This ties into why I personally find cosmic/eldritch horror so cathartic. It says to me "this world is full of powers that are beyond your control and care nothing for you, that will crush you underfoot with neither malice or remorse, *and you have every right to be afraid of that."* My personal outlet is a game called Dredge, which is full of horrors that cannot be beaten... only tiptoed around.
Fun fact, father of cosmic horror, HP Lovecraft, based most of his stories on him just being scared of not understanding things And also, one of his stories, "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (a story of a man returning to his home village only to find out that people there are some kind of fish monsters who worship a satan under lake) was created after he discovered that he is in like, 5% Welsh, which caused him to have mental breakdown because he wasn't 100% white
Dredge is a weirdly relaxing game for me. Like, sure, it's absolutely packed to the gills with eldritch fish monsters, but also, like, most of them can't really hurt you? And the ones that can stick to their own section of the map, and follow simple rules. So it's just like, "Oh, yeah, that's just The Serpent. Don't go into the canyons unless you're prepared to have to bolt out of there at a moment's notice! No biggie!" Like, I _wish_ all the day-to-day anxieties were as simple to understand and deal with as facing the horrors from beyond human ken are in that game.
@@rekaraker Yeah that is the other great thing about it. It's both soothing and beautiful and also full of The Horrors. I like to say they may not be your friends but they'll certainly become your neighbors. Though I still get got by Chester (the serpent) if I get cocky.
It also has many fishies to collect and fill the encyclopedia (the enfishopedia, you could say), which not only gives you a simple task that feels relaxing but that also has enough challenge to not feel mind numbing, but also makes the strange horror fish feel familiar after a while. "Oh yeah, this is a Void Carp, looks a little weird but they're harmless, also fetch a good price"
@@piotrwisniewski70 Given the pedigree of his usual protagonists, I kind of wondered about that last one. Turns out it was _exactly_ what I suspected. 😂
I think cosmic horror is still plenty common, just in its true form of "things beyond our power and understanding", not "giant tentacle thing from space". Stuff like the backrooms reflects our life in systems far larger and more powerful than us, that we have zero control over whatsoever. We cannot fight the thing, we cannot flee from the thing, it doesn't even want to kill us, so there's no escape there either. We just... exist in it, in a perpetual state of fear and confusion.
i, like the OP, *also* do not like horror or movies, but i do share the common fears discussed-especially since i’m autistic, so “performing correctly” is something i can’t unconsciously do
Same. You know, in a way panopticonsequence horror is validating, in that sense. There’s rules they *must* follow, that do not come naturally to them, must be learned, and take exhaustive effort to perform. That’s just existence as an autistic person. It’s an allistic person being put into the shoes of an autistic person’s daily life, and confirming “This is hell”
That’s a really interesting connection! I also have ASD, and I agree. There’s lots of other things that make me different from the majority. It feels kind of scary living in a prodominantly neurotypical/cishet society, because it feels like my every move is being watched by people who will call me “wrong” because they don’t understand. I think it’s interesting to see how specific experiences can translate into the same sort of things that the average person might also understand one way or another. Like you and OP, I don’t like horror or movies much, but I think that horror is really interesting when you look at the layers of it in relation to everyday life in our society.
Personally I also think that a lot of the horror of having to look at something is a fear of having to keep constant awareness. We _have_ to keep constant focus at all times, and it's tiring, anxiety inducing, prays on our fear that the exact _moment_ we take a break to not pay attention to the world around us. We're dead. It's a fear representative of news, and culture, and media. The exhaustion from constantly trying to view the world around us to keep ahead of anything. It honestly could be scary if presented in the right way.
I'd also like to add that this goes both ways too. The idea of perceiving something and having that kill you is scary cause just like, humans nowadays have such an intense want and need to keep up with everything that to not be knowledgeable of something for long periods of time is terrifying. Just imagine the feeling of so desperately wanting to think of something, to learn what something is, yet knowing that dwelling on it is your doom. A lot of this stuff kinda reflects fear of the news, media, horrifying events. Stuff we'd rather not see but that we'd also rather be informed of. And stuff like that has been prevalent for years now.
How do you (plural) incorporate Weeping Angel's? These are recurring antagonists in the Doctor Who television show, with the feature that they only move if they are unobserved. Fixed, direct attention is needed to keep them at bay. Monitoring devices are ineffective, as an image of a Weeping Angel IS a Weeping Angel.
@@permberd4185 It also reflects on the idea of very powerful people wanting to have their dirty laundry hidden, and finding out about it is a good way to end up dead (I mean, the journalist who discovered that basically all the world's billionaires are all cooperating on schemes to avoid paying taxes and maximise profit had her findings not go anywhere at all in the media, only to be murdered).
@@DeathnoteBB I understand them to be talking about the need to avoid looking at something to ensure safety, while my example was about the need to keep looking. Did I misunderstand?
Interestingly enough, the sexification of vampires happened around the same time that embalming rose in popularity--the beautiful undeath mirroring the beautiful dead. Fear of the vampire has some sex-related cultural stuff, to be sure, but it also reflects our fears surrounding dead bodies.
"Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do." Is simultaneously a spontaneous demonstration of intellectual humility and the precise reason why I love tumblr!
I think that one thing that often gets overlooked in film analysis, as someone who's done it academically, is that it's never *just* one thing. Aliens for example; Can be a metaphor for Communist Spies, for nuclear annihilation, and all the other 50s stuff. They can also be Terrorists, Nature Itself, Colonialism/Imperialism (as was the original point of the War of the Worlds). Vampires can be sexy vampires, or gay vampires... Or the Wealthy Elite draining the lifeblood of the oppressed working class (but more literally) For this modern era, look a little deeper: A Quiet Place. The Monster kills you if you make a sound... *unless* you make the right sound, then it becomes the monster's only weakness. Fear makes you want to stay silent, but if you stay silent you will never actually defeat the horrors and nothing will change. Nope is a movie about a monster that will kill you if you look directly at it; and the entire movie is about trying to look at it anyways to prove to the world that it exists. It is a thing society refuses to see but which a black family must capture anyways, must prove to the wider world which does not believe them that it exists... It's a movie about surveillance, but, it's *also* about racism. Imagine the UFO is a cop; killing people without any way to stop it... until it is exposed And so on
I think NOPE more-so represents humanity's undying want for something cool to look at. The movie is about a brother and sister risking their and others' lives just to record an incredibly reclusive and dangerous animal. Jupe (one of the characters in the movie) makes a show of feeding horses to the UFO to the public because he falsely believes that he's formed a bond with it. Another character, this time an old cameraman, decides to help film the creature and he loses his life trying to film it while it's in the process of eating him. The main themes of the movie is "we will pack bond with anything, even if the thing we pack bonded with would kill us." and "we will do anything for spectacle, even if it means exploiting animals or our own deaths."
@@jacobcox4565 Yet another correct and valid interpretation; that's my point It's never just one (or two) things. Any good movie is gonna have multiple layers to pick at; multiple readings to take
I watched Don't Look Up. And it's less about the disaster, like 2012 was, but more about the lack of action, the PR madness, the control of what was being said about the whole thing, the politics, all of that flying on the face of common sense, to the point of being basically comedy because of how over the top it seemed, that if you told me it was a TomSka video I wouldn't have questioned it. It was a very obvious and direct allegory to the Covid 19 pandemic, I think we all got that one, it even came out during the last third of the whole mess, and if it wasn't on prupose it sure had a perfect timing.
Makes sense, since movies take a long time to make and the script was probably finished before the pandemic even started. It's just that a much more pressing example of the same phenomenon ended up happening before it released.
This reminds me of a short story I read recently which was obviously based on "The Color out of Space". It's called "The Color of Itself" and it isn't very long. The reason I brought it up is that the horror came from the consequences of seeing the color rather than the color's effects on the environment specifically (in contrast to the original story). The conceit was that if you looked at the color, it would turn the data from all of your sensations into visual data, force you to see all your thoughts instead of thinking them, and basically hold your ability to distinguish between all of your sense data hostage unless you spread the color all around.
@@CarnivalClowm I guess if you got that from the story, that would be pretty interesting. I personally don't know how to describe it, though I feel like it's more similar to a pig-butchering scam where you participate by looking at the color, except you're being blackmailed by not being able to experience the world properly and the goal is to get other people to participate in the scam instead of spending money. So I guess like a combination of being enthralled, participating in a pig-butchering scam, and participating in an MLM.
This reminds me of a recent video by Tale Foundry, where they discussed how several pieces of horror these days intentionally look out of date. Think Analogue horror, pixel graphics horror games, or even aspects of FNAF. The idea they proposed was that they are tapping into a fear generated by how many sequels, reboots, remakes, and the like are being made. The idea that we are getting so sucked into nostalgia and focus on what's come before that we eschew new stories and ideas. That our culture is growing stagnant, and that we are clinging to the past rather than developing an identity of the now. Of course, sometimes it's purely because the creator is working with a budget and finding ways to make that help their project rather than hinder it.
I'd say it reflects the increasing accessibility to both information and capacity to spread it creates an echo chamber with lots of meaningless or harmful information thrown around instead of advancing society. A lot of the stories also involve technology going awry and/or misused.
I think big part of why analogue horror exists is because deliberate archaic style serves the same purpose as darkness in most horror movies - old style video footage keeps the viewer from being able to see the monster clearly. What is hiding in the dark? What is hiding behind that old video distortion? The whole genre also has a heavy basis in Found Footage - in fact you could view the Blaire Witch Project as a precursor to Analogue Horror. Most of the AH series I know about (I watch Wendigoon and occasionally NightMind, and The Exploring Series for SCP) are very much "A collection of old and/or amateur media that tells a story" - very found footage.
