Guide To Horror

Pictured below: A teaser image of Koji Shiraishi’s latest spine-tingler.

I worry I went to far with this one-- too verbose, to many jokes-in-jokes and callbacks, getting lost in the sauce of it all and muddling the whole thing overall. Is this still a clean read? Do these jokes still hit? Sound off in the comments! 

I think it’s pretty cute that Lovecraft’s most famous stories debuted in a magazine called “Weird Tales”. Society was so utterly cream-of-wheat that they didn’t even have the words to classify stuff as horror or sci-fi; you just wrote up some unusual-ass shit, and your editors had to decide whether it counted as a ‘Weird’, ‘Strange’, or ‘Fantastic’. I suppose it’s preferable, though, to hyper-classifying every piece of YouTube-sidebar-recommended music as fuckin Synthwave or Vapordream or whatever. Look buddy, it’s all ‘weird’ to me.

I don’t know how popular the whole “girls lusting after slashers” thing actually is, or if it’s just something that keep popping up in the same niche circle of twitter. I often worry about that with my comics; is this actually #relatable#sotrue or is this just me showing my proverbial ass, showing off how totally insulated and internet-brained I am? Are there people who read stuff like this and think “alright, he’s finally lost the fucking plot”, my comics charting my descent into madness like that one guy who kept doing self-portraits as his Alzheimers worsened? (…maybe that was in bad taste, sorry.)

Anyhoo— the funniest part about the slasher thing is something I couldn’t quite nail here. It isn’t just that Jason Voorhes or Michael Myers are #toxic. I totally get liking villains— they are interesting, often quite charming, quite charismatic. In your affection for these things, you can forgive their wretchedness. But not these guys— these characters’ sole personality trait is that they love executing sex-positive teens. There’s nothing else to latch on to! And yet, you want to turn around and tut-tut me for thinking Walter White is epically based, hypothetical woman I invented? For shame! All three of my girl roommate did the same thing to me with Kendall Roy, while the sole other boy in the house helped me the hold the line. If you’ll allow me to be a crude, binary reductionist for a moment, I think this is just one of those gender chasms that will never be able to be broached.

For someone who’s only seen like 2.5 folk horror movies to completion (Wickerman only counts for half here— it was the Nic Cage version) I’m pretty proud of my analysis. Someone hire me to their english department.