#horror culture

[anthropologist-on-the-loose]

I'm as grateful for cellphones as the next person, but sometimes I think about how everyone having a phone on them at all times really did cause us to loose some things as a society. I mean - for example, kids these days will never experience their car breaking down and needing to find the nearest place with a phone they can use. They're never going to have the opportunity to tentatively approach a house only to discover that it's full of queer people having a party hosted by a transvestite to celebrate his creation of a sex homunculus, stay the night, and loose their virginity while unintentionally partaking in cannibalism. It's tragic, that kind of gay sexual awakening just doesn't happen these days because of cellphones.

[diaryofaphilosopher]

"The shift from the Afro-Caribbean zombie to the U.S. zombie is clear: in Caribbean folklore, people are scared of becoming zombies, whereas in U.S. narratives people are scared of zombies. This shift is significant because it maps the movement from the zombie as victim (Caribbean) to the zombie as an aggressive and terrifying monster who consumes human flesh (U.S.). In Haitian folklore, for instance, zombies do not physically threaten people; rather, the threat comes from the voduon practice whereby the sorcerer (master) subjugates the individual by robbing the victim of free will, language and cognition. The zombie is enslaved."

— Justin D. Edwards, "Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas" in Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture.

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[exilley]

I do sort of wish western anime fans would analyze anime and manga from a framework of japanese historical and cultural context. Specifically a lot of works from the 90s being influenced by the general aimlessness and ennui that a lot of people were experiencing due to the burst in the bubble economy and the national trauma caused by the sarin terrorist attack. I think in interacting with media that’s not local to our sociocultural/sociopolitical sphere it’s easy to forget that it’s influenced and shaped by the same kinds of factors that influence media within our own cultural dome and there ends up being this baseline misalignment of perception between the causative elements of a narrative and viewer interpretation of those elements. It’s a form of death of the author that i think, in some measure, hinders our ability to fully understand/come to terms with creator intent and the full scope of a work’s merits

[melomancy]

Kate Bush as the Sound Monster in Experiment IV (1986)

[itshouseofwarpeddesire]

#ghost

[owlstar97]

When you were a kid - how did you picture the boogeyman?

HERE’S MINE !

1. (r/CreepyArt) 2. (IrenHorrors)

[guardcanine]

[carbonatedeverclear]

purity culture ruins people’s ability to engage with works that deal with serious issues and it’s disheartening to see people entirely miss the point of a work because they are guided by a knee jerk reaction towards disgust and I need to ramble

so, I’m reading a book called Jawbone by Monica Ojeda and it’s a very interesting horror novel that centers around puberty and teen girls and their relationships to their mothers. One of the bigger themes in the book is the idea of shame revolving around sexual development. One of the main characters is a young lesbian who is developing feelings for her best friend and has a mother who is incredibly homophobic and disapproving and in part of the book there’s a scene where this character talks about her mother catching her masturbating and the way that she is disgusted by her daughter and kind of this horror around being viewed as having lost your innocence from experiencing something that is common and should be mundane. sexual development is seen as a horrific and sinful action and that causes this character trauma through the rest of the book surrounding the way that her mother looks at her and how her mother is going to react when she finds out that she’s gay it’s a book that deals with a lot of topics around sexual shame. For example, another character is so terrified of the sin of masturbation that she keeps herself from masturbating by imagining being raped by men in her family who she cares about because it disgusts her and keeps her from achieving sexual arousal. the book itself shows that the action of the character masturbating when she’s six years old is an innocent action. It’s one that comes from curiousity and just what happens when you have a body. The book is very clear that the act is being sexualized by the adults around her and their reactions feel violating.

So it is infuriating to then go from reading this book to trying to read reviews of this book and finding that the first review on Goodreads is a one star review that just says “in this book a six-year-old masturbates 🤮” participating in the same disgust with the natural sexual development of young girls that the book itself tries to depict as a horrifying and violating way to view children and puberty 

[bebs-art-gallery]

Art by Inferior Amphibian

[cthulhu-nymphos]

Die-cut cover art for My Sweet Audrina by V.C. Andrews

[devilsskettle]

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) / Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

[popculturebaby]

Perfect Blue (1997)

[tearosecafe]

Two sentence horror story (warning very scary 😰😱😨)

"I have a new hyperfixation!" I said happily.

(Three days later) sigh…pk;m new

[itshouseofwarpeddesire]

#frankenstein

[muffinlance]

I'm barely to the massacre and I can already tell I'm going to be screaming at every this-makes-no-sense decision made by the writers (your temple is under violent attack, and you evacuate the kids... to a barely enclosed corner in a prominent temple room? Instead of to the hundreds of sky bison that were highlighted as flying in earlier? Why?) (And Aang left to clear his head and think instead of to run from his duties? That's such a less compelling plot arc?) (And the show had him briefly monologue about being a goofy kid who loves pies and his friends instead of using the extended temple scene to show any of that? Didn't want to pay more child actors, did you, Netflix?)

Yeah I'm just. Going to be screaming at the screen instead of enjoying this. Different decisions aren't necessarily bad, but when those decisions seem to be in the direction of "show a man burning alive before we even get to the on-screen massacre" this is just... not the show for me.

[guardcanine]

(found on Pinterest)