iâm not going to call myself âthe friend whoâs too wokeâ or hedge around my opinion because this is my deeply considered belief: horror literature is the theater of disgust, and the disgust that drives the vast, vast majority of classic horror media from the 1890s-1940sâdracula, jekyll and hyde, king kong, nosferatu, the mummy, universal frankenstein, the wolf man, cthulhu, and moreâis the exact disgust that drove the worldwide tide of violence in the 1930s and 40s, a tide that has never fully receded, and you have NO business adapting a piece of classic horror media if you arenât willing to put in the work to identify what is portrayed as disgusting in that property and enter into some form of dialogue with it. if you donât want your movie to be âaboutâ race or class or gender or sexuality or ability, youâre free to choose a source material that isnât already about that, but unluckily for you giant hypersexual apes do not exist in a vacuum
just finished Brian Attebery's Fantasy: How it Works and though he's talking about the same issue in fantasy lit rather than in horror I think it applies--
(p. 134, id in alt text)
(I don't necessarily agree with some of the other points in that essay/book but I think this is relevant to the broader point that the origins of a genre are inextricable from what is produced in that genre, and the elephant in the room is not really something you can pretend isn't there. he has some further recs on the topic and on the notion of 'taproot texts' but I haven't read anything on that (yet) so idk)




















