these, my dear alice, are the dangers of wonderland

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There is a specific and terrifying difference between “never were” monsters and “are not anymore” monsters

“The thing that was not a deer” implies a creature which mimics a deer but imperfectly and the details which are wrong are what makes it terrifying

“The thing that was not a deer anymore” on the other hand implies a thing that USED to be a deer before it was somehow mutated, possessed, parasitically controlled or reanimated improperly and what makes THAT terrifying is the details that are still right and recognizable poking out of all the wrong and horrible malformations.

hey I totally fucked up and forgot the 3rd type, which is “Is Not Anymore And Maybe Never Was” monsters

“The thing which was no longer a deer and maybe never was” implies a creature that, at first glance, completely appears to be a deer, but over time degrades very slowly until you realize (probably too late) that it is not a deer anymore, and had you seen it in this state first, you wouldn’t have recognized it as a deer at all, and there’s a decent chance that it was never actually a deer to begin with but only a very good mimic, and what makes this one scary is the slow change from everything being right to everything being wrong, happening slowly enough that you don’t even notice it until its too late, as well as the fact that something now so clearly not a deer could have fooled you to begin with.

And the fourth type, which is, “I dunno, but it sure ain’t a deer.” Which implies complete confusion about what the creature could be, to the point that even a person as comfortable in this world as someone who would use the word ain’t unironically is uncertain, which should horrify you to the deepest depths of your soul.

one that i particularly enjoyed was the ‘nonesuch’, a beast which when you see it your brain convinces you ‘nope, no way that shit is real’. on some level it becomes less real after having been seen by someone who disbelieves its existence as well

@systlin

May I propose the additional type of “that’s definitely a deer but deer are much more fucked up than previous realized”, because turning the corner on a trail and having half a dozen deer suddenly turn and look up from eating Thier companion’s remains is a special kind of spooky.

oh that’s not a deer, that’s just Kyle. Mostly he sticks to shapeshifting into inanimate objects but he really wants to totally take out this one neighbour’s fuck off huge ATV, so he just waits on the brush on either side of the frontage road, listening for Bill’s motor. I told him, if he really wants to total the ATV and still be able to walk away after then he shoulda gone for a Canadian moose. But you know how it is; you can’t really reason with Kyle when he’s in one of his big moods.

I submit: “That’s just what deer are like,” in a tone of resignation, no matter what it does. A shambling visual glitch of a creature, looming on your porch with eyes that are blank portals, opens a horrifyingly glistening maw to unravel an unearthly tongue, which inexorably cracks open the bird feeder to consume all that lies within it: “That’s just what deer do,” you say, showing no surprise, as it hovers fifteen feet in the air before vanishing with a tree-flattening sonic wave and annexing the northeastern corner of Latvia.

“Probably a deer,” You sigh, despite the evidence to the contrary, rubbing your chin and looking thoughtfully at the shattered ruins of an aquaponic biodome on the surface of Mars, the splintered shards of which are, not to put too fine a point on it, dripping with vitriolic black ichor and fragments of something terrible. “They’ll do that.”

“Oh, was it the deer?” you ask the vicar sympathetically, patting her hand, her hand that has gone cold with dread where it is fixed around her cross, although she does not respond; her eyes, so wounded by the spiritual wrongness they have seen, are as lost and blank as those of a dead fish on ice. 

And, when the horror-stricken citizenry turn to you with blank terror and mute appeal, you feel you must demonstrate leadership:

 “We shall hang up an old AOL CD on a piece of string tied to a stick,” you say wearily. “They hate that.”
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abloodymess:

“The monstrous girl has always had to play within a set of rules — an ultimate irony, considering that their ultimate crime is trying to break free.”
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”Horror films don’t create fear. They release it.” Wes Craven
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Joni Murphy | Double Teenage

Ghérasim Luca | The Passive Vampire

Alice Notley | Phoebe Light

Our Bodies, Ourselves

Nina Auerbach | Woman and the Demon

Dayna Tortorici on Elena Ferrante

Foreword by Wayne Koestenbaum | Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick | Between Men

Elaine Kahn | Women in Public

Anne Carson | Men In The Off Hours

Dorothea Lasky | Two Doors To Hell | Black Life
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god i can never stop thinking about certain sculptures used in modern art and how they can be used to elicit the beautiful and terrible feeling of true and genuine horror in ways that a lot of horror movies can never do

like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.

but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror. 

it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”

or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”

like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:

“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.

and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.

anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.

that’s horror, to me.

@admiraloblivious

This is amazing

This post makes me think of Klaus Pinter’s work:

The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.

I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.

Anyway this is such a great post thanks for putting the whole idea into words so well. <3

This is how I feel about wind turbines (I tried to walk up to one once and felt the most inexplicable terror I’ve ever felt in my life), or most things that are ridiculously large, for that matter. Ships fascinate me but make me feel very uneasy. Certain buildings, especially if they look old-timey in any way kind of freak me out. 

Examples: The Halifax shipyard building made me feel almost nauseous, and I have to drive past this cold storage building in Winnipeg every time I go to visit my boyfriend’s parents. I do not like it one bit.Also, I got to see that sculpture of a giant newborn baby last year. That was very surreal in the way that is described here.

WHAT AMAZING ADDITIONS TO THIS POST, thank you! I didn’t know of Kalus Pinter’s work and now I REALLY want to see it for myself, goodness.

Honestly, I’m so glad so many people have responded and reblogged this post with examples and stories of their own!! It’s so cool to see just what people think and perceive as this horror of “wrongness”. I also see some people saying that this is essentially the uncanny valley effect, which is only an aspect of this kind of horror - the uncanny valley primarily deals with something we perceive that looks close to human and yet doesn’t quite make it there. It’s just one subset of a really uneasy sort of horror that can be found in so many forms, which may really honestly differ from person to person.

Overall, THIS HORROR IS WIDELY UNDERUSED IN FICTION and I’m so glad to see so many examples of it posted here!!

I feel this way about kangaroos. If you really look at a kangaroo for a minute it’s deeply unsettling, they’re bipedal and they have insane abs and they move wrong, it’s too human and I get that creeping horror that this thing exists. If I look at kangaroos too long I feel like I’m going insane

Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculptures did this to me, a bit. It was less the shape than the form–the lumpiness, the uneven shine–but mostly it was the scale. Most of these examples of horror don’t feel quite so wrong when they’re at a scale we can look “down” on. But when they overshadow us, or at least when they overshadow our general certainty of control, even for just a moment, the disorientation can slip suddenly into horror.

consider the Gelitin collective’s enormous pink rabbit left to rot in the Italian alps for the next 10 years

Eoin Mc Hugh - The Ground Itself is Kind,  Black Butter, 2014

Kiki Smith’s lilith sculpture is more humanoid but i feel like it belongs on this post because walking into the stairwell in the met and seeing this fucking thing was one of the most unnerving experiences in my life

If “the horror of wrongness” makes your soul sing as it does mine, read literally anything by Robert Aickman. My favorite is “The Hospice”.

in terms of literature, my favorite example of the horror of wrongness is ‘declare’ by tim powers. if you want to be slightly creeped out by concentric circles for the rest of your life, read it. it’s… mostly a spy novel.