The earliest cephalopods date back to the Cambrian period. They predate trees and land plants. So, the Earth knew tentacles before it knew leaves. Anyway, sweet dreams.
schrodinger’s chekhov’s gun. a detail in a story that looks like it should have some big payoff but it’s too early to tell if that’s relevant or if the author just has a passion for lovingly describing guns.
the thing is, i think horror needs to have a little love. it needs to have an obsession. does the parasite in your body love you? it raises you from the dead, it sustains you. this is its body. this is your body. does the haunted house feel intruded upon? is it hungry? what is hatred but adoration?
obsessed with the way that gothic horror is about horror but never directly. it’s not horrific because there’s a haunted house and that’s scary, it’s horrific because the monster isn’t a monster, it’s your grief, your loss, your pride, your desire, your fear. the monster skulking in the shadows, the darkness at the edge of the woods, the haunted house that is too broken to be a home—those are manifestations of events that grabbed onto the fabric of time in a fit of abject horror and clamped down so tightly that they couldn’t keep moving forward toward resolution and eventual dissipation like they were supposed to. it’s all about the scared child and the mourning mother and the hunger in your gut and the little emptiness in your chest at the end of the day. those things are all little horrors but you can’t approach them directly to understand them, so gothic horror gives us these little metaphors and says “here play with these for a while and see what you find.” and all of those metaphors need someone to go back to childhood to release them. you have to care, and be curious and clever, and look for a way to heal the hurt. you have to be so achingly human to survive in gothic horror
