#the rest of the trilogy is fine imo but annihilation is the first and really stands head and shoulders above the others

[visceravalentines]

DEAR MEG

I think you wrote that you loved the movie Annihilation. If I misremembered, please feel free to ignore this asdfg.

I remember I saw it and I really enjoyed the visuals, and the terrifying mutated plant bear screaming with a human voice (that part was haunting holy crap) but besides those scenes I wasn't super scared???

Maybe my brain is too small to understand the horror of it asdfghjk

But anyway, what I wanted to ask is, what were your favorite parts of the movie, and what scared you? If you don't mind me asking!

Have a nice day!!!

SOL MY LOVE

thank u for sending me this ask it is so lovely let's talk about cool movies!!!

I love Annihilation the movie but I also love Annihilation the book!! they are very different, only the very basic characters and concept make it into the movie. which makes sense because the book is surreal and abstract and can be hard to interpret what is actually going on at certain moments, and that doesn't translate very well to the big screen. the book, to me, is far more unsettling than the movie. I will answer for both! brain explosion below the cut!

it's an absolutely gorgeous film, weird and captivating and creepy. I love the body horror, the found footage from the previous expedition where the man's intestines are moving of their own accord......incredible. that bear???? scares the bejeezus out of me every time I watch it. one of the scariest creatures I can think of in a horror movie, creatures don't usually freak me out. the sound it makes haunts me. and the bear is not in the book! the book has......other guys. I also thought Natalie Portman ate the role of the biologist. she is distant and offputting and has very little interest in anything but the natural world around her, both in the book and in the movie.

in the book we get much more of a look into the biologist's very rich and strange internal life, and I remember reading it for the first time and being shocked how much I related to her. she was one of the first characters, maybe THE first character, I identified with on a meaningful level. when I read the book again recently I was pleased to find that hasn't changed, even though I have changed a lot since my first read. she is by no means an ideal role model or even a reliable narrator, but I just adore her. and her husband nicknames her Ghost Bird, which is everything to me.

the horror in the book is ultimately about something unmaking you and the world around you in a way you cannot understand. it's a very cosmic horror concept distilled down into very manageable pieces--a plant that begins to alter what you are with just a single touch. a creature that looks like something familiar, but feels distinctly wrong, or distinctly human. something wearing a face that does not belong to it. a sound you cannot identify. words you know, words you can read, but you can't understand what they're saying. it's there, it's right there, but you don't quite get it, and suddenly you are no longer you anymore and it's too late. it's about love and nature and knowledge and meaning and the value of all of these things and the horror of all of these things.

here are some of my very favorite lines from the book, the ones that give me the shivers every time I read it for one reason or another!!

"I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time..."

This was really the only thing I discovered in him after his return: a deep and unending solitude, as if he had been granted a gift that he didn't know what to do with. A gift that was poison to him and eventually killed him. But would it have killed me?

I took the photograph out of its frame, shoved it in my pocket. The lighthouse keeper would come with me, although he hardly counted as a good-luck charm. As I left the landing, I had the peculiar thought that I was not the first to pocket the photo, that someone would always come behind to replace it, to circle the lighthouse keeper again.

Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you're staring at it now.

"We should never have come here. I should never have come here." "That's all?" "I've come to believe it is the one fundamental truth."

There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.

An almost plaintive keening, a lonely sound in that place, called out to me. And kept calling, pleading with me to return, to see it entire, to acknowledge its existence. I did not look back. I kept running.

Almost anyone else might see it differently. But I am not those people. I am just the biologist; I don't require any of this to have a deeper meaning.