something i really enjoy in horror movies is when the victim(s) start to hunt the killer in return in order to kill them first, both because it’s an interesting parallel that (if done well) asks the audience to consider the question of when violence and killing are a justifiable means to an end in order to survive and at what point it crosses the line from acceptable to abhorrent and condemns the perpetrator, and also because it’s a little bit funny. like i can do that too bitch you’re not special.
this quote about cordyceps from this article in a scientific magazine is basically how i’ve always imagined possession to work in horror stories. the demon/entity/whatever doesn’t alter your perception, displace you, or control your mind, they just take over all your bodily processes, bypassing your brain entirely. they force your mouth and vocal cords to form the words they want you to say, force your limbs to move in the direction they want you to go, and force your lungs to keep expanding and contracting and your heart to keep beating, even through excruciating pain and horrific injury, so you can’t even self-sabotage and your friends and loved ones are discouraged from trying to stop you for fear of what harm they might cause you to do to yourself to escape. you’re a passenger in the driver’s seat of your own car, and the hands on the wheel, though outwardly apparently the same pair you’ve always had, are no longer your own.
“[The] obsession with the body suggests a connection between horror and pornography, one critics have noted before (Williams 1989b, Clover 1992). The horror film, like pornography, dares not only to violate taboos but to expose the secrets of the flesh, to spill the contents of the body. If pornography is the genre of the wet dream, then horror is the genre of the wet death. They each whet the appetites of their respective and overlapping audiences for more, as video rental receipts and the proliferation of remakes and sequels attest. The link between hard-core pornography and hard-core horror or the gore film is captured in the term “carnography” (Gehr 1990, 58), which uses the carnality of both genres as a bridge.
(…)
These disreputable genres violate taboos by privileging the act of showing the body, by figuring what Clover calls “the ‘opened’ body” (1992, 32). They expose what is normally concealed or encased to reveal the hidden recesses of the body, porn through carnal knowledge and horror through carnage. Porn and horror are obsessed with the transgression of bodily boundaries. Both are concerned with the devouring orifice. But whereas pornography is concerned with the phallic penetration and secretions of sexually coded orifices like the mouth (gaping in ecstasy or pain), vagina, and anus, horror is more concerned with the creation of openings where there were none before.”
— Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing
ALT
