life in mokievision

Grief is inherently isolating.

A friend is going through it right now, and is frustrated at all of the I'm here if you need to talk, because grief takes away all the words. What is there even to say?

What everyone wants to say is I'm here; I've been there. But when you're going through it, it sure as hell doesn't feel like anyone else is here.

I can't say this to that friend, because everything except (maybe including) I'm here is the wrong thing until it's not, so I guess I'll tell you: The Buddhist parable of the mustard seed.

A woman lost her only son, and desperate in her grief, came to the Buddha asking for him to be returned to her. The Buddha agreed, if she could bring back a mustard seed from a household that hadn't known death. She went door to door, begging for help, until she realized there was no family that hadn't lost someone.

In the proper Buddhist telling, she has an epiphany about impermanence and the nature of reality, the first step towards enlightenment. You know, the official point of the story from the religion's point of view.

What many people get from the story, though, is the reminder that we're not alone in our grief. She hears it over and over until she actually hears it; it's community that pulls her out of her isolation, by wanting to help her with her grief, but only being able to share theirs with her.

This is the second birthday that my older sister isn't here to share with us. Soon, it'll be my second birthday without waking up to a call from her singing happy birthday at me. I still can't find words to talk about this. (Admittedly, the world being a dumpster fire isn't helping.) But I'm still here, and I know you've been here, too.

A few Octobers back, when everyone and their mother was putting out their must-see scary movie lists, I decided to gather up as many as I could find and cobble them together into my own giant list. I was tired of trying to remember if I'd seen this lesser-known film or that quintessential film, the title of the film a friend was going on about a few weeks earlier, movies that had been recommended to me, etc., and figured it was just time to outsource that effort to a proper list.

And because I'm me and I like to overthink everything, I then made it weird by breaking it down into categories, subtypes and eras, and I'm going to tell you about it, because I need to think/talk some things out, and who's reading anyway? (Unless you are, in which case, hi, you!)

Category 1: Monsters - often a fear of nature and the in/unhuman
- Monster Mash: traditional, unnatural or supernatural monsters, including folklore, fakelore, werethings and fairy-tale stuff
- Creature Features: natural or realistic things as monsters, including animals, insects, plants and cryptids

Category 2: Dead Things - fear of death and dead things as a metaphor for whatever
- Ornery Dead: corporeal, i.e. vampires, mummies and zombies at any speed, including the not-actually-dead metaphorical variety
- Ghost Stories: incorporeal, i.e. spirits, ghostly encounters, hauntings, entities attached to a person, place or thing, including films where they say 'demon' to make it extra-spicy but story-wise treat like a bog-standard scary ghost

Category 3: Knowledge - secret knowledge, special knowledge, knowledge as power but in a scary way, etc.
- Bad Religion: generally folk horror - magic, religion and the occult, old/odd gods, witchiness and psychic powers
- Mad Science: generally bio/body horror - science run amok, messing with nature, misuse of technology, disease and disaster
- Extra/Terrestrial: generally cosmic horror - mind, space and existential fuckery, outer space and outer planes

Category 4: Society - fear of inclusion or exclusion, and social breakdown¹
- Baleful Boonies: the threat is being apart from society, isolated, lost and alone in unfamiliar, hostile territory, but a rural setting isn't a prerequisite - it's not physical isolation alone (or at all) but being an outsider that puts a target on the protagonist's back
- Savage Society: the threat is being part of society, and a system that oppresses you by design, or that has turned against you - the military's rolled in to take over your town, aliens have infiltrated your community, there's a system putting a target on your back, because it's working exactly as intended
- Failed State: the threat is being in a broken society, where order has collapsed entirely and chaos reigns - there's no system to be inside or outside of, and that's the danger

Category 5: People - always the problem! Always!
- The Fucking Worst: terrible people! Madmen, serial killers, home invasions and random bastards
- Slasher-rama²: terrible people, but following a formula - in a setting that is familiar enough that characters are at ease, something stirs up memories of an old wrong, which sets off someone who lashes out in a vengeful killing spree which almost always involves improvised/bladed weapons (not guns) and quick but often creative deaths (not torture)³
- Home Sweet Hell: intimate threats - fatal families, sinister spouses, terrible tots, gruesome grannies, alliterative aunties and so forth

