#do I dare venture out into the main tag to try and find artists

[sunn-mechanic]

Man the most interaction I've had with the Demon Slayer fandom was like, 3-5 years ago, before I had a Tumblr, mostly with YT animatics and ao3 (which was where I spent the most time with the community, writing my own fics and making friends with other authors).

So I don't actually have any clue what's currently happening in the fandom rn, especially here on Tumblr...

Maybe that's not a bad thing, to not be super involved with a fandom of a media you like, but I do kinda miss seeing fanart of it ngl. The animatics on YT have all kinda died out and I've seen all the older ones (which I cherish fondly).

Idk man...

[tlbodine]

Stories That Don’t Flinch: Let’s Talk About Hereditary

There’s a lot to be said about 2018′s Hereditary, the directorial debut of Ari Aster. We could talk about it’s oppressive atmosphere and slow-but-inevitable-crescendo pacing. We could talk about the unbearable tension built around a crumbling family. Or we could talk at length about its incredible amounts of meticulous foreshadowing and the tightness of its visual storytelling. 

But I want to talk about that scene. You know the one. 

Heavy spoilers underneath the cut. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, venture cautiously forward -- you might want to watch it spoiler-free so you can be shocked the way I was. Trigger warnings for child death. This is not a pleasant movie. 

Hereditary opens on a funeral, but its first on-screen death happens around the 35 minute mark, and nothing can really prepare you for it. 

Up to this point, you think you know where this movie is headed. We’re introduced to Annie, a mother who’s dealing with complicated grief after her own mother’s death. They didn’t have a good relationship, to say the least, and her own life has been marked by a series of tragedies tied to mental illness. We’re introduced to her daughter Charlie, an uncanny child whose hobbies include eating chocolate, drawing, and building creepy-ass effigies in her bedroom. 

We have every reason to believe that the primary conflict of the film will be centered on the difficult relationship between mother and daughter. Annie wasn’t close to her mother, but Charlie had a special bond with her grandmother. Charlie is despondent and weird and creepy. She does things like sneak out to sleep in her tree house, follow lights into the woods, and cut the head off a dead bird for her next art project. 

So around the half-hour mark, Charlie’s older brother Peter asks if he can go to a party. His mother, suspecting there might be drinking involved, tells him to take his little sister along -- a classic parenting move I think is probably familiar to most people. I know I spent a lot of time as a kid being the annoying tag-along sister chaperoning (and cock-blocking) my brothers and their friends. Highly relatable. 

Anyway - so Peter takes Charlie to the party and is trying to make the best of it (ie, not let his weird creepy kid sister completely ruin his chance at having fun) so he gently urges her to go eat a piece of cake and enjoy herself. Unbeknownst to both of them, the cake has walnuts in it -- and we’ve previously established that Charlie has a nut allergy. 

Not long later, Charlie finds Peter sequestered in an upstairs bedroom, taking a bong rip. She’s broken out into a rash and started to wheeze. 

Peter, being a dumb teenager, panics and bundles her up in the car to drive back to mom and dad -- a bad call, but again, utterly relatable. Who’s going to call an ambulance to a party full of underage drinking and weed? What teenage boy is going to remember to carry an epi-pen all the time for his kid sister? 

So he starts driving down the empty country road leading to their house. It’s dark, and he’s flooring the gas pedal. We see the speedometer top out at 90. Charlie is gasping and wheezing terribly in the back seat. She rolls down the window and leans out, trying to breathe better. Peter, obviously frightened, is trying to share his attention between her in the backseat and the road. 

There’s a dead deer lying in the middle of the road. 

He swerves to avoid it. There’s a telephone pole on the side of the road, the same side Charlie is hanging out of. 

We hear the impact, and we know. We know what happened. 

At that point watching this movie, I legitimately screamed, and that doesn’t happen often. Never in a million years would I have expected that. 

Kids in movies -- even horror movies -- tend to have plot armor. It’s pretty rare that the kid dies. It happens, of course (look at Pet Sematary), but it’s uncommon. 

And it’s rare in movies -- even horror movies -- for a death to be sudden and honest and brutal. Stories usually give you a place to hide, emotionally, when a character dies. Either the death is treated with some filter of sentimentality -- sad music and on-screen tears and a lingering camera view of fingers unfurling, or some such -- or the shlocky gore factor is played up, driving the death to the point of absurdity so that you can feel a little safer about watching it. 

