The Horror of It All
“Camp horror or horror horror?” was the question I posed to the friend sitting next to me as we sat down to watch the grouped short films, “Fangs After Dark.” Those were the two subgenres I had divided the genre into. Everything fit into these, whether it was planned to or not. Silence of the Lambs? Camp. Barbarian? Horror. But there are so many intersections of campiness and horror within films (e.g. US’ use of N.W.A.’s “Fuck the Police” during one of the gorier scenes of the 2019 film toes the line during Pearl’s minutes-long crying-eyed stare into the audience as the credits roll falls right into it). Even if I loved them the same and considered them valid depictions of the storytelling medium, I still had slightly harsh genre divisions of horror that were “serious and meant to scare you sleepless” and “horror that dared you to try and take it seriously with the use of bloodshed as the butt of the joke.”
The first of the films was “STINK.” It was absolutely nasty in the way it didn’t hold back from showing the mostly silent fiend of the film break every convention and safety norm as it stalked and craved its unknowing victim. The creeper was objectively gross for his desire for nonconsensual interactions with his victim, and with the perspective of the film following him the entire time, you can’t look away and escape. The film also used undeniably over-the-top scenes, everybody audibly groaning at some of the more grating shoe-sniffing or spit-drinking.
The next short was “Mamántula,” and as anyone who was forced to listen to the few of us who had seen the film, it was weird. So unbelievably good and weird. For a film about spiders, there were parts where I wished for more spiders so I could escape watching the mind-bending kills and sexified manners of death. The final and by far most reactive film was “The Deep Queer Massacre.” Between takes of Psycho-esque screams with dramatized murder scenes, that were more laughable than scream-inducing, was the unsettling, unnamed, and masked killer who takes the audience through the fateful night that killed the friends in the queer massacre where he giddily laughs and sociopathically titles the chapters of the murders. It was a head-spinning ride throughout the film as it jumped from a skin-crawling and “voyeuristic” murderer to the provocative and gritty massacre, slowly and surely intertwining the two ideals into one unimaginable and sexually explicit shock.
All three of these films took me on a ride through every imaginable horror, some more realistic to the chaotic and unpredictable, or unlikeable, nature of humanity and some characteristically alien. One key similarity I felt through all of them was the twisted core of the story and the antagonistic characters that made you question what you were even watching. That is the one thing I love most about horror, what brings me back, what I truly felt was reignited after watching these three short films, and what I hope to feel and see in the other horror films at Frameline this year. Horror works even in its often unappealing and disgusting nature because of the ingrained bravery it takes to be different. To be ugly or horrific or show the worst of characters and the most evil someone can be. It works to reflect not only society’s fears and harmful institutions that render people in it as victims to disparate aspects, but also reflects one’s own inner fears and flaws on a screen so gory and frightful you can’t look away.
