#horror philosophy

[primprim]

so ur saying this *isn't* about me??????

[jaythelay]

The best horror is the kind that is equally humorous as it is horrific.

Kinda like being stalked and harassed with memes, good luck explaining that in court to a judge. A twinge of humor with purposeful horror forces an almost fight or flight response between laughter and terror.

It's a balance mind you. One more than the other and it turns mediocre. And no, I don't me comedy horror, I mean you witness something that's breaking social norms in humorous ways but it's by something legitimately so horrifying you're genuinely split between your online grown instinctual humor and an absolute nightmare.

Like finding out your friend was killed by 5 clowns, it's very real, and there's just a polaroid of a facebook post of your face on your friend's body saying "next"-

like you really gotta grapple with many moving parts of emotions at once there. Not Knowing even for a second can be super effective.

[palaeosinensis]

...I haven't given up yet. (In spite of the character's design this is indeed positive.)

[mycoffeisblue]

watched Dracula’s Ex-Girlfriend today. took approximately 6+ hours to made this piece and love the result

[woundposting]

wound, eroticism and subjectivity

the holy wound, attributed to jean le noir / the incredulity of saint thomas, guercino / the body of signification, elizabeth grosz (in: abjection, melancholia, and love: the works of julia kristeva) / hannibal nbc / the incredulity of saint thomas, caravaggio / saint catherine drinks the blood of christ, francesco vanni / the body of signification, elizabeth grosz / crash, david cronenberg / side wound of christ (england, 15th century) / the terror amc / the terror of pleasure: the contemporary horror film and postmodern theory, tania modleski (in: the horror reader)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Welcome to the Dungeons of Fear and Hunger.

[typhlonectes]

[wormpool]

I love The Substance's undying dedication to grossness as an aesthetic. It's not just that it's body horror, it's the kind of body horror that lingers on needles being pushed into skin and then supernaturally enhances the length of the needle and the scabbiness of the entry point just to milk your reaction. I love that that body horror exaggeration effect is present in mundane things too, like endless shrimp or a trashed apartment or old person skin. It's just part of the gaze that the movie forces you to take on, and I think it's both good at that aesthetic and smart with that aesthetic. It uses the emotional strength of that gut feeling to tug at your self hatred, or to make you hate the asshole TV producer, or even to simulate a bad relationship with food.

This is a harder point to articulate, but I feel like the substance understood something about what I like about horror movies: that there is this catharsis aspect to the grossness which you can only really properly reach the heights of by exaggerating it to the point of ridiculousness. I like the ending not just because it's crazy but because it knows what I'm looking for in crazy. It's a movie for people who love grossness and a movie that shows you how to love grossness.

[katabay]

”—ah. seems like mother goose has been playing around in your egg salad. if you won’t dance to that tune, I got others.”

honestly, the would you kindly scene is whatever to me*, code yellow is the more interesting violation/betrayal of the body because of how beautifully it escalates the Fontaine reveal/betrayal and shows how ugly some of those ‘locks and keys’ that Tenenbaum mentions are. not only have you been a tool in another man’s hand this entire time, it goes deeper. your body is not your own.

*there used to be a meandering thought here about the would you kindly scene, but it was really just talking around the fact that I spent way too many years seeing people discuss it in the most insufferable and reductive ways possible when it’s a combination of three or four other things that make that moment compelling lmao

collage credits: heart one/heart two

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app / tip jar!

[essektheylyss]

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)

[newwavesylviaplath]

[vaxolang]

" Shitty Philosophy "

Acrylic painting on Canvas.

Size 23 x 30 cm.

[whereserpentswalk]

People always say we're like ants to eldritch horrors. But that's weird to say because enough ants have killed people by working together. And the main thing we are to ants is just bigger. Are we smarter? We're also smarter then fish by any metric than we're smarter than ants. And sharks are deadly to us, not as much as you'd think but they can be, they kill us without wanting to, without malice, they just think we're other things that they want to eat, things that also aren't human, they only hurt us when they're wrong about us. When someone's attacked by a shark it's not like being attacked by a bear, it's somehow less than that, they know nothing. Sweet innocent angels of the the sea, they dont know what we are, they dont know why were here. We are incomprehensible to them. We operate on a timescale a sharks will never understand. We know things sharks will never know. And it won't protect us. Even though we kill more of them it can't protect the individual. Mabye that's what it would be like to kill an eldritch horror, to see a creature at the edge of the sea, that you could never truly understand, and strike it down mistaking it for a demon, thinking its humanity's cosmic prey, because you don't know what it is, because you can't know what it is. Even when it's just peacefully resting your heart knows there's something deeply disturbing and dangerous about it, and your heart is entirely wrong.

[the-great-bonkings]

THIS WILD RABBIT SAT THERE FOR 20 MINUTES AND LISTENED TO ME SPEAK ABOUT EVERYTHING AND NOTHING IN A LANGUAGE SHE DIDN'T UNDERSTAND TILL MY TRAIN ARRIVED IF SHE COULD UNDERSTAND OR REPLY SHE WOULD SPEAK OF GRASS AND FUR AND FEAR IN THE TONGUE OF ELAHREHRAH THE PRINCE OF A THOUSAND ENEMIES AND THE BLACK MAIDEN OF INLAY UNDER THE FRITH. HOW DO I SCREAM IN RABBIT I THINK I'VE REACHED THE NIRVANA OF THE TRUE RELIGION. SHE CAN'T REPLY BECAUSE HER KIND DON'T HAVE A LANGUAGE, BUT JUST THINK WHAT IF SHE'S WONDERED ABOUT SOMETHING MORE THAN EATING RUNNING AND REPRODUCING??!! WHAT IF SHE KNEW THERE WAS MORE, THAT YOU COULD SPEAK OF A STAMPING FOOT INSTEAD OF JUST DOING SO, AND SHE COULDN'T EVEN CONVEY THOSE THOUGHTS TO HER FELLOWS, IT WOULD BE HELL ITSELF. BUT THE KNOWING ITSELF WOULD BE MADNESS, FOR FROM FRITH'S VIEW, DOING SOMETHING OTHER THAN WHAT YOUR BODY TELLS YOU IS MADNESS, SO WHAT IF WE ARE THE MAD ONES AND THEY ARE SANE, WHAT DID I DO TO DESERVE BEING BORN TO COLOURED MADNESS AND SHE TO HELLISH SANITY?! HOW DO I SCREAM IN RABBIT???!!!!

[mycoffeisblue]

@theabigailthorn

[schizoid-hikikomori]

Body horror is such an intrinsic part of gothic horror and gothic literature.

Gothic stories tend to explore ideas of dark romanticism, art, humanity, sins and love. Often they are stories with a focus on the unpleasant past coming back to influence the present.

A tormented individual may have their torment manifest in the body, and gothic horror takes this to the extreme.

Self hatred, guilt, trauma, mental agony, it all may manifest in a form of body horror. To emphasize the way how violating it is to experience such dreadful things.

And themes of humanity, what it means to be human or a monster, whether we are far more monstrous than primitive creatures.

Who are people to judge the savagery of nature when they have committed far worse acts of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, rape, and genocide?

Body horror speaks to my existence in a world where I feel I do not belong.