It’s pretty rare for death in fiction to come suddenly and brutally and without any warning or safe space to hide, and for that death to be the death of a child -- shit. It was hardcore. It was viscerally uncomfortable to watch. We actually had to pause the movie to go outside for a minute and collect ourselves before going back into it. 

And not just because the death itself was so shocking and so awful, but because the film broke an unspoken contract: 

The kid isn’t supposed to die. We had every reason up to that point to believe that she was going to be the main character, or the antagonist. 

It’s a genuinely Hitchcockian twist, and watching it, I think I know how audiences must have felt the first time Psycho aired on theaters. That kind of contractual betrayal works on a meta-textual basis to deeply unsettle the audience. 

We’re barely 40 minutes into a 2-hour+ film at this point. Where the fuck can it go from here? 

Back on the screen -- Peter has stopped the car, and he is completely frozen with shock in the front seat. There is no more noise from the back seat. He doesn’t dare look. He knows. He knows what he’s going to see back there. And for a long, long time, he sits there frozen in complete shock and terror. 

And then he puts the car into gear and drives home. 

And pulls into the driveway and goes inside and climbs into his bed without ever looking in the back seat, without saying anything to anyone, without turning on a light or making a noise. He lays down in bed wide-eyed and completely numb and, some sleepless quantity of time later, hears the sounds of his parents moving around, and his mom heading down to the car, and then her screaming. 

I don’t know that I have ever felt more sorry for a fictional character in my life than I did for Peter at that moment. 

This poor kid -- this doe-eyed teenager, who made some bad calls, but can you blame him? None of this was his fault, not really. And now he’s going to live with this weight for the rest of his life. He is completely and utterly traumatized, and we know immediately that he’s not going to get any support in this -- not from his mother, who we can already see is both selfish and pathological in her own grief. 

As you might expect, things continue to get worse for him throughout the rest of the film. 

And just in case you thought the movie would be kind to you -- just in case you thought you still had somewhere safe to hide, in case you thought you could get away without confronting the whole situation (god help me) head-on...well. In the bright light of day, the family (and the camera) return to the scene to retrieve Charlie’s head, already teeming with ants. 

This movie does not pull any punches. Not a single one. 

I think there are a lot of useful things to learn from this particular film, from an artistic standpoint: 

You have an unspoken contract with the audience. There are certain expectations that people have based on genre conventions and cultural norms. You can break those to great effect -- but you have to be careful with it, because breaking those conventions is a betrayal of trust. You might lose audience members who are not willing to surrender their time and attention to a creator who betrays the contract. This is the kind of thing you can only manage to pull off once in a story, and you’ve got to make it count. 

Highly specific situations are often, paradoxically, more relatable than “universal” ones. Eschewing common tropes and expected, predictable creative choices can make a story feel more authentic and real. The situation of going to a party and having to drag your kid sister along is real. Panicking and running home to mom instead of calling an ambulance is real. Being in total shock after a terrible accident and not telling anyone about it is real. They’re things I don’t necessarily think I’ve seen play out very often in a story, but they’re things that are absolutely believable. Universal tropes are often based more on cultural norms of behavior than on actual individual experiences. Real life is usually messier and stranger and more messed up. Crib experiences from real life -- yours, your friends, your family, news stories -- to tell authentic and relatable stories. 

Decide whether you want to give the audience a place to hide. Sometimes horror movies are fun. Sometimes you want to create a scary environment that people can feel safe watching, like a haunted house. You give them places to hide and protect themselves emotionally -- you incorporate humor, you drive up the absurdity of the violence, you make all of the characters sort of caricature-esque. But sometimes you want to make a story that will actually genuinely horrify the audience -- even traumatize them. And you do that by refusing to flinch or look away or pull punches. You make them confront the terrible things directly and force them to process them on their own. 

Anyway. I’m not sure that Hereditary manages to live up to its first act. It’s a fine film, and it continues to be creepy and uncomfortable and genuinely horrifying throughout -- but that death scene is a tough act to follow, and I personally found its supernatural resolution to somewhat cheapen the events that preceded it. 

But that scene will stick with me forever. This film will haunt me. And for someone who consumes and creates as much horror media as I do, that is truly saying something.