomenon, Kaminski refuses to pull punches, refuses to make this platonic.

All I Ever Want Is Just A Little Love

Kaminski’s reading of Brock is far beyond romantic, and it bleeds into how writers would interpret the character even decades later (most notably, Mike Costa’s Venom run from 2016-2019). In the first volume of Hunger, Kaminski writes a heartbreaking scene in which, after eating a man’s brain, Eddie shows a deep remorse that drives Venom to separate from their bond. This was mentioned above, but what was not mentioned was how the symbiote left Brock; naked and trembling in a back alley, begging “the other” not to abandon him. The man is left in a state of temporary psychosis without Venom, his brain leached of all phenethylamine. After a stint in a tortuous sanitarium, he chases the symbiote down and reunites with it, claiming proudly “It’s not human, but it’s given me things no girlfriend ever could,” and declaring that he finally has enough love to sustain the titular hunger. 

This wouldn’t be the last time Eddie would be written as captivated by his love for Venom, but it would go on to influence later iterations of the character, from the aforementioned Costa run to directorial notes of the films that’d launched the character into infamy.

In Venom #150, Mike Costa compared the bond between Brock and Venom to marriage. The interaction is a chilling one, taking place within the church where the two originally bonded, and where Eddie angsts about the nature of their relationship. He confesses, in vague terms, to a priest, that he loves his “other,” but that he’s been driven to do things he never would have done before. When the father implies that the dynamic isn’t healthy, we see a violent, possessive side of Venom. The symbiote overtakes Eddie’s body and nearly kills the priest– an action he later repents for the very same priest. He vows to try to be better in the name of devotion to his other. This marks a shift in Venom’s character and a complex arc into a more open and honest relationship between the two. And, as stated previously, this interpretation would grow to be popular with an audience of queer people, but the question remains as to why. 

All Guts and Heart. There's an air of nuanced relatability to Venom as a unit. On online forums, users within the fandom each have unique reasons for loving the ship. Some enjoy that both characters are relatable outcasts, some are enthralled with the trope of “idiots in love” present in their dynamic, and some are just plain attracted to Venom. 

But for a more devoted sect of the fan base, the intrigue lay in the intense physical proximity between symbiote and host. The potential for intimacy that comes with literally sharing a mind and body is intense. Venom, according to both the comics and films, sees every thought, compulsion, desire, and regret Eddie has, and Brock can do just the same to Venom. 

One example of this is an excerpt from Marvel Comics Presents #5 (2019), which recently became circulated for its dark, provocative, and tense language. In the comic, Venom is handling the man with their tendrils while speaking in his mind. “We can feel every dirty curve of Eddie's intentions. All that lust entangled with terror.” and later, “We enjoy the taste of Eddie's heartbeat. Strong, solid, sweet … Should we make it go faster?” To which Eddie responds, “Watch the teeth.”

Fans were stunned by the sensuality of these panels; particularly on Tumblr, a popular blogging website. One fan claimed to have even seen a phallic shape in the dreamscape of flesh and teeth that the scene was set in. Many more declared the scene was a sex act.

It seems almost like an intentional callback to the “It's not human,” line. As though the writers are willing to explore the dynamic in a romantic and psychological context, and fans love getting to see this dimension of the characters– even when the subject matter is dark. 

As with any piece of media, fan interaction is integral to the longevity and survival of a fan base, so it'd be an obvious point to investigate opinions of Venom within the fandom. 

Fan testimonials. When asked why the ship appealed to them, popular Symbrock blogger @symbiotic-slime responded, “I guess I would describe it as the intimacy of being known? Having your self laid bare and someone else seeing and knowing everything about you and still choosing to stay is very romantic in my opinion.” 

Regarding personal relation to the individuals: “It's partially because of being the weird neurodivergent queer kid. People think they're weird, their relationship is wrong, or something like that. Kinda hits a little too close to home.” says user @cannibalhellhound. The community in general seems to relate deeply to the outcast nature of Eddie and Venom, a point that comes through as well in discussions of the characters’ presentation and gender, as well as their “loser” status. Symbiotic-slime described a sense of connection to the devil-may-care attitude the symbiote takes with their pronouns and appearance, and user @just-anti-heros-things states succinctly, “Together they make a whole idiot who can fight battles and save the world. Or just fuck around and find out.”

 A handful of aspec (asexual spectrum) fans even described connecting with the alien nature of their relationship, with user @bridoesotherjunk saying quote, “They’re not putting on a performance to please anyone- they’re just… them. And they love each other for it! That’s what I want for myself,” and @shiningstardan comparing the relationship to their own experiences with attraction towards other people. 

No matter the sentiment, most fans agree that despite being outlandish and extraterrestrial, Venom and Eddie have a character more grounded than many an idealized hero in the Marvel universe. From holding hands in a movie theater to raising a child together, the two are never alone, and fans crave that proximity. 

Discussion

While not a  universally beloved franchise on its own, Venom has achieved cult status among a number of internet users for its raw, vulnerable, and often camp portrayal of a complicated relationship between two flawed characters. It's a fanbase that breeds creativity, exploration, and catharsis through the fantasy of a love foretold in stars. A place to make art, write fanfiction, and bond with other outcasts.

References

Kaminski, L., Halsted, T., Koblish, S., Lopez, K., & Smith, T. (1996). Venom, the hunger (Vol. 1–4). Published by Marvel Comics. 

Lee, S., Ditko, S., Yanchus, A., Rosen, S., Simek, A., & Lord, P. (1988). Marvel masterworks presents the amazing spider-man: Reprinting the amazing spider-man, nos. 11-20. Marvel Comics. 

Ryan, M. (2021, September 27). Andy Serkis on eddie and Venom’s “Love affair” in the new Venom sequel. UPROXX. https://uproxx.com/movies/andy-serkis-venom-let-there-be-carnage-eddie-venom-love-affair/ 

U.S. National Library of Medicine. (n.d.). Phenethylamine. National Center for Biotechnology Information. PubChem Compound Database. https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Phenethylamine 

Pak, G., Nocenti, A., Waid, M., Lapham, D., Lapham, M., Aydin, A., James Monroe Iglehart, Kibblesmith, D., Percy, B., Claremont, C., Williams, L., Seeley, T., Brisson, E., North, R., Pierson, D., Sacks, E., & Emily Ryan Lerner. (2020). Tales Through The Marvel Universe. Marvel Entertainment.

[littleyarngoblin]

10 People You Want to Know Better

Tagged by: @hellishnotions ahhhh thanks! i do love tag games

Relationship status: @mspareader and I have been together for almost 6 years and we're ~enGAYged~

Favorite colors: ok so orange and brown are severely underrated and therefore my favorite colors. But also, yellow, pink, green, and gray populate most of my closet.

Favorite foods: sushi and strawberry milkshakes

Song stuck in my head: Limelight by Rush! I've really been channeling my dad lately

Last thing you googled: "NVI ophthalmology" because of my job lol

Time: for dinner

Dream trip: Visiting the family farm in Germany, near the Black Forest would be so so cool. Part of me is still so sad I didn't get to spend three weeks digging in the desert, though, due to COVID :(

Last thing you read: Inuyasha fanfic (it was a lot of fanfic in a very small amount of time)

Last book you enjoyed reading: Cursed by Marie Regan! It's a great short story anthology, featuring a few of my favorites authors, such as Christina Henry, @neil-gaiman, and Jane Yolen.

Favorite thing to cook/bake: I cannot express to you how much I love baking apple pie. Challenging myself to peel an entire apple in one go is my favorite part, and it's so satisfying to do it. I also love baking bread, especially my grandma's cinnamon rolls.

Favorite craft to do in your free time: Depending on the weather, either sewing or knitting.

Opinion on circuses: OK SO I HAVE OPINIONS. FIRSTLY, I love when TV shows have scary episodes taking place in a circus because they are TRULY nightmare fodder. Something about the circus is so inherently disturbing and I like to lean into the horror, but would you find me *at* the circus? Hell no. SECONDLY, the history of the circus is really interesting (read: kinda horrifying) and remembering animal mistreatment in circus groups makes me so sad.

Most niche dislike: I really hate the way my teeth feel after drinking milk. It's so bad that I instantly have to brush my teeth or I'll spend hours obsessing over a bad sensation.

Do you have a sense of direction?: compared to @mspareader, no. Compared to @mouselafay, yes.

tagging: @starschlep, @mouselafay, @killing-time-w-kaz, @trektaalik, and @mats-bloody-hat :)

[adamwatchesmovies]

Carrie (2013)

The 2013 update of Carrie (the third adaptation after the classic 1976 version and largely-forgotten 2002-take) shows why the original was a one-in-a-million horror classic. At every turn, you watch the film and go “that was done better before” or “it’s too bad they couldn’t go with the same choices that DePalma did”. Aside from a good performance from Julianne Moore, there's little else here to look forward to.

Carrie White (Chloë Grace Moretz) is socially awkward and has no friends at school, thanks largely to her disturbed, religious fanatic of a mother (Moore as Margaret White). Knowing nothing of puberty, she panics when she experiences her first menstrual period in the locker room and is ridiculed by the girls in her class. After she is punished by the kind Miss Desjardin (Judy Greer) for bullying Carrie, Chris (Portia Doubleday) plans on humiliating the girl on prom night. She's unaware of Carrie's emerging telekinetic powers.

The movie shows problems from the opening credits with the casting of Chloë Grace Moretz. She’s too pretty for the role. Even dressed in a sack of potatoes, every boy in high school would be lining up to ask her out. The idea of this Carrie having no friends and being either ignored or bullied by everyone she encounters is preposterous and though talented, Moretz doesn’t have the skill to convince us otherwise. At least she looks like a teenager, which is more than you can say about Chris’ cartoonish boyfriend Billy (Alex Russell). We’re never told how old he’s supposed to be (at least 18 but nothing else) but he’d be more convincing as a teacher than as someone who gets roped into an elaborate prank on a high-schooler. The film doesn’t know how to tackle him or Chris. Depending on the scene, they’re either all in and committed to pure evil or acting as though they got roped into the situation by accident.

In a contemporary setting, this story doesn’t work. The town seems too big for the disturbing events which eventually take place. You don’t believe for a second that Carrie’s school curriculum wouldn’t include some kind of sex-ed or that she wouldn’t have stumbled upon the information she needs to prepare for puberty with the internet is at her fingertips. In a small town, 40+ years ago, when people categorized the type of bullying that takes place here as “something everybody goes through”? Yes. Today? No way.

In many ways, this film highlights the inherent problem with so many “second takes”. It isn’t that 1976’s Carrie is flawless. Some of the special effects are dated and the director’s style is all over the climax, which could make people want an update. The problem is that ultimately, it's still a great movie. For a remake to validate its existence, it would have to be drastically different or even better. Unfortunately, coming late to the party means 2013's Carrie always has to go with “option B”, when making any choice. The thing is, you know De Palma rejected this option nearly 50 years ago, so that's a sure-fire way to lose. That's when the film isn't forced to go with the only logical choice when telling its story, which is what we saw last time.

Giving this project to director Kimberly Peirce should’ve given it a fresh new angle. Unfortunately, no one would watch this "Carrie" and prefer it over the original. Even without the comparison, the movie feels out of place when set in present-day and with its lead actress trying to play the part of a girl no one would ever ask to dance. The director’s obsession with blood, the prom scene and the conclusion just don’t feel right. In the end, 2013's Carrie is just another unnecessary remake. (July 17, 2020)

[jukemaid]

ok real talk i know it’s fun doing angst to the twins but there needs to be a hard line drawn in the obsession with making emmet insane and violent with grief. i’m taking a gamble putting this in the main tag but i believe it NEEDS to be said, so please feel free to block and disregard if it’s too upsetting. believe me i get it

i have ptsd. i know what it’s like to be so traumatized that it changes you, makes you angry and upset and prone to lashing out bc your brain can’t function properly anymore. i know exactly what it’s like to lose control of how you think and feel and process information and it’s terrifying. i’m all about respectful depictions of mental illness in my media and anyone who’s followed me for a while is well aware how passionate i am that people DO talk about it. write fic about it, make art about it. but have some goddamn tact for all of us out there who don’t have the luxury of moving on from one fanfic to the next.

think about us reading these things and having to deal with the reality that this is how you perceive us. we’ve suffered from immense trauma and continue to suffer in so many different ways all the time, and that’s not something we can escape from. we can’t push the tragedy away like you can. we get triggered, have flashbacks, have psychotic episodes, and have to manage those for our own safety and well-being. i have triggers that i’ve spent years working through so i can safely browse random shit online, but even then something could happen at any second that sends me spiraling. it happens. it has happened and will happen countless times for the rest of my life, but i’m fortunate enough to have had treatment for my ptsd and adjacent traumas.

there are many of us who aren’t as lucky to get that help and end up somewhere truly awful, and they’re the ones hurt the most. we are not inherently violent. we aren’t suddenly cruel and callous and do horrible things to people we love. we are permanently, irreparably injured and cast aside, disregarded, because we’re an ugly truth nobody likes to acknowledge. we exist just like the rest of you, have regular mundane lives, and fight every single day to keep our heads above water only to try to indulge in our favorite series’ and see ourselves painted as broken, violent things to pity, by the very people we thought we could trust with our vulnerability. and i’ve been burned before.

trauma victims are not concepts of fiction for you to play with. we aren’t tropes and tags to delight in for morbid satisfaction or borderline perversion for tragedy. i love angst and i love dark media exploring these exact topics and go out of my way to roll around in disturbing content and psychological horror. it’s cathartic, it tickles my psychology brain, and i know i'd love them with or without my own mental illnesses. with them however, i genuinely adore and appreciate grounded depictions of emmet working through his trauma, confronting the darkest parts of himself, and learning from them. that’s a struggle i understand. it’s unfathomably difficult and many of us don’t make it out. it’s ugly at times but it is all the same.

so here is what i present at the end of all this: have respect for topics of mental illness, trauma, and ptsd. have respect for the victims out there who enjoy the same things you do, the same genres, but find ourselves romanticized. fetishized. author intent does not matter because we’re real people whose largest wounds are being used as playthings in media we’re trying to enjoy with everyone else.

and if you continue to do so regardless (i’m not your dad you can do whatever you want), don’t be surprised by negative reactions. being quiet certainly hasn’t helped us this far.

[aion-rsa]

The Horror Influences of Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan

https://ift.tt/2Zl6eQ9

This article contains spoilers for JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is beloved by shounen anime fans for its nonstop action, absurd and over-the-top showdowns, and creative Stands (physical manifestations of one’s true self). It’s a bombastic series that defies predictions. We’re still waiting for the fifth part of the manga, Stone Ocean, to be released as an anime adaptation, and the story is still ongoing. Strangely, there’s still no confirmation that a fifth season is even coming yet.

