Why we wanna transition to Mad Scientist (or, revulsion and queerness in horror)

(Hi, @ash-eats-film! This is the thing I mentioned!)

Horror has a few baseline emotions it tries to inflict on the audience. This has been written about for decades, most famously by Stephen King, but the baseline elements most writers agree on are as follows.

Dread: Anxiety over what is about to happen

Terror: The fear of what is occurring right this second

Revulsion: Being forced to interact directly with what's happening right now

Black comedy: Being tricked into laughing at either the terror or the revulsion

Horror: The trauma response to what just happened

A great example of this can be seen in The Evil Dead II (YT link that doesn't include the full context, but does have the, uh, money shot). There's the dread of realizing there's something in the root cellar; the terror of when the Deadite pops up in the trapdoor; the combined revulsion and black comedy of Ash jumping on the Deadite's skull/the door, popping out its eyeball which shoots into Bobby Joe's mouth, and then the horror of what just went down rolling over Ash and his current companions.

Often, revulsion and black comedy go hand in hand. That's because they're tension relievers. The revolting thing becomes ridiculous, and you laugh at how ridiculous it is. This lets you settle down in the midst of the gore and death, just slightly, just enough to get through it... so the horror can fully set in for you, too, once it's over.

You also, often, question your own stability if you laugh in the middle of a gross-out horror scene: "Am I sick? Is there something wrong with me for laughing at X?" This is even worse if the villain starts laughing--now you're questioning whether you're IDing with the monster. Are you okay? Is something wrong with you?

Revulsion is often framed as the slutty member of the good, proper, morally-upright brigade of horror. We have a name for folks who seek out gross-out horror--they're gore-hounds, a term that is virtually always pejorative when applied to other people. We call certain types of horror "torture porn" or "gore porn", as though it is inherently sleazy and sexual to rely on this specific emotional reaction. (Note that we don't have "black comedy-porn", or "dread hounds", even though a dread hound sounds really fucking cool.)

Not to go off on a huge tangent, but I think the issue with media that overly relies on revulsion is that it's unbalanced, not that it's bad. A movie that's nothing but dread never has any emotional payoff. A movie that's nothing but terror never lets the audience relax back into their seats and, paradoxically, will become boring (imagine two hours of jumpscares).

So forth and so on: all aspects of horror rely on each other to survive. That includes scenes that make you go "Awww, sick" while nervously cackling.

Here's the thing: in previous generations, revulsion was similarly understood to be an essential part of horror, but what led to a revolted reaction was very different.

Lovecraft (boo this man! BOOOOO) understood the power of revulsion, which was the source of a lot of his strangest and most vivid descriptions. It was also the source of some of his most bigoted ideas working into his stories. The undercurrent of "non-WASPs are evil because they are repulsive" is as pervasive in his work as "the universe is incomprehensibly vast". You kind of can't get around that.

But there's another thing Lovecraft did to generate revulsion. He wrote a number of stories where an unhealthy focus on corpses, graveyards, graverobbing, and the like is, indirectly or directly, associated with sexual perversion. 

How many, you may ask? Off the top of my head, there's "The Loved Dead", "In the Vault", "The Disinterment", "Pickman's Model", The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, "The Hound" and "Herbert West: Re-Animator". All of these tales share certain themes, which don't repeat beat-for-beat in each tale but do overlap:

Male character becomes obsessed with dead bodies--whether that's stealing them, having sex with them, desecrating them, or resurrecting them.

He is comfortable around death and the dead to a degree that is unusual, sometimes explicitly stating that he prefers the smells/sights of death to those of life.

Terms like "fiendish", "hellish", "abnormal" and "perverse" are used to describe him; his gaze towards dead bodies or to experiments may be framed as "leering" or "speculative".

He is frequently a twink; often described as being frail, if not noticeably beautiful; he may recall being mocked for being "bookish" or "weak" as a child.

He is superficially charming in a way that gets him by in polite society, but not long-term nor in-depth.

He often ensnares an otherwise "normal" man to share his obsessions, effectively recruiting him as an assistant... until the "normal" guy realizes he's about to go on the chopping block (or, in at least one story, already was on the chopping block).

Their crimes involve a lot of sneaking around late at night, locked doors, whispering so they don't get caught (or they'll be killed), secretiveness, glee at getting away with it, and frequently, sharing the same living space.

The Unrepentant Evil Dude is often killed at the end of his tale in a way that implies vigilante/mob justice is at hand. 