Okay, but turning to the past isn't something to be immediately afraid of, it's happened loads of times in history already, one example I have would be Weimar Classicism which drew inspiration from Antiquity from Greece. Of course, always also because people wanted aspects of the time period they were adapting for their own lives. And then there were and will always be people again who don't like that paticular direction anymore and who will do something else to contrast that "old, wrong view" on life. I think. Yah 👍
Itll be interesting to see how other genres also react to this. The horror made surveillance into the monster. Maybe superhero movies will make sticking to your guns despite surveillance some kind of heroic “rage against the machine” trope
The second Captain America film spoke to it, a bit, with the big bad being the panopticon being used to target potential dissidents by fascist elements within the government. Notable then, though probably more about Bush-era civil liberty violations (which have never been rolled back) and particularly salient now.
The discovery that muscles of an animal corpse can be triggered by electricity clashed with the usual belief of what is defined as life at that time era, hence by imagining the science of unknown fields it was also interpreting the horror of the unknown territories.
I would like to add that other than the surveillance, it is also about control. All of those movies have been made in the western world, mostly America, and while many western countries are still relatively free and have stable democracy, the anxiety of losing this democracy and those freedom getting violated is absolutely understandable at the moment. I can imagine how that anxiety is getting into people, who fell that horrbile things beyond their control are happening and the only way to avoid them is to look away (turn of the radio, tv, your social media) and focus on what little you can control instead
Many western companies still have a stable democracy, yes. I wouldn't count America as one of those anymore. We still have something resembling democracy, but whether we still will in 4 years is anyone's guess. (I don't need to tell y'all to vote if you can legally do so)
Recurring theme that has several names I come across on my internet travels: Panopticoncequence horror mimetic hazard cognito hazard mind trap The Game
Memetic hazards are particularly compelling for me. I believe in the fact that any issue can be overcome if you know how and you have the resources, and memetic hazards specifically forbid you from knowing how.
I mean yes, that's how art works, it is by definition the expression of people's feelings, with certain art works becoming so good at displaying a popular feeling within the culture that it becomes symbolic of said culture.
I maintain that things that were scary back in the day can still be scary today. Vampires might've become popular as a horror idea in Victorian times for instance, but I'd definitely not want to meet one nowadays ^^;
The thing is, what was scary about them then is probably not what's scary about them now. In the case of things like vampires, you probably picture them using a much different approach when they're being scary than the Victorians did. Lasting horror is lasting because it's scary on multiple levels, so when culture changes, the fear due to one factor can be replaced with a different fear from a different factor.
TBF, it depends on the flavor of vampires nowadays. I wouldn't want to meet the "undead horror disguised as a human that will kill you without remorse" vampire, but the "immortal, superhumanly beautiful, will leave you with a major hickey" vampire doesn't sound that bad.
I really don't like the Bram Stoker-type vampire because they're way worse at what they're trying to do that the original vampire folklore would have been. If they're supposed to represent powerful aristocrats, then them being suave ladykillers is a lot less accurate than them being bloated hideous predators that we should seal away.
That's because the question isn't "what is scary?" The difference is that for the average person anything that poses a serious threat is scary - vampires, killer dolls, heights, your house burning down, etc... As long as it ticks the box of "universal fear" it doesn't really say anything about you as a person, you have to get into irrational fears to learn something about the person you're dealing with (and even then it often doesn't say much because it's either from a bad experience or neurological wires being crossed in a funky way) The part that actually expresses something about you as a person is *making up* something scary, "if your goal was to invoke fear, which specific concepts would you use?" Would your mind default to an impersonal eldritch horror that crushes you without realising, or an obsessive stalker? Something that kills you in the goriest way possible, or something more psychological? All of these also tick off the universal box of "it kills you", but they also have secondary motives that you're subconsciously picking from, and *that* is the interesting part. Of course, there's always more to it, s an author you wanna make something original and/or you're trying to convey a message that certain stuff might be more suited to convey. But that's why we try to look at general trends during literary analysis rather than specific works
as someone who loves horror (especially psychological horror, it's one of my favorite genres), I think that this is actually a pretty good dissection of this particular style of psychological horror. bird box also falls under "do not look at it or it will Get You" but my point still stands. also Panopticoncequence Horror is a badass name for this genre and I will be using it from now on.
Of course horror stories reflect the actual fears and anxieties of their time and place. All literature and art are influenced by the social and cultural context in which they are created. It's unavoidable
Come to think of it, the whole deal of "Perform correctly or it will get you" has been explored as early as 1962, by Madeleine L'Engle in her novel "A Wrinkle in Time", with the planet of Camazotz. There, everyone has to act a specific way at any given time, such as bouncing a ball in perfect sync with every other boy in town, or throwing a newspaper at a perfect angle every time with no deviation, or you will be punished by IT (quite literally, perform correctly or IT will get you.).
Funny, my dad's a devout christian and he loves eldeitch horror the most. While I feel comforted by immediate threat horrors- torture, a demon running after you, cannibalism- where there is no escape unless you have plot armor, you know you are being surveilled and know you're going to be killed and/or maimed. *There Is No Escape* Also plays into "surveillance state," I think
I am also a devout Christian who loves eldritch horror- and the flip side, eldritch bliss! To me the connection is the affirmation that there is so much more to the universe than humans can know or understand, including great dangers.