In the meantime, however, we got something of a holdover: Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan. An adaptation of a series of one-shot chapters from JoJo creator Hirohiko Araki, it bridges the gap between the fourth season, Diamond is Unbreakable, and the fifth season, Vento Aureo. But while it follows manga artist Kishibe Rohan and what he’s been up to between both seasons, it takes on a decidedly different slant than the vanilla anime. Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan takes more inspiration from episodic horror anthologies, like that of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. It is, by all counts, a horror series. 

It’s a new direction for JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, though not completely unexpected. The thing is, JoJo has always been riddled with disturbing, horrific, and downright chilling moments. They’ve just been couched between action-packed showdowns and bombastic character design so that the terror creeps in without you even realizing it’s there. Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan approaches the genre in a much more straightforward manner, though, wearing its influences on its sleeve. Both series, including JoJo to a staggering degree, are inherently spine-tingling properties, even if they don’t seem so at first blush.

Creator Hirohiko Araki is a ravenous horror fan, after all, and makes no secret of his passion for the genre. In his book, Hirohiko Araki’s Bizarre Horror Movie Analysis, he cites some of his top 20 favorite films as Misery, Alien, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The work itself is divided into several parts, each exploring a different branch of chilling media, such as “Bizarre Murderers,” “Animal Horror,” or “Sci-Fi Horror.” It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility to think that, despite Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan originally being meant to be unrelated to JoJo, Araki created it to satisfy his love for the macabre.

The episode “Mutsu-kabe Hill” follows a woman named Naoko Osato, who belongs to a well-to-do family. She’s living in a house that belongs to said family along with boyfriend Gunpei Kamafusa. But she can’t be with Gunpei, as she’s already betrothed to a man her father has chosen. Plus, Gunpei is a family gardener, a profession her father won’t abide. The two end up arguing, and Nao tries to pay off Gunpei to get him to leave, as she knows her father and fiancé are on their way to the home. But tensions escalate as the two become violent. 

Nao pushes him into a set of golf clubs and Gunpei dies instantly. He’s bleeding, and while Nao struggles to figure out what to do with his body, her father and fiancé are approaching her home. No matter what she does, she can’t get Gunpei’s corpse to stop bleeding. In the end, she lives with this bizarre phenomenon, telling no one about her plight, and doting on Gunpei’s corpse, disposing of the blood he continues to generate for the rest of her life.

Several comparisons can be drawn from this episode to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which the narrator commits a murder, dismembers a body, and hides it beneath some floorboards. Despite having seemingly gotten away with the perfect crime, the narrator is driven insane by the sound of his victim’s heartbeat. He ends up confessing to the authorities as he believes they can hear it, too. It’s the story of an unreliable narrator whose sanity is slipping. 

Though the narrator in that story ended up confessing to ease his suffering, Nao chose to live with the consequences of her crime, succumbing to a monster that lives off of people’s affection. The stories are quite similar in tone, though with very different outcomes. 

In “At a Confessional,” Rohan recounts a story of how he met a man who confided in him while in an Italian confessional. The man spoke of a beggar to whom he refused food and instead forced to work until he died. The beggar returned as a ghost, swearing revenge on the man who wronged him, promising he’d return on the happiest day of the man’s life. Return he does, as the man has enjoyed riches beyond belief, a beautiful marriage, and the birth of a daughter. 

The beggar appears in the form of an apparition in the man’s daughter’s tongue. He forces the man to toss pieces of popcorn his daughter was eating into the air and catch them with his mouth three times in a row in an absurd challenge. If the man succeeds, his life will be spared. If not, he’s beheaded instantly.

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This tale immediately recalls Stephen King’s Thinner, a similar story about a man who’s committed several wrongs, cursed the father of someone he’s murdered — this time, because he runs over a woman while driving and engaged in a sexual act with his wife. The curse finds the man, who is obese, becoming thinner and thinner at an uncontrollable rate. 

Eventually, there are options available to the man, who pleads for a resolution. He’s informed by the same person who cursed him that he can eat a strawberry pie with his blood in it and die, or give it to someone else for him to be spared. It’s just as gruesome as forcing the rich victim in Kishibe Rohan to munch popcorn or die. 

In JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, the scares seem to come directly from a series of inspirations for Araki instead of new stories based on the media he’s obviously consumed. 

The first JoJo arc, Phantom Blood, sets the stage by introducing a swath of Gothic horror elements. It introduces the eventual vampiric rise of DIO in a Victorian society, which directly references classic novels like Dracula and Frankenstein. There’s even a serial killer named Jack the Ripper, who faces off against Jonathan and his allies, pulled straight out of history — a perpetrator of grisly murders who ends up transformed into a zombie. The undead are also a major component of Phantom Blood, likely due in part to Araki’s love for classic zombie cinema.

In the arc Stardust Crusaders, Jean-Paul Polnareff finds himself de-aged by a Stand user named Alessi. A young woman named Malèna nurses him back to health, up until Alessi uses his Stand, Sethan, unceremoniously de-ages her to that of a fetus outside of the womb. A few of Araki’s favorite horror movies of all time, including Basket Case, center on body horror, which doesn’t make this narrative decision surprising. But for those reaching that point in the story for the first time, it’s chilling in a way that even some of the most nightmarish films can’t even touch. 

While the visual of a fetus itself isn’t as offensive as some gnarled, disfigured victim, its implications are disturbing, to say the least. A fetus outside of a mother’s womb will eventually succumb to a slow death, especially one of Malèna’s apparent age. That makes Polnareff’s eventual victory over Alessi and his Stand so bittersweet.

The entirety of the fourth arc, Diamond is Unbreakable, plays out like a classic slasher flick with the introduction of Yoshikage Kira, a man with a powerful obsession with hands to the point of fetishism. He murders women with “beautiful hands,” then keeps the hands as his “girlfriends.” It wouldn’t be a stretch to compare Kira to classic killers like Psycho‘s Norman Bates or The Silence of the Lambs’ Hannibal Lecter, as Kira is believable and charming when he isn’t committing grisly murders.

Most of JoJo’s Stands are horrific on their own, and even though their story arcs enhance their terrifying power, there’s a fair amount of fridge horror to be found in these beings. The Freddy Krueger-like Death 13 can kill you in a nightmarish dream world while you sleep. Metallica (yes, named after the heavy metal band) forces you to cough up razor blades or have scissors burst from your chest. 

Another Stand, Green Day, can secrete a deadly mold that will rot and destroy the flesh of anything it touches in an instant. Lastly, Rohan Kishibe himself has a fairly disconcerting Stand: Heaven’s Door. It allows him to literally read someone like a book, then erase parts of their being, or add in what he pleases, like the ability to learn a new language as his pal Koichi asks in Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan.

It’s easy to see how Araki has masterfully melded horror into every space when it comes to both JoJo as well as Kishibe Rohan. With that in mind, it’s strange that the former has been relegated only to a series of one-shots when it shows so much potential as its own project, in which Araki gets to stretch his Rod Serling-esque legs or impart some very Argento-like stylings into his works. For now, we can appreciate what’s there — and continue finding parallels to additional well-loved classics in the genre. 

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Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan is available to stream on Netflix now.

The post The Horror Influences of Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3bOxa0C

[sloppy-butcher]

Angel of Music

The Wraith (Philip Ojomo) x Survivor!Reader 

ok so

I’m probably very late to this, like 3 years late, but whatever just hear me out

My smooth brain has been going crazy lately for Phantom of the Opera and i just realized how similar Wraith’s “Angel of Music” cosmetic is to the drama (i mean, i known it is inspired by it but like). 

so now with this glorious revelation, me and the monkeys in my head have come up with the brilliant idea to write a Phantom of the Opera inspired Wraith fic. gods speed you funky lil dudes. 

note;; this is going to be very OOC for him. I’m am going to model wraith to be more like the phantom he is dressed as, thus expect a more devilish, seductive creature rather than the tree-man we already know. also, he can talk now. maybe sing

literally no one asked for this

word count: 4110

TW: Death and blood. Stalking and obsession. Musicals 

This place is an undeniable and indisputable nightmare. An eternal night that twists and corrupts all with shadows and despair. From the repetitive game of cat and mouse that almost always ended in death to the ever-present feeling of eternal damnation, there is absolutely nothing inherently good about the Fog. There wasn’t even light. As if stuck in the haze of an ecstasy-trip, time bleeds into itself seeming to stretch on forever yet also never move an inch. A true paradox.

And to make matters somehow even worse, you had started to hear voices in your head.

It first spoke to you on one of your regular trips into the woods. Scavenging for tools and items that could be used in trials, you hummed to yourself. Oblivious to the world around you, lost to the music playing in your head. It was easier to forget the horrors of the night and give in to the melody of some old song than to ponder on dangers yet to come. You found personal peace in singing, drowning out all your earthly worries by the power of your own imagination. The fog swirled and swelled with the rise and fall of your song and out in the darkness the voice made its presence known. ‘Sing louder.’ You obliged willingly.

Initially, you had chalked it up to your heightened sense of purpose and inner monologue being superimposed so as to form its own being. You would command yourself in third person, detaching and driving your body as your thoughts spoke. Intuition personified. This theory made sense; endless panic often causes those to develop the most peculiar of coping mechanisms. In passing conversations with the other trapped souls you realized that they too had their quirks; one had a rubber band that he snapped on his wrist whenever scared, another rubbed dirty into her palms to stop them from sweating and so on. Unfortunately, you had developed the most bizarre habit out of everyone else. You only started to question the voice’s true intention when its orders became more sinister.

‘Leave him.’ It spoke over your shoulder referring to your teammate dying on hook, an open exit gate before you. ‘Run away.’ It commanded to your half-way through healing another when you spotted the killer fast approaching. All these new and selfish instructions, although ensuring your survival, left you feeling hollow inside. You escaped but at what cost? The lives of your friends. If it really was your true self talking to you then, by default, did that mean you were as evil as the voice was? No! You plead. You were a good person. By God you were human, and the weight of all the death and suffering inflicted by your obedience to the voice began to crush your conscience. You couldn’t even look the others in the eyes anymore.

You couldn’t just ignore the voice either. When it spoke there seemed to be an almost physical force behind it, driving it and giving it momentum. Sometimes it even felt as if someone was standing right behind you reaching out and instructing you with their hand as they whispered in your ear. There was also the fact that you drew strange comfort from the voice. In this desert place, so drained of softness and angry with hate, you depended on what little gentleness the voice offered you.  

It even occurred to you that maybe, the voice wasn’t even yours - as in it belonged to someone else entirely. An unknown watcher, a ghost or phantom, who somehow had a deep connection to you, a one-way mode of communication. A large part of you wanted desperately to believe that who were just overreacting and that it was all just in your head. Regardless, you just couldn’t shake the feeling.

For what felt like days now the voice had been uncharacteristically silent. You noticed it in your first ever trial with the killer that could go invisible with the toll of his bell. There was no guidance, no consoling vector to take your hand and help you through your problems. You had been left alone like a new-born chick, blindly searching for the love and warmth of a guardian. Feeling completely lost, the panic that sat on your chest was overwhelming in that trial. But oddly enough, no matter what you did wrong, how many times you blew up a generator or accidentally revealed your position, the killer never disturbed you. You didn’t even see him until the end where, standing in the exit gate looking in on the realm, you spotted the figure. Bright eyes gleamed back, a bloody weapon in his hands. He allowed you a moment longer to gawk at him before ringing his bell and disappearing into the night.

Even after escaping the voice didn’t return. Your ears yearned for the sound of it, hungry for its filling noise. You sat alone at the campfire, eyes staring unblinking into the mesmerizing flames. It was so lonely, the panic and unrest mixing into a dangerous concoction in your head. There was nothing good anymore. Why do you keep on trying? Perhaps it would be better if you just gave in already. You almost jumped out of your skin when, as if manifested by your desperate cry, the voice called.

‘Come.’ It sounded from the treeline, darkness bending and beckoning you into it. It didn’t feel real. Perhaps you were imagining it. ‘Come,’ It said again sensing your hesitation. You looked around at the other survivors none of which appeared to notice the disturbance. You faced the forest again, it opened to you like the mouth of a great fish. Your feet itched to run to it. There was a powerful pull and before long you followed it.

The woods were freezing, broken branches grabbing out as you passed them. Through all these adversaries, pushing past doubts and warranted skepticism, you kept your eyes focused ahead. Even with all the warning flags the voice had given you, the pure desperation you had to find anything even remotely kind lit the fire of will under your feet. Besides, what was the worst that could happen? You were dead either way. The trees swayed and whined as a tired wind blew through their crumbling leaves, oddly not even making a noise. As the voice continued to call, luring you away from the safety of other people and fire, you spotted something ahead of you. There just through the fog, like a lighthouse over a raging sea, was a light. It bobbed and sway and wondered away from you through the trees. It was hypnotizing to watch the light flicker deeper into the trees, your feet not needing motivation to follow.

The light and voice mingled in your head, overwhelming every sense until it felt like you were walking through a dream. Your pace was sluggish and sloppy, you couldn’t feel the ground anymore. Just as it seemed you’d never catch up to the light, it suddenly stopped, blinked a few times then popped out of existence. You went to its last location, looking around for any possible signs of anything to help you but instead found yourself completely surrounded by an all impressive mist. It danced through the trees creating unbreakable walls of wood and water. It felt wrong to be here, your head spin around for an exit which came to you in the form of an out-of-place stone archway.

The bright yellow of the stone contrasted brilliantly against the somber atmosphere it lived in. Your mind wasn’t your own as you unknowingly went to it. Beyond the mouth of madness lay a beast in wait, purring as he felt your impending arrival. Eagerness overtook him and slowly the wooden door creaked open to welcome you inside. The tunnel that lay behind was one lit by old candles tinting the world with a much-appreciated golden light. It stretched on for miles, leading down into the earth where, at the bottom drifting up to you like a breeze in a cave, the voice beckoned.

‘Come.’ You stepped inside. ‘Come to me.’ If, by some strange miracle, you could have stopped yourself for a brief moment from descending the tunnel, you might have noticed the voice’s odd word choice. You might have even noticed the person on the other end licking his lips and smiling. Walking as if through honey, you unhurriedly made your way to the yearning voice. Before long the warm light that had bathed you drew back its loving embrace and faded back to absolute darkness.

At the edge of the last candles reach was a room - so large and empty of light that it appeared to have no roof, no walls, no end. You couldn’t help but feel like you had walked into the lair, the most secret and quiet place, of a monster. You couldn't shake the feeling that you had passed the point of no return. The artificial night swallowed you whole; your eyes strained in the pitch black, your ears burning from the total silence save for your own beating heart. The shadows inspected you, looking you up and down while you were none the wiser. His eyes also ate you up, so pleased to have you alone that he let the moment slip into an uncomfortable length.