Category 6: Pretzels - where categorization itself is the horror
- Murky Stew: if categories are so vague or complicated due to meta commentary, metaphors, mixed/multi-trope stories, or gear shifts (where it's not a horror movie until it very suddenly is one), then into the stew it goes
- Mystery Meat: things that defy convenient categorization, because they're too niche, too art school, or they're part of a foreign (to me) subgenre that just doesn't quite fit
- Tofu of Terror: things that are horror-flavored, but not actually scary, like all-ages/kiddie horror, horror-comedy and spoofs
- Horror D'oeuvres: anthologies! Horror loves anthologies, and they're usually a buffet of types and tropes, so they get their own basket

Category 7: Meta - where the non-fic goes! Media about horror, and real fears
- Meta Musings: documentaries and docuseries about the genre in general, specific works and creators, and relevant adjacent/niche topics, like The Nightmare (2015), a documentary on night terrors that manages to also be terrifying its own right
- True Crime: works I find noteworthy, influential stuff, fictionalized retellings that could easily make the list themselves, like Citizen X (1995), a fascinating fictionalization of the hunt for Andrei Chikatilo and how it was hamstrung by bureaucracy and ideology

Eras are divvied up into 20-year sections after 1960, because nitpicking aside (when did 'American New Wave' start? Should the '00s be bookended between 9/11 and 1/6?), it just works easier...

Era 1 - up through 1960: 80-odd years from the invention of film and birth of cinema, through 'old Hollywood', the imposition (and subversion) of the Hays Code, the rise and fall of the studio sytem, set against world wars, the Cold War, the fall of empires (as we pretend new ones aren't taking their place).

This covers most of your Universal monsters, giant radioactive animals, and creatures from another planet.

Era 2 - 1961-80: 20 years around the 'new Hollywood' period, when the reins were loosened on directors and they could get a bit more morally ambiguous, while the national view of ourselves and our morality was challenged by the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam, and young suburbanites scared themselves by imagining the city! the country! hippies! non-white people! In their defense, the '70s was the decade of the serial killer, so...

Here's your backwoods brutality, menacing hippies, hagsploitation, and the birth of the zombie film.

Era 3 - 1981-2000: the franchise era! 20 years during which the VCR took horror mainstream, made it almost respectable, then bogged it down with tired, uninspired sequels, and a million and one Hannibal Lecter wannabes. In the real world, there was AIDS, the Satanic Panic, Wall Street vs Main Street, the evangelicals vs everybody, and a lot of people pretending cynicism is a personality.

In here - well, this is the golden age, so all the stuff you think of as horror, basically. But also, so many smug serial killers. SO MANY.

Era 4 - 2001-2020: 20 weird years, in which real horror pushed us back to a version of backwoods brutality (no, torture porn wasn't new or an indictment of the genre), TV took center-stage and everything suddenly became 'a 10-hour movie', Hollywood tried very, very hard to ignore found footage and make CGI-driven action/horror/comedy hybrids a thing, and Netflix killed Blockbuster and then DVDs, while we were busy watching the real-time horror of our relatives becoming screaming bigots and conspiracy theorists.

Sure, you've got Saw and Hostel, which reflected some weird societal shit, but you've also got your Babadook and Hereditary, reflecting other weird societal shit. (Hint: horror always reflects weird societal shit. The whole genre's about pushing your buttons.)

This is also where you find the reboots, as Hollywood tried to figure out how to bring back the profitable franchise for an audience that was okay with a Friday the 13th marathon on TV but not with paying to see yet another dumb sequel in theaters.

Friday the 13th (2009) didn't quite make it, because they sidestepped the franchise too far, opting for a vague urban legend and a generic kidnapper in the woods, and Halloween (2007) decided to demystify a character literally known as The Shape with a white trash back story that thoroughly misunderstood the point of setting shit in the 'burbs in the first place, but Halloween (2018) poked at the trauma of surviving, and A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) remembered that before Freddy was funny, he was a child molester, and for all the many, MANY faults of Poltergeist (2015), it at least tried to vaguely wave at real world events in the form of the housing bubble and economy.

The Millennials might be killing all industry as we know it, but they at least got Hollywood to remember that beyond popcorn and cat scares, horror is about pushing buttons.

And that's how we get to Evil Dead (2013) and Hellraiser (2022) both upending the tired sin=death nonsense—that Boomer hypocrisy of titillating the audience with sex, drugs and rock & roll while pretending there's some kind of moral punishment implicit in it—by turning that 20th century party vibe upside down as 21st century social problems, making its protagonists unreliable addicts and its supporting characters supportive characters trying to help them, and the plot ends up actually meaning something, so of course the fanboys hate it - but when don't they?

Anyway.

Era 5! Currently upon us! The fragmentation of the streaming wars as mega-corps suck up distribution routes, killing even the idea of indies being able to get their shit out there, and drowning innovation in a sea of superhero IPs. Honestly, we could be off to a better start.