The idea of eldritch horror is that there's this thing that you can't fully understand and you're at it's mercy (anything from Lovecraft's mythos to The Backrooms qualify.) God is literally something you cannot fully understand and is all-powerful, yet all-loving. So it totally makes sense why Christians would be drawn to it- it's basically a story where things are inverted and the incomprehensible thing is scary instead.
The fact this uploaded right after me and my boyfriend watched Grave of Fireflies for the first time blind by just a few hours ago kinda sent shivers down my spine. Or maybe its just the spooky season, doing its seasoning. The...human apathy part tears me apart, i just cannot see a person with apathy and say "thats a human", to me, thats an incomprehensible nightmare i just want to yeet off into the sun. Just me feeling like it? idk im going to sleep
I think part of the reason that fear of the unknown is so much less of a source of horror is that there's so much KNOWN horror we see on social media that the unknown is less scary in comparison
There's also been more of a surge of Impostor horror, especially in the indie horror scene of things like the Mandela Catalog, arguably Marvel's Secret Wars plays into this despite not being horror, and stuff in the uncanny valley where it looks like a human but off. Sometimes it's wildly off with crazy or strange proportions that make it seem surface level scary but sometimes its more deeply terrifying because it's accurate. There may be a slight mistake, a slight hint, but on a surface level they may be indistinguishable from your loved ones and you don't know who you can trust. And all of this around the time of the rise of generative AI.... hmm....
The impersonation and fraud fears have risen gradually with time with the increasing threat of phishing and like scams, too. And I'd point to, for impostor horror, Among Us.
In a good way, this makes me sad because you’re incredibly right. What matters is not that the monster acts and looks and feels exactly like my loved one, it’s that it’s NOT TRULY THEM and has nothing human inside. It’s a machine; it feels nothing and has no love or care inherent in it… but it’s just like my loved one. It’s the same reason AI art is wrong. It isn’t because it looks wrong or could mess up, it’s because it STEALS from real artists; it takes their work and cuts and pastes it and calls it its own when it’s NOT, and doing so is the most machine-like thing it possibly could do. Art being made by an actual human and having love and care poured into it is what makes it art; it’s not the final product. And, it’s the same thing with character ai. I hate it with a passion. It’s not real. It sucks away your creativity-if you NEED it to be creative in the first place, you can’t do something a two year old can do. That aside, people are lonelier than ever, and the solution to it is not to talk to a machine. It’s to go outside (or online), put yourself out there, and try your best to make some friends. I myself am terrified that things are gonna go wrong and people won’t like me, but that’s life. Things aren’t always gonna be good. Things won’t always be bad. There’s always gonna be someone out there who’ll love you and like you for who you are. But an AI can’t love you. An AI can’t create. It just acts as if it can.
@@inkterstellar I like you, new stranger-friend! If nothing else, inkterstellar is a pretty swanky pun for a username, and you seem vehemently principled!
@inkterstellar Yeah, I've used character AI and honestly it's so much *better* to just write if you have an idea, it's so janky and unfun to use most of the time, I come back to it and am frequently disappointed. It's really accentuated when I make my own characters or try to do anything for longer than a few seconds, it can't remember, it doesn't know what the character would say, it just makes a thin veil of illusion that it *is* that character and I have to end up painstakingly guide it so much that it takes longer than if I had just written a story and using it only further reinforces how much I'd prefer to be role-playing with my actual buddies with our fun little characters and having a good time. I honestly can't understand how people sit and use it for so long and have a good time, I'm usually just left dissatisfied
One of my favourite science-fiction movies is "The Day the Earth Stood Still." And one of the things I love to tell people is that _it was probably a _*_scary_*_ movie at the time it was released._ I'm over here going "guy acts with respect, understanding, and reason at every opportunity. He's performing a morally but not strictly necessary mission. He's the hero, I wanna be his friend." People at the time it was released (presumably) : "He's a *foreigner.* He has immense power that can threaten the whole world at once. And he _looks just like us._ I'm glad he's polite, but this man is terrifying!" I guess you could say that one person's horror is another person's heaven. Just a matter of era and the flavour of their strife.
An interesting effect of a large part of the more modern ones is that they are barely things that can be survived, wheras things like vampires have ways humans can conquer them. Today though, your best bet is to hope and pray you can't be noticed, and the survival tips is just 'here is the thing that draws attention, dont do it"
I think the SCP foundation helped popularize this genre of horror. Not just in terms of a shadowy organization that keeps watch over everything to protect us from incomprehensible menaces and is in some ways almost as bad as the horrors it contains, but also because many of said horrors have to do with perception. Any given "cognitohazard" (does a Bad Thing to you if you perceive it) like the infamous Shy Guy is an example, but also the very first SCP (which in turn is basically a Doctor Who weeping angel) has to be under constant direct surveillance. And then there's SCP-2884 ("One Nation Under CCTV"), which is very overtly about surveillance states.