You wanted to speak, make your claim against whatever had brought you here. You could sense something out there just outside of your already limited view. But the silence held you tight in its suffocating grasp. You dared not even breath. You had to wait for him to make the first move.

“Bravo.” The voice called from somewhere behind you, startling you to the point of drawing a gasp. “Bravo! Bravissimo!” Someone started to clap. You could hear him stepping around you, his voice echoing endlessly around the room, impossibly loud and booming. Although there was something deeply unsettling about the voice, the only thing you could take from it was odd comfort. It was real. A person. A guardian Angel! You spun around on your heels desperate to see the source of your guidance however he managed to remain hidden in shadow. You swear you could hear him grin at your confusion.

“You listen well, my dear.” There was no denying it, it was the voice. Although only now, when it spoke so openly, did you notice that it was inherently male. So relieved with the news that you weren’t going completely mad with disembodied voices, you glazed over the other implications this reveal came with. If it wasn’t yourself than just who have you been talking to all this time? And, the more pressing matter, just who were you stuck with in the room.

The stranger claps again and moves around in the black, shuffling from one side of the room to the other and at times seeming to even be above you, looking down. “I am beyond impressed my dear.” The stranger smiled, unbeknownst to you getting closer with very advance. “Do you know where you are?” No reply. Honestly you had no clue. You had never been in this place before - it felt so detached, so different when compared to all the other realms you had grown accustomed to in the Fog.

“Hell.” The voice answered, purring like a cat with a trapped mouse, teasing it - relishing off its fear. “The deepest pit. And, what’s more, you came here all on your own free-will.” He moved again not content to stay in one spot for too long, trying to view you from every possible angle before he made his last move.

“Won’t you sing for me. My Angel of music. You know the one I mean.” His words hit you like a ton of bricks. A song? As you wracked your brain for whatever he could be referring to, a faint idea began to materialize right in the tip of your tongue. Words of a melody that you swear you had never heard before but still feel familiar with in your heart. The voice, it sang to you. How could you forget!  

“Every night I was there. Whispering my song to you in hopes that one day, you could join in with me.” That was true. Each time you dared to drift off to sleep, the voice would appear. He sang to you, gently and softly, talking into your ear to lull you safely away - only to wake hours later with no memory of the night before. Perhaps that is why you were always so attached to the voice, why its absence impacted you so deeply. There was a build of pressure behind you and suddenly he was there. The stranger towered over you without even looking, his chest pressed tight to your back. Exploring hands went down your arms and slowly brought them up like the two of you were about to start a dance. His head hung low to your ear, his breathing touching your exposed neck. He sucked in and exhaled meaningfully, taking in your smell and touch and your reaction to his closeness.

“Sing.” God, his voice was so smooth, demanding and rich. A sonorous tone that had never been shown to you before this. It shocked you to your core. He sighed again, one hand moving to caress your neck with the other holding your own hand. “Sing my Angel.” Up till now you were passive, sitting ideally in a dream-state as you let the stranger do as he wished. But now you wanted answers.

“Let me see you.” No answer came from the man be it verbal or physical. He remained completely unphased and unchanging.

“Sing.” He commanded again, no anger or annoyance in his tone only patience and hunger. He yearned for you to sing with him, to join in with his symphony. For too long has he gone silent, his soul dying along with his music. The bells no longer tolling and his music fading out like a lit match in the rain. When he found you, fallen like an angel right out of Heaven, humming alone to yourself, he felt the fire of passion ignite within him. You were perfect to him and now, you couldn’t resist him. You were defenseless, night having accustomed you to its unfurling beauty to the point that you were addicted to it – needed it, just as he did. There was no way either of you could go back now. You breathed into him, your nose filling with the smell of pine and smoke, and hesitantly after closing your eyes, you began to sing the words now burning hot in your head.

“Say you’ll share with me,” It wasn’t really singing, rather just breathless talking – a whisper that only the keenest of ears could hear. Regardless of what you sounded like; the stranger cherished every word that left your mouth. He started to shake, his hands holding on to you for support.

“One love, one lifetime.” He joined you now, singing as you did in a volume that only you could truly appreciate. His raspy, low-pitched voice mingling wonderfully with yours, sounding almost desperate to get the words out. Lips grazed your ear sending shivers down your spine.

“Say the word,” His hands tightened their grip as if to empathize his lyrics. “And I will follow you.”

“Say you love me.” Your combined voices bounced around the darkness stirring whatever creatures lay in hiding, your harmony compelling and immensely sorrowful. While a part of you faded into the song’s words, swaying and melting with the stranger content for once, something crawled into your head. The song was ending, and while you wished to stay forever in this blissful embrace, you demanded to know the face behind the voice. Your moment was coming.

“That’s all I ask of -” Slipping out his grasp at the moments climax, you spin around to finally lay your eyes on the stranger. He froze under your gaze, surprised by your sudden action. Looking up at an incredibly tall man, you felt your knees threaten to give out. Staring back were the glowing eyes of a killer, the very one that had, not long ago, tormented your friends. You couldn’t help but gasp and step away from him, breaking his hold on you. You inspected him as best you could in your lack of light, squinting your eyes as hard as you could but nothing in the darkness made itself known to you save for his unmistakable eyes. The stranger noticed your efforts and, fuming at your defiance to play along with him, raised a hand.

“You wish to disobey me? Fine!” The ground shook under foot, his shouting voice ricocheting off the rooms stone walls and sending the world into disarray. “Look at me Angel! In all my glory!” He snapped his fingers.

Suddenly your senses were overwhelmed by blinding white light. You flinched, shutting your eyes to the dramatic change in the room. When next you opened then you found the room to be hazed in familiar yellow candlelight. As if by magic, all candles had all be simultaneously lit. Your attention darted around like a trapped bird before resting on the man standing in front of you, his arms open and expression unreadable. Bathed in new light you could see him in immaculate detail.

Yes, it was the invisible killer, no doubt about it. But something was off about him. He looked different somehow; maybe it was his prim suit, navy fabric decorated with golden lace that fit his slender body snugly giving him a sense of proper and divinity. Behind him hung an extraordinary cape that fluttered in a non-existent breeze. On his face sat a white mask, crooked and dirtied from years of neglect which, in all honesty, covered little to none of his truly disfigured and burnt flesh.

Unparalleled fear began to rise in your chest. He was so tall, powerful and strange that it terrified you to be standing next to him. You stepped backwards, edging closer to the exit. The stranger’s eyes flickered. How could you fear him? He had never hurt you, Angel. All he has ever wanted was to be by your side, to never be lonely in the dark again. He has given you no reason to distrust him, he has never shown you his monstrous side. Yet still you shrunk away from his touch, choosing rather silent suffering than a lifetime of music with him. He felt something break inside him.

You saw his hand twitch, his off-center head bobbing as his labored breathing intensified. He took a small step forward and you replied by taking a large one back. He halted and so did you. Next to the broken thing that rattled around in his bones, he heard something else. A beating heart, weak and faint but somehow still alive. It moved and leaped, reaching out for you to take it and hold. Just standing in your company he heard music start to swell in his ears. You had listened to him once before, maybe he could get you to again.

The stranger's head dropped; through the lumpy cape you saw his shoulders deflate. What was he doing? Playing possum so as to catch you off guard? Whatever it was, you didn’t let the tension ease out your legs. You waited for his next move, ready to run if he tried anything suspicious. You didn't expect the sound of his voice to suddenly start singing again.

“Say you’ll share with me,” He sang his solo, his voice that of an airy murmur as if afraid to sing alone. Every word he sang clung to your ears, kissing your heart and mind with a complex sorrow. Your guard started to halter.

“One love. One lifetime.” He paused, swallowing the lump building in his throat warning to overflow and render him speechless.

“Lead me,” He raised a cautious eye to find you still waiting, offering him the chance to try coax you closer. A fist clutched his chest in an attempt to sooth his aching heart. “Save me from my solitude.” He was certain he was crying but he couldn’t feel the tears; you had his undivided attention.

“Say you want me here...” He faltered here, hand itching to reach out and grab you. “Beside you.”  The stranger could barely form audible words anymore, so slurred and choked up that you unknowingly leaned forward to try hear him better. 

“Anywhere you go,” He tried again, begging you to close the distance and join him. It was heartbreaking, this phantom, this person and the way he sang to you, each syllable dripping with an ocean of unimaginable pain and beastly hopelessness. It was infectious really; you could feel his sadness take over your heart shaking it in an iron grasp. Miserable eyes glared you down as you took the smallest step forward. “Let me go too.”

He didn’t continue - he couldn’t. The horrors of the whispering darkness and this god-awful place left him near-drained. Everything pushed down on him, suffocating him until he thought he was going to pass out. He could only keep his eyes on you. Blurry from tears he held onto your figure like your were a buoy in a raging sea, his only safety, his air. The stranger heaved from trying to maintain his composure. Finally the curtain fell and you gave in. 

Your foot falls were the only sounds that broke the silence in the room. You approached him with little to no conflict in your mind. Yes - he was scary. Yes - he was a monster. But the way he looked at you now, the way he sang and spoke; no killer would beg to be loved the way he did. It was like he was afraid of the dark, of being alone, of being condemned to an existence of pitiful silence. You craned your neck to look up at him, sucking back the wreckage still wavering just outside his control. 

“Pitiful creature of darkness,” The words tumbled out of your mouth, through teeth unfazed by their possible repercussion. You were speaking from your heart. A small hand connects with his unmasked cheek taking in the feeling of old, burnt skin and years of mud. He leans into your warm embracing having forgotten what it was like. “You are not alone.” 

Even on tip-toes you still were short of his lips. It was only when he gave in and leaned down that you were able to kiss him. Eyes closed, shoulders tensing, you melted into the kiss. His lips were rough, chapped, but gentle. He didn’t give anymore pressure until you asked for him, dragging you tongue along his bottom lip asking for entrance. He opened to you gratefully. Inside his mouth housed monstrous sharp teeth and an excited tongue and moved inside your mouth, tasting ever inch of you. He was greedy, demanding everything of yours. When you had nothing more to give, he relented and let you go.

You sank back on your heels gasping for breath. You noticed he was smiling, an odd sight of such a distorted and sad face. 

“My Angel. My Muse.” You felt him move on top of you, a hand sneaking behind your back making to bend over so as not be pressed uncomfortably against his chest. “I have many names of which to call you. I am eager to use them all.” He laughed, the sound rattling your whole body with its bass leaving you quivering. “But you, can call me Philip.” He tilted his head in a mock bow, his free hand grabbing the edge of his cape and fanning it out in respect. You offered you own  meek nod. His smile only widened at your compliance. 

“Come now,” Philip said standing up to his full height, his hand still securing your back. “Let me take you away. Away from all this numb light and into the darkness where no one will find us.” He raised his arm and cape and quickly brought it down around you, sweeping it around the both of your until he had you cocooned. 

The world fell into black again and all you could sense was him; his breathing, his reinforced arms cradling you. You could also hear a faint thumping when you put your ear to his chest - his heart. Once diseased and weak now pumped with vigor and delight. He had you in his grasp and he was never letting you go. You were his everything; his Angel of music.

[chiseler]

Ophelia By the Yard

Cobwebbed passages and wax-encrusted candelabra, dungeons festooned with wrist manacles, an iron maiden in every niche, carpets of dry ice fog, dead twig forests, painted hilltop castles, secret doorways through fireplaces or behind beds (both portals of hot passion), crypts, gloomy servants, cracking thunder and flashes of lightning, inexplicably tinted light sources, candles impossibly casting their own shadows, rubber bats on wires, grand staircases, long dining tables, huge doors with prodigiously pendulous knockers to rival anything in Hollywood.

Here was the precise moment — and it was nothing if not inevitable — when the darkness of horror film, both visible and inherent, leapt from the gothic toy box now joined by a no less disconcerting array of color. The best, brightest, sweetest, and most dazzling red-blooded palette that journeyman Italian cinematographers could coax from those tired cameras. Color, both its commercial necessity as well as all it promised the eye, would hereafter re-imagine the genre’s possibilities, in Italy and, gradually, everywhere else. 

When color hit the Italian Gothic cycle, a truly new vision was born. In Hammer films and other UK horror productions, the cheapness of Eastmancolor made it possible for blood to be red. Indeed, very red. And, while we shouldn't underestimate the startling impact this had, it was a fairly literal use of the medium. In the Italian movies, and to a large extent in Roger Corman's Poe cycle, color was an unlikely vehicle to further dismantle realism rather than to assert it. Overrun with tinted lights and filters, none of which added to the film’s realistic qualities, the movies became delirious. In Corman's Masque of the Red Death, we learn of an experiment that uses color to drive a man insane; it seems that filmmakers like Corman and Mario Bava were attempting the very same trick on their audiences.

The application of candy-wrapper hues to a haunted castle flick like The Whip and the Body adds a pop art vibe at odds with the genre, and when you get to something like Kill, Baby...Kill! the Gothic trappings are barely able to mask a distinctly modern sensibility, so much so that Fellini could plunder its phantasmal elements for Toby Dammit, fitting them perfectly into his sixties Roman nightmare.

Blood and Black Lace brings the saturated lighting and Gothic fillips into the twentieth century -- a sign creaking in a gale is the first image, translated from Frankensteinland to the exterior of a contemporary fashion house. A literal faceless killer disposes of six women in diabolical ways. The sour-faced detective remains several deaths back on the killer’s trail because the movie knows its audience, knows that it has zero interest in detection, character, motivation — though it’s all inertly there as a pretext for sadism, set-pieces of partially-clad women being hacked up, dot the film like musical numbers or action sequences might appear in a different genre. 

Since the 19th-century audience for literary Gothic Horror was comprised of far fewer men than women, would it be fair to ask whether Giallo’s advent might be an instrument of brutal violence, even revenge against “feminine” preoccupations? Consider 1964’s Danza Macabra, the film’s amorous vibes finding their ultimate source in that deathless screen goddess named Barbara Steele, whose marble white flesh photographs like some monument to classicism startled into unwanted Keatsian fever. Her presence practically demands that we ask ourselves: “Who is this wraith howling at a paper moon?” In other words, is it a coincidence that Steele’s “Elizabeth Blackwood” — a revenant temptress and undead sex symbol — hits screens the very same year as Giallo, which would transform Italian cinema into a decades-long death mill for women? 

The name “giallo”, meaning yellow, derives from the crime paperbacks issued by Italian publisher Mondadori. The eye-catching covers, featuring a circular illustration of some act of infamy embedded in a yellow panel, became utterly associated with the genre of literature. These books were likely to be by Edgar Wallace, the most popular author in the western world, or Agatha Christie: cardboard characters sliding through the most mechanical of plots; or classier local equivalents, like Francesco Mastriani or Carolina Invernizio. The founding principles laid down concerned the elaborate deceptions concealed by their authors, traps for the unwary reader, and the use of a distinctive design motif. The tendency of the characterisation to lapse into sub-comic-book cliché, the figures incapable of expressing or inspiring real sympathy, was, perhaps, an unintended side-effect of the focus on narrative sleight-of-hand.