So...

Why do I do this to myself? Because I like seeing how things develop and evolve, nerding out at the sight of a category color-coded for a decade then dropping off suddenly, little clusters of weirdness.

NOW YOU KNOW.

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¹ "But mokie, how many horror movies do those actually fit?" Genre is a basket that catches similar things—sometimes defined by setting (fantasy), sometimes by mood (horror), sometimes by a fancy-pants attitude problem ('literature')—rather than a fence that divides things. A lot of stuff on my list wouldn't make other people's lists, because I'm not worried about whether it's horror or scifi, or horror or suspense - I see it as horror AND...

² The slasher subgenre gets its own basket, outside of The Fucking Worst, because of just how much of it there is, since slashers were the dominant subgenre during horror's '80s heyday - so much so that most 'rules for horror' or definitions of it are just slasher tropes cited by people who conflate the subgenre with horror in general, and also insist that they hate horror but love True Crime, or usually hate horror, but love 'elevated horror'.

In case it's not obvious, this irritates the hell out of me.

³ The supernatural element usually crept in once it wanked off into franchise territory, because trying to swap in copycat killers wasn't cutting it, and it happened to dovetail nicely with the traditional Western ghost story's 'past wrongs = present consequences' formula.

Someone out there writing about slashers compared it to Asian ghosts as an unstoppable death curse on a particular location, and "the unshakeable presence of the past" as a pointed stab at America's relative lack of reckoning with our history, but Google is now useless for actually searching the internet for anything outside your algorithmically approved results, so good luck finding that essay. (Dammit.)

It's iZombie with vampires.

IT'S IZOMBIE WITH VAMPIRES.

(Sorry, do you need a link to previous yelling?)

( Let's Keep the Spoilers In )

A subject line that's a little less funny after 2020!

I'm tempted to do the popular pondering about how difficult it is to write long blog posts after getting used to 'microblogging' in 144-280 characters, but I think the very existence of threads exposes that as a bit of self-deception.

Maybe we are a little shorter in the attention span than we were before. Maybe we're a bit busier. Maybe just less long-winded. I don't know.

Kinda suspect we've all psyched ourselves out, thinking we have to write something new and fresh every time, and polish it to a fine shine before we release it into the void, completely overthinking the 'social' part of social media and how we put on the show, instead of letting go and being ourselves.

Meanwhile, I'm writing up long, longwinded essays about things I just watched and thinking, "I don't think X is going to appreciate this wall of text in their DMs," and stuffing them away, intended eventually to edit them and post them here, but first making sure I haven't written exactly this same thing before, as if anyone else cares if I repeat myself about a particular topic in my wee corner of social media.

(Also, the userpics. Egads, how I overthink the userpics.)

SO WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN UP TO, MOKIE?

NO, MOKIE, WE'RE NOT DOING THAT. THAT LEADS TO A CATCH-UP WHICH IS ALL BAD NEWS AND DEPRESSING AND JUST SHUTS THIS SHIT DOWN.

How about what we're going to be up to: NANOWRIMO.

Yes, we're going to dip back into ye olde days of internet escapism and hopefully get some of my WIPs whipped and then, fuck, I don't know, see if I can get anybody to give me money for it? That's still a thing, right? Just put on a shawl and sell chapters for a penny on the street corner like a Dickensian writing waif? I have no idea. We'll see!

Someone had sold me a large container full of deer carcasses, and I was in a hurry to get them butchered and in a freezer. It was a lot of meat, of dubious provenance, and I didn't have much time.

A few deer in, I found a woman, injured but alive, and hesitated.

Obviously, I knew should call 911. Obviously. But all my questionably legal, scene-of-the-crime meat, sitting there and spoiling while police poked around, waiting to get taken away...

Perhaps I could just get the deer out of the container first? The woman was irate (understandably) but I started pulling deer out, and uncovering more women, not all of them alive. I then reasoned I should be emptying the container to look for anyone else inside who was hurt - but I was lying to myself and I knew it.

The alarm woke me and I hit snooze, falling back into a half-dreaming state to mull the morality and ethics of it, knowing that my panic over the waste of the deer was completely unhinged, and my hesitation to act unconscionable...

Notes, details and explanations
#1. I had some herbal tea aimed at lucid dreaming before laying down - a mix of sleepy herbs and thinky herbs. The result wasn't quite lucidity—I wasn't consciously making decisions and directing the dream—but I was definitely more actively engaged than usual, in a critical way. It was almost like I was heckling a morality play in my own brain, and quasi-aware of that.

