#horror's greatest

[polkadotjohnson]

[bradassholemajors]

This is totally what happened with them in the movie, right?

[kelsh]

“You were a friend when we needed it, and we won’t forget that. Should you ever need it, you have family in Baldur’s Gate.” - Zevlor

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[riverphoenixsgothwife]

they should put this at the beginning of scream (1996)

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Vincent Price and Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In (1971)

[mourningsbane]

oh, god. did tanglefern try to do a sort of c-section on honeyspring when things went south? that slit on their belly looks a lot like a classical incision to me, and tanglefern's greatest mistake...this might be completely wrong so feel free to disregard!! obsessed with this blog right now, honeyspring what happened to you....

She was just so sick, and it was all so sudden. What else was there to be done? Nobody knows what struck Honeyspring ill so swiftly or with such brutal lethality, not even Tanglefern (but he is also a liar).

Desecration;

He wedged the cutter just under the skin, and pried the walls of her womb apart, glistening with watery wetness and slick with blood. Fluids sunk into the dirt flooring of the medicine den, reeking of disease, but Tanglefern pushed forward. He was not gentle, but he did not have to be. They knew that when she took that last heaving breath not even an hour ago, she was gone.

There was no patient to be gentle for, just a cooling corpse.

And so he ripped and tore until he could wrap his mouth around each little neck, a total of three. When he felt no more of the doomed litter, he stopped and took the time to finally glance at the little bodies sitting at his paws, sticky like honey.

He looked, and saw with rising despair, that they didn't look like kits at all. He could hear the rain pounding outside through the ringing in his ears, a thundering roar.

As he stared at those things that were not quite kits, those vague lumps of wet fur and teeth, Flaildrizzle wailed. Distantly, some raw part of him, carved open like the body before him, realizes it was all for nothing.

[timsutton]

Do you have any good horror movie recommendations????

ANGUISH (1987)

[ooklet]

been that kind of month yknow

[marciliedonato]

Laios watching his sister turn into a dragon/chicken like hybrid monster:

[theunmarkedtombstone]

#same.

— Willard (2003)

[polkadotjohnson]

Horror's Greatest - Film Scores (2025)

[bradassholemajors]

[gaywineauntsstuff]

I love Jason and dick being drinking buddies who love shit talking the rest of family but also

Sometimes

When I’m craving peak

I remember that their relationship is low key messyyyy

I mean from Jason’s side Dick is the ideal son who Bruce loves, Jason saw Bruce’s absolute grief when bludhaven was nuked as red hood. As Robin he was constantly and unfairly compared to Dick Grayson bc while Jason was great. He had a normal but sad ass life while being naturally gifted and brilliant, dick was training before he could crawl, Dick had never learned to stay still while also being naturally grifted and brilliant. Jason couldn’t do the things Dick could do at 12 bc dick had been training for 11 years by that point but neither he nor Bruce really gave himself that grace. Dick is proof of the concept of child heroes, while he is kinda like proof that children really shouldn’t be on the field. Dick became this well respected, important person. He got to grow from Robin whereas Jason is still burdened by his time in the pixie boots.

And from Dicks side? Dick got out, he LEFT Bruce’s shadow and when Bruce gave his mantle to some kid? He was nice about it! I mean he was too busy with his amazing girlfriend and his team to really become hung up on it! He gave the kid his number and his OG Robin suit and goes maybe we can form a relationship. And then the kid dies and Dick is destroyed, not only did his kid brother die, his kid brother DIED in HIS legacy. And the Jason comes back. Steals his suit, and begins killing people. Nearly gets Dick killed by the cops and spends so long trying to ruin Dicks solid reputation. Not only that? But in the suit father preformed in? With the name Clark Kent gave him??? One of the men he respects most in the world? WHICH he proceeds to do again?? With their Dead Dads costume? After all the SHIT he spewed about no one giving a damn about his death. About how Bruce and his crusade killed a child. And he goes and not only hurts Tim, the brother Dick worked SO hard to build a relationship with bc the last time he got out a Kid died. But also Damian, a literal 10 year old. Dick sends him to Arkham bc when he got sent to regular prison he killed hundreds of people? And sure now?? Jason’s working with the family sometimes? But if it was just a difference in morals Dick wouldn’t have that much of an issue? He’s friends with people who have differing moral codes! Hell he’s DATED people with different moral codes. But? Jason made their beef personal and now Dicks stuck with the knowledge that his younger brother DID a lot of that to HURT him specifically. Bruce was dead for a portion of this? Did that stop Jason from trying to ruin everything dicks ever believed in? Nope.

Like Dick has to exist knowing that he loves his brother and his brother very well could and would do what he did to him again.

[vaguely-concerned]

you ever think about how the horrific thing dorian almost had done to him... is exactly the thing iron bull went to the reeducators to beg them to do to him. yeah. me either. for ten years straight now. what the fuck. wanna be my narrative foil dude. we could fuck about it if you're game and single

[lucidwindz]

tbh i straight up lost it yesterday night and drew the last drifting stars post right after puking these Billford sketches help

hiding some body horror under the keep reading oh yeaaa