Eek Week Day 6: Aw, c’mon, 6? How’m I s’posed to tie the number 6 into a horror theme?
Welcome back to Gil Mann’s Undersea Castle ot Terror, where fear’s depths are plumbed and the electronics, as it turns out, are water-resistant, not -proof, but that’s cool, we just go over a friend’s place to watch stuff and type up posts. So technically welcome to Frank’s. And we’re not really talking about movies today anyway; no, today we’re going to perform an autopsy of the conservative corpse in a torrid little tale we call…
Before You Die You See the Wing
Mwa Ha ha! Foolish right-wingers, they never even see their comeuppance comeupping.
Horror Is Conservative [John J. Miller]
What an idiot. Did he really just… well no, wait, does he mean, like, the adjective conservative? Because that’s fine.
Halloween is my favorite time of year for literature. For the last week, I’ve been reading horror stories to my kids before bedtime: “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” by Richard Matheson (made into a Twilight Zone episode starring William Shatner), “The Statement of Randolph Carter” by H. P. Lovecraft, etc.
Heh, yeah, those are awesome. Lemme take a closer look at that; gotta be something stupid, it is NRO after all… OH MY GOD YOU’RE THE COOLEST DAD EVER.
No wait, sorry. He’s just trying to distract me with horror geek cred; it’s an old trick they pull, those wingers. Probably reads ‘em the Shivers books.
Over the years, I’ve written quite a bit about the literature of horror (go here for a quick compendium).
Oh I will, as soon as I’m done administering an epic beatdown.
I’ve also wondered why I like the genre so much. It may be as simple as what Edith Wharton called “the fun of the shudder.”
Oh, way to explicate. We know it’s fun; that’s like saying “the yumminess of the calzone,” it doesn’t actually get to the… oh, wait, that was Wharton. Okay, hold tight, people, we are gonna eviscerate this tool. Eventually.
But there may be something else at work as well: Horror is a fundamentally conservative genre.
Give it to me, John. And hopefully you don’t mean the adjective, you mean that horror is about how people should be religious gun-owners.
It’s of course a huge and diverse field, so it’s a little silly to slap it with a label.
Well, you could say the same for people, and yet here we are on opposing blogs, which is sort of like jousting footstools or battling hackey sacks, but you get my point.
Yet so many of its stories involve a rupture in the social order and conclude with its restoration.
Crap, he means the adjective.
They are also full of warnings about not messing with things you can’t understand, which is a sublte plea for respecting tradition.
Insofar as tradition is way terrifying and will fuck your shit up, but true as far as it goes.
Finally, this is the one genre that aggressively questions the assumptions of materialism and gets away with it.
Yeah, because conservatives are so totally not into money and consump… oh, he means that kind of materialism.
Russell Kirk’s fondness for ghost stories — as a reader as well as a writer of them — was no coincidence.
I s’pose I could swoop in here and say he’s just admitted that it’s conservative to believe in ghosts, but everybody knows that, the way they still leave cookies out for Reagan.
I wonder if this is Obama’s problem with Republicans. Maybe they talk Trek with him and he gets all family-of-man and would feel bad not letting their decisively vanquished asses influence the debate far beyond their numbers.
Oh well. Let’s check that link from before, see if he’s all about Dean Koontz’s ear for dialo…
What’s the best opening paragraph to a horror story? Some say Shirley Jackson wrote it, in The Haunting of Hill House:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
Um, yeah. Yeah, that’s about as good as it gets, all right.
And come to think of it, being a religious gun owner would solve, like, 60% of your horror-related issues, really.
Hokey doke! So I’m 0 for 2 in handing wingers their asses over horror fandom. The hell of it is, you just know this Miller cat’s Thanksgiving column is gonna be nine kinds of crazy wrong, but that ain’t my beat. Check back tomorrow for Eek Week Day 7, in which we scope out the territory first, make sure there’s no abiding kinship there before we go starting shit.
(p.s. Anybody have a theory as to why Jackson’s opening paragraph works so well? I’ve got one but I’m curious to see what people who can’t quote it from memory think)
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Categories: Geek Speak •
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