When Italian filmmakers sought to translate sensational literature to the screen, they looked to other filmic influences: American film noir, influenced by German expressionism and often made by German emigrés (Lang, Siodmak, Dieterle, Ulmer); and the popular krimi cycle being produced in West Germany, mostly based on Edgar Wallace's leaden "shockers." These deployed stock characters, bizarre methods of murder, deceptive plotting, and exuberant use of chiaroscuro, the stylistic palette of noir intensified by more fog, more shafts of light, more inky shadows. A certain amount of fun, but different from the coming bloodbath because Wallace, despite somewhat fascistic tendencies, is anodyne and anaemic by comparison. No open misogyny, a sadism sublimated in story, a touching faith in Scotland Yard and the class system. In the Giallo, Wallace's more sensational aspects are adopted but made to serve a sensibility quite alien to the stodgy Englander: people are generally rotten, the system stinks, and crime becomes a lurid spectator sport served up to a viewer both thrilled and appalled. 

The Giallo fetishizes murder. But then, it fetishizes everything in sight. Every object, every half-filled wine glass and pastel-colored telephone, is photographed with obsessive, product-shot enthusiasm. Here, it must be emphasized that design implicates the viewer as the Italian camera-eye gawps like some unabashed tourist. Knife, wallpaper, onyx pinky ring — each detail transforms into an object made eerily subject: a sentient and glowering fragment of our own conscience, staring back at us in the darkened theater and pronouncing ineluctable guilt. And yet, for the directors who rode most dexterously the Giallo wave, homicide was something one did to women. Indulging in equal-opportunity lechery was merely an excuse to find other, more violent outlets for their misogyny. Please enter into evidence the demented enthusiasm for woman-killing evinced by Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, et al. — whatever trifling token massacres of men one might exhume from their respective oeuvres are inconsequential. Argento’s defense, “I love women, so I would rather see a beautiful woman killed than an ugly man,” should not satisfy us, and hardly seems designed to (also bear in mind Poe’s assertion that the death of a beautiful young woman was the most poetic of all subjects).

Filmmakers like Argento have no interest in sex per se. Suffering seems inessential, but terror and death are key, photographed with the same clinical absorption and aesthetic gloss as Giallo-maestros habitually apply to their interior design. Here, it must be emphasized that design implicates the viewer as the Italian camera-eye gawps like some unabashed tourist. Knife, wallpaper, onyx pinky ring – each detail transforms into an object made eerily subject: a sentient and glowering fragment of our own conscience, staring back at us in the darkened theater and pronouncing ineluctable guilt. That’s one important subtlety often lost amid Giallo’s vast antisocial hemorrhage.

Like a river of blood, homophobia, in the literal meaning of fear rather than hatred, runs through the genre. Lesbians are sinister and gay men barely exist. As we try to work out what in hell the Giallo is really up to, little dabs of dime-store Freudianism seem sufficient.

The filmmakers’ misogyny could be suspect, a sign of compromised masculinity, so they need fictional avatars to cloak their own feverish woman-hating. The subterfuge is clumsy at best, the desultory deceit embarrassingly macho. Giallo’s visual force, powerful enough to divorce eye from mind, is another matter, leaving us demoralized and ethically destitute; our hearts beating with all the righteous indignation of three dead shrubs (and maybe a half-eaten sandwich).

The Giallo is founded on an unstated assumption: the modern world brings forth monsters. Jack the Ripper was an aberration in his day, but now there's a Jack around every corner, behind every piece of modular furniture, every diving helmet lamp. Previously, disturbing events arose from what Ambrose Bierce called The Suitable Surroundings, or what the mad architect in Fritz Lang's The Secret Beyond the Door termed, with sly and sinister euphemism, "propitious rooms." There's the glorious line in Withnail and I: "That's the sort of window faces appear at." But now, in the modern world, evil occurs in the nicest of places, and tonal consistency died in a welter of cheerful stage blood. One needn’t enter an especially Bad Place to meet one’s worst nightmare, or perhaps better to say: the whole bright world qualified as a properly bad place. Imagine the pages of an interior design magazine invaded by anonymous psychopaths intent on painting the gleaming walls red.

Though the victims are overwhelmingly female and their killers male (Argento typically photographed his own leather-gloved hands to stand in for his assassin’s), when the violence becomes over-the-top in its sexualized woman-hating (like the crotch-stabbing in What Have You Done to Solange?), it’s usually a clue that the movie’s murderer will turn out to be female: a simple case of projection. Only Lucio Fulci, the most twisted of the bunch, trained as a doctor and experienced as an art critic, not only assigns misogyny to a straight male killer (The New York Ripper) but plays the killer himself in A Cat in the Brain. Though, in another self-protecting twist of narrative, all psychological explanations in Gialli are bullshit, always. Criminology and clinical psychology are largely ignored, and Argento has a clear preference for outdated theories like the extra chromosome signaling psychopathy (Cat O’Nine Tails). Did anybody use phrenology, or Lombroso’s crackpot physiognomic theories, as plot device?

A tradition of the Giallo is that the characters all tend to be dislikable, something Argento at least resisted in Cat O’ Nine Tails and Deep Red. With disposable characters, each of whom might be the killer and each of whose violent demise is served up as a set-piece, this distancing and contempt might just be a byproduct of the form rather than a principle or ethos, but it’s of some interest, perhaps mitigating the misogyny with a wash of misanthropy. A Unified Field Theory of Gialli would find a more deep-seated reason for the obnoxious characters as well as the stylized snuff and the glamorous presentation. What urge is being satisfied, and why here, now, like this?

Class war? Though prostitute-ripping is encouraged in the Giallo, most victims are wealthy, slashed to ribbons amid opulent interiors. Urbane characters who might previously have graced the sleek “white telephone” films of forties Italian cinema were briefly edged out by neo-realism’s concentration on the working class. Now these exquisite mannequins are trundled back onscreen to be ritually slaughtered for our viewing pleasure.

Victims must always be enviable: either beautiful and sexy or rich and swellegant, or all of the above, so the average moviegoer can rejoice in their dismemberment with a clear conscience. Mario Bava bloodily birthed the genre in Blood and Black Lace (1964), brutally offing fashion models in a variety of Sade-approved ways, the killer a literally faceless assassin into whom the (presumed male) audience could pour their own animosities without ever admitting it, with the female killer finally unmasked to provide exculpatory relief.

If narrative formulas absolve the straight male viewer, compositions have a way of ensnaring him. Beyond that omnivorous indulgence of sensation for its own lurid sake one finds in Giallo, there is a more gilded emphasis placed on Beauty (in the Catholic sense), and it is only the women who are mounted upon its pedestal. That these avatars of beauty are to be savored, ravaged, and brutalized — in that order — is what concerns us. But the sex and the suffering that captivates most sadists is never what registers; no, it is the instance of death, the terror that afflicts the dying woman’s face that resonates. Once again, physical interiors become a negative form of emotional interiority, rooms amplified for the sole purpose of grisly annihilations; a kind of heretical, strictly anti-Catholic transcendence through amoral delight in what otherwise falls under trivial headings, either “the visuals” or “color palette” – neither of which touch the essential nerve endings of Giallo.

Swaddled inside an otherwise hyper-masculine castle lies a windowless chamber with feminine, if not psychotic, decor. Before he tortures and stabs her to death, “Lord Alan Cunningham” (fresh from his sojourn in the asylum) brings his first victim to this pageant of off-gassing plastic furniture, the single most obnoxious vision ever imposed on gothic environs. Risibly overblown ’70s chic rules The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave with nods to Edgar Allan Poe, as the modish Lord juggles sports cars and medieval persecution. Laughs escape the viewer’s throat in dry heaves when each new MacGuffin devours itself without warning. Take “Aunt Agatha” (easily two decades younger than her middle-aged nephews) suddenly rising from her motorized wheelchair, clobbered from behind seconds later, her body dragged into a cage where foxes promptly munch her entrails. Nothing comes of this. The phony paralysis, the aunt’s role in a half-dozen mysteries, which include a battalion of sexy maids in miniskirts and blonde Harpo Marx wigs – all gulped, swallowed.

About the only thing we know for certain is that “Aunt Agatha” is gorgeous. Though, in the end, she’s another casualty of the same nihilism that crashes Giallo aesthetics headlong into Poe country. That is into “Lord Alan” and his gaudy room crowded with designer goods to be catalogued in a horror vacui of visual intrusiveness – a trashy shrine to his late wife, the titular Evelyn. If lapses of good taste define The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, they also reflect Giallo’s abiding obsession with real estate. After all, this Mod hypnagogia has to fill the eye somewhere. Why not bang in the middle of a castle? Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher features a wealthy aristocrat burying his twin sister alive, thereby entombing his own femininity.

Evelyn represents both Usher’s primary theme of the divided self and the obdurate refusal to learn from it. “Alan,” who emerges a moral hero in the end (after his shrink aids and abets his murder spree), remains just as ornery, alienated, and vainglorious as Giallo itself. We’re never told precisely what the film’s fetish objects are supposed to mean. And since the camera seizes upon each one with existential grimness, we’re left with a visual style that begs its own questions.

Function follows form into the abyss. One Ophelia after another dies to satisfy our cruel delectation, even as will-o’-the-wisp light, taken from the bogs and neglected cemeteries of Gothic Horror, finds itself transformed into a crimson-dripping stiletto.  Evelyn stands in for all Gialli, a genre which redefines film itself on the narrow front of visual impact: stainless steel cutlery and candy-colored light enact a sentient agenda as color becomes an instrument of hyperbolic misogyny that fills the eye and then some.  

As with certain other Italian genres, notably the peplum, smart characterization, solid performances and decent dialogue seem not only unnecessary to the Giallo but unwelcome (the spaghetti western, conversely, in which many of the same directors dabbled, seemed to demand a steady stream of good, cold-blooded wise-cracks). Argento, in pursuit of that “non-Cartesian” quality he admired in Poe, took this to extremes, stringing non-sequiturs together to form absurdist cut-ups, torching his stars’ credibility merely by forcing them to utter such nonsense. And this wasn’t enough: from Suspiria (1977) on, the psychological thriller (which the Giallo is a sub-genre of, only the psychology has to be deliberately nonsensical) was increasingly replaced by the supernatural. So that the laws of nature could be suspended along with the laws of coherent motivation.

In Suspiria and its 1980 quasi-sequel Inferno, the traditional knifings are interspersed with more uncanny events, as when a stone eagle comes to life and somehow makes a seeing-eye dog kill his owner, and there are also grotesque incidents with no relation to story whatever: a shower of maggots, or an attack by voracious rats in Central Park. The Giallo’s quest for a solution, inspired as it was by the old-school whodunits, is all but abandoned, replaced by the search for the next sensational set-piece.

Argento’s villains are now witches, but, abandoning centuries of tradition, these witches show more interest in stabbing their fellow women with kitchen knives than with worshipping Satan or riding broomsticks. Regardless of who they’re meant to be, Argento’s characters must express his desires, enact the atrocities he dreams of. And inhabit places built for his aesthetic pleasure rather than their own. Following Bava’s cue, he saturates his rooms in light blasted through colored gels, making every scene a stained-glass icon, no naturalistic explanation offered for the lurid tinted hues. Just as no explanation is offered for the presence of a room full of coiled razor-wire in a ballet school, or for the behavior of the young woman who throws herself into its midst without looking.

Dario Argento’s true significance, at least with respect to Giallo, was perceiving in the nick of time the almost incandescent obviousness of its limitations; that Italian commercial cinema’s garish, polychromatic spin on the garden-variety psychological thriller – departing from its forebears mainly in the rampant senselessness of its “psychology” – had Dead End written all over it. It could never last. On the other hand, Giallo does take a fresh turn with Argento’s Inferno, thanks in no small measure to a woman screenwriter who sadly remains uncredited. Daria Nicolodi explains that “having fought so hard to see my humble but excellent work in Suspiria recognized (up until a few days before the première I didn’t know if I would see my name in the film credits), I didn’t want to live through that again, so I said, ‘Do as you please, in any case, the story will talk for me because I wrote it.’”

Daria Nicolodi

Nicolodi’s conception humanizes (it would be tempting to say “feminizes”) Argento’s usual sanguinary exercises du style, while at the same time summoning legitimate psychology. This has nothing to do with strong characterization – indeed, the characters barely speak – and everything to do with the elemental power of water, fire, wind.… Inferno rescues Giallo by plunging it into seemingly endless visual interludes, a cinema that draws its strength from absence.

by The Chiselers

Daniel Riccuito, David Cairns, Tom Sutpen, and Richard Chetwynd

[chocoships]

Nightmarish dream

Chase is aware that he’s dreaming. 

He remembers going to bed, spending a few hours aimlessly scrolling through various apps on his phone while his tired eyes took almost none of the endless stream of information offered to him. There wasn’t any anxiety or fear as his eyes finally slipped shut and he let himself be taken away into the comfortable embrace of sleep, but as his eyes suddenly shoot back open with an acute lucidity, a deep feeling of unease already seize him. 

Chase’s gaze nervously darts from side to side as he tries to take in his surrounding. This isn’t what he’s used to. Instead of a dark expanse of nothing, Chase finds himself to be in some sort of... coffee shop? At least it’s the best guess he can make as to what the warped space around him is supposed to be. There is an air of familiarity to the chairs and tables neatly put away, to the unintelligible signs hanging above the empty service counter, but everything looks just a degree too off for him to fully recognize the place he’s supposed to be in. Just standing there feels wrong, it’s lifeless. He doesn’t know why he’s here, how he even got to this place, but as memories slowly slips back into places, fill in the blanks in his mind, he remembers now… And he knows what is about to happen next. 

He remembers the series of strange encounters he started having in his dreams, of the entity that infest his mind every nights, of Its… strange obsession with him. He has no idea what he could have ever possibly done to attract Its attention but it’s too late for him to wonder about the cause of it all. Chase silently curse himself for falling asleep so nonchalantly, but how could he have known? With each morning, or abrupt awakening, Chase forgets. He always does. The memory of his dreaming self simply slips away, and the gaps it leave behind trap him further into this vicious cycle. Dooming him to unknowingly commit the same error every night and finding himself yet again at the mercy of whatever being haunts his nightmares.

He recall  breaking down at the very beginning of it all, desperately asking It why he could never remember in his waking hours. The entity, which eventually named Itself Anti, simply answered him with; It is in the nature of dreams to be forgotten.The answer had been strange enough by itself, but Its following promise to change that unfortunate truth left Chase slightly more disturbed for the rest of the night. He didn’t want to learn what that promise could mean anytime soon.

 The current scene Chase finds himself in is a little odd though. As far as he can remember, his “meetings” with Anti have always happened in a mostly empty void. He doesn’t know whether to feel relief or dread at the change.

