#you know what? the writing ISN'T that fucking awful. its not perfect because no movie is ever fucking perfect and sometimes you

[bl00dh0rs3]

God. God. God. Holy fucking shit i love Avatar so fucking much

[machinesonix]

Hello Tumblr, it's been a while. Once again I find the specters of literary analysis haunting my blood screaming for release, and you are my favorite void in which to scream. Today we're taking a departure from Dune to talk about some thoughts regarding the horror genre and why I think It really knocks it out of the park.

Famous racist H.P. Lovecraft in his essay Supernatural horror in fiction asserts that the earliest human emotion is fear and the oldest fear is that of the unknown.

I largely agree with what Lovecraft is getting at here that the unknown is the key to eliciting a feeling of fear, even if the primacy of an emotion having to do with age feels weird. Please, Tumblr, understand that I do not share his opinions regarding the Chinese, but the guy was among the first to pick apart the horror genre to find out what made it tick.

Lovecraft's expression of fear of the unknown is decidedly dated, even aside from the bigotry. His writing is famously full of 'Dear reader I dare not describe what I beheld' sort of stuff. It's even more diminished in the public eye by the fact anyone with internet access has a very clear image of Cthulhu as being like a squid dragon as depicted in the sculptures in its eponymous story despite once they actually find the thing and run a boat into it it's like some geometry violating cloud thing.

The thing I do appreciate about Lovecraft is that he's never actually under any compunction to explain anything. Polaris starts with the line 'I am a scholar of the Pnakotic Manuscripts' and that's all we really get. There's an economy of words here in letting us know the narrator is an academic and the subject of his studies is something with an unholy assembly of consonants suggesting it is very strange. In Call of Cthulhu everything we know about the cult and its intentions is communicated by the phenomenally unreliable character of Cesar, who shines a light on the global scale of the operation, fleshing out the worldbuilding while only leaving us with more questions.

Now I'm not breaking any new ground by singing the praises of Stephen King. Dude's far from perfect, and his idiosyncratic style makes all sorts of people just bounce right off, but I think It is probably the best example in the public eye of this 'fear of the unknown' thing in practice. See, for King 'nightmare' is not just a word you use to describe a scary situation. In a nightmare, you feel like there's some hidden logic to the world you can't quite understand. There's a terrible sense of foreboding that preceeds the terror because our brains are familiar with that script. Even if something isn't implicitly awful, there is a pervasive wrongness that our subconscious latches onto.

So lemme just take a second to underline the fact that a clown in a sewer is really fucking bizarre. Like yeah, we're 40 years out from the Tim Curry movie and it's ingrained into the public concious, but please do your best to imagine your response to a sewer clown in an Itless universe. It is important to dispell the whole 'Oh yeah, that old chestnut, the sewer clown' to establish how totally surreal this famous scene actually is.

The thing I think is the real masterstroke is the line 'We all float down here. You'll float too!' Nowhere in the book do we have any inclination of what the fuck that means. There is a threat implicit to it; whatever future Pennywise has planned is not gonna be good, but it's not like there's anything implicitly wrong with floating. The story prominently involves a toy boat, several sinister balloons, a semi-aquatic clown monster, and moments of disconnectedness from reality. If you're a ginormous nerd, you'll know that in the Stephen King Multiverse, the nightmare that manifests as Pennywise is trapped between realities, 'floating' in a gloaming space. There are many floating things, but there's no real explanation. Rather than being point blank 'The thing is impossible' like Lovecraft does, we're given a box of puzzle pieces that seem like they make a complete picture and the slowly dawning realization none of them actually fit together.