I love Guillermo and I love Jordan Peele who has treated us to some awesome iterations of classic horror tropes and so forth but the success of Get Out began a wave of so called "woke" horror media that only wants to be as scary as Disney's villain rehabilitation movies are villainous, instead pointing out how morally primeval the original conceit of a classic horror story was but unable to find anything to replace the horror with. GDT adapts the Shadow of Innsmouth by making the union of fish creatures and humans a union of love fighting against the mundane and ultimately defeated evil of oppression, turning the horror into a heroic, heartwarming drama that acts as a fix-it to the original story's premise, because GDT doesn't wish to actually adapt HPL but to sublimate the horror and alter the story to reflect modern values. Guillermo wants monsters to be good and only good, and his movies are just rehabilitation for the trope of the monster.
ISTTG on the other hand is an adaptation of stories like Innsmouth where there is a horror at recognizing the other within the self, but instead of the horror being about race mixing, the terror of that recognition is organically transmuted into the tragedy of not being able to reckon with the other within the self. realizing that something is different about you, realizing that you don't know yourself how you thought you did, terrified that something is very wrong but having no one to turn to, afraid of the other-you deep inside the facade of you that you wish would just go away but every attempt to smother it just makes it worse. the deep visceral horror of the story is kept intact but the reason why it's scary changes with a modern perspective. you can recognize the timelessness and the truth of an antiquated classic without having to shift the genre or erase the fear factor by recognizing that the story held truth and giving legitimacy to the fear it inspired in its readers over a century by respecting that there were good reasons for its timelessness, even if the original author thought those reasons were something else.
no one is disallowed from making fix-it fanfiction or indulgent happy twists on old stories, but there's a childish disrespect in taking a classic stories (a horror classic especially, in a genre that has an entirely different intent and purpose than others) and wanting to soften all its hard edges and make everything seem morally simple because you don't have a genuine respect for what the original story did. there's a disingenuousness in acting as though fear of the unknown or an inability to do the right thing are concepts somehow unwoke in and of themselves when they're simply universal human experiences, and there's an arrogance in thinking that a modern progressive person has nothing in common with and nothing to learn from an author with very different values to them but who nonetheless was infinitely more honest about what scared and fascinated him.
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
origamiaround
yousharknotpass
