The horror, the horror

The Lady believes that I should write about "sweet potato goddamned ice cream," by which I believe she is referring to the sweet potato marshmallow ice cream that we got at Jeni's this evening. Yes, we have a Jeni's. It's about time all these Ohioans did something worthwhile for Charleston rather than taking all our jobs and polluting our history and, I don't know, claiming they were first in flight and naming their football teams after terrible things. Well, one terrible thing. They basically looked at a buckeye and used that for college and then needed a team for Cleveland and looked again for the color. But Ohioans are all right once they get out of Ohio, just like I'm a decent person once I stop being a churl prejudiced about people based on where they come from, which is a pretty bullshit thing to be prejudiced about, really, because, I mean, you can't really control that.

Of course, I really have no intention of writing about sweet potato goddamned ice cream, partly because I didn't have it (although I had a bite of The Lady's, and it was pretty good, although I would not think that it was worthy of divine retribution for being as good as it was), but mostly because I can't write for 1700 words about sweet potato ice cream. That would be impressive but also beyond my capacity for description. She recommended copious use of copy/paste, but I don't think you're ready for THAT much ctrl+v. So now I'm left with my usual problem of what to write about without using copious pa- oh. Oh. I'm already doing that padding thing. Okay. Onwards and upwards.


Well, I may not be able to talk about sweet potato goddamned ice cream, but you know what I can talk about? Neither do I. Give me a minute.

While I figure this out, have a surprised owl.

I've never been a huge horror movie buff, partly because I scare obscenely easily. I remember an episode of The X-Files that I saw when I was 8 about a pygmy albino melanin vampire (hey, X-Files had some pretty politically incorrect episodes back in the day; see: "Shapes," "Excelsis Dei," and much, much more) that probably scared me for years. Because, you know, I've got so much melanin to give. I remember the trailer for Jeepers Creepers 2 creepered the jeepers right out of me. By my recollection, I've seen three (okay, fine, two and a half) straight, unabashed horror movies in theaters (The Exorcist, the dreadful remake of When a Stranger Calls, and the delightfully comedic Drag Me to Hell). I've seen a few on video or on TV (namely, Saw and bits of the later and terrible Nightmare on Elm Street Movies. I feel like I've probably caught the entirety of Jeepers Creepers and Bride of Chucky. Oh! And Hellraiser. Saw that on Netflix a while back. Despite the iconic monster design... meh.), but I've never been a particular horror buff, so I probably shouldn't write the next bits on this, but when have I let decency and good taste dictate anything on here?

There are those out there who say that each era of horror films is dictated by the sociopolitical problems of that generation. Zombies came about due to racism (which was supposed to be pretty blatant but entirely unintentional in Night of the Living Dead), Mike Myers and Jason Voorhees and the progenitors of the, "Hey, kids, don't have sex, or you'll die!" craze came from HIV and the backlash against the free love lifestyle, and Leprechaun came about due to fears of the wave of papist immigrants in the 1860s.

I HAVE A DIFFERENT RELIGION, A STRANGE ACCENT, AND WILL WORK HARD TO ESCAPE POVERTY! ALSO I WANT TO REOPEN MY FATHER'S PUB AND CONTINUE MY ROMANCE WITH JENNIFER ANISTON!

Frankly, horror as a film genre seems sorta played out, though. I'm sure I'll eat my words in a few years when somebody comes up with a really novel horror movie (possibly Christopher Nolan), but bear with me. We had our start with the classic vampire/werewolf/Frankenstein trifecta, all of whom have been made "sympathetic" by Anne Rice and Aaron Eckhart, who really needs to hire a better agent because he's been really great when he has a good script. We moved to zombies, which got remade again and again, because it's a good trope rather than a monster- you get to work with the character dynamics and can do so with any genre (as Zombieland/Shaun of the Dead, World War Z, and Warm Bodies have shown with varying success. As an aside, Ajax rightly says that the way to do zombies right at this point is to have them be entirely supernatural. There is no science, and nothing can stop them. You can only run and delay the inevitable. This will come back later in the post.). We went through the meta phase, starting with New Nightmare and moving along with a string of imitators, followed by Scream and its imitators. In more recent history, there was the surge of remakes of Japanese horror films, which I guess could be allegories for technology (see: The Ring, One Missed Call, etc.). From there, we've moved to the torture porn genre, which I guess is less about horror and more about spectacle. Over the past ten years, the movies that come to mind as being original, scary, and well made (from what I've heard, what with my having no business discussing this topic) have been The Descent, The Orphanage (and probably some other Spanish and Asian horror movies), and maybe As Above, So Below (which looked interesting to me, albeit somewhat hamfisted).

