The True Meaning of Gothic Horror

     

Around autumn something comes over me and I get an almost hormonal urge to do damage and create things, especially when walking around at night smelling the new air. Maybe this has something to do with the moon cycle or solstice or human breeding patterns. I wouldn't be surprised if that's why spooky month is designated to be October. Halloween is the only holiday which matters and I always have and will revere it until the day I die because it encompasses everything I love in life. It makes sense that it took so many years for me to philosophize an ode to the autumnal spirit which could justify a blog post. So this is what I came up with.

One of the most harrowing scenes in cinema I can think of is from Deathwatch, where a British soldier is lying under a blanket, being comforted by the protagonist, only for it to be revealed that he’s in the process of being eaten alive by trench rats from the thighs down, having not noticed due to numbness. The screaming and pleading for help as if anyone could help is particularly hard to watch. But it reminded me of a different WWI story, one actually based in reality, Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger, which is famous for its glib, prosaic way of describing carnage, which is in fact the attitude of Junger himself, as he recounts what he did and witnessed. 

He could have pampered man's appeal to sympathy like T.S. Elliot and other British poets, but he didn't. He called it Storm of Steel, like the title of a movie, because that is the reality of war; there is no lee way for feminine emotions which can be used for coercing reparations. I got to thinking, the scene in Deathwatch is horrifying, but it's coming from a British perspective, which is an entire mental climate in and of itself. If the abstract scenario in the film is one of the worst outcomes you can possibly think of, how would a German, Italian or American deal with it. In war, does it make sense to bring with you the the exercise of sorrow? From what I've heard, you enter a state relative to what can and cannot be done. After the war there was a whole generation of English lamentation, mainly in literature, which still exists to this day. I remember being lectured in school every year and everyone wearing those poppy badges. I remember being told that my great grandfather on my maternal side was so traumatized that he refused to ever listen to music or have music played in his household. What could he have possibly seen that put such a stick up his ass which the male mind isn't meant to cope with after the epigenetic memory of generations of shock and warfare. Instead of segregating art from reality, Otto Dix made art of the horrors of WWI, and still had the mirth to portray a witty caricature of the following Weimar climate—because what else are you going to do? 

Separating hard truth from the inspiration of media is to surmise that all media is good for is Walt Disney's Snow White, which funnily enough, was criticized by J.R.R. Tolkien for sterilizing European folklore while undermining the wits of the youth. And by the way, Tolkien came from Prussian aristocracy, the same heritage of the Black Hussars who wore skulls on their caps. The same heritage, which alien to the British, maintained a legacy of warriorship in the duelling scar.

Where the Germanic mind is able to amerce itself into and play around with the macabre, the Tommy is often portrayed as thinking about their home in the shire or local pub, and cries about it to this day even though they won, twice. My paternal great grandfather, who was a Geordie, came back and got a job as a psychiatric nurse for veterans with PTSD; he didn't mind being called a nurse because he had arms like tree trunks, which probably helps since therapy relating to war can only suffice as a thing between men, particularly those who were there. So at least he made something out of it. British lamentation assumes a universal attitude of the races, with English common law as a standard, as if plenty of Americans didn't come back with gruesome stories as war trophies, that they didn't sever ears as keepsakes in Vietnam or the pubic hair off Cheyanne women a hundred years earlier; that when soldiers from the east coast came back they became gangsters, imitating military structure in their syndicates. When does the gangster genre detach itself from horror? Is it when Sing Sing Sing is blasting louder than George Lucas cruising through Harlem? How would, even, a Japanese compare when they were coming up with new and abstract methods of torment, as they had been in their near and distant history. 

But let's keep it within the ball-park of Europeans.