...It's almost unsurprising that people would be afraid of being surveilled nowadays, with all the omnipresent spyware. Almost, because I never thought it could be perceived as something fearful, not reasonably. Though perhaps I should've; if this keeps up, privacy will eventually become a luxury, or worse, a crime.
we should also point out that this is why a lot of horror movie killers are mentally disabled people, queer people, black people, ect. ect. it does reflect fears and anxieties, but they’re not all good. Lovecraft wrote about cosmic horror, about powers beyond your control destroying the very fabric of the world you know. leaving you helpless against the destruction of your home. but that was because he was afraid of more poc moving into his city and feared anything vaguely science related. i agree with the things said in the post/video, i just wanted to add something :3 shoutout to the three people that read this XD
There’s been a bit of a shift in film recently where black/POC people or LGBTQIA people are protagonists or at least more sympathetic. Not a big shift (especially for LGBTQIA), but it’s there. Nothing for mentally ill people, though. They’re still playing villains. Ah, well. Guess that’s what books are for. Better rep there.
@neccturtle Lovecraft was very likely suffering from a number of neurological disorders, which is why even for his time he was quite xenophobic and incredibly paranoid. It's interesting how that shows up in his writing, given he made an entire pantheon of incomprehensible beings. @animeotaku307 I wouldn't say it's not a big shift for the LGBTQ community. And as for mental illnesses, while someone being a monster just because they have a mental condition is an excuse for lazy writing, it still does make sense for certain antagonists to be a certain way. If the villain sees everyone else, even his supposed friends, as inferior to him and disposable, then it might makes sense for them to be a sociopath. It should be a show, not tell thing though- Show that the villain isn't the most mentally okay, but don't go out and say "yeah, he's schizophrenic."
@willowarkan2263 To be fair, Bentham came up with the theory of the panopticon in the late 1700s and had been referenced in a bunch of "Big Brother"y literature (including Georgy-boy himself), so that hashtag wasn't *_necessarily_* a Rusty Quill reference; but either way one of my nerd-faces (fandom or philosophy) is squeeing. ;^)
I had a course in college that went over how films are a reflection of society and for our sci-fi/horror combo unit we looked at how the analogies these life-ending terrors stood for changed over time. Even watching remakes made in the early 2000s vs their original counterparts from as early as the 50s.
The Time Machine from 1960 had a post-apocalyptic above and below ground society brought about by nuclear war while the remake from 2002 had the apocalypse brought about because moon colonization by the rich went about as wrong as one could imagine. The Day the Earth Stood Still from 1951 had the fate of mankind resting on judgement at the hands of an alien visit for their use of nuclear weapons but in the 2008 remake it's because we've been destroying the environment.
@@joe_zgood dystopias are, at the very least, also relying on the fears of humans at the time (perhaps even more so, since that’s the point of the dystopia while in horror it is more subconscious)
the irony is we used to have camfire tales that always ended with "and they were never heard from again!" ... people used to be scared of not being found. not being seen. I would also like to propose we develop a new genre based on the current fear of inflation, low birth rates, and so forth. or at least revitilize a past genre for this meaning.
I think "and they were never seen again" comes at least partly from the fear of the unknown - are they dead? Turned into some otherwise innocuous piece of the landscape? Somehow kept alive and in constant pain for the rest of eternity? The only way you'll ever know is if it happens to you... Certain death can be bravely faced in an act of heroism. Uncertain death? Not so much.
@@michaelmann7816 well no, because usually those stories have graphic descriptions of how they brutally died. I wouldn't say that's very "fear of the unknown". then again, im scared of spiders.
7 дней назад
I thought vampires were more about some sort of parasite seeking to drain you, throw you away and then move on to the next target.
Folklore-wise, vampires represent the wealthy nobility draining the "blood" of common folk for their own benefit. It is unfortunate for contemporary media that some people decided the undead mosquitoes in human guise are sexy, because the original theme is still pretty relevant today (and could even be reapplied to things like art/character theft that have plagued the internet for ages).
6 дней назад
@@tinyshinyfeathers that sounds like it fits my description.
Pretty sure The disaster film "don't look up" is less horror but more parodying the modern world, where misinformation and disinformation(deliberately spreading misinfo) is abundant, the amount of willfully ignorant people in control of the majority of world. The horror..comes from the fact that at this point we live in that world right now It's less about perception but rather the feeling helplessness of people trying to inform a world that doesn't want to learn Also for more of these sorta perception horror, there's a super eyepatch wolf video about it.
Panopticonsequence horror, I like that term. Probably not the same but, the idea of Freedom wars and their whole dystopia and how your every move is under a microscope and you have to “contribute” to society to work off your sentence of 1 million years for the grave sin of being born and burdening your panopticon. Now take that premise and multiple it by the number of other countries there are and it’s downright horrifying if you dwell on it for too long.
At first I though they were going to say it is about people refusing to acknowledge and talk about obvious problems. "Don't Look Up" is about as obvious as fiction can get, that the problem is that people refuse to acknowledge and prioritize and work on THE BIG PROBLEM. It is not subtle, so the person using it as an example has not seen it. There's a big difference between You Looking At Monster and Monster Looking At You. They are not metaphors for the same thing just because they involve looking. Though it could be a simple as scrolling through social media and seeing something upsetting.
