A Pattern of Madness
I recently attended the North Bend Film Fest. My Saturday pass allowed me five events and access to the VR lounge. I signed up for the following:
Short version: My predilections and the tastes of the festival organizers combined with constructive interference to produce an overload of strange.
Long version: As the shorts program progressed, spooky fatigue was setting in. Everything was dark. Nothing made any sense. The Ghosted augmented reality experience at least had a sense of humor. Monument made less and less sense as it progressed, was relentlessly bleak, and played a trope card at the end that enraged me. Knives and Skin’s dark content was leavened by humor and empathy but muddled with sprinklings of magical realism. To be honest, the strange storytelling was blessedly straightforward.
My younger self would have grooved on all the trippiness and let it all wash over him. As the day evolved, my current self grew increasingly frustrated and resentful. Nobody was doing the hard work of telling a story that made sense end-to-end. They were using the uncanny as a crutch, stringing together scenes with primal resonance or baffling imagery and hoping that hitting enough of those beats would be enough to satisfy the audience. I wasn’t satisfied. I was angry.
A Danse with the King
I’ve read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. King knows the genre like few others and he’s specific about how horror can and should elicit terror, horror, and revulsion. Horror’s gotta horrify. I respect that. And a film festival whose tagline is “Something strange is coming to North Bend” might be expected interpret strange as disturbingly irrational and program accordingly. Caveat emptor. As Super Chicken often said, “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.”
Sympathy for the Diabolical
I needed to stop whining and grumbling and look for an opportunity to fish something edible from this sea of nonsense. There had to be something more than sheer laziness in play. Something more rewarding that fealty to the genre’s irrationality. The pay-off appears to be that if you give yourself over to the genre, you are absolved of having to be coherent. You can pursue the most startling and evocative images that come to you if they are some manner of scary. If you’re feeling guilty afterward, you can work to retcon some diabolical plot to tie it all together.
This makes sense to me in the abstract. I just don’t know how to let this arbitrary, uncanny stuff flow. And that blind spot may compromise The Grey God, which is supposed to be a horror story.