The difference is recourse, the ability to counter the world around you. True hell isn't what comes unto you, it's not having the recourse to deal with it. There's a reason that classic horror isn't actually scary, it's because the good guys always win in the end, a prospect which gets tossed in a lot of modern shock horror movies. Yes, Dracula feeds his concubines a human baby before killing the mother in the book, but they still slam a stake into his heart for retribution. The most unsettling, and in my opinion the most evil movie I've ever watched is Hereditary. The reason for that, other than that it targets the family and is gratuitous filth, is that the characters are complete sheeple. I had a weird relationship with night for a while after watching that movie, and this only shifted when I figured out that I had seen equally violent media as a kid, the difference being that those examples had masculine agents whose instinct it was to expect and embrace hostility, a quality instilled into the viewing audience including myself. At that point darkness became my ally, as it had been.

It's only because it castrates the audience and makes them forget their role in the hostile world, that Hereditary has grounds to be unsettling; this is even within the fabric of its jump scares. We are so used to being on queue for loud and invasive imagery, that when we see a guy with his dick out standing silently and there is no jump scare, it tricks us into comfort, when we know something's wrong. To arise to fear and naturalize a sense of engagement is clarity, but without an audible prompt to reach that point, the burden is put on the initiative of the viewer to decide what they make their enemy; if you're still in a limbo of discomfort, but are unable to generate your own threat response, what results is a profound feeling of inertia, kind of like getting winded; however it you have the initiative to decide for yourself and the hunger to become dangerous to danger, the naked home invader just becomes a weirdo degenerate. I was fully convinced of this notion when I heard an anecdote about the films director. Apparently when (((Ari Aster))) was a boychik his mamme took him to see Dick Tracy, and he was so frightened by a scene of someone firing a tommy gun that he ran out of the theatre and down several blocks crying and pissing his pants. So how is it that someone who would go on to make a film where a little girl's head gets nocked off in a driving accident and eaten by ants, get scared by what to most white kids would be a dope action movie. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If you can't find your balls then that fear for action, for what in most cases is a healthy display, is indistinguishable from degenerate gratuitous smut. Hereditary wouldn't be scary if the situation was faced by Ash, who would gore the naked cult members with a shotgun and probably smack that little brown kid around for being a pussy. 

I told my old teacher, isn't Evil dead more of an action movie, because I had only seen Army of Darkness, to which he affirmed that the first one was still a horror; maybe it is for people like Ari Aster as soon as men with higher T and more inspiration start thinking that way. If you have equipped with you, moral initiative and a brutality matching that which threatens you, then you can be cold and aloof to that which cannot be effected, as you yourself are only mortal and would be dead within the time it would take to process therapeutically, as a woman, all of what can be interpreted as trauma in the world. 

The shores of America have a long legacy of man's hunger to conquer danger, going back to the Jamestown Massacre and Salem Witch trials. Is it a wonder that Halloween was brought over, not by Angloids, but the Irish, and adapted by Germanics of the new world as a celebration of fear, and a test of the youth to face it? That the gothic legacies of Celtic and Germanic folklore would become movie monsters, which were celebrated every year when we were jits? 

...and when the medium was digitalized that it came in the form of Castlevania, Vampire Hunter D and Majora's Mask; then furthermore, Resident Evil, which must have taken as much influence from Evil Dead as Berserk, till becoming so drenched in creativity and testosterone that it couldn't justify itself as a horror anymore, and Silent Hill had to fill in for its vacuum? As that franchise has shown, it is possible to champion the human will and moral right while securing a genuinely unsettling experience in the process. It's very rare to arise, but when it does happen, it's special. The Japanese are pretty good at it, which makes sense considering how reliant they are on societal norms and structure. Often are they enamored when the lines are blurred between orthodox and unorthodox, as in Junji Ito and all that weird progressively chronic body horror of trypophobia and people wriggling through holes. If you want to hear some crazy ish, follow J nightmares on YouTube. As an ode to my own spiritual heritage I would recommend you to make your kids watch the Helloween Tree, or generally give them a good experience of the holiday and autumn vibe while you still can. When they grow up they can't go around at midnight during covid, picking up bowls of socially distanced candy from houses like I did.