#2. I have no idea how to take apart a deer. The dream very conveniently skipped over all the details, and I am grateful.

#3. I had several things on my mind earlier in the day that seem to directly echo here.

First, I was anxious about having to throw out a lot of leftovers that had hit their too-late point. I've got issues about wasting food and money, in case it's not obvious.

Second, a scene from the TV show Hannibal in which a father and daughter talk about deer, except it's not really deer they're often hunting. "And we’re gonna honor every part of her. [...] Eating her is honoring her. Otherwise, it’s it’s just murder."

Third, hardcore pandemic anxiety (of course!) about the casual approach we're taking to the latest variant. Specifically, a doctor on PBS casually stating that because it's so contagious, this was going to be the way we got everybody immunized. This has me pissed, because it writes off a lot of people, and because the messaging last year was that every infection was an opportunity for it to mutate, and because we're well past the wishful thinking that it's a once-and-forever-done illness, so it seems to me this "oh well" attitude is really just going to be the way we get the next goddamn variant(s).

Put them in a pot to simmer, and...

#4. The relatives I was going to get together with over the holidays tested positive for COVID the morning of, so I dodged a bullet but feel bad for thinking about it as dodging a bullet - especially when it's a second infection for both of them.

#5. There's guilt here, obviously. At being OK when others aren't? At thinking of myself instead of others? Those are both pretty vague and generic, given the dream here.

So there I was, thinking it's a new year, I should log in and write, or at the very least show signs of life given, oh, the pandemic and all, but "Tomorrow" turned into "This weekend" turned into "Oh shit, are you seeing this?" turned into "Wait, what's happening now?" and suddenly it's the end of the month. Again.

I should make a schedule or something.

So, anyhow - I'm still alive! One of the many saying, "I don't know, I think maybe I had it back in March/April? Or July?" because it's less scary that way, to push it off on the awful sinus troubles that I know damn well were actually related to the wildfires (holy shit, do you remember the wildfires?), or that weird week in July when I could not stay awake for more than an hour or so at a time, and I still don't know what that actually was, but everything was a potential symptom so why not?

I hope you folks are staying safe and healthy, and that less interesting times are ahead of us all.

Millions of Americans are about to discover that a virus is not a terrorist and does not give a fuck if you're not scared of it.

Millions of people who are sure they'd quickly adapt to and survive a zombie apocalypse spent the weekend standing in bars, proudly proclaiming that they refuse to change their way of life in the face of an actual, real threat...

Happy Pride month!

If you hear "Pride" and feel the need to immediately ask why straight folks don't get a similar celebration (you do! It's called Halloween!), consider why your first instinct is to ask, "But what about me?"

If you hear "bisexual" and feel the need to immediately talk about how yeah but sometimes it's a phase, consider why your first instinct is to negate someone else's orientation.

If you hear "trans" and feel the need to comment on how it must be trendy if so many people are coming out, consider how the landscape around our discussion of LGBT+ issues has changed so people feel safer being out.

Every day I think, "I should be writing about this," and immediately afterwards, "Where do I even start?"

Not for the kids or for posterity or because I think I'm some kind of pundit, but because at some point in the future, we're going to collectively come to, look back, and wonder what the hell just happened.

Not a hot take, just a note to future me, whispering, "I know, right?"

It's common knowledge at this point that The Exorcist was loosely (oh so loosely) based on a real exorcism conducted at Alexian Brothers hospital in St. Louis back in 1949. That building is long gone, torn down in the '70s and paved over, which seemed fitting because parking lots are inherently creepy anyway. But a new building was erected to replace it, and fifteen years ago this January, my Grandma Betty was there to die.

(Not my grandma, Betty, but my Grandma Betty. My other grandmother Betty. My step-grandmother. My stepmother's mother. Extended families: requiring parentheses and digressions since forever.)

She had always been warm and inviting to my mother and us stepkids, and naturally my mother wanted to visit, pay her respects and lend some moral support to my half-sisters and their mother. When they needed to leave the room for a moment, Mom stayed behind at the bedside.

The door closed, and Betty turned her head to my mother, and said, "Your father was never proud of you."

It's possible this frail little woman had been carrying a grudge against my mother for years, and decided to vent it before she left this world.

It's possible she wasn't even aware she was talking to my mother, and was instead speaking through a medicated haze to some moth-eaten memory, or my stepmother (and if so, thank heavens she'd stepped out).

But my mother swears the voice that came out of Betty's mouth was not Betty's voice...