The other may be allowed to live if he's very sorry and frames the whole story as being the fault of the other guy, or he may die too while affirming his horrible demise as just, even if it terrifies him.

(One could make an argument that Wilbur Whateley fits into some of these tropes. It's me I'm one)

If this all sounds very gay, Lovecraft probably would have agreed. He had as dim a view of homosexuality as he did on most other things that were Outside The Norm. In other words, we were supposed to see Richard Upton Pickman with his ghouls and think, "Ah, yes, this is a metaphor for queerness", only we were supposed to be revolted by that revelation.

This same attempt at revulsion can be easily read into Victor Frankenstein, and probably more Mad Scientists than I can name offhand (but feel free to in reblogs). Frankenstein's "crimes against nature" were connected to dead bodies as well, and likewise involved a lot of sneaking around, locked doors, and worry about what would happen were he caught with this naked man-thing he's keeping in his dorm. His crime, as with his parody character Herbert West, is creating life outside the bounds of heterosexual cisgender sex. This was meant to revolt readers' sensibilities as much as the whole cutting-up-corpses-and-stitching-them-back-together thing would.

This is why, if we're being honest, "Re-Animator" and "Bride of Re-Animator" are not necessarily gay… they're homophobic. This might be controversial, but stick with me.

I feel like Gordon and Yuzna were tapping into that old-fashioned Revulsion Handbook, including from the source material, which thematically linked Herbert West with queerness. (I'm using "queer" a lot here, but I would personally include trans-friendly readings under that rubric; I'm using "queer" in the analytical sense and not solely in the identity sense.) This means that, ironically, a lot of what we could point to as queer subtext is actually homophobic text.

This is reinforced by the novelization of the first film, written by a homophobe who got Trumpist brainworms later in life. He wanted to make West repulsive to the reader, and therefore, he tried to make West more gay. And IT WORKED. 

To be clear, I'm not accusing anybody, other than the novelist, of being a homophobe. There's a difference between possessing internalized bigoted beliefs which express themselves in writing, versus utilizing tropes originating in bigotry because That's What's Done Around Here. (I can understand why others might not perceive a meaningful difference.) Like the Cuzco lizards, this queerness-as-villainy is definitely a stupid thing ported in from the source material.

I do think that this is why everybody but Our Queen Barbara Crampton seems embarrassed or nonplussed by all the transfags pestering them about fellatio tapes. It's because they don't get why this thing appeals so much to us. It shouldn't. If anything, they should be canceled for having yet another queer-coded villain, along with a number of other plot choices of questionable taste (I'm looking at you, The Head Scene, and I don't like what I see).

Only, uh, it didn't work out that way long-term, did it?

I thank Cronenberg and venereal horror for this, in part. Brutally queer despite not being explicitly gay, venereal horror is what happens when the characters should be revolted, but aren't. 

This kind of thing is horrifying for crossing the line twice: first by being disgusting, then by having characters respond as though it is exciting, or sexually stimulating, or if nothing else, normal. They are perverse. They leer at the dead and the subjects of their experiments. And the disgusting monsters at the center of these narratives are celebrated. Their twisted sexualities are explored with the same brave frankness other filmmakers give to milquetoast cishet missionary nonsense. Their political views are given life and air, and usually, they're right. Their deaths, if they come at all, are framed as tragedies brought on by society's sick rejection of the flesh their brave experimentation.

Cronenberg's the dude who unironically thinks that Shivers (trigger warning for literally everything) has a happy ending. My man David's got subscriptions where others have issues.

Venereal horror has given us a new metaframework for looking at the repulsive, the monstrous, and the problematic and responding to it… differently.

Now here's another thing: Lovecraft likewise provided a structure for embracing the grotesque and the queer.

Pickman, the Decadent artist, paints photorealistic, enormous portraits of ghouls. Literal flesh-eaters. He is fascinated by them, comfortable with them. "Model" heavily implies that Pickman is a ghoul changeling--switched at birth with a human child. This leans into Lovecraft's ideas about heritability being a major source of horror, of course, and seems run of the mill until you get to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

In there, Pickman appears again, but this time as a ghoul. He has cast off his human social shackles and joined the beings he loves, beings who understand him and support him. Kadath is notable in that the ghouls are actually... like... reliable, loyal, and morally good? Carter's opinion pretty much is, "They do eat human corpses and they smell awful, but they're all very nice and want to help me on my quest, so maybe they're not so bad (if not as good as the cat army)".

