Bryan Alexander of Infocult calls our attention to a lovely essay on horror by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, singing the praises of what he dubs “cycle” horror, horror in which the viewer or reader is made to understand that the horrific events she is witnessing have happened many times before and will continue to happen many times in the future. (Think The Shining or The Ring.) Palahniuk argues that these films are in some strange way comforting, in that they imply that the victims are sacrifices made in our stead to keep the evil forces that threaten to overwhelm us (i.e. death, the monster with a thousand faces) at bay. Bryan has some quibbles, centering on both the accuracy of some of Palahniuk’s examples and whether the near-total innocence of many of these films’ victims negates the sacrifice aspect, but as you might have guessed I like where Palahniuk is going with this: certainty and repetition are a big part of what makes the horror genre “work” for me. But regardless, it’s often exciting to see a philosophy of horror originating from an outsider. I interviewed Palahniuk way back in 2001, and was delighted to discover that his next book would be a horror novel; in fact Palahniuk’s last three fiction books (Lullaby, Diary, Haunted) have all been works of horror, and it’s compelling to see how he works with the tools of the genre given his lack of, for want of a better word, an apprenticeship among the hardcore.
Speaking of thoughts on horror from the non-hardcore, the stellar comics critic Jog of Jog the Blog reviews the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, pointing out how it’s really quite a beautiful film. (And he separates “Chain” and “Saw,” which always goes over well with me.)
And what better way to follow up a post on Texas Chain Saw than a post on eating meat? Slate’s William Saletan writes on how science may be on the verge of accomplishing what both soy and human morality have for the most part failed to do–make it unnecessary to eat the flesh of dead animals.
The moral dimension of Saletan’s argument is derived in part from the recent discovery that dolphins refer to one another by name. And I don’t mean “Flipper”–they have recognizable names in their own language of clicks and squeaks. I’d make an Onion joke, but this just makes me sad.