Eventually his attention is brought to the thing in front of him, to Anti patiently sitting on the other side of the small table Chase is currently seated at. He didn’t even notice he was sitting down until this moment... As if on reflex, Chase immediately avert his gaze from It. His head faces downward as he keep his eyes fixed on the table instead of looking directly at Anti.

He can’t bear to look at it.

It’s not inherently monstrous, in fact It probably could pass for a normal person at first glance, but simply looking at It for longer than a fleeting second is enough to shatter any illusion of normalcy It tries to put up. The more you look, the harder it is to see past all the details that aren’t quite right. Eventually, you’ll end up wondering how you could ever have mistaken this Thing for another human being. The wrongness Its presence alone exude is simply too strong to ignore.

And the worse thing of all is that It’s wearing his face.

It look like someone took Chase’s skin and then draped it over a barely human shape. It doesn’t fit, nothing could ever be done to make it look natural or seamless. The way It moves or simply is cannot be hidden under the mere layer of stolen flesh It wears.

The air feels tense, thick with dread. Each inhale and exhale takes more effort than the last, it  almost feels as if it started solidifying in his lungs. Like it shifted from gas to liquid without him noticing, and as far as Chase is aware maybe it did. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch considering his situation. Dreams are weird like that after all, right? But the pressure weighing down on him from every direction feels so real and he’s trying with everything he has to not outwardly show any of his growing discomfort. But with Anti’s gaze directly fixed on him, never once leaving his hunched over frame, finding the strength to not squirm under Its intense scrutiny is a much harder task. It feels like something is crawling under his skin wherever Its eyes land upon him, like It’s trying to find its way into the deepest part of him.  

Chase is eventually brought out of his spiraling thoughts as the wood grain of the table he’s staring at starts moving, dancing, crawling, in front of his eyes. The sharp yelp that escape his throat at the sight cannot be held back. 

Right. This is a dream. One that Chase isn’t in control of.

 A dull ache starts forming at the front of his skull as he keep his gaze fixed on the ever shifting shape trapped in the glossy surface of the wood. No words are spoken, but a clear choice seem to be offered to Chase: either look up and face the captor of his dreams or keep his head down and let the pain grow. The ache slowly climb in intensity as Chase weight both of his options. A decision is eventually made, and it’s with a whimper stuck in the back of his throat that Chase straighten up and slowly lift up his head.

He’s shaking as he finally meet eyes with Anti. As the man return Its gaze, the thing’s stolen visage shift from an expressionless mask to a twitchy facsimile of a smile. There are far too many teeth crammed into Its mouth, far more than what should be physically possible. The sight alone send a cold shiver down Chase’s back.

“do you like it?” Anti’s voice reverberate through the space, and yet Its lips do not once move. There is an eagerness to the question, perhaps even hope, but for what? Chase doesn’t know. 

He doesn’t know if he’ll ever get used to hearing the being’s voice. Like Its appearance, it seems similar enough to his own at first but an undeniable layer of wrongness hides right beneath. As if Its voice itself was afflicted with rot and decay, inevitably tainting it whole with a deep feeling of unease. If Chase’s voice was a melody, then Anti’s would be a cacophony of dissonance.

“What?” Chase’s voice is barely above a whisper, meek and confused. He watches as It vaguely gestures around Itself and him, Its movements jerky and stiff.  

“Our surroundings… From what I’ve seen, most humans seems to considers those places to be good spots for dates. I won’t pretend like I fully understand why. The supposed romantic charm of it is lost to me, but I thought you’d appreciate it” Anti’s head cock to the side, Its dark blank eyes never once blinking or leaving Chase as It spoke. 

“So, as I said before; do you like it?”

Chase stays motionless as Anti speaks, completely stunned. Well, until his chest shakes with a faint laugh, it’s more nervous than anything but Chase is at a point where he’ll latch onto any emotions that isn’t fear like a lifeline. 

“I mean… It’s better than the previous empty void for sure. It’s, uhm- it’s alright. This is kinda impressing, if I’m being honest...”

At the half hearted praise, Anti seems to glow with pride. Its whole demeanor perks up, but Its excitement seem to also cause Its disguise to slip ever so slightly. In a matter of seconds, multiple eyes blink open across Its body, breaking skin as they do so. Its smile stretches further and further until the flesh of Its cheeks rip apart, showing even more crooked teeth than before. Anti leans forward, placing his elbows on the small table as he rest his chin in the palm of his hands, more limbs soon following suit.

Chase watches, frozen with terror, the horrible display of body horror happening in front of him. He cannot look away from it no matter how much he tries to will his eyes to move or even simply blink. Panic surges through his body as he soon discovers he can’t move at all. He desperately tries to get up from his seat, to stand up and run, but his body feels like each joints has been locked into places. The only thing he can do is trembles as the phantom sensation of countless of hands starts grasping at him, at least he hope it is. Chase cannot look down to see if what he’s feeling is real or not.

The only thing he can see is the terrifying beast sitting across him, admiring him with either yearning or hunger in Its eyes.

“I’m glad my efforts paid in the end, maybe next time I should try to recreate your home” It sigh, yet Its chest never moves to even attempt to give the illusion of breathing. Its voice sounds dreamy as It continues on.

“For now though, let’s just enjoy our time together. I still have a lot to show you tonight” 

Chase whimper when a cold elongated hand take hold of his. It’ll be long before this nightmare end.

[bluewatsons]

Alice Bolin, The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime, Vulture (August 1, 2018)

The “true-crime boom” of the mid- to late 2010s is a strange pop-culture phenomenon, given that it is not so much a new type of programming as an acknowledgement of a centuries-long obsession: People love true stories about murder and other brands of brutality and grift, and they have gorged on them particularly since the beginning of modern journalism. The serial fiction of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins was influenced by the British public’s obsessive tracking of sensational true-crime cases in daily papers, and since then, we have hoarded gory details in tabloids and pulp paperbacks and nightly news shows and Wikipedia articles and Reddit threads.

I don’t deny these stories have proliferated in the past five years. Since the secret is out — “Oh you love murder? Me too!” — entire TV networks, podcast genres, and countless limited-run docuseries have arisen to satisfy this rumbling hunger. It is tempting to call this true-crime boom new because of the prestige sheen of many of its artifacts — Serial and Dirty John and The Jinx and Wild, Wild Country are all conspicuously well made, with lovely visuals and strong reporting. They have subtle senses of theme and character, and they often feel professional, pensive, quiet — so far from vulgar or sensational.

But well-told stories about crime are not really new, and neither is their popularity. In Cold Blood is a classic of American literature and The Executioner’s Song won the Pulitzer; Errol Morris has used crime again and again in his documentaries to probe ideas like fame, desire, corruption, and justice. The new true-crime boom is more simply a matter of volume and shamelessness: the wide array of crime stories we can now openly indulge in, with conventions of the true-crime genre more emphatically repeated and codified, more creatively expanded and trespassed against. In 2016, after two critically acclaimed series about the O.J. Simpson trial, there was talk that the 1996 murder of Colorado 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey would be the next case to get the same treatment. It was odd, hearing O.J.: Made in America, the epic and depressing account of race and celebrity that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, discussed in the same breath with the half-dozen unnecessary TV specials dredging up the Ramsey case. Despite my avowed love of Dateline, I would not have watched these JonBenét specials had a magazine not paid me to, and suffice it to say they did very little either to solve the 20-year-old crime (ha!) or examine our collective obsession with it.

Clearly, the insight, production values, or cultural capital of its shiniest products are not what drives this new wave of crime stories. O.J.: Made in America happened to be great and the JonBenét specials happened to be terrible, but producers saw them as part of the same trend because they knew they would appeal to at least part of the same audience. I’ve been thinking a lot about these gaps between high and low, since there are people who consume all murder content indiscriminately, and another subset who only allow themselves to enjoy the “smart” kind. The difference between highbrow and lowbrow in the new true crime is often purely aesthetic. It is easier than ever for producers to create stories that look good and seem serious, especially because there are templates now for a style and voice that make horrifying stories go down easy and leave the viewer wanting more. But for these so-called prestige true-crime offerings, the question of ethics — of the potential to interfere in real criminal cases and real people’s lives — is even more important, precisely because they are taken seriously.

Like the sensational tone, disturbing, clinical detail, and authoritarian subtext that have long defined schlocky true crime as “trash,” the prestige true-crime subgenre has developed its own shorthand, a language to tell its audience they’re consuming something thoughtful, college-educated, public-radio influenced. In addition to slick and creative production, highbrow true crime focuses on character sketches instead of police procedure. “We’re public radio producers who are curious about why people do what they do,” Phoebe Judge, the host of the podcast Criminal, said. Judge has interviewed criminals (a bank robber, a marijuana brownie dealer), victims, and investigators, using crime as a very simple window into some of the most interesting and complicated lives on the planet.

Highbrow true crime is often explicitly about the piece’s creator, a meta-commentary about the process of researching and reporting such consequential stories. Serial’s Sarah Koenig and The Jinx’s Andrew Jarecki wrestle with their boundaries with the subjects (Adnan Syed and Robert Durst, respectively, both of whom have been tried for murder) and whether they believe them. They sift through evidence and reconstruct timelines as they try to create a coherent narrative from fragments.

I remember saying years ago that people who liked Serial should try watching Dateline, and my friend joked in reply, “Yeah, but Dateline isn’t hosted by my friend Sarah.” One reason for the first season of Serial’s insane success — it is still the most-downloaded podcast of all time — is the intimacy audiences felt with Koenig as she documented her investigation of a Baltimore teenager’s murder in real time, keeping us up to date on every vagary of evidence, every interview, every experiment. Like the figure of the detective in many mystery novels, the reporter stands in for the audience, mirroring and orchestrating our shifts in perspective, our cynicism and credulity, our theories, prejudices, frustrations, and breakthroughs.

This is what makes this style of true crime addictive, which is the adjective its makers most crave. The stance of the voyeur, the dispassionate observer, is thrilling without being emotionally taxing for the viewer, who watches from a safe remove. (This fact is subtly skewered in Gay Talese’s creepy 2017 Netflix documentary, Voyeur.) I’m not sure how much of my eye-rolling at the popularity of highbrow true crime has to do with my general distrust of prestige TV and Oscar-bait movies, which are usually designed to be enjoyed in the exact same way and for the exact same reasons as any other entertainment, but also to make the viewer feel good about themselves for watching. When I wrote earlier that there are viewers who consume all true crime, and those who only consume “smart” true crime, I thought, “And there must be some people who only like dumb true crime.” Then I realized that I am sort of one of them.

There are specimens of highbrow true crime that I love, Criminal and O.J.: Made in America among them, but I truly enjoy Dateline much more than I do Serial, which in my mind is tedious to the edge of pointlessness. I find myself perversely complaining that good true crime is no fun — as self-conscious as it may be, it will never be as entertaining as the Investigation Discovery network’s output, most of which is painfully serious. (The list of ID shows is one of the most amusing artifacts on the internet, including shows called Bride Killas, Momsters: Moms Who Murder, and Sex Sent Me to the Slammer.) Susan Sontag famously defined camp as “seriousness that fails,” and camp is obviously part of the appeal of a show called Sinister Ministers or Southern Fried Homicide. Network news magazine shows like Dateline and 48 Hours are somber and melodramatic, often literally starting voice-overs on their true-crime episodes with variations of “it was a dark and stormy night.” They trade in archetypes — the perfect father, the sweet girl with big dreams, the divorcee looking for a second chance — and stick to a predetermined narrative of the case they’re focusing on, unconcerned about accusations of bias. They are sentimental and yet utterly graphic, clinical in their depiction of brutal crimes.

It’s always talked around in discussions of why people like true crime: It is … funny? The comedy in horror movies seems like a given, but it is hardly permitted to say that you are amused by true disturbing stories, out of respect for victims. But in reducing victims and their families to stock characters, in exaggerating murderers to superhuman monsters, in valorizing police and forensic scientists as heroic Everymen, there is dark humor in how cheesy and misguided these pulpy shows are, how bad we are at talking about crime and drawing conclusions from it, how many ways we find to distance ourselves from the pain of victims and survivors, even when we think we are honoring them. (The jokey titles and tongue-in-cheek tone of some ID shows seem to indicate more awareness of the inherent humor, but in general, the channel’s programming is almost all derivative of network TV specials.) I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but in its obvious failures, I enjoy this brand of true crime more straightforwardly than its voyeuristic, documentary counterpart, which, in its dignified guise, has maybe only perfected a method of making us feel less gross about consuming real people’s pain for fun.

Crime stories also might be less risky when they are more stilted, more clinical. To be blunt, what makes a crime story less satisfying are often the ethical guidelines that help reporters avoid ruining people’s lives. With the popularity of the podcasts S-Town and Missing Richard Simmons, there were conversations about the ethics of appropriating another person’s story, particularly when they won’t (or can’t) participate in your version of it. The questions of ethics and appropriation are even heavier when stories intersect with their subjects’ criminal cases, because journalism has always had a reciprocal relationship with the justice system. Part of the exhilarating intimacy of the first season of Serial was Koenig’s speculation about people who never agreed to be part of the show, the theories and rabbit holes she went through, the risks she took to get answers. But there is a reason most reporters do all their research, then write their story. It is inappropriate, and potentially libelous, to let your readers in on every unverified theory about your subject that occurs to you, particularly when wondering about a private citizen’s innocence or guilt in a horrific crime.

Koenig’s off-the-cuff tone had other consequences, too, in the form of amateur sleuths on Reddit who tracked down people involved with the case, pored over court transcripts, and reviewed cellular tower evidence, forming a shadow army of investigators taking up what they saw as the gauntlet thrown down by the show. The journalist often takes on the stance of the professional amateur, a citizen providing information in the public interest and using the resources at hand to get answers. At times during the first season of Serial, Koenig’s methods are laughably amateurish, like when she drives from the victim’s high school to the scene of the crime, a Best Buy, to see if it was possible to do it in the stated timeline. She is able to do it, which means very little, since the crime occurred 15 years earlier. Because so many of her investigative tools were also ones available to listeners at home, some took that as an invitation to play along.

This blurred line between professional and amateur, reporter and private investigator, has plagued journalists since the dawn of modern crime reporting. In 1897, amid a frenzied rivalry between newspaper barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, true crime coverage was so popular that Hearst formed a group of reporters to investigate criminal cases called the “Murder Squad.” They wore badges and carried guns, forming essentially an extralegal police force who both assisted and muddled official investigations. Seeking to get a better story and sell more papers, it was common for reporters to trample crime scenes, plant evidence, and produce dubious witnesses whose accounts fit their preferred version of the case. And they were trying to get audiences hooked in very similar ways, by crowdsourcing information and encouraging readers to send in tips.

