albie
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 134
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Post by albie on Mar 2, 2019 11:16:10 GMT
Of course there are other things that horror offers. Blood and guts. I believe that kind of horror is a matter of surrealism. violence is surreal. Horror could be described as a branch of surrealism.I think we get bored of reality. Shops. People going shopping. cars. Houses. Suppose someone was run over by a bus. Guts and blood spilling out of a person screaming. Surreal. It's not surreal at all. If you think something's surreal, it's because the elements in it are combined in a strange way that you would not normally expect, like in a dream. A screaming, bleeding, eviscerated accident victim isn't surreal. It's as real as it gets... BUt violence is unexpected. We never know how a stabbing or disembowelling will look(at least the first few times). I've never seen anyone gutted in real life. You may see it as an octopus coming out of someone. And I don't think surreal has to be limited to one definition. I think surrealism denotes dreamlike images. That could mean all manner of things.
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albie
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 134
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Post by albie on Mar 2, 2019 11:18:19 GMT
You might as well ask why we enjoy any type of story. Conflict of some kind is central to all meaningful story-telling. We are programmed to be interested in hearing about other people in trouble, basically, because it may provide clues about how to survive. I'd like to think it's more an imaginative response than anything determined by our biology or DNA. It may be that the devil is real and we all(at least those into horror) have a soul memory of him. It could be that horror films like A NIGHTMARE ON ELM ST remind us of the devil. It's a crazy notion, true.
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albie
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 134
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Post by albie on Mar 2, 2019 11:21:25 GMT
I really can't say. It is a difficult question. There are so many aspects. Because it is a paradox? So often the epitome of conversatism and at the same time anarchistic. Has anybody ever truly rooted for van Helsing? Isn't Dracula not much more interesting? BUt why is Dracula more interesting? Because he proves the supernatural? Horror films are really a battle or comparison between reality and a reality that may be. Between the mundane and the supernatural. That's why I see this as a spiritual matter.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Mar 2, 2019 12:42:10 GMT
I really can't say. It is a difficult question. There are so many aspects. Because it is a paradox? So often the epitome of conversatism and at the same time anarchistic. Has anybody ever truly rooted for van Helsing? Isn't Dracula not much more interesting? I was certainly on Van Helsing's side when this happened to him in The Brides of Dracula.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Mar 2, 2019 12:46:55 GMT
Brontosaurus I'm afraid, which I promptly dropped when scientists decided to change its name to 'Apatosaurus' for some reason. Haven't they changed it back again now? It was my favourite too. Anyone else here irritated by the way people in the media have started pronouncing diplodocus split as di-plodocus, instead of the correct old way, diplo-docus? I suppose pretentious folk think they're being etymologically correct, but they're not. Some people just ain't got no education! I was never into dinosaurs, which as all right-thinking people know, never existed in the first place.
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Post by The Thing in the Vacuum Valve on Mar 2, 2019 15:27:05 GMT
I'm in total agreement with all of the above by albie and Dr Strange. I can add that I think it causes us to interface with our own shadow self (as described by Jung), somewhere between casual flirtation and outright confrontation... Which can develop one's personality and character for the better, as long as the dark-half remains held in check. The connection horror makes to the mysterious and unexplainable is great exercise for the imagination as well. And how about Freud's death drive? The idea that part of us is seeking our own death? I hadn't heard about that. But it sounds right to me!
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Post by andydecker on Mar 2, 2019 17:42:04 GMT
I really can't say. It is a difficult question. There are so many aspects. Because it is a paradox? So often the epitome of conversatism and at the same time anarchistic. Has anybody ever truly rooted for van Helsing? Isn't Dracula not much more interesting? BUt why is Dracula more interesting? Because he proves the supernatural? Horror films are really a battle or comparison between reality and a reality that may be. Between the mundane and the supernatural. That's why I see this as a spiritual matter. I admit the example is valid only for a small part of horror literature.
I thought of the charaters in the original novel, not the always watered down movie versions. It can be argued that the movies glamorized Dracula more then on the printed page. I find it hard to differentiate between the two. He seems to be interesting because he personalizes a lot a well adjusted male may secretly yearn for or fears, a kind of uneasy wish fulfilment.
In the novel he is of course an even worse sociopath then in the movies. A leech made flesh, but he is (seemingly) invincible for hundreds of years, a conqueror who knows no rules, immortal. Van Helsing on the other hand in his original incarnation on the page is even for all his modern views on science a pillar of victorian and especially christian values, who not only knows the places of woman and men, but enforces them unwaveringly. Who "knows" what is right.