There’s also the fact that anyone who is outside the norm (LGBT+, kink community, neurodivergent) or in a vulnerable position (disabled, minimum wage workers, poverty in general) probably has an added layer of fear of discrimination if discovered, especially if they live in more conservative areas.
So I think we are falling back into colour theory on this one. Hear me out. I might not be the sharpest lightbulb in the crayon box so take all this with a grain of salt. I think it’s much simpler than that. Sure some movies might link back to the surveillance state and whatnot (I don’t know enough about British horror, since they have been in the situation much longer than us.) but I think most of them are still closely linked to anxiety. Since horror and comedy are so closely linked we can look to what people joke about to get a sense of what scares them, and what was (and still is) a really big meme? Being able to function emotionally and socially with others. ‘Don’t look at the monster’ don’t make eye contact. ‘Stay small and avoid the monsters attention’ avoid being noticed so you don’t have to interact with others. What was seen as a massive personal victory not that long ago, scheduling an appointment with your doctor. Like I said, I’m stupid with a capital B so I might of missed the mark, so let me know.
Bringing up purity culture in this is so real. Also, the music... not sure if anyone else felt creeped out by the repetitive music that wasn't supposed to be inherently scary, but I feel like it added another layer to that discussion.
Not entirely dismissing the theory, but there's another factor too. Sometimes popular entertainment just follows trends. Writers see the popularity of a writer who introduces some interesting monster or situation and that inspires them to do their own take. Sure, that horror might reflect the anxieties of the time, but at least in the more modern era, I'm thinking it's kind of a case of, "the studio wants me to write a horror movie that will do well at the box office, now I have to think of something original enough to be interesting but familiar enough to be financially safe". Edit: For example, DC trying to create its own cinematic universe on the heels of Marvel.
The thing about following trends is that one thing has to get popular first, and then the second work to try that usually needs to also have some degree of success. And two works if fiction will usually only both succeed at the same gimmick if there's something about it that is genuinely speaking to the audience. The reason the trend is able to become a trend is because it's reflecting something the audience wants to see.
I wonder what analog horror’s obsession with uncanny valley doppelgängers is. Is it just copying The Mandela Catalog’s homework, or is something else going on? Also, while mascot horror doesn’t represent a fear, it’s still reflectes or current society’s love for all things nostalgia
Analog horror drives upon the aesthetic that what you are watching is/was real, as many take place in a setting that either is or resembles our own world, I believe. Mascot horror also features the corruption of something nostalgic, and usually have themes of child abuse and broken childhoods.
the "uncanny doppelgangers" represent the fear of being replaced and the overall feeling of nothing you do will be remembered and the thing can take your place and no one will know or care
Simply put, it's existential horror. Sometimes it's easy to tell the difference between a mimic and a person, but in Mandela's case, the alternates are convincing enough to overtake an entire small town, racking up a body count in the thousands, creating a terrifying scenario in the viewer's mind if whether or not they could survive an encounter with one. Not to mention, a well trained doppelganger can have their target wondering if they're the real one or not. It's all a matter of could you tell the difference between an alternate and someone you love, or even yourself.
I'd argue that mascot horror represents the fear of the hidden evil, the idea that surface innocence and joy can hide sinister motives and deeds, and might even be specifically crafted to do so. In terms of society, it's the idea that evil doesn't have to advertise that it's evil, and doesn't even have to actively know it's evil, in order to be evil.
The internet brought rise to impersonation and fraud and the threat of stolen credentials, and that was a prominent threat from the 90s forward for the computer user. Or for 60s related horror it might be connected to the fears about Russian spies and the commie next door, course I wasn't then and there, I just hear that was what it was like.
Reducing vampires to fears about grappling with sexuality seems quite reductive to me, and feels like it overlooks the fact that the authors of both Dracula and Carmilla, two of the most foundational vampire stories, were both Irish in a time when Britain was subjugating Ireland to hell and back n
I've always enjoyed the Nature's Wrath Monster movies. Especially when it's deserved, where the monster isn't really a monster. Its just a creature doing its own thing and humans made the mistake of messing with it. Especially when there is no killing the monster, just appease it. It really puts in to perspective just how little control we have over nature.
Also, now that I think about it, the internalization of surveillance has also affected how people review media. A *lot* of critiques I see always note “How did they not get caught, wouldn’t everyone know who they are”. I even think it myself when attempting to write anything.
I haven’t finished the video yet but I also think it’s generally about how often we are perceived in this world compared to the past and how that effects us and also added onto thr part about the two different modes going on the second one is relevant in this in how if we don’t want to be attacked on the internet we have to do certain things and project ourselves certain ways, idk for sure I’m not really into horror
I think it might also have to do with policing. A lot of these films came out after the 2020 George Floyd riots made everyone, even white middle Americans who could have previously safely ignored them, aware of the realities of policing and the threat that a privileged, entitled, and often mentally unwell man with a gun can pose to people who are doing everything 'right', and the need to avoid that at all costs.