Of course the producers of Serial never did anything so questionable as the Murder Squad, though there are interesting parallels between the true-crime podcast and crime coverage in early daily newspapers. They were both innovations in the ways information was delivered to the public that sparked unexpectedly personal, participatory, and impassioned responses from their audiences. It’s tempting to say that we’ve come full circle, with a new true-crime boom that is victim to some of the same ethical pitfalls of the first one: Is crime journalism another industry deregulated by the anarchy of the internet? But as Michelle Dean wrote of Serial, “This is exactly the problem with doing journalism at all … You might think you are doing a simple crime podcast … and then you become a sensation, as Serial has, and the story falls to the mercy of the thousands, even millions, of bored and curious people on the internet.”

Simply by merit of their popularity, highbrow crime stories are often riskier than their lowbrow counterparts. Kathryn Schulz wrote in The New Yorker about the ways the makers of the Netflix series Making a Murderer, in their attempt to advocate for the convicted murderer Steven Avery, omit evidence that incriminates him and put forth an incoherent argument for his innocence. Advocacy and intervention are complicated actions for journalists to undertake, though they are not novel. Schulz points to a scene in Making a Murderer where a Dateline producer who is covering Avery is shown saying, “Right now murder is hot.” In this moment the creators of Making a Murderer are drawing a distinction between themselves and Dateline, as Schulz writes, implying that, “unlike traditional true-crime shows … their work is too intellectually serious to be thoughtless, too morally worthy to be cruel.” But they were not only trying to invalidate Avery’s conviction; they (like Dateline, but more effectively) were also creating an addictive product, a compelling story.

That is maybe what irks me the most about true crime with highbrow pretensions. It appeals to the same vices as traditional true crime, and often trades in the same melodrama and selective storytelling, but its consequences can be more extreme. Adnan Syed was granted a new trial after Serial brought attention to his case; Avery was denied his appeal, but people involved in his case have nevertheless been doxxed and threatened. I’ve come to believe that addictiveness and advocacy are rarely compatible. If they were, why would the creators of Making a Murderer have advocated for one white man, when the story of being victimized by a corrupt police force is common to so many people across the U.S., particularly people of color?

It does feel like a shame that so many resources are going to create slick, smart true crime that asks the wrong questions, focusing our energy on individual stories instead of the systemic problems they represent. But in truth, this is is probably a feature, not a bug. I suspect the new true-crime obsession has something to do with the massive, terrifying problems we face as a society: government corruption, mass violence, corporate greed, income inequality, police brutality, environmental degradation, human-rights violations. These are large-scale crimes whose resolutions, though not mysterious, are also not forthcoming. Focusing on one case, bearing down on its minutia and discovering who is to blame, serves as both an escape and a means of feeling in control, giving us an arena where justice is possible.

Skepticism about whether journalists appropriate their subjects’ stories, about high and low, and about why we enjoy the crime stories we do, all swirl through what I think of as the post–true-crime moment. Post–true crime is explicitly or implicity about the popularity of the new true-crime wave, questioning its place in our culture, and resisting or responding to its conventions. One interesting document of post–true crime is My Favorite Murder and other “comedy murder podcasts,” which, in retelling stories murder buffs have heard on one million Investigation Discovery shows, unpack the ham-fisted clichés of the true-crime genre. They show how these stories appeal to the most gruesome sides of our personalities and address the obvious but unspoken fact that true crime is entertainment, and often the kind that is as mindless as a sitcom. Even more cutting is the Netflix parody American Vandal, which both codifies and spoofs the conventions of the new highbrow true crime, roasting the genre’s earnest tone in its depiction of a Serial-like investigation of some lewd graffiti.

There is also the trend in the post–true-crime era of dramatizing famous crime stories, like in The Bling Ring; I, Tonya; and Ryan Murphy’s anthology series American Crime Story, all of which dwell not only on the stories of infamous crimes but also why they captured the public imagination. There is a camp element in these retellings, particularly when famous actors like John Travolta and Sarah Paulson are hamming it up in ridiculous wigs. But this self-consciousness often works to these projects’ advantage, allowing them to show heightened versions of the cultural moments that led to the most outsize tabloid crime stories. Many of these fictionalized versions take journalistic accounts as their source material, like Nancy Jo Sales’s reporting in Vanity Fair for The Bling Ring and ESPN’s documentary on Tonya Harding, The Price of Gold, for I, Tonya. This seems like a best-case scenario for prestige true crime to me: parsing famous cases from multiple angles and in multiple genres, trying to understand them both on the level of individual choices and cultural forces.

Perhaps the most significant contributions to post–true crime, though, are the recent wave of personal accounts about murder and crime: literary memoirs like Down City by Leah Carroll, Mean by Myriam Gurba, The Hot One by Carolyn Murnick, After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry, and We Are All Shipwrecks by Kelly Grey Carlisle all tell the stories of murder seen from close-up. (It is significant that all of these books are by women. Carroll, Perry, and Carlisle all write about their mothers’ murders, placing them in the tradition of James Ellroy’s great memoir My Dark Places, but without the tortured, fetish-y tone.) This is not a voyeuristic first person, and the reader can’t detach and find joy in procedure; we are finally confronted with the truth of lives upended by violence and grief. There’s also Ear Hustle, the brilliant podcast produced by the inmates of San Quentin State Prison. The makers of Ear Hustle sometimes contemplate the bad luck and bad decisions that led them to be incarcerated, but more often they discuss the concerns of daily life in prison, like food, sex, and how to make mascara from an inky page from a magazine. This is a crime podcast that is the opposite of sensational, addressing the systemic truth of crime and the justice system, in stories that are mundane, profound, and, yes, addictive.

[zachvillasource]

The eighties' serial killer Richard Ramirez became infamous as the Night Stalker. A Satanist to the core, who had admitted to channeling his inherent evil in a way most humans wouldn't, Ramirez can be seen now haunting the fictional Camp Redwood, on Ryan Murphy's 'American Horror Story' season 9: '1984'. Of course, the real-life Ramirez died back in 2013 from liver failure, so donning his depraved and deplorable aura on the show is actor and musician Zach Villa, who still hasn't entirely grasped the concept of how popular someone as twisted as Ramirez can be with women. It is no secret that society adores serial killers for some odd reason and implausible as the idea might seem to most, for Villa it was a job he needed to do well. And so he did.

"When I found out that I was playing Ramirez, I just had a gut-check moment: am I glorifying serial killers? Am I glorifying violence? What is the tone of this project?" Villa said in a candid chat with MEA World Wide (MEAWW.) The 33-year-old has just released his debut solo 'Revolver' and is still basking in the glory of how well-received it has been. Luckily for him, his version of the Night Stalker has been received with a lot of warmth from female fans as well. "I think that humans just have a complete fascination with true crime and that manifests in a very lighthearted sort of way this season. So for me, it wasn't an issue; it was basically me doing a job that required all of my faculties and skills as an actor and that's about where it stops emotionally for me," he shares about playing the man who is believed to have raped and murdered at least 13 people before he was arrested and put away.

There's a certain downside to playing such a depraved character too, Villa claims, and most of that is "Balancing the schedule and balancing the kind of emotional stress that it takes. It's really difficult to be up all night, in a headspace where Richard is having evil thoughts and fantasies that aren't societally acceptable. That takes a toll, and when I have to come home, it's definitely a purge process. I have to let go but I can't completely drop it all off because of another shooting."

Day after day, as Villa put on the Night Stalker's persona on screen, what he also does is make an army of avid fans drool as they simply can't get enough of his bad-boy charm and all-black leather outfits. Thanks to his portrayal, fans all over social media have also gushed about what an absolute 'snack' the real-life Ramirez was. And while Villa doesn't necessarily get this strange fondness for the monster, he does have some insights into what gets the fans going.

"Society, in general, tends to get obsessed, especially when someone's playing a real character, with how close they are to the actual person," he said about the constant comparisons drawn between him and the Satanic murderer whose beliefs and supernatural prowess is being tackled in the series. "Physically, I do see a similarity (between Villa and Ramirez) and that was jarring at first because I think it's dangerous for an audience member to expect someone to be and act like what they imagined a serial killer will be in real life, specifically Richard."

He clarifies where the lines are drawn, saying: "I'm playing a character that was shaped for the show, because of the world that they've set it in. Maybe his satanic beliefs were a certain way in real life, but I also don't know that many people who knew Richard personally and on every level, or what his real-life beliefs were. My job is to take the information that is present and then make a decision about how I'm going to play it to make him interesting and entertaining. I think I've done a good job, but I understand there are purists out there talking about him as an evil Satanist or chaotic in a certain way, and that's not necessarily your goal when you start to act."

Even when it comes to the frantic frenzy that arose when Villa's first look as Ramirez was revealed, the actor believes none of it was far from what happened in real life. Disturbing as it might be to be told that they are pretending to be a monster exceedingly well, Villa believes, "The flip side of being as close to the real-life Richard as possible is that when he was captured, he had hundreds of love letters that were written to him in prison - something that, for whatever reason, the public, especially women, at the time, found fascinating and alluring."

Sure, Villa might not exactly know the root of this fascination, but he does remark that "We as humans are just obsessed and confused about people who are that depraved, and that makes us want to investigate further, for better or for worse. We want to understand our own human nature and I think that's where attraction comes from. Sexual attraction definitely crosses over into that realm a little bit so it's a confusing topic and I'm still trying to figure it out."

[umthisisawkward]

Feels Like Home

Welp, I watched Midsommar a couple weeks ago and have slowly become obsessed with it, while also maintaining my obsession with Far Cry 5. So this is what happened, I guess. 

Title: Feels Like Home

Pairing: Sort of Female Deputy x Jacob? Not...really, though?

Rating: M

Warnings: Non-Consensual Drug Use, Descriptions of blood/violence, dark.

Link to Story on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22788205

The way he looks at her feels as though it was important - something that she should pay attention to and a moment she should keep in her head for the rest of her life. As if the cosmos had all lined up and brought her to him on a bed of stars and he would protect her through every horror she had seen. Like she is home. For the first time in her life, she is home.

His long fingers reach out and brush away the wet hair from her face as she keeps her eyes fixed on his as best as she can. The entire world had felt so heavy when she went under the water, but the moment she came back to the surface, it is as if the entirety of that burden is lifted from her shoulders. No more fear rests inside her belly, no more pain or anguish. Well, the pain is still there. She’s not exactly sure why it’s there, or what purpose it serves, but she knows it’s real and will take time to fade. She accepts that.

“My child,” he whispers.

“Father.”

“Welcome to Eden’s Gate.”

The others, gathered along the shore, applaud and cheer as the Father himself wraps an arm around her waist to help her make her way back to them. Dizzy and delirious, she wonders what she was so nervous about before all of this. Arms welcome her to her new family, and as she is passed from person to person, each one locking her in an embrace and telling her how welcome she is, Sarah cannot find her footing but somehow stays upright. As if her feet are guiding her on their own.

The last pair of arms that find her are rough and scarred and when she looks up, she is met with eyes so blue they startle her. They match the Father’s eyes, just as they match the Baptist’s eyes, and she knows whose arms cradle her as she takes in his fiery red hair and beard.

“Welcome, Sarah.”

His voice is jagged and rough, almost like gravel crunching under a tire. Arms circle her and pull her to his towering frame, and she lets out a sigh at the way they warm her through her soaking wet clothes. Her feet forget their inherent clumsiness for a moment but as those eyes find hers again, they remember. She stumbles forward though she tries to move backwards, as if her body will not cooperate with her brain, and he steadies her on her feet with a smile on his lips. Something she has seen only once before, but she can’t remember when.

A celebration follows later, near the river from which she had emerged a happier woman. They eat a modest feast and toast sparkling grape juice and laugh and dance. Dance. Sarah watches the rest of the followers dance from her spot at the long table but she cannot even begin to think about lifting her arms or moving her legs. It’s like the entire air hums with energy and peace, alive like a wire but softer, gentler. Something she cannot explain. It’s as though she could feel the Earth rotating slowly in its suspended place in space, and she is moving along with it. Safe. Home.

Faith places a flower crown on top of her head and wipes away the tears that have gathered on her cheeks. Sarah wonders where those came from, she didn’t even know she had been crying. Why is she crying? Is this not a celebration? Something to be thankful and happy for? The tears must be from joy, from relief that the fight has concluded and she is safe now, and the world will not end as Joseph had said it would but it will thrive and grow and learn. Learn from her example. Learn from what happened in Hope County.

The sickly sweet smell of Bliss wafts from the flowers around her head into her nose and she inhales it, almost needy. Desperate. To make all of this stay as light as it feels. There is happiness, joy, dancing, laughter. Peace. Quiet. Calm.

Nothing could ever take her from this place. This is where she belongs, where she is meant to spend the rest of her days. Her new family rejoiced and welcomed her, despite all the harm she has caused. Despite the blood that still taints her hands - even though the baptism was supposed to cleanse her of her sins. The blood is still there and bile rises up in Sarah’s throat for a moment before she swallows it back down and tries to smile.

Desperation.

She wants to feel clean but she cannot stop thinking about the blood on her hands. So much blood. So much violence. All because of her. Why, though? What had happened to cause it? She cannot even remember if she wanted to. It’s as though there is only the ‘here’ and ‘now’, no such thing as the ‘then’ and ‘past.’ As if whatever brought her here is not real at all, not compared to the way that joy and laughter seems to flow through her bloodstream. Her entire body is alive, is present, awake now out of the darkness.

The big hand on hers causes her to look up. Jacob. His eyes nearly drowning her and causing her breath to catch in her throat. What can she possibly feel desperate about, sad about, while he is there with her?

“Are you all right?”

She nods and the motion is slower than it feels. “Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

“You’re crying.”

“I...don’t know why...”

“I’ve heard dancing helps,” John’s voice startles Sarah and she turns to see him standing before her with his hand extended.

She does not know why but she glances at Jacob, as if silently asking for permission. The older soldier wears a smile on his lips that she doesn’t understand as he nods. She stands and makes her way around the large table before John sweeps her up into his arms and leads her around all the others, as if they are nothing but air and he is the wind. They move for them, and Sarah isn’t sure which way is which after John spins her around and pulls her back into his arms. She catches Jacob’s eye as he watches the two of them with a happy smile, and for some reason she feels as though he should be jealous. Why?

“John,” she whispers. He doesn’t hear her over the music, the laughter, the dancing. “John.”

He still doesn’t hear her and she is certain if she raises her voice that the entire group will stop and stare at her for yelling at one of their Heralds. She tries again and again but her voice is so soft, so meek, so pathetic-sounding as though she cannot summon enough oxygen into her lungs. But what is causing it? Why is she so afraid to speak louder, assert her presence? Why is she afraid at all?

“John,” she says, voice shaking and tears clouding her already cloudy vision.

He hears her this time. “Yes, my dear?”