This feels like Lovecraft acknowledging that his entire approach of linking queerness, death, and revulsion is fundamentally flawed. Once you become familiar with the repulsive, it becomes not-really-that-repulsive-at-all. You can find beauty in it, and amusement, and love. Pickman embracing his ghoulish nature isn't all that different from Seth Brundle's overall lack of revulsion at his body's transformation. And it's not that different from what a lot of transmasculine folks go through, either.

It's not that transmascs, trans men, and/or transfags don't see what West does as crimes against nature. It's that we're all very fucking tired of being accused of crimes against nature. We're tired of not being able to look at socmed without finding accusations that we're disgusting perverts who sneak around behind closed doors to corrupt innocent, promising people to be our lackeys and partners in crime.

Hell, I refer to my wife as "my partner in crime" not because it's a cute way of acknowledging how well and how much we work together both in life and creativity. It's also because we could have been arrested for our relationship when we got together.

We were illegal.

There was a lot of sneaking around and whispering and trying not to get caught and "what if they call the cops on us if we're clocked". Can I tell my friends about this? Will they reject me or rat me out? Where am I safe? Nowhere. Best to lock the door and then check it again to be sure. Best to be very quiet.

Best to act like a graverobber trying to get their grisly wares back home before good, decent, Christian folk see them.

So when I hear "Blasphemy? Before what God?!", I read it as (whether he's ace or aro, gay or achillean, trans man or transmasc or genderfucked) a queer slogan of defiance, instead of a defense of graverobbing, corpse desecration, and non-consensual resurrection.

We're told we and our bodies are repulsive, so being told that Herbert is also repulsive makes him more relatable. Instead of wondering what the hell's wrong with him for shooting up reagent, we all theorize that it's actually T or has similar effects--because we're all told that T is a toxin that will horribly change and disfigure our bodies. He dresses in a three-piece suit for school, and instead of reading him as a stiff and overly-formal little freak, we assume he's layering up because he hasn't found a hoodie he likes yet. 

He cackles at his horrific creations, and instead of saying "What a fucking freak (anguished)", we say "What a fucking freak (affectionate)" and laugh along with him. Who among us hasn't taken apart our Barbies and tried to combine their parts with the Kens? What is a doll, or a human, but a collection of parts to be rearranged? Haven't we also been told we're freaks for rearranging our own parts?

We've already been told by society at large that we are Herbert West. We're just embracing it, in the proud tradition of venereal horror fans who are not revolted when they ought to be, and I think that's delightful.

my possibly unpopular opinions on therapy/psychiatry

- Just like suffering is not inherent to womanhood, suffering is not inherent to humans. Just like it is not okay to just expect that women will be subjected to suffering, it is not okay to expect that it will happen to anyone and it's just the way things are.

- Therapy is not inherently wrong for trying to alleviate the suffering, but I fail to see the doctors acknowledging the fact that the suffering is a collectively shared experience, and suffering is caused by someone. Moreover it is the whole point of therapy to focus on just yourself, "take responsibility"(for the harm that was done to you?) and seeing what you can make do. Basically because again, doctors cant really tell their patients to go overthrow the gvt or divorce their shitty husbands. Thus endless copium instead of, yknow... something actually meaningful.

- Antidepressants arent inherently bad but they cant cure you. They are just psychoactive drugs. Caffeine, tobacco, cocaine, they all are psychoactive in one way or another, and your brain doesnt really care if the substance is legal, illegal or prescribed. It modifies the symptoms but it cannot actually cure you. Or something. If you struggle with depression/anxiety related issues, I would highly recommend that you try to look for a way to alleviate them that is not just you popping pills for 10 years in a row.

- Our society is purposefully built to fuck us up. Just like "dyslexia" is not a thing in societies that dont have a writing system, "ADHD" or "depression" or "anxiety" are non-syndromes, they show only in very specific circumstances. It is possible to reform the world so that it doesnt force suffering and disabilities onto people.

- Psychoactive drugs that actively alter people's neurochemistry and may lead to both psychological and physical dependency are catastrophically overprescribed and one day the big pharma will be held accountable for their crimes lol

- I repeat that I do not oppose psychiatric medicines as a concept. Psychiatric disorders fuck people up, I know it personally. BUT. Sorry but there is a difference between a socially-induced disorder like anxiety, and a disorder of a purely biological genesis like bipolar mania or schizophrenia. I dont think depression or anxiety are easy. But consider what, someone suffering from delusions in mania cannot CBT their delusions away, they basically have to be on meds. MAYBE think really hard of the pros and cons here. You are lucky to have a relatively healthy brain, dont wash it down the drain.

