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May. 1st, 2011 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreThings:
- Caught up on Doctor Who today. No spoilers except - bwee, I am full of flaily happiness. I would like to keep Canton - he would make a hilariously awesome companion. Let's keep Amy and Rory and River and Canton and have the most crowded TARDIS ever. It would be great. Also! I am choosing to believe that the Doctor's "Oh, is this the Oval Office? I was looking for the...oblong room," is a random Discworld joke, because that pleases me. I can't wait till next week.
- Also today, I went back and watched the River Song two-parter from season 4 because I stopped before that in season 4 and never went back. It was likewise pretty awesome, though I am always a bit disappointed by the monsters that people tell me are scary on Doctor Who, because I almost never find them to be so. I'm sorry, I did not think Blink was scary at all and the Weeping Angels only got a little creepier in season five, solely because of the "anything that contains an image of an angel becomes an angel" thing. (I love harmful sensation horror.) The Vashta Nerada? Likewise not scary. The data ghosts were scary but that is mostly because repetitive noise or speech freaks me out. (Seriously, if you want to creep me out really easily, you can just say the same thing in the same tone at regular intervals for about a minute or two. I will leave the room with my hands over my ears. That is why I no longer have an alarm clock that beeps.) The gas-mask people from The Empty Child were scary, though. They had gas-masks coming out of their mouths. Foreign objects in people's mouths are not okay.
- On the subject of things that are (not) scary, I was at a bookstore yesterday and I came to a rather disheartening conclusion. The first is that we, as a society, have done zombies to death (ha ha). I saw two books with zombie protagonists and that signals the end. See, the thing about zombies is that zombies aren't characters. Zombies are props or possibly events. Zombies happen to characters. The point of zombies is that they are a relentless unthinking horde that crashes over you like a wave. Zombies are the last monster we have that is purely The Corpse, simply and solely the horror of death and rot. And the dead always outnumber the living and the dead are always unavoidable and unstoppable. Once the zombie starts talking, starts having feelings and relationships, all of the horror is gone. I don't want to explore what it's like to be a zombie. Being a zombie should be like anything - it should be mindless inexorable hunger. A zombie is scary because it used to be a person and now it's not and someday, you won't be either. If you make a zombie a person again, then what the hell is the point?
And those are my thoughts today.
- Caught up on Doctor Who today. No spoilers except - bwee, I am full of flaily happiness. I would like to keep Canton - he would make a hilariously awesome companion. Let's keep Amy and Rory and River and Canton and have the most crowded TARDIS ever. It would be great. Also! I am choosing to believe that the Doctor's "Oh, is this the Oval Office? I was looking for the...oblong room," is a random Discworld joke, because that pleases me. I can't wait till next week.
- Also today, I went back and watched the River Song two-parter from season 4 because I stopped before that in season 4 and never went back. It was likewise pretty awesome, though I am always a bit disappointed by the monsters that people tell me are scary on Doctor Who, because I almost never find them to be so. I'm sorry, I did not think Blink was scary at all and the Weeping Angels only got a little creepier in season five, solely because of the "anything that contains an image of an angel becomes an angel" thing. (I love harmful sensation horror.) The Vashta Nerada? Likewise not scary. The data ghosts were scary but that is mostly because repetitive noise or speech freaks me out. (Seriously, if you want to creep me out really easily, you can just say the same thing in the same tone at regular intervals for about a minute or two. I will leave the room with my hands over my ears. That is why I no longer have an alarm clock that beeps.) The gas-mask people from The Empty Child were scary, though. They had gas-masks coming out of their mouths. Foreign objects in people's mouths are not okay.
- On the subject of things that are (not) scary, I was at a bookstore yesterday and I came to a rather disheartening conclusion. The first is that we, as a society, have done zombies to death (ha ha). I saw two books with zombie protagonists and that signals the end. See, the thing about zombies is that zombies aren't characters. Zombies are props or possibly events. Zombies happen to characters. The point of zombies is that they are a relentless unthinking horde that crashes over you like a wave. Zombies are the last monster we have that is purely The Corpse, simply and solely the horror of death and rot. And the dead always outnumber the living and the dead are always unavoidable and unstoppable. Once the zombie starts talking, starts having feelings and relationships, all of the horror is gone. I don't want to explore what it's like to be a zombie. Being a zombie should be like anything - it should be mindless inexorable hunger. A zombie is scary because it used to be a person and now it's not and someday, you won't be either. If you make a zombie a person again, then what the hell is the point?
And those are my thoughts today.
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Date: 2011-05-02 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-02 03:43 am (UTC)2. Harmful sensation! I knew that phrase but I forgot it. I love how people have come up with these brilliantly succinct-yet-vivid descriptions for horror tropes. I wonder if there's a wiki page or something listing a bunch of them.
3. The only "zombie as POV character" novel I know of isn't really intended to be a horror story, as far as I know anyway--never read it, way too much grossness for me. I'm confident in the author's skills and sensibility, but yeah, I agree that it wouldn't really work as horror per se, as opposed to an SFF story. Hmm, although, the concept of being trapped inside a decaying body, increasingly unable to control it or communicate with anyone, is pretty scary. Not in the same way, but quite potent horror.