“Where are we?”

“Holland Valley.”

“Why...why are we...why are we dancing?”

He smiles at her like she’s a toddler asking an obvious, silly question. The look would normally irritate her, but this time it frightens her. Why is she so afraid? She is happy, everyone around her is happy so why isn’t she? What’s going on below all this joy and excitement? It’s as though she can smell something rotten under the scent of the Bliss flowers. Something rotten and disturbing and horrifying. What is it, though? She cannot put her finger on it.

“Sarah, it’s a celebration. Dancing always happens at celebrations.”

A celebration of what, though? Just her atonement and baptism? Why is that a cause for such a celebration when every single member of the Project went through it, too? Did they do this for every single one of them? No. So what makes her special? She tries to remember what took place before the baptism, before she confessed her sins aloud and John had tattooed ‘lust’ onto her wrist to accompany the ‘wrath’ written across her chest. Her brow furrows in concentration as she tries to think, tries to remember what she had done earlier, just moments before the atonement.

She looks down at her arm to see the fresh tattoo, but what catches her eyes is her dress. It’s white, which she was aware of before, but it is more than just a dress, it’s a gown. It reminds her of a wedding gown. She glances back over at Jacob, who is dressed nicer than usual, too. A boutonniere is pinned to the lapel of the suit jacket he wears.

The desperation comes back.

Her entire throat seems to close.

“Sarah,” John insists as he stops the movement and cups her face in his hands. “Sarah, breathe.”

She shakes her head and croaks out that she can’t.

“In and out, in and out.”

John’s eyes slide behind her and brighten as she feels a hand on her back. She turns to see Faith again, carrying a vial of something. Bliss. Bliss. She’s in the Bliss. That’s what this is. She’s trapped inside a world that she cannot control, not even for herself. She’s in their clutches and they can do whatever they want to her and…

“Sister, don’t worry. I know how heavy the world can feel,” Faith says as she wraps her arm around Sarah’s shoulders.

Sister?

“Be careful, Faith.”

“I know,” Faith says with a smile, despite John’s venomous tone. “She just needs the world to dull a little. It can be so sharp and painful sometimes.”

Sarah winces as Faith uncorks the vial and places it under her nose. She tries not to breathe, to hold her breath so she can come out of this alive, she has to come out of this alive without anyone hurting her…

But she can’t hold her breath for long and soon the powder dances up her nose and the world grows fuzzier in her line of vision, duller, the way Faith had said it would. A peaceful calm washes over her and blankets her in a cloud of safety. John’s fingers stroke her cheek and she leans into the touch that feels like home. Heaven. Home.

“Jacob,” John greets.

Sarah turns to see those blue eyes again, the ones that threaten to drown her in their beauty. Warmth floods her entire body as she looks up at the older man with a smile on her lips. He returns it and mutters something to John that she doesn’t exactly catch. His hands find her waist and before she understands what is happening, they are swaying to some sort of soft, acoustic song. The lyrics babble through her ears like a brook but she doesn’t catch the specific words or their meaning. Her eyes stay on Jacob’s as the entire dance floor moves away from them like the Red Sea had parted for Moses. The way she glides across it effortlessly makes her think she may be floating. She should not feel such grace, she knows, not while the Bliss is flowing through her veins at the rate that they’ve given it to her.

“Sarah,” Jacob says, bringing her attention back to him and away from her thoughts. “Are you all right?”

Why does he keep asking her that? Why is he so focused on whether or not she’s all right when she should be absolutely perfect? Is it her? Is she doing something wrong, something not in custom with what this celebration entails? Does she look sad?

Suddenly aware of every muscle in her body, she tries to relax her face and place a smile on her lips that doesn’t sting like her mouth is on the ends of fish hooks, tugging it into the shape of a smile while she bleeds from the corners. No, that’s not the right look to have here, is it? Muscles in her face spasm as she tries to relax them, tries to paint her expression into something that would make sense here, that would make Jacob stop worrying about her.

He places a hand on her cheek and it's then that she realizes they’re not dancing anymore. They’re not even on the dance floor. The music is far away now and they stand in the woods, her back against a tree as Jacob looks deeply into her eyes and Sarah isn’t sure what all of this means.

“Sarah, do you know where you are?”

She shakes her head and Jacob sighs, his fingers soft in a way she never imagined he could be as he wipes more tears from her cheeks. Tears she doesn’t remember gathering in her eyes. What is going on?

“I told them to be careful with the amount they gave you.”

“Amount?”

“You’re on Bliss,” Jacob says.

His eyes are dark with anger and disappointment, but Sarah doesn’t flinch. Without him even verbalizing it, she’s aware that the intense emotions the Soldier is feeling are not towards her but towards his own family. His eyes meet hers and the blue is not so suffocating now, it’s softer and gentler and she sighs as his hand finds her shoulder.

“What do you remember?”

“Dancing. Being underwater. The way I moved as if I was on air.”

“Shit,” he whispers. “Before that?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

She nods and Jacob rubs a hand down his face as if in frustration before he plants a kiss on her head and tells her to stay where she is, that he wants to talk with his brothers. He makes it very clear that she needs to remain right there, in that spot, back against the tree. There is no threat in his voice, it’s mostly filled with worry, as a parent would worry about a small child running off into the unfamiliar only to get lost in the abyss and never be seen again.

She does what he says, she waits. The longer he is gone, the more anxious she becomes. She presses her back up harder against the tree, hopeful that the pain will bring her some sense of clarity. Happiness and sorrow battle it out in her belly and she shifts from highs and lows in a way she’s never experienced before. One second she has a smile on her lips that finally feels natural and the next, she feels her entire body curving inwards - stomach towards spine - and she cannot see with the tears that cloud her eyes.

When Jacob comes back, she is crying. Sobs rip themselves from her throat despite her desperate attempts to hold on to them. The pain and anguish in her stomach blossom and stem upward towards her brain. It feels like grief. Grief for what? She’s not sure and that scares her. Grief is specific, there is mourning involved with grief, but not sixteen yards away she can hear the soft music playing and the laughter wafting up to her in her seclusion and darkness.

“Sarah,” Jacob whispers as she falls into his sturdy arms.

“What’s happening?” she begs.

“I don’t know. What do you feel?”

“Sadness and…” She doesn’t know how to verbalize it.

“Like you’re in mourning?”

“Yes,” she gasps.

“Do you remember anything at all before the baptism?”

“I can only remember feeling unclean. Like no baptism would wash away what I’d done. But what have I done?”

“You didn’t do anything, Sarah. You didn’t.”

“I did, I can feel it.”

“You blame yourself but you should blame us. We’re the ones who started this war. We’re the ones who found your friends.”

“My...friends?”

The word tastes unfamiliar on her tongue and suddenly Sarah remembers flashes of Nick and Kim, Grace, Mary May, Eli, Wheaty, Tammy...all of their faces float out in front of her as if they are spirits. Spirits? That doesn’t make any sense, does it? She gasps as Jacob pulls her close again and closes her eyes against the accusing looks that her friends’ faces shoot at her. What has she done? What has she done?

“They told me you came to them on your own.”

“Who?”

“My brothers.”

Did she? When would she have come to them? She imagines it would have been a rough night, full of violence. She could only picture herself anointed in blood as she appeared on one of their doorsteps after everything and threw herself to the ground and begged forgiveness from them for everything she had done.

Only that memory doesn’t feel real. She frowns as she tries to recall what had really happened to make her come to them. The Seeds were her enemies before all this. They were people she was afraid of and hated. She cannot recall what would have made her join them, side with them, abandon all hope for saving her friends and Hope County as a whole.

Hope County.

Hope.

She crumples to the forest floor with a wail as she remembers. Everything. She remembers the guns pointed at Kim and Nick’s faces, the way Wheaty’s hair was bloody and matted to the side of his head, the way Mary May shouted at her not to do it and how the butt of a gun had collided with her temple, causing her to crumple onto the floor in a puddle of blood, her face frozen in a look of panic and fear. She remembers weeping at the sight, remembers the cold and calculated way John ordered her body be taken away so as not to upset the Deputy. Sarah. The Deputy. Sarah.

Sarah, do you see what your violence has done?

You see it now, don’t you, Deputy?

Your friends will die, they will be offered to God if you do not come to us like you are meant to.

Sarah, do you see?

Do you see, Sarah?

Jacob’s arms wrap around her small frame as her screams pierce the night air. She can still hear the shouts of her friends as they are carted away, the way she knelt on the ground with her head bowed in front of Joseph and how he pet her hair as if she was a child, as if she was his child, as if she was his.

His.

Theirs.

Jacob’s.

Jacob sounds broken as he weeps, too. His pain echoes hers in a way she doesn’t understand, and as she looks up to see his eyes she realizes that he did not know either. His brothers kept him in the dark the same way the Bliss kept her from feeling the grief that had sewn itself into the lining of her stomach and the chambers of her heart. The memories of gunshots echo in her ears as she remembers the screams from the friends she thought she was protecting. The way their blood baptized her bare feet and the way that her clothes grew soaked after Joseph made her stand behind him for each and every one. The weight of her arms feel heavy as if holding a shotgun as she remembers it all. Had it been her? Had she been the one to do this?

Before she can register what’s happening, Faith’s smile floats into her sight and the young girl kneels at her side with hands reaching for her face. Lips press against hers and she tries to back away as another sensation takes over her, brings her back to Earth or farther away from it, she’s not exactly sure because it feels like both at the same time.

“It needed to be done, darling Sarah,” Faith says, petting her hair down. “No peace would come to us if you had not made your own sacrifice.”

Sacrifice?

Sarah breathes.

Sarah breathes and inhales oxygen almost greedily as she tries to hold onto the horrors her brain had recalled just moments ago. She cannot forget them, she cannot forget the friends she took from this Earth.

But as their faces slip away, back into the hidden corners of her mine, she smiles up at Faith. The feeling of fish hooks comes back but she ignores it as her sister wipes the tears from her cheeks again.

“Thank you, sister.”

She is home.

[adamwatchesmovies]

The Good Son (1993)

Good Son, bad movie. Elijah Wood plays Mark Evans, a sweet and somewhat disturbed 10-year-old still reeling from his mother's death. He's sent to live with his aunt (Wendy Crewson) and uncle (Daniel Hugh Kelly) while his father is away on business. Befriending their son, Henry (Macaulay Culkin), Mark soon realizes the boy pretends to be nice and well-mannered but is actually a cruel sadist obsessed with death.

If you’ve seen any movie of this type, you know the entire plot. Seemingly content with "shocking" us by casting a child as a killer and then having him put on a smile before killing a small animal (all the while hinting that he'd like to do much more), The Good Son ends - of course - in a battle to the death because Mark tried and failed to convince anyone that Henry is behind the string of odd happenings. To overcome this inherent weakness, the film would need a dynamite script.

The Good Son is like the horror/thriller equivalent of a dumb romantic comedy where a huge misunderstanding drives the two romantic leads apart and the plot would be over in five minutes if the people simply acted like normal human beings. I can believe that Mark, still shaken from his mother's death, could be intimidated by someone his own age and make the mistake of not calling the police when one of Henry's "pranks" results in news-worthy damage. What's the parents' excuse? Even though their son’s built himself a crossbow, has a creepy lair in the woods, possibly had a hand in the death of his infant brother, and is seen repeatedly threatening his sister, no one believes Mark? The boy's torturing small animals, setting fires and making creepy masks but no one’s ever seen this as odd? How do you miss that unless he decided to turn evil ten minutes before his cousin showed up.

Even with the dad being a one-dimensional douchebag you can kinda believe wouldn’t listen to anyone, and the mother spending every spare minute standing on the edge of a cliff, reminiscing about her dead baby (I wonder if her precarious position will come into play at some point...), Henry is a terrible liar; you can’t believe his inability to abstain from speaking about creepy subjects hasn’t raised any flags, particularly to the psychologist he regularly sees. You might buy it if he were really smart, but he makes blunders everywhere. Whenever he makes attempts at murder, it’s always in broad daylight when everyone knows he was the last person to see the victim. And yet it isn’t the police (who are completely absent from the picture) who figure out something’s amiss, it’s a 10-year-old?

The movie's climax is preposterous. Once again, there's no way Henry would get away with his plan and then it concludes with a line that will leave you utterly confused. The whole thing feels like a major misstep, like it was originally supposed to be about a bunch of teenagers but was re-written so they could be all daring and shocking by having the star of “Home Alone” act intimidating instead of cute. It isn’t really that imaginative, or well written. In its defense, however, it is well acted and you do want to see our hero make it out alive so it may be predictable but it's never boring. There are even times where it manages to be genuinely tense. 

If the appeal of Macaulay Culkin playing a psychopath intrigues you, I still can't recommend The Good Son. It's simply been done too many times before and isn't written well enough. My advice instead is to follow-up Home Alone 2 with The Collector, and re-write it in your head to have the beloved Christmas film is the prequel to the gory 2009 thriller. (On VHS, August 6, 2014)

[enjo-kousai]

206 - 202105030150

The other time I was thinking how the label “pr*shipper” is just an explicit synonym for “p*do” , given the fact that the majority of people that use it do it because they like or tolerate that type of content (normal people who do not base their personality around the nsfw fiction they consume, that enjoy problematic stuff (not p*do) and that are aware the content they consume is fiction and should be kept in separated spaces for adults only do not generally go through life identifying with that term). And it seems I am not the only one thinking that because recently an artist I know (but don’t follow) decided to drop that description from their bio under the explanation “I just prefer to not label myself, I know what I like 🤷” (the artist is a pretty innocuous jonadio shipper). I am sure they dropped the term because of that negative association, because I’ve seriously not seen any sane person in the last years using the term pr*shipper in a not cringey way. I realized I was not the only one noticing this association when, recently, I saw a few posts from individuals involved in these niche discussions agreeing on how pr*shipper = p*do

I think there was a time were the label made sense: people used it as a way to say “is okay to ship whatever you like (as a way to not invalidate fans that liked crack ships or “toxic” ships like hero/villain, antagonists, etc; ships that were probably not popular or “wholesome”). Then the discourse started to include not only something as innocent as non-popular ships, but other topics like “problematic” kinks (I say “problematic” because although I understand why people are grossed out by the content I don’t share the opinion these are always inherently negative) like BDSM, nonc*n, dubc*n, inc*st, yiffy, age g*ps/age diff*rence, etc. People defending that were generally thinking about clear situations were the authors were keeping their work adequately tagged or works were the kinks were not depicted in scandalous or too disturbing ways or where people were using that as a resource to write or create certain material without condoning it in real life or people liking ships where these things happened or just people unapologetically liking these dynamics while being conscious they were fiction and not condoning the real things (example: someone shipping two characters that in the original source are siblings because they like their chemistry [like Luk*xLei, Els*nna], someone writing pretty bad yaoi where one character is abused and then falls in love with the abuser, people who liked ships of characters that in the source hate each other or have an abusive relationship, etc) Up to this point I think the label and people using it had a point regarding how absurd it was to police the preferences of others in fandom. It was a good response against the “*ntis” who were like Christian soccer moms trying to keep a Puritan way of consuming media and wrongly accusing people of being degenerates. It made sense to defend fiction as a way to indulge in certain fantasies or scenarios.