- Medicalization and profiting off of any suffering is highly concerning. The transgender pharma will also pay for their crime of persuading (otherwise healthy) people that they cannot exist and will literally kill themselves without unnecessary medications and surgeries.

- If you have agreed on me on the previous points but my opinion on transness triggered you, consider unbrainwashing yourself? Idk? Can't you put 2 and 2 together? These are literally the same kind of phenomena.

- I say it all as someone who has been on antidepressants for a long time, and also who knows many people who were on antidepressants for a long time. I've seen both huge benefits and huge debilitating side effects.

As a matter of fact I am also completely normal and can be trusted w

Something I think would destroy Michael when he finally got out of William's house:

At every turn, the adults who were supposed to care for him failed him. Now that he's an adult, nobody is expected to help him at all.

"white people stop" — that's my race tag.

WOW.

FUCKING WOW.

Racist much?

i am a white people

Google is it immoral to sexually fantasize about friends that have expressed that they do not have interest in you yes/no

im so fucking mad about capitalism's devaluation of manual labor (especially financial, hi raise the fucking wages) and expectation to outsource labor, leading to dire exploitation (everyone is exploited, but manual workers especially AND don't get compensated for the toll on their body AND get looked down on unlike white collar workers, all that because making intellectual products is worth 10 times more money i fucking guess). The average person used to have so many more practicak skills and we used to know how make so much more stuff, having people cook, clean, take care of your children and sew for you was the height of luxury for a wealthy woman, depending so much on buying to substain your lifestyle was reserved to the extremely wealthy. People were expected to hold more basic skills outside of a hyperspecific field of their career like today and were allowed to spend time on broad and practical knowledge, and today schools do not even out the playing field because it's still mostly theoric regurgitation (which great, but give all the youngsters a cooking, crafting and sewing class and teach them accounting im begging) making people into highly specific tools relying on buying most of what they don't even think they can make, because disempowered. (this is linked to capitalist shaming of perceived failure and beginners and imperfection but that's a whole other can of worms)

Like for example it was just a given painters made their own paint (or started by making it for their mentor, any way they were taught how), it was considered a necessary first step, a way to understand your medium, and a way no to depend on anyone else or a corporation, and i think a lot of artists are missing that step of having to spend effort on the medium itself. I don't know how my graphic tablet works and i can't make acrylic paint and that's a shame

Like it was always normal for the already rich to leave all physical work to exploited workers but today it's everyone else's case too (at least in the economic north), making your own stuff is a counterculture thing, and even poverty or being an exploited worker eats so much of time that it makes it so buying is necessary and stuff made with exploited labor the only affordable option, fucking vicious cycle

there were deep inequalities with how the teaching of those skills were segregated, which was for which gender and social class, im not saying it was universally good, and women were expected to accumulate way more skills just to do all the managing of a household AND get that labor devalued, just, urgh, it was considered important to know at least i guess

also the birth of packaging and the rise of single use plastic+ worldwide transport of goods is heavily linked to this and a consequence of a global economic boom but it's still a fucking disaster-

anyways buy a s little new shit in as little packaging as you can and fuck corporations

Was just having a conversation with my friends the other day about how difficult it is to be a fan of things nowadays and actually avoid spoilers and so in preparation I blocked/muted literally every jjk tag I could think of across sites and somehow I still immediately open tiktok to spoilers (which is not too surprising as tiktok has literally the WORST filtering system I've seen, like even tumblr has their shit together better than that). But anyway it just kinda makes me sad that it's almost impossible to be online now and actually enjoy things at your own pace? It makes me think of when Netflix drops whole seasons and suddenly it's a race to binge everything so you don't get spoiled and I do think it's actively killing our enjoyment of things. Obviously this case is a lil different, the leaks still come out on a weekly basis but I think there's really something to be said about reading a finished product rather than seeing 25 blurry images of the same panel with iffy translations

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Okay so, my one question is… name three movies that you could watch over and over again without ever getting tired of them? 🎬

alright so I’m honestly a romcom girlie so I think it’s the same answer it’s been for the last decade (I have yet to find ones that make me feel as at ease as these do):

- the holiday

- 10 things I hate about you

- notting hill

which I’m sure can’t be a surprise DNNDDN but we like what we like (used to be prisoner of azkaban too but the bitch did ruin that a bit for me sadly)

