Things:
- I have now finished episode 22 of The Magnus Archives. I promise I will stop constantly talking about it soon but soon is not now, so I'm going to mention how consistently excellent the sound design is on this show. There aren't sound effects as such, but the very slight tape recorder distortion during all the statements is very effective and god, I love the little changes to the background music that reflect the story being told. The bell in episode 20 really got me, as did the slight skittering noises in 22. It's very good.
- Also, episodes 19 and 20 (which are, unusually, a two-parter) were lovely, because they were a flavor of horror that I don't see nearly enough of, which is spiritual horror - the horror of being cut off from god.
The Exorcist has a little of that with Father Karras' whole thing, and I'm sure I'm missing some other obvious works, but I'm hard pressed to think of a story that dealt with that flavor of horror so directly. Maybe I would enjoy possession horror more if more of it were from the possessed person's point of view.
- Actually, this may be a place where I am displaying my ignorance: I have not enjoyed much of the possession horror I have read/watched so I tend to avoid it. Is there other possession horror from the possessed person's point of view? It seems like most of what I've seen tends to be otherwise.
- Relatedly: I've had to take my
WWI and horror book back to the library half-finished, as it has a hold. I'm not sure that I will try to get it again to finish it. While parts of it were very interesting, the author's thesis is far too broad to my mind (while obviously influential in terms of early horror film and thus some of the tropes that survive to this day, I don't really believe that all 20th century horror is about WWI and the author did not make his case on this point convincingly). Also, he does a thing that I've seen other horror scholars do before and which always irritates me, which is decide early on that all horror ultimately boils down to fear of one's own bodily death and then continue to try to interpret every work of horror through that lens. Which is obviously nonsense: I can think of all sorts of horrific things that have very little to do with the fear of bodily death. The author at several points tried to argue that all of Lovecraft's work is about fear of bodily death and I had to physically put the book down for a few minutes due to the weight of all that wrongness. This dude wrote a Lovecraft biography! I don't understand! In conclusion, I cannot finish this book because it would end with me writing the author a long and angry letter about how wrong he is and I cannot be that person.
- I have my D&D meetup scheduled for tonight, but only two out of the six players have said they could make it. Which means I'm going to spend the rest of the day anxiously wondering if they're going to come or if I should try to reschedule for next week. It is a trial.