The spiritual matter in Dracula the novel is not very appealing from todays point of view. Even God casts Mina out after Dracula makes her his victim, visibly marking her "unclean". And for all his progressiveness van Helsing, who has earlier praised Mina as the pinnacle of british womenhood, has no problem with this. It reinforces a rigid belief system which at the time of the novels first publishing surely was shared by most of its readers.
I think there is a big gulf between horror literature and horror movies. Just take Frankenstein, the other of the foundation texts. Most of the novels difficult and not very escapist themes have been ditched in time. To just reduce it on its "horrific" elements seem to do dumb it down. But it had made it a success.
I really don't know if one could compare Joyce and Hemingway. Seem to me they are worlds apart. Surely both come from a time where novelists were not only rated for their entertainment value. I never read Joyce and Hemingway only a long time ago, but Hemingway was a different game then some genre literature.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Mar 2, 2019 18:31:19 GMT
Hemingway was a different game then some genre literature. And here I feel I need to remind everybody that a Hemingway story appears in Wise and Fraser's GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Mar 2, 2019 18:59:25 GMT
Hemingway was a different game then some genre literature. And here I feel I need to remind everybody that a Hemingway story appears in Wise and Fraser's GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL. I had forgetten that, and even when I looked up which story it was ("The Killers") I couldn't remember anything about it (unlike, say, Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," another non-supernatural story in Wise and Fraser). Not a high point of the anthology for me. But then I don't think I've ever particularly liked anything I've read by Hemingway.
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Post by jamesdoig on Mar 2, 2019 20:08:39 GMT
Haven't they changed it back again now? Well that's good news - about time too! In the dinosaur books I had as a kid it was always getting eaten by Tyrannosaurus.
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Post by peeedeel on Mar 3, 2019 8:23:46 GMT
Why Horror? In truth much that is marketed under the Horror genre banner is junk. A quick review of the paperback contents of my bookshelves is almost equivalent to a fourteen course feast in McDonald’s, junk food paradise. But, hey, I love Bacon Clubhouse Chicken and Fries… Sure there are films by directors like David Cronenberg and David Lynch, works of art, intellectually stimulating, and yet I find myself drawn to viewing “The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue”. Those shambling Zombies are like a double sausage and egg McMuffin on my plate. Not to sound like a total Philistine, I do have a taste for more ‘arty’ cinematic horrors: Hammer studios vibrant Technicolor offerings; Vampires, Zombies and even snake-haired Medusa appeared on screen in garish, comic book hues. Hammer’s liberal use of blood and an unprecedented emphasis on sexuality was probably what drew me to the genre to begin with as a teen. And in the books, writers like Machen, H P Lovecraft, Caitlin R Kiernan and Blackwood captivated my imagination. Yet I still enjoy Gerald Suster and Nuzo Onoh; still lose myself in the stories of Terry Lamsley or the novels of Richard Laymon. And still get a kick out of Shannon Rullo’s “Cannibal Kitchen: a horror lover’s cookbook” with its sections ‘Sadistic Sides” and “Slasher Soups”. Where else can you find a recipe for “Henry: Portrait of a Pulled Pork Sandwich”? But WHY? I don’t honestly know. Even as a young child I was drawn to the “Fantastical”. On Television I watched “One Step Beyond” “Twilight Zone” “The Outer Limits” “Tales of Mystery and Imagination” and the original BBC production of “Quatermass and the Pit” which scared the bejesus outta of me – it really did. Maybe that’s why? To confront my own worse fears and nightmares and survive the experience? Open a single novel of Caitlin Kiernan for example and you find it reads like a solemn hymn to violent death – an incantation to old, dark Gods: those powerful, supernatural forces beyond our ken, who delight in pain, suffering and blood, because Madam Terpsichore desires “the busy, secret whispers passed between them…” (her dark, chuckling, Ghoul-like creatures) “…like scraps of flesh and gristle”. Here, yes, we listen to the poetry of rendered flesh and viscera… We have confronted the unthinkable and come through.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Mar 4, 2019 12:38:12 GMT
I really can't say. It is a difficult question. There are so many aspects. Because it is a paradox? So often the epitome of conversatism and at the same time anarchistic. Has anybody ever truly rooted for van Helsing? Isn't Dracula not much more interesting? I was certainly on Van Helsing's side when this happened to him in The Brides of Dracula. From The Evening Standard 7 July 1960: "I do not know if The Brides of Dracula will frighten you, but it disgusted me. Its makers could have achieved the same artistic effect more easily and cheaply by having a severed head borne through the auditorium on a pole". I'd pay to see that.
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Post by franklinmarsh on Mar 4, 2019 12:57:22 GMT
The grown ups hate it.
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