Actually Nope is about facing up to your fears, the alien represents surveillance and being watched and the characters don’t wanna look at it for a long time, but they only defeat it by capturing it on film
The modern sexy vampire schtick is just that, modern, more birthed out of the 70s than the victorian era. Cold war foreign influence is also kind of a stretch given just how overwhelming monster movies were in the 50s and 60s. This absolutely Can be true about trends in media but it's a very narrow, basic way of looking at it. The zombies part especially irks me because zombies were always about more than splashy gore and the last of us is literally one single media property.
I feel also that among these things it all leads to every form sight. we will be watched, hide. we are being watched, perform. but then my addition is, situations where, if you are going to die or someone is gonna kill you, or just plain, something bad is going to happen, are you gonna creep down the hall to find out what that scary noise is, or would you rather hold on to this dear time you have of peace. it seems there are two options, one where you believe the situation is hopeless for you and your better off running and hiding ad not looking at it for as long as possible, or you go face it with a high chance of dying, and dying sooner at that, but a higher chance of winning as well. it seems we as a society have chosen the first more often than not, but the one thing i've thought lately is, why now? we are we so terrified to take a step, while i think one thing is how much more we are aware of how much the odds are stacked against, with the internet and history and all the world available to us. idk where im going with this, its not very clear what do y'all think?
Media always does reflect the attitudes and anxieties of the time, even beyond horror. For example we see fewer dystopian movies dealing with massive levels of overpopulation nowadays because overpopulation isn't really the concern it used to be (I think world population is on track to start declining before hitting 11 billion). Really even positive visions of the future tended to feature extremely high human populations, it's just that in those we figured out how to provide for all those billions of people.
Nowadays, what dystopian fiction tends to discuss is overreliance on technology and AI, or abuse of power by those in charge. Which tracks considering the rise of AI and the fact that people like Putin, Kim Jong-Un, etc. will do anything to get their ideal world with them in power.
Horror definitely works best when it's playing off the fears of the people watching it. I know that sounds super obvious to the point of being ridiculous, but I don't find the majority of horror scary at all, but you know what does scare me? (I don't watch movies so I'll use games as examples): Subnautica. Flight simulators. Stealth games. These are playing off my specific fears and therefore affect me much more strongly
Most Cold War horror is actually about atomic/radiation anxiety or the Red Scare. That’s how you get all of the “what if thing but giant” movies like the ants in Them and “what if people you know acted subtly different” like the original Bodysnatchers from ‘56 or several dozen Twilight Zone episodes.
Personally I think the perception thing is also from percieving disturbing stuff online and how you gotta avoid it to keep you from being harmed, you beed to see but be careful so you don't see that, that'll give you psychic damage
I'm sorry to be focusing on the wrong point but are we gonna gloss over ignoring tbe obvious? Yeah Vampires be hella bisexual, but remember they weren't "hot" to the audience until recently, vampires were the literal *aristocracy* living long lives and enjoying great power by _bleeding the populace dry_
It kind of irks me how they boil vampire's just down to sex. In the bramstoker novel, you had a sense of an old dingy medieval balkan European foreigner guy coming into the fresh and new London. The whole hero crew where using up to date stuff. Like the futuristic type writer and blood transfusion. So you have a fear of foreigners in it as well. Also before Bramstoker. Vampire's are quit literally dead things that wont stay dead. The past not staying in the past, but prolonging. Eager to feast and kill on the future. Its not just sex.
I have to bring up Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. C S Lewis deconstructs eldritch/space/alien horror so well in those books. (He even does the same thing in The Silver Chair, come to think of it.)
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While it's not a movie, my personal favorite horror, Sweeney Todd, got its inspiration from 1846's penny dreadful "The String of Pearls." The story involves people eating each other without knowing it after their corpses are baked into meat pies. While I'd have to check to make sure my exact references are correct, I'm fairly certain that England, particularly London at the time, was marred with poverty, overpopulation, and poor working conditions. Despite that, the rich were thriving and benefiting from the work of the poor. There was such a divide between the high-class and the low-class that the low-class began to fear that the upper-class could do something terrible to individuals and they would face no consequences because people wouldn't notice. There were even rumors going around that you shouldn't trust any meat that was sold to you because you don't know where the meat came from and could very well be from someone taken off the street. These social and economic fears are depicted in The String of Pearls/Sweeney Todd by having a common barber and baker be responsible for killing humans and selling their meat while just saying that the meat came from cows. This sort of stuff is FASCINATING. I can't stomach most horror, but taking them apart and learning about their symbolism, inspirations, histories... MAN...
I'm sceptical of some of the connections being made here - a perfectly valid reason to be afraid of vampires is 'this is a creepy, inhuman being that would gladly tear my throat out', for instance. There doesn't need to be a deeper meaning (besides, vampires weren't necessarily supposed to be seductively evil anyway - the original Count Dracula is described as cruel looking with a large white moustache). That being said, I do think that the theme of having a lack of control has something to do with horror tropes. In older horror, for example, it was a lot more believable to have evil beings from another continent/ancient cursed magics/etc, because people knew less about the world around them. Nowadays, the convenience of having things like the internet on hand make everyday life seem a lot easier, but it also means that people can feel more impatient when encountering setbacks or losing access to these things.