I think up to that point the label “pr*shipper” made sense. But then people started to use the label to basically say that “anything goes” and suddenly this became not a way to defend others in the fandom to be free of exploring fiction in ways that were not “pure” but as a way to identify people that use freedom of speech as an excuse to consume content that raises suspicions because of how explicit, detailed and gross it is.

Yeah, I don’t think that “fiction always affects reality”: people do not become killers after watching action or horror movies or playing videogames, someone does not become a serial r*pist after watching p*rn, someone doesn’t go and bangs their mom or siblings after reading incest fiction. However, one does not have to be a genius to realize that obsessions, attachments, previous mental affectations, etc can change the way in which this type of media affects an individual. I don’t mind, for example, someone that likes n*ncon or d*bcon although I don’t share the liking for it. However, if that person obsessively consumes it or creates it, if they talk about it all time, if they consume highly violent content of it, if they consume it out of adult spaces, if instead of recognizing why some people (have an understandable reason to) find it bothering and they are oblivious to it, if they get super defensive, if they confuse freedom of speech with consuming or creating content that is getting into disturbing territory (trying to act as martyrs) then I do think we are right on not wanting to associate with these individuals. I can’t blame people (*ntis and others) of not wanting to associate with them and wanting them out of their spaces. Saying “fiction always affects reality” is giving too much credit to certain works and their relevance in our world. But saying “fiction does not affects reality” is being stupid and not recognizing how fiction is a powerful tool to imagine and create other possibilities of existing.

Although *ntis are in no way better (they harass people who enjoy content in ways that are not equiparable to the individuals mentioned above and are all for censorship) I think we cannot blame them for taking that stance after we’ve seen the worst that pr*shipper people have offered. I think is pretty funny and sad that a label that started as a way to defend people’s right to enjoy fiction became a synonym of, precisely, the thing they didn’t want to associate with.

[ranadae]

Obscenities, Oddities, and Consumption

Most people, in their day to day life, try to be as civilized and as “normal” as possible. One of the biggest reasons that this phenomenon is so common is due to and inherently understood belief and/or acceptance that deviation from the norm is considered negative in some way shape or form. Some of this understood negativity is represented in the thoughts of “normal” on lookers as participants being delinquents, unholy, gross, corrupted, ugly, or even attention seeking. While they may not personally like that the person is acting in such and uncivilized or norm-deviating way, it is still typically self admitted that said types are captivating. This phenomenon is also present in comics, the grosser, more violent, and weird a comic is, the more attention it grabs. People would much rather spend their time looking at something, at least for entertainment purposes, that is strange, and consists of a foreign experience, than something that is tame and already understood.  One of the most common forms of obscenities  that comics rely on is blood and violence.  Most people tend to shun those who out right say that  they enjoy bloody violence, but it is a very common occurrence through out all of media,  and typically appears excessively in comics. One of the easiest ways to justify a drive and desire to see people get the crap beat out of them is with blood sport, where both parties have agreed to the situation, but also in “eye for an eye” like situations, where one person is considered to deserve  what will be happening to them. 

In many super hero comics, we see bad guys and villains beaten to a pulp, cut, and even killed all in the name of justice and for retribution. With out context and the dialogue within these panels, most people would tend to lean towards disgust at the act. However it is seemingly justified because Bane is a renowned terrorist who has caused the lives of many to be ruined and/or ended. This leaves his brutal beating with a much sweeter taste in a readers mouth, since the grotesque violence is much easier to swallow in a moralistic manner. Now justified,  this act is easier to consume and no one needs to feel bad for going against the status quo, making it all the more interesting and enjoyable to see blood fly. 

Other instances of disturbances that makes works all the more enjoyable is with character design and their appearances. While it may seem hard to believe, people are intrigued and even obsessed with out of the ordinary visuals, and what is more out of the ordinary  than a popular or main character that is absolutely disgusting, even more so when the grossness doesn’t just stop at the visuals. It typically takes more time, effort, and artistic capability to draw characters so far from typical people. Every twisted feature becomes its own miniature game of eye spy for these types. Characters who are this way but have their features hidden at times may even be more interesting because, like with justified violence, their features are not constantly “persecuted” by the norm, at can be “cleaned up” and “ogled’’ at when ever so desired by the reader. 

Other forms of abnormalities that capture the readers interests are those that are more content related. This is typically seen throughout all of the horror genre. In fact, seeing nothing odd within a horror work is in itself odd, but these odd devices are not solely confined to that which is deemed horror. 

Junji Ito is well known for his ability to create excessively disturbing imagery, many of which include repetitive body parts, foreign objects, bugs, and skinlessness. 

All of these oddities help to create a truly grotesque scene that bring the work together by leaving the reader transfixed on all that is “wrong” and messed up bout the situation and scenes.

the disturbing attributes of horror imagery and what maybe considered by some as “style” is utilized in all sorts of works to help add allure to the characters and work as a whole as seen in Prague Race. While this scene makes the figure on the right seem disturbing and absolutely terrifying, in truth he is a big cry baby, but the early on distortion of his character is what made many people fall in love with him. For many of these types of works it is it their disturbing qualities that makes them so enjoyable and bring intrigue and interest to the readers, making them come back again and again to enjoy said works.

[vivi-tran]

Problematic Disclaimers

I am incredibly biased towards David Fincher’s work, and that in itself comes with a few other more specific disclaimers we’ll get into later on in this review.

This is a largely historical piece, taking place during the 1970s-80s. If you’re looking for groundbreaking representation for POC/LGBT+/female characters, you may be disappointed.

This show famously deals with the analyses of behavioral science, specifically in dealing with serial killers. This kind of subject matter can be tricky: it’s one thing to be intellectually fascinated by the psychological aspects of these cases, and another thing entirely to sympathize or rationalize these murderers. Mindhunter, of course, makes this type of tightrope act the centerpiece of their story. However, real life serial killers are depicted and dramatized in the show. This could ultimately play into the kind of dangerous romanticizations the show attempts to subvert.

I encourage audiences who correctly assess the character of Holden (Jonathon Groff) as a pretentious shithead to watch till the end.

You could probably make the argument that this series is riddled with ableism. Given, again, the historical background of these analyses, however, mental illness is not something assumed to be well understood in this context. But how we should approach mental illness in storytelling such as this is not my area of expertise, and I am open to anyone bridging that gap for me if I’m being too tone deaf in that respect.

Trigger Warnings

The only instance of gore that you see actually happen in real time is in the first scene of the first episode.

This show is about researching serial killers. There is blunt and often irreverent discussion about murder, gore, torture, masturbation, incest, pedophilia, and sexual violence. 

Even protagonists who are regarded as the “good guys” in this show are expected to put on a front in order to coax information out of their serial killer interviewees. Lewd, inappropriate, and disrespectful language is used in these contexts.

Some nudity and sex scenes. 

Drawings and photography of violent images from serial killers’ case files are shown.

Final Verdict: I loved this show.

As to be expected with a story of this subject matter, there’s a lot of ground to cover with disclaimers and triggers. This is exactly the kind of taboo audiences love to indulge in at a distance, telling each other that it’s the psychology of examining a serial murderer that makes these sorts of films and shows so exciting. But these dark and horrendous accounts, interesting as they may be to so many viewers, have to come with a certain amount of responsibility.

This is something I realized with a cold flush while in vacation in Los Angeles, perusing the Museum of Death. I examined a series of figurines modeled after a number of real life serial killers such as Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy. I tried to imagine what kind of mindset drives a person to buy these kinds of collectibles, much less manufacture them for purchase. 

Putting such a far distance from these murderers and placing our attractions in the same realm as a hobby takes away from the true horror of what these criminals have done. There’s a line between wanting to learn more and becoming part of a subculture that turns monsters into celebrities. 

Luckily for us, that is exactly what Mindhunter addresses.

The story begins with bright-eyed bushy-tailed young FBI agent, Holden Ford. Ford, initially specializing in hostage negotiation, is discouraged by a recent failed case. Behavioral science calls to him, and in pursuing this trade he joins forces with FBI agent Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv). Together they pioneer a new wave of behavioral science methods in order to better understand the way these murderers think, and, ideally, find them before they can take any more victims.

As I said before, engrossment in this field of study is, as I have come to recognize it, not uncommon. The rise of a show like Criminal Minds, a prime time television series dedicated to the analysis and capture of fictional serial killers, is a strong indication of this. Most of us would find it difficult to wrap our heads around the idea of somebody with such perverse and twisted desires to be as mundane as you or me. We form this distance maybe to avoid the other side of this obsession that the living can afford: that it could have been us. Because it is far easier to gawk at a monstrous form of evil, than to imagine ourselves as their victim.

Mindhunter attacks this line of thinking at its origins and its source. Based on a book by the same name that details the true events of real FBI investigations, the show uses fictional stand-ins to perhaps convey more dramatic representation of these ideas. But I haven’t read the book, so this is just speculation. 

I mentioned in the disclaimers that our supposed hero of this tale, Holden Ford, explicitly presents himself as an utter jackass. Nothing drives the point home harder than Ford’s development which sees his confident rise and his perplexing downfall. Like many rookies in your stereotypical crime story, Ford wants results. He wants to make a difference, and he wants to see the fruits of his efforts now. He thinks that by acting on instinct and asserting himself, he can change everything around him to his favor. This kind of brazen naivety is nothing new and also not inherently wrong. It’s Ford’s intentions, however, that complicate things.

“Why are you here, Holden?” “I don’t know.”

What starts out as a justified practice meant to stop serial killers in their tracks becomes a battle of the minds where Holden Ford manages to put himself on top time and time again. And yet, even after outmaneuvering and coercing valuable information out of several different murderers, Ford’s life crumbles around him. His long-term girlfriend leaves him, he is formally reprimanded by his superiors for his actions, he confronts the consequences to his impulsiveness, and a tell-tale press release puts an almost complete halt to his investigations. 

The first season ends as Holden Ford hits rock bottom. We realize, seeing him fall this far from grace, that by jumping through all these intellectual hoops in order to get the information he so desperately craves, Ford has played right into the hands of some of the most notorious serial killers in history. He’s in too deep. In his hubris, he placed himself so far above these murderers in his own mind because he believes what he is doing is for the sake of justice, that he actually sunk down to their level.

It probably isn’t too difficult to see this progression throughout the first season. We, as the audience, start out rooting for Ford. Yes! We should study these serial killers and put clearer terms to their behavior in order to catch these criminals early on in the game. Horrid as their crimes are, they are actual human beings and as such we need to understand what went wrong as well as when and where. And then Ford’s behavior becomes deplorable, cringey both in and out of interviews. The show poses the question: is it worth it to stoop so low so as to gather this information?

And in reverberating response, the show also answers in the same breath: no.

In some instances, we are drawn to resent characters like Tench and Carr when their bureaucracy stands in the way of Ford’s justice. But, ultimately, Ford becomes unhinged as he learns that by trying to locomotive his way into success, he has shrunk that distance I had previously stressed and learns he has never been fully in control. 

The moral comes effortlessly enough. And while he isn’t the sole director or writer for Mindhunter, we see this kind of thing a lot in David Fincher’s work: well-intentioned men being crushed by a weight they did not take the time to fully grasp in scope, all under the guise of something thrilling and grisly. Fincher’s most famous work, Fight Club, is perhaps one of the most widely misinterpreted pieces of film in cinematic history thanks to every knee-jerk reaction-having male who came out of those theaters wanting to start their own fight club or project mayhem. Fincher himself has advised his own daughter from associating with young men who romanticize the movie. Fincher takes on these topics all the time. I’m having trouble finding the interview that cites this, and I’ll update this post if I find it, but there has been a point in his career where Fincher has been accused of producing torture porn. But this brings me to the meat of what I love about this series.

Mindhunter is told masterfully. The most disturbing and action-packed part of the show is at the very beginning of the first episode when Holden Ford is trying to talk down a man at the forefront of a hostage situation. But, even then, the way the situation is presented is crude and somewhat sad - you immediately understand there is an inherent problem with how criminals with complex mental faculties are treated and handled from this opening scene. After that? The most unnerving images are shown in photographs and drawings, but never played out for the audience. In fact, when was the last time you saw Fincher play out half the gore he alludes to in his films aside from Fight Club? And thus we can be certain this show was not made for the serial killers, but for us. This is a cautionary tale. There’s no reason to show the whole terrible ordeal - just the effects.

At no point did I feel this series was dragging on either. You forget that what you’re watching is mostly comprised of dialogue. There’s no compulsion to show exploitive material. The characters and their responses compel the story forward. You don’t need a SWAT team to break down an unsub’s door and catch the perpetrator mid-dynamic-action. You’re already amongst some of the most ruthless real-life villains in our country’s history. Anything more than that would be jarring. This is not a show for the serial killers. This is a show for how we react to such a tragic brand of evil, or how we should react. It needs to be said because it’s important that we tell the difference.

In the disclaimers, I also mentioned there being little to no ample representation for POC/LGBT+/female characters. While I don’t necessarily retract that statement, I do need to point out that we are given two supporting female characters in the series who play a significant role in both the story and Holden Ford’s life. The first we see is Debbie (Hannah Gross), Ford’s long term girlfriend. Debbie is a smart, independent woman who is able to banter intellectually with Ford and initially finds his thirst for knowledge to be charming. Gross does a wonderful job with this character, but I felt she wasn’t fully done the justice she deserved, especially when she abruptly displayed disloyalty that was never actually addressed in one of the episodes. Had it not been for this scene, it wouldn’t be as obvious that she was probably just a placeholder made to show all the aspects in which Ford’s life was falling apart. 

More prominent than Debbie is Wendy Carr, a well-established psychologist as well as a lesbian. Carr is perhaps the better-written of the two female figures, being decisively driven by her own moral compass and toting the kind of calculating patience that Ford could have afforded to learn from. Torv plays the kind of character we never question, that we trust, that we know is making the most diplomatic calls possible. And even here, I am left wanting more out of her story, out of where she found herself towards the end of the first season other than just a ghost of Ford’s consequences.

Maybe it is for personal reasons that I felt the need to praise this show for distinguishing the difference between feeding a killer’s ego and not losing sight of what is truly important under these investigations. Maybe I am just a fanatic for whatever Fincher touches. And to be sure, it certainly does have his trademark cinematic touch - from seamless and compelling editing to the intense portraits of its characters. But, in any case, this show far exceeded my expectations in its mindful storytelling and is an important piece in a society obsessed with the grotesque.