Horror! Panic! Hysteria!

[keire_ke]

I think we're being coddled a tad too much, us students. What are they afraid of, a lawsuit? It took some insistence to get my tutor to muster up the courage to rip the piece I wrote to shreds (my heart!! *gasps*), but damn, I bloody well want it! How the hell am I supposed to work with "that's really nice"?

Today's session was on horror, and for some reason the guy managed to freak me out by talking about writing horror stories. Apparently, there is a guy who wrote a short story so gory and disgusting, that he's keeping count of how many people would faint while he's reading it. o.O On an also weird note, I got an email from one of my mates. She won't attend classes until we're done with horror, cause she's Christian. If you failed to notice the causality in the sentence, we're in the same boat.

Also! Tomorrow I'm going to see yami_tai! *beams*




Commissioned by merula31. You might want to camp out in her LJ for the ficcy! Heero looks so shy about the attention. ^______^

Comments

[seraphim-grace.livejournal.com]

decent horror shouldn't be gory, it should just be.
Look at J-horror, there is no blood in Ringu at all, and certainly none in the book, parasite eve is about organ transplants. and then you get Tomie, which freaks ME out where its just this girl who doesn't die, or long hair in the attic (again by Junji Ito) or Uzumaki.
all these are subconscious fears.
Most decent horror is written around Freud's theory of the uncanny (I know Silent Hill is)
the theory, in a nutshell, says when we look at something we recognise it and categorise it by that recognition, so when that recognition is slightly off it creates a sense of unease. This is the uncanny, ie by this token the nurses in silent hill are more frightening than say the slugs in slither because we recognise them as caregivers, and their appearance is subtly changed by having their faces as polished domes of flesh (tell me they dont' freak you out irrationally) so they use our recognition and sense of safety against us. compare them to the dogs in silent hill, also subtly mutated, but we already fear them because they will go for us.
also to be considered is the fear of the primal, the innate fears within us of the predator (not THAT predator), the fear of the dark, the forest and the protection of light which dates back to the caveman.
this is why horror is mostly based on the supernatural, it goes back to our racial memory of witches in the forest (women in power) the dead rising (common to every culture known to man - they all have vampires) and that which goes bump in the night.
we fear what we cannot explain and I'm sorry but if you need gore to do that you're doing it wrong.

Duo's eyes in the picture freak me out, probably by the same token, but I'm in love with Heero's shoes.

[keire-ke.livejournal.com]

The Ring freaked me out so bad! And it wasn't gory at all, I know! I love horror movies like this. *grins* I'm still working up the nerve to watch Ringu 0 & 2. I know what you mean, it's not that the gore scares me. It disgusts me.

One of the scariest movies I've ever seen was "War of the Worlds" with Tom Cruise, weirdly enough. There was once scene that just freaked me out, so bad - the one where they drive into a crowd of people and all the people just push at them, it was horrible. *shudders* Aliens were a picnic, but that one scene...

Things might go bump in the night, but nothing can be scarier than humans, I think.

I'm in love with Duo's eyes. *grins* Thank you!

[seraphim-grace.livejournal.com]

the icon is revenge, isn't it?

i didn't like war of the worlds, it bored me, i know the scene you mean though, where they stole the car and the gun.
Ring 2 is freakier than Ring, but 0 just makes the others worse, it's not scary in and of itself.
I've seen gory films that were scary - Event horizon comes to mind- but things like hostel just bored me, in fact i ate lasagna whilst watching hostel, and saw intrigued me because i wanted to know who jigsaw was. Films like Jeepers Creepers only were considered scary because there was no resolution - the monster got away with it, but he still had a great big zipper down his back.
I'm a horror junkie so it takes a lot to scare me

[keire-ke.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I couldn't resist! *runs and hides*

The film was crappy, yeah. That one scene stayed with me though.

I don't like gory movies. My stomach cannot stand them. I like being scared though.

[seraphim-grace.livejournal.com]

gore can be powerful, i mean in like the black dahlia you only briefly see the body and so it slaps you in the face, but alternately the film was more powerful when you couldn't, and look at saw, you saw nothing in the first one, absolutely nothing at all, it all happened off screen so you filled in the blanks, I haven't seen 3 yet but 2 happened on screen so it was like, yeah, whatever.
the gore is made with caro syrup and when they were making the evil dead they had so much of it they were eating it out of the jar because there was no food and hwen they had food they poured caro syrup over it. Hmmm, gore covered pancakes. Bruce Campbell was using it as hair gel. makes you look at it in a whole new light, and you know the slime you get, the lovely clear shiny slime - it's KY jelly, no really.
so the alien was just a man in a suit designed to look like a penis covered in ky and splashing people with syrup (really!) does it sound so scary now.
and that's before you get into the male fear of birth, the omnipresent representations of male rape in that film, in which again, everything happened off screen or in very quick cuts. your imagination is what scares you.
Have you played fatal frame, there was a massacre which you never see, you see the people running and you see a splash of blood on his face, that's it, but you fill in the blanks and that makes it frightening.
I did a semester on horror at uni, and the psychology of it in relation to the gothic genre. I aced it too.