October 16, 2024
It's spooky month okay
Personal update: I have employment again! Hurray!
Anyway, there are times when I have to sit down and wonder what I'll write about for a month. Not that I don't have ideas and topics, but sometimes you have to actually pick one and think about it and you know how it is. This isn't one of those months because this is October baby! Actually, my problem is finding the concentration to pick a topic and write something that works for me. I'll try.
Queer people loving Halloween is just very cliche'd now and that's fine. That's cool. Obviously not going to pretend like you need to give a shit about the season or any garbage like that. Actually, since I like the occult trappings so much I just made all of my characters pretty Halloween by default and it became a little less fun to imagine dressing them up. That's on me. I do like cartoon monsters, though. I like those a lot. Thus, I still get satisfaction from looking at spooky-themed art in October. I also like the Autumn and the chance to wear a nice coat outside more often. Getting to have a coat makes up a bit for it being too cold to wear shorts. I like buying some cheap candy and making bad decisions regarding its consumption.
At the specific moment I write this, though, I'm thinking about how many people I know who watch a bunch of horror movies around now and how little I like those. I think about this a lot, probably because I find them such fascinating cultural objects. I, too, have a fascination with the morbid, I suppose. I definitely remember all that stuff being way too scary for me as a kid, which kept me away. Now, I usually see the object for the construct it is, and none of it is scary, but that also means I usually get pretty bored with it.
Obviously there's a lot of horror for different people, and it's dead easy for me to dislike the stuff that just sucks because it's regressive without much thought. "Evil Insane Asylum" is not even shitty in an interesting way. Miss me on that. The thing is, I've been surrounded by horror fan friends for a long time and I simply don't get it! I don't think I relate to the fears, and I've never seen a horror work that I thought had interesting or relatable characters. Undoubtedly this is because I am very strange, but I guess it nags at me anyway. Lovecraft couldn't write for shit and most of the fears he is expressing are just the existence of foreigners, what's so compelling? I eventually watched John Carpenter's The Thing and it's an incredibly well made movie that was a delight to watch but I fundamentally want all 900 bearded white guys in the cast to die. I am on the side of the Thing here. The interesting part is the ending, existing alongside that being and knowing that it is what it is and there not being any stakes anymore. Also Wilford Brimley.
I guess I actually like slashers more. Just the campiest shit imaginable will always entertain me. Caught the original Friday the 13th on TV one time with an actual film degree haver who was like "I don't want to watch this it's shitty and hates women." And I'm like "Hell yeah it does." Funny as hell, it's a terrible thing all around but I understand it better. I'm interested in the mind of the individual who thinks its unironically good. I like it in a way that I don't enjoy any number of much, much, MUCH better works.
But then, not liking the genre means I haven't seen all that much of it, either, and I do usually find something to appreciate in them. When I got a chance to watch the original Nightmare on Elm Street, I was happy to discover that it's actually a movie about how suburban America creates its own monsters out of paranoid fear of the other, bringing torment on future generations. I think this idea probably gets super lost in the six trillion sequels but it's a good movie, I just don't really feel I need to watch it a second time.
Funny thing, though, and I feel like I unlocked some kind of knowledge from this: despite everything I've said, the recently-released UFO 50 has a horror game called Night Mansion and it is very freaky to me! It wasn't at first, either. Ironically, once I discovered that it was essentially a random jumpscare simulator it started making me anxious. I have enough problems with anxiety as it is, and the sensation isn't pleasant. I have a good idea how it works, and there's no real penalty for failure, it's there's just nothing difficult about any of it. However, the knowledge that a thing is going to eventually pop up is just killing me. Anticipation and uncertainty does this to me. I've unlocked the fear response again and I fuckin' hate it.
I'm just not sure if there's anything I can do with that information at this time. Maybe I'll figure it out.