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potential tw for mention of the handling of sensitive topics, specifically sexual in nature, but oh my god one thing that's almost never discussed about the Great AI Debacle is the fact that it is literally incapable of sensitivity reading

even though i specifically state that i don't accept ai manuscripts i obviously still get fucking inundated with them and when i tell you that the most consistent content marker of an ai generated manuscript (so beyond the obvious grammatical, structural and language-related errors) is that there will be straight-up sexual misconduct or assault that is never, ever approached as such. (revenge porn! false assault accusations from the Rival Love Interest! harassment played for laughs!)

it's not that humans are not fully capable of writing that shit on their own—if they weren't, it would be quite literally impossible for it to show up here—and more than a few of these scenes wouldn't have been out of place in the 2000s bro comedies, but that's the thing. they're SO out of place and tonally dissonant. they're not only dated, they're nonsensical and virtually never have any actual bearing on the actual plot.

anyway. another way chatgpt brings progress & change to the industry <3

you know, i appreciate the work Susan Sontag has done for people appreciating Camp and stuff but i feel like if you are still using Susan Sontag as the authority on Camp in the year of your lord 2023, using notes that were written in 1964, as if the landscape of art and our relationship to art hasn't fundamentally changed since then,,, it's like, you need to catch up babes, a lot of those points are still really relevant, i'm not saying throw it out, but like update your understandings of Camp beyond that one authoritative text that's at this point almost 60 fucking years old. Susan Sontag is not the fundamental authority on what art today is or would be considered Campy, build off of those basics, please dear gods, evolve your understanding of what Campy art today actually looks like rather than trying to apply a prescriptive label from a text that can kinda boil down to 'Camp is whatever you feel like, and you'll know it when you see it because it won't be like traditional art' because the attempt to define it is so wide, calling every non-traditional piece of art campy is fucking pointless and not how anyone is obviously using the fucking label, people are very deliberately talking about one specific feeling they get from the piece of art, and it's got very little to do with aesthetics, at least as far as TV shows are concerned (movies are a different conversation), and much more about presentation and tone and intended effects and what the whole fucking point of the piece of art actually is, which is a lot more than what is afforded to most things considered Campy, like 90% of the shit people call campy at this point is just called campy and then it's left there, because it's a "oh you can't say anything about it because it's campy" like at this point it almost functions as a conversation ender because anyone you're talking to about any aspect can just go "yeah that's meant to be that way, it's campy" and it's like. okay, where do we go from here? should the piece of art not be analyzed as a work of art? does it not deserve to be evaluated in good faith and treated like any other piece of art? i understand the urge to defend the use of the term, as like "oh we're using it because people are misunderstanding art and what it's trying to be", and as a Riverdale-truther (as in genuinely love it as a piece of art and what it says and does, it's not fucking campy i swear to god, none of you fucking know what pulp art is!), and as a TASM2 truther (best Spidey movie after ITSV, and definitely best general movie after ITSV, and i don't care what your opinion is) i understand the urge to want to defend it as camp, but like, what's the piece of art actually doing and trying to say, what are the deeper layers at play? or are you really just satisfied saying something is Campy and stopping your analysis of the piece of art there? is your soul really okay correcting someone's interpretation of a show and saying it's campy and not doing anything beyond that? what does it being campy actually change? what the fuck does it actually do for the piece of art, if the piece of art is even campy at all?

i dont want to be brave about it all any more i want to scream and cry but i must continue on somehow

cosmo wanda i fucking wish students understood that universities have limited reach and that public silence does not automatically mean no action is being taken internally and that the decisions of collectives / institutions do not reflect the decisions of all of the people within them (e.g. all faculty staff and administrators within an institution) etc etc. god DAMN it to hell. you people (not anyone reading this im saying this as if im talking to the student body at my school) look so fucking stupid @ing the social media accounts of distinct departments like that’s actually going to do anything. you think they ARENT doing anyrhing????? that’s probably ALL they’re focusing on rn and they’re spending days carefully gathering information so they can share it. and shit is hitting the fan in MULTIPLE areas rn if you haven’t noticed and also it’s winter fucking break so no one is even supposed to be working anyway. so what is wrong with you. why are you fucking making demands. getting a college to finally post an update about something is not the same as cancelling someone on twitter and the fact that so many of you think it is is indicative of how SICK our society has become. PLEASE calm down.