[Low Odysseys]

It’s funny, but I haven’t talked much about the horror genre here. Obviously not enough posting while drinking, cuz you get a few in me…

So I’m trying to figure out what my problem is, man. Like last night, I was sort of rambling to poor Catherine at Stich ‘n Bitch about my weird vendetta gainst the standardized contemporary vampires of film and fiction (you know, the eurotrashy ones that dress like they walked past an exploding latex factory?)… I also recall Yojo grumbling something about finding a strong female character leading a contemporary hollywood vampire story, which set off a part of my brain…

And this morning I had a coherency meltdown or something while twittering (ugh) about the dichotemy between “Sexy” and “Scary”.

Not the way on Halloween so many nubile young thangs (and some not so nubile or young ones, for that matter) tend to just afix “Sexy” to their costume. Now, if someone is going for an Elvira/Morticia Addams type look- more power to them. And sure, we’ll always have the Sexy Nurse, Sexy Vampress etc. outfits- fine, it’s par for the course. It gets silly, IMHO, when we drift towards the Sexy Toaster Oven etc… I mean, it seems that any basic costume has a Sexy prefix attached to it- but like I said, fuck, I’m losing the point…

WHERE did it go?

Ah. Yes. Sexy vs. Scary.

To me, being Scared can be a little bit sexy. After a good fright, we all enjoy a cuddle, and sometimes with the right people those cuddles lead to something pretty sexy. Fine and Good, it is one of the many wonderful side-effects of being Scared.

But the “Sexy as Scary”… see, I can barely count some movies as horror movies, because to me they are less about being Scary and more about being Sexy. I get it- what the filmmakers are going for- we equate Sex with Death, or at least Fear of the Unknown… the Virginal Lead is “menaced” by the Sexy Monster who embodies forbidden lusts and pleasures (be they oral vampires, the savage fuck of a werewolf, the haunting “forever” romance of the specter or ghost)… at the end of the movie the Virginal Lead has had their brush with death (i.e. they’ve lost their cherry, or at least come close) and the “abnormal” lusts, the kink, has been excised with the monster being killed. The lead is older, wiser, and a bit more comfortable with their own sexuality as a result…

Okay, this is all Horror 101 stuff, we know how it works. Dracula has to die, or at least be banished, because even though he made Mina feel all hot and bothered, she is a good little Victorian woman…

But I hope I’m not some retro-puritan throwback manbeast. I mean, that is why I don’t really enjoy the traditional (or non) tellings of Dracula. No, Dracula, for me, doesn’t have to die because otherwise Jonathan Harker will be deprived of his quiet, gracious little wife- but because he is the Monster.

Now we can certainly have some fun where the Monster isn’t all bad, or the Fearless Monster Killers that assemble to defeat said beastie are more wretched in soul than their intended scapegoat (Clive Barker certainly plays with that one in the underrated, overripe Nightbreed)…

But my pet peeve (of the day) comes from the contemporary “defanging” (if you will) of horror’s monsters. The “Twilight”ing of once violent, scary monsters has taken away all of the nocturnal horror and left us with sweet baby bunnies that just want to cuddle, and be our immortal badass super-pretty protectors…

The reason the TV series Beauty & The Beast worked is because Vincent was a tragic/romantic hero- so don’t think I’m immune to a little bodice-heaving and longing sighs for a doomed love… but the modern pre-teen/YA transformation of both Werewolf and Vampire to misunderstood Tiger Beat pop idols infuriates me…

I’d rather, I guess, that they go back to representing savage forms of sodomy- willing or not- than chaste “our love is 4evah!” starry-eyed gasping.

It’s hard to be scared- really frightened- by zombies beyond the “aw fuck, they outnumber us by like a lot” aspect. Make ‘em faster (and call them “infected”), blood-spitting, wire-work knowing death-dealers, and it’s still “survival horror”. It isn’t the zombies themselves that are frightening, it’s their inevitability. No matter how safe our stronghold, now matter how many bullets and MREs, we’ve all seen the movies, read the comics… we know they are gonna get in sooner or later…

And on the Z note, how completely unsexy are zombies? I mean, really?

A & I were subbmitted a comic book for a potential adaptation (we passed) and the premise had some promise, but one of the characters had us laughing (in a bad way) at the writing… she kept posing and throwing out these buffy-esq one-liners, except R-rated, stuff like when a Z is crawling at her leg after being vivesected by her explosive arrows or whatever: “Aw, whatsamatter, can’t get it up?” punctuated by a vicious shotgun blast to the head… “C’mon you bastards, do what my last boyfriend couldn’t and eat me!” and I’m just shaking my head… with Vampires, which have stood in for sex/death since that half-drunk Irish theater manager banged out his novel over seven long years well over a century ago, you can get away with the come-on badass talk… but Zombies? The hell!