The thing is, we've gotten used to spectacle in movies. We've gotten used to the tropes in movies. The one horror movie that really surprised me in a non-jump-scare sort of way was The Turn of the Screw. Some friends and I watched it in college on Netflix under the assumption of, "Hey, we've heard this is pretty good. And, I mean, it's black and white and from the 50's (Author's note: I think we saw the Ingrid Bergman one? It's hard to remember.), so how scary can it actually be?" HOLY CRAP WAS THAT THE WRONG ASSUMPTION. That movie was creepy in ways that are hard to manage even now, which is a shame. You can get jump scares, and you can get spectacle, but getting at real horror? That's tricky, and I think that most of the movies coming out don't get it. Maybe it's just taking an abstract concept and running with it as a theme rather than just giving a crazy guy an axe. Maybe it's getting the audience involved. Maybe it's defying expectations. Maybe it's something more.

This is why I think that video games are the future of horror. Video games force you to be involved, because you want to win. It's acceptable to railroad the player a little bit in terms of objectives, and it's easy to pen them in with the environment. Video games can go off the rails in ways that movies just can't. Survival horror games are already a pretty established genre, and the independent games out there have been able to retouch old ideas or use new ones that are too ludicrous for film (see: Night at Freddy's, which is basically surviving the night in a demented Chuck E. Cheese). But the really good ones are the ones that keep it simple.

For example, Slender is an independent game based around the Slenderman Mythos. Basically, Slenderman is a monster created by some folks on the Internet that does... something. It's basically a more humanoid C'thulhu that terrorizes people for unclear reasons. Slender is a game where you walk around the woods trying to collect eight pieces of paper without running into Slenderman. Every paper you collect? Well, Slenderman knows where you are a little bit better. The game is a really simple concept- walk around and don't get caught- but they used the mechanics to make it profoundly creepy. They make the screen and audio glitch a bit whenever Slenderman is around, whether you see him or not. Slenderman can teleport around the area. Mostly, you just walk INFURIATINGLY slowly, but that just makes the anticipation build. The big thing is that YOU CANNOT ESCAPE SLENDERMAN. Even if you win, he gets you.

The other top notch example that I've seen is PT. PT is a playable teaser for the new installment of the Silent Hill franchise, which is supposed to be pretty terrifying as is. PT (and by extension the new installment)? Handled by the creator of the Metal Gear franchise and Guillermo del Frickin Toro. In PT, you wake up in a dingy basement (with a beautifully rendered two-headed cockroach).

Apparently they had to downgrade the graphics.

All you have to do is get out of the house. It's a pretty generic suburban home with a clock radio that reads 23:59 and is broadcasting a news story.

There's ambient noise, like gurgling and a swinging lamp, but that's just the house settling, right? You walk through the hallway, and the doors are all locked except for the basement. You go into the basement and come out...

At the beginning of the hallway. Each time you go through, there are little things that change. Maybe the house is a little dirtier. Maybe the lights are out. Maybe a door is locked on the first try. Maybe the radio says to look behind you. Maybe there's writing on the wall

Nope.

 Maybe a door is open.

NOPE.

Maybe there's somebody on the landing above you.

NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE

Throughout the game, you're trying to avoid The Witch, whose character design would do Pazuzu proud (and, no, I'm not going to post a picture because I do NOT need those sorts of heebie jeebies right now). Even if she gets you, though, you just restart the most recent loop. It's a really confined and realistic setting with just enough ambient noise to set you on edge, just enough creepiness to ramp it up, and then jump scares at the right times to give you the payoff. There's a backstory to it that seems to make some sort of sense and gives the whole scenario some degree of twisted logic, but even without it, it's plenty scary at face value. I'm not going to play this or Silent Hills, because I like being able to sleep (well, apparently not during Novemblog, but that's neither here nor there), but it looks like it's going to be absolutely terrifying and absolutely amazing.

Now that we're through with that, let's just have a nice video about a highway.