wilt sounds

 Good evening Dreamwidth, Dia tuning in to talk about a subject that's kind of been turning around in my head for a few weeks now. I've been debating making this a Twitter thread, but that was only out of a lazy desire to not force myself to sit down and organize my thoughts into a post befitting of Dreamwidth's longform culture and I knew it was a cop-out, so I'm biting the bullet and forcing myself.

( gay under cut )

Basically just using Dreamwidth as a way to expand upon my very rare semi-coherent Twitter threads. Anyway, while it's a genre I can only swallow in small doses due to the fun fun nature of my weirdo brain, horror media remains one of my top interests. When I returned to the genre with a vengeance a few years ago, it didn't take long for me to pin down why it's so difficult for me to find horror that I actually enjoy (aside from a general & oftentimes arbitrary pickiness in what I consume). I'm still trying to feel out the line between straight-up elitism and just... attempts to be critical of what I consume within myself but that's easier said than done.

But anyway, I was talking on Twitter about how I was given the book Bird Box with the assurance that, as a horror fan, I'd enjoy it. And... it was fine. I read it in a single sitting (it's a short read). But it didn't really do it for me at all. I don't enjoy "surface level" horror that much personally, although I recognize so-called "mindless" thrillers have their place. What really chills me are series like Netflix's Hill House (on which I've also written long, rambling ""meta""), where the horror stems less from the specters/supernatural elements than from the way grief nearly devours their family whole. Two of my favorite books in the horror genre (if not of all time), We Have Always Lived in the Shadows (another excellent Shirley Jackson) and A Head Full of Ghosts (which takes many cues/themes from the former, even outright referencing it, and I'm of the opinion that the two should be read together) contain no supernatural elements whatsoever... but the interesting bit about the latter is the fact that it's open-ended enough to allow the reader to draw their own conclusions about whether or not its events stemmed from supernatural forces. Coming out of the book, my mom said, "What a terrifying story about demonic possession." I said, "What a terrifying story about what happens to a child and by extension the family when the family denies their child's mental illness and neglects to have them treated." The point of the novel, at least how I interpreted it, is to deconstruct the "possession as mental illness" trope, to show that the symptoms of demonic possession as portrayed by horror movies/novels overlap with the symptoms of certain mental illnesses, and subtextually urges us to be cognizant of that overlap so that we don't end up further demonizing these illnesses through harmful depictions. It's painful, moving, and all the more "scary" for its apparent lack of the paranormal. It's a book I still think about today due to its construction, its ambiguity, how devastated and helpless it made me feel. I often quote it facetiously but the sentiment stands: "The real horror was humanity all along". 

Horror excels when the supernatural is used as a vessel or a mirror for the human actors around whom the plot actually revolves. Take House of Leaves, where the story of the house itself is the story of a marriage, a strained love, a family under pressure (much like Hill House!!), the house merely a backdrop for these events, amplifying them in metaphor. Horror is both tragedy and introspection, and it suffers for the loss of the latter element. 

Which brings this rambling to its thrilling conclusion, which is: Bird Box was alright, I guess. I'm watching the movie tonight. I expect to be entertained, but I don't expect to be thinking about it two years from now.

EDITING TO ADD that "mindless" horror is intentionally in quotes because I don't want to deride thrillers like that, and that "surface-level horror" is not a criticism but a term to describe the kinds of horror that exist just to slash, which is not to say they're LESSER OR BAD. Thanks/sorry

So the snippet of the opening cinematic for Kingdom Hearts III dropped today, along with the song "Face My Fears"! I woke up too late to catch the live release, but scrolling through Twitter after the fact is always fun. I've always found the consistency with which trailers & new information are released pretty tiring (especially as an occasional graphics-maker, where each new piece of footage triggers a race to see who can gif it the fastest), but at least release is only a little over a month away. Potential spoilers under the cut, so if you're trying to steer clear of anything to do with the game until January, go ahead and skip this one.

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