Even if somebody writes a story that's literally just "heehoo scary man" if that story doesn't connect to something within the human experience it won't connect with audiences on a deeper level and become a classic. The reason there's always a deeper meaning is that a story without one is typically shallow. There's no book that's solely about vampires, they're about fear and its effect on the mind or about oppression or the unseen or something. There's necessarily a point to it because people don't like pointless stories. The backlash against literary analysis, the "not everything has to have a meaning" movement, is based on a failure to properly teach analysis. That is, when English teachers tell you to guess what the theme they have written down on their curriculum is and punish you for getting it wrong instead of teaching you to see how the different elements combine to form an effect and where that effect leads, including different valid interpretations. For example, I find it very hard to believe vampire fiction has nothing to do with class divides, which is due to the whole "they extort resources the weak need to survive out of them purely to fulfill their twisted desires and are always portrayed as rich and powerful" thing. But Victorian era puritanism is also a valid interpretation because there's a basis in it for the source material. Whether or not the author's intent is relevant depends on who you ask, but that's more of a philosophical question. So while yes, the fact that they're scary might be a perfectly valid reason to be afraid of vampires, it isn't a enough reason on its own for a story to have an impact like _Dracula_ did, and it honestly isn't really enough of a basis to write a good story with either.
Nope is both textually and subtextually about the exploitation it takes to run the film and TV industry. There is …an element of the Panopticon there. It’s a very good movie and if you can handle horror you should watch it.
Ah, this tracks with why I've never found Eldritch horror that is uncombatable compelling. The unknown should be studied snd learned, not feared. And yeah, thete is a lot of cosmic scake stuff we can't do much about, but most if it isn't close enough to be a problem, hence why Earth mafe it this far anyways. It may be far off, (both as a problem and something solvable) but solutions to at least avoid most of it are already theorized. Most problems we face as a species are things we can actually do SOMETHING about, even if we can't get rid of the problem. no sense in worrying about something that will most likely only be a problem when we are more capable anyways.
So... according to the start, current day horror is... *_nobody knows wtf is happening and those that do are making everything more and more confusing aaaaaaaaaaa_*
I Don't remember what it was But I remembered someone doing a video on Instagram and I remember it showed people I don't remember the context But the only thing I could think of was "Oh how I hate the panopticon" And then sadly realize that so little people Actively would knew what I was talking about under that video
It's a reference to one of the 'monsters' in the Magnus Archive, who (among other things) kills people with their gaze and whose place of power is called the panopticon
@@SkyP9812 Fun fact, the term 'Panopticon' originally comes from a theory of prison architecture from the 18th century, which posits a building design in which all the prisoners can be observed from a single point by a single prison guard who is hidden from view of the prisoners. Obviously it's impossible for the one guard to be observing every prisoner simultaneously, but the inmates would have no idea if they are currently being observed or not, so they are as a result forced to behave as though they are being watched at all times to avoid punishment. The term has since become a metaphor for the concept of constant surveillance and people forcing themselves to act in certain ways due to not knowing for sure if they are being observed or not at any given time, so it's a very good metaphor for what's being described in the tumblr thread. The whole concept of Big Brother in 1984 was based on the idea of the panopticon being used on a country-wide scale. Big Brother could be watching you at any time, so you 'behave' constantly, just in case
I agree, but more in the political sense. Cant have a different opinion than the popular one, cant stand up for my ideals or my life might be ruined by social backlash, or do anything about this "monster" at all. Surveillance isnt only done by corporations but regular people as well.
In the series, it is gradually revealed that all of the supernatural/paranormal/anomalous phenomena chronicled in the Archives are caused by various entities that represent different kinds of fear, and it actually discusses how these various entities have gained and lost power over time, even indicating that some of them predate humanity or feed mostly off animals' fear. It's eventually revealed that the Magnus Institute itself is controlled by one of these entities, known as the Eye or Ceaseless Watcher, which very much represents the surveillance-based fears discussed in this video. Additionally, it is revealed that there is a new fear entity, which arose from a new type of fear. The Extinction, which represents the fear of ecological devastation, nuclear war, and any of the other thousands of things which could result in the end of the human race or even the end of all life on Earth. It is worth noting that the Extinction is very clearly a distinct entity from the End, which represents the fear of death. The Extinction is used to show fear and anxiety about much broader threats than the death of an individual.
I personally don't like horror movies. But I've been having nightmares that hinge around gaslighting, memory loss, and a lack of a concrete reality. The closest stories that I can think of are the movie _Inception,_ some parts of The Matrix series, and Alice in wonderland.
All of this is correct except the conclusions - they got *real close* with "you were awfully aftaid of facing up to things" and then the thread continued talking about *terror*, which is very different from horror.
I have some feelings about the fact that it's much simpler for what horror is popular now in my country (I'm from Ukraine, and the movie in question is a reverse horror), but I'm not sure what these feelings are.
