New Horror 2023 – Day 3
“Someone screamed – it was me, it was me – as her flesh blackened and greened and sank in around her bones like fallen cake.”
“The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror” by Carmen Maria Machado (2020)
Horror-ish? Certainly in the spirit of the time. But it’s also just one of those meditative pieces about how one gets here through all the muck of youth and existence, where you are who you are and sometimes you have to wonder how you got to be this way.
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“I’ll tell them what we did and you won’t be able to stand it!”
“Do You Know… the Beast-Man?” by Richard Howell, Colleen Doran, Kevin Cunningham (1992)
Wow. This one’s pretty raw in terms of a character being abused and treated horribly. But the thing is, Machado’s story has the exact same scenes, only between a man (abuser) and a woman (victim) instead of a man (abuser) and a man (victim), like in this story. So why does a man abusing another man stand out to me when the other, more heteronormative abuse does not? And that’s the most fucked up thing here, realizing it’s just because it’s between two men and that’s not normalized in my brain the way it is when it’s a man abusing a woman. This one absolutely got to me.
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“Might be your dream, but it’s my rules!”
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare dir. Rachel Talalay (1991)
Oh, so is this how Freddy Kreuger became a cartoon? Because pop culture definitely took this character and made him into a spooky family-friendly spokesman. And the movie isn’t being coy about it, but somehow the comedy and campiness doesn’t quite gel. The ending montage showing scenes from the previous movies definitely make me think I should go watch those instead.
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“Remember to carry matches; the HAUNTED HOUSE is very dark.”
Haunted House dev. Atari (1982)
It’s obviously of its time and technology, but I can see how this sort of thing is a progenitor to a lot of what we now know as survival horror. It has limited supplies, a house full of spooky creatures, and most importantly it’s explicitly dark with the need to light one’s surroundings. I also appreciate the many modes available so players can customize their difficulty level.