At the same time, The Creature (ye olde reanimate) can be a bit sexualized. Let’s not forget, Frankenstein’s Monster wanted a bride, and when denied one he told Victor “I’ll be there on your wedding night,” which is a pretty in-your-face subdued threat of rape, especially in an era when it is on the wedding night that all good little girls and boys will first experience carnality.

But anyhow, I just can’t find the romantically sexualized monster to be scary. It isn’t them, it’s me (I’m sure it happens all the time, to lots of guys). The Lost Boys, is awesome because of the 2nd disk of the SE, Bram Stoker’s Dracula has fucking INCREDIBLE production values (and two of the worst performances of all time, but that is another rant), and…

See, howsabout Candyman? When Helen first encounters Tony Todd, he’s seductive, sure. He’s also Fucking Creepy as All Hell. And the ending of that particular film doesn’t leave you going, “aw, I sure wish Candyman would come whisk me away like that…” it leaves you going “brrr”. Because it is not comforting.

In Ginger Snaps Ginger is changed by the bite she receives that fateful night. And it seems exciting and new to her, she’s pretty, the boys notice her, she’s confident. She is sexually awakened as she changes (the blood of her first menstrual cycle attracting the werewolf is a grand touch to the mythos), and she likes it.

But the scary part of the story is that her sister Bridgette, unchanged, is unnerved by her sister and her new… appetites. It’s with Bridgette that with sympathize and fret. And Ginger doesn’t want things to go back to “normal”, she doesn’t want to return to the pre-awakened state. She’s seen the hot breath of the bestial instinct and it excites her…

Ginger Snaps reaches classic status because it balances what is very obviously a “traditional” take on the sexualized monster (”Beware!”) with a darkly humerous look at the discomfort and awkwardness we all went through at puberty. But is it then a throwback? That the sexualized girl is “punished” for accepting her change, while her chaste/pure (pre-menstrual) sister… well, she’s punished to, which would take us into the increasingly dark second film in the cycle…

There is also the reversal, the subversion of the standard tropes. Like in The Convent, when a character’s virginal status acts against her…

With vampires in particular, I have this grievence: They used to be a metaphor for sex, some more overt than others. Well they’ve ceased to be a metaphor. Todays audiences (primarily, apparently, women and girls) want their bloodsuckers to be impossibly buff (but they don’t excercise) incredibly well dressed (be it in crushed velvet or designer slacks), breathtakingly handsome (they fucking sparkle?) and oh so in search of a soulmate to love… for evah Oh, and despite being a persecuted minority group that one imagines should be staying under wraps- they always seem to go out of their way to make the presence known to the Mary-Sue heroine who will end up boning them.

The Good Vampire always has some Bad Vampire friends (who want to eat/fuck the heroine as well) and they act more like the Standardized Contemporary Vampires (SCVs!) mentioned in the first paragraph or so, the ones that seem to live in every shitty techno goth club since David Goyer dropped his balls…

And on that subject/side note though it may be, how come ALL vampires (especially evil ones) hang out in goth/fetish/bdsm clubs? Don’t you think thats a bit, uh, to easy? I thought they were trying to stay underground? Where are the boring middle-class vampires, the shitkicking duck-hunting vampires (oh, Billy-Bobpire in the cold opening of the so-bad-I-can’t-avert-my-eyes True Blood, why couldn’t you have been a reoccuring character?), the vampires who just don’t buy into the hollywood mandated/hissing vampire/fetish-ware SCV mold?

I guess I just need to accept it. I like the grimm and gorey puberty analogy horror movies. I don’t think I’m a puritan, but I like the warning that sex isn’t always safe, it isn’t always romantic, sometimes it’s dangerous and with the wrong person- deadly. This probably means I shouldn’t be the one giving Sam “The talk”.

But what it comes down to, for me, is I’d rather see a monster used as a Frightening Image, than as a Sexy one. I’d rather go away with a lingering “Bleah, I sure hope I never run into that” than “Man, wouldn’t mind running into that in a dark alley, if ya know what I mean?”

Fuck it. I’m old-fashioned then. I want my vampires to be nasty, my werewolves to be nastier still, and goddamnit, can’t our monsters just be monsters again?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 11:06 am and is filed under Spooooky!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.