What ‘Fiction Affects Reality’ Does Mean: Major movies, TV shows, comics and books have a large cultural impact and can alter how we perceive issues like race, lgbtqa+ rights and environmental change as a society, and while this does not mean that all media should be ideologically pure, we should be critical of the media we consume and support in an effort to be progressive, as well as ensure that media is flagged with appropriate warnings and age recommendations.
What It Does Not Mean: A group of less than 1,000 people on the internet writing and enjoying a ship that is morally questionable is going to shape society to accept things like pedophillia and abusive relationships, and therefore we should waste time and effort on harassing those people in a meaningless moral crusade because they clearly are monsters who cannot differentiate between media and reality or see issues as black and white.
my fave SCP is Geoff who is basically a regular guy who doesnt even work at the SCP foundation but just happens to keep wandering into high-security parts of the building by accident somehow and escapes containment the same way
like it says its an SCP on probation because they cant prove if he has some supernatural power or if hes just a guy who knows all of the passwords to the SCP foundation
I think my favorite part are the transcripts
“Commander Price: Alright people, it’s go time! I
want suppressing fire on this thing NOW! Neptune squadron, hit it with
everything you’ve got! If this thing gets one claw to the surface, then—
SCP-008-J: Hey, I remember you!
Commander Price: (Exasperated and enraged) FUCK!
SCP-008-J: Can you help me out? I’m a bit turned around. I’m trying to get to Grays Street.
Commander Price: WE’RE 3,000 METERS UNDER THE FUCKING OCEAN!
SCP-008-J: (Produces smartphone) Well that explains why my map won’t load.
Commander Price: WHO THE FLAMING CHRIST ARE YOU!?
SCP-008-J: Geoff, remember? Hey, are you on Facebook? I feel like I keep running into you! We should be friends!”
Geoff is tormenting this poor commander for no reason.
I like the non horror SCPs. Most of the horror ones are ok but the non horror ones are amazing.
My favorite one is a book that when you read it makes you fall asleep then you have an amazing fantasy adventure,
SCP-1230. It doesn’t steal the energy of people, it doesn’t make you die if you die while dreaming, it’s just the most kick ass adventure of your life.
Also it’s sad because the book tries as hard as it can to make people happy but one time this guy who is super into fantasy and stuff used and was asleep for like day and in the dream it was 200 years. The after he got out he killed himself because he just couldn’t take going back to the normal world. When that happened the book grew depressed and sad. The pages were wet as if someone had been crying on them and it keep saying it was sorry.
Eventually a researcher used a sticky note to communicate that he wanted to talk with it. He then fell asleep and met with the manifestation of the book in the dream world, he talked with him and was able to learn what happened and through visiting him and using sticky notes he was able to help it out and it eventually started displaying
“A hero is born” on its pages
again.
I LOVE THAT
One of my favorite SCP’s is this giant, old house that nobody dares to touch because they all think it’s haunted. Eventually, the researchers find that the house isn’t haunted, but hosts an inter-dimensional portal, and some sort of Lovecraftian horror is communicating with the tenants.
He’s not really evil or anything; he’s actually pretty laid back. It’s just that he’s just kind of racist against carbon-based life forms and is really passive-aggressive.
My favorite is the toaster that makes people talk about it in the first person. Even the entirety of the report is written as “I am a toaster. I toast bread just like any other toaster” People don’t even realize they’re doing this and there are no negative side effects they’ll just go right back to normal when they leave the toaster it’s ridiculous
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.
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. ❤
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.
My dad is a musician at the Naples Philharmonic orchestra hall, and let me tell you, there is nothing more terrifying than being no older than 4, wandering out to the courtyard at your dad’s workplace, and feeling this horrific aura of cosmic judgement from the masked Phillip Jackson sculptures just looming there. Their height and limbs are just tall, twisted and elongated enough to not be human, and you can totally feel it in person.
Secretly, Korra also felt relieved to have found someone who could be just as intense as her, having constantly been criticized for this trait in the past; she had never had anyone in her life who got her the way Asami did.
basically emotional manipulation and guilt tripping as social justice praxis is pointless and not sustainable imo. it doesn’t promote real growth or solidarity if the entire basis of your activism is stemming from guilt or fear
it’s also worth pointing out that it turns “social justice” into something uncomfortably like religion. it establishes patterns of behavior that you’re expected to follow, not necessarily because you understand them or agree with them, but because you are afraid of the consequences if you don’t. it turns communities of “activists” into self-aggrandizing moralistic pissing contests, where the pecking order is defined by who knows more of the rules, and who is more willing to enforce them on others (usually, by any means necessary). it encourages ideological purity and discourages debate, discussion, education, and subsequent individual and community growth.
the most fucked up thing about married straight couples in paranormal reality shows is that the husband is almost always the skeptic and the wife will be like terrified to exist in her own home and she’ll beg her husband to believe her and she’ll be crying every night and he’ll straight up look at the camera and be like “I don’t know I guess I just thought she was imagining things.”
like this is beyond belief in ghosts what it comes down to is one member of these couples was so distressed they were in tears nightly or at least weekly, BEGGING their partner to listen to them, and their partner was like “whatever this’ll blow over.”
how does your relationship survive that?? how are these people still together?? if my wife came into the room crying and told me she’d seen bill watterson, author of acclaimed comic calvin and hobbes, manifest in our kitchen and tell her he didn’t like our wallpaper, I’d like. obviously have some questions. but I’d fucking address her distress and take steps to make her feel better lmao???
these husbands are all garbage and they feel justified bc they weren’t the “crazy one” who believed in ghosts.
they were the good, logical, “sane” spouse who did rational and good things like, completely and purposefully ignore their partners’ growing and life-altering distress for months.
I know this seems like such a niche topic to get into but I grew up in an old town where everyone has one or two ghost stories, and it’s almost always wives telling them while their husbands chuckle and shake their heads throughout the entire story.
It doesn’t matter whether they believe in ghosts or not. What it is is one adult recounting experiences they not only firmly believe to have happened one way, but which have profoundly affected their lives, and the other adult literally publicly laughing at them “hahaha, women and their imaginations, you know?”
Both possibilities shock me but don’t really come as a surprise: the husband literally thinks his wife is such a child that she “imagined” these experiences like a backyard game for elementary schoolers, or the husband believes his wife apparently idk?? hallucinated but it’s not a big deal and we don’t need to have a discussion about her health and whether she feels safe and happy in her home because again. silly women and their apparent hallucinations you know???
Turns out horror tropes aren’t actually Metaphors, that’s really just how it is
So whenever i would watch movies and see The Badass Female Character fighting in various ways, something about it always bugged me. I just assumed it was internalized misogyny that made me dislike characters like black widow and Tauriel and tried to make myself like them.
Then I was rewatching Mad Max Fury Road the other day and I noticed that nothing bothered me about watching Furiosa fight and I realized the problem wasn’t watching women fight in movies that got on my nerves.
Watching the stereotypical Badass Female Character she always has these effortless moves and a cocky, sexy smirk on her face as everything is easy. Watching Furiosa, she grunted and bared her teeth. Her fighting was hard and it took effort and it hurt like fighting is supposed to. For once her fighting style wasn’t supposed to seduce the audience it was to be effective.
I wasn’t disliking these characters because they were women I was disliking that their fighting was meant to remind me they were women. High heels and shapely outfits and not showing effort or discomfort because it’s more attractive to effortlessly lift a long leather clad leg over your head rather than rugby tackle someone.
It’s the same with the Wonder Woman movie too. Fighting is hard and it takes effort, blocking bombs and bullets with a shield makes her grimace and bare her teeth with the effort it takes. She’s not flip kicking bombs she’s yelling and straining, not because she’s weak or bad at fighting but because that’s what it would be like.
I really hope we’re moving into an era of women having fighting styles designed for realism and not how hot it looks for the men in the audience.
i'll apple your turnover 