I do not like Urbanspook's The Painter. It is a bad example of analog horror, filled with baseless shock value content with no good payoff. Characters are brought in then killed off, the kills can be ridiculous, and it honestly just feels like a powerpoint. But I have to give Urbanspook credit where credit is due.
Mona is fucking wonderful.
It is rare to find female antagonists in horror media that aren't either pretty or killing for a sympathetic reason. They aren't allowed to just be sleazy and ugly in the same way male characters are allowed to be. And even when they are ugly or self serving, that later gets taken away from them. For example, Carrie was ugly in the book, fat and pimply and described as generally unappealing. But the movie? She's literally so pretty. They wouldn't allow her to be ugly. And it upsets me. It upsets me so much that media doesn't allow for flawed, ugly, morally corrupt and sleazy women in horror.
In comes Mona.
Mona isn't pretty. Not conventionally. She has a receding hairline, big unnerving eyes, extremely thin eyebrows, possibly a cleft palate or at least a deformed lip. Hell, when I first saw her, I thought she was a man. She's pale and oily and ugly. And she's not just allowed to be ugly, she's also allowed to be proud of it. Her self portrait exaggerated her features. Her hairline is even more receded, her eyebrows are straight up gone, her eyes are small and beady. She doesn't prettify herself, she makes herself worse.
She isn't moral either. She doesn't kill as revenge for whatever tragedies happened to her, she doesn't go after those she deems guilty. She goes after the innocent. She goes after the weak, the soft. She's sleazy, and gross, and evil. And she's ALLOWED to just be evil. Her paintings are horrid and ghastly and offensive. They don't paint a beautiful, serene scene of the murders committed, they make them seem just as vile as they actually are.
She is a breath of fresh air to me, and I absolutely adore her. Despite the flaws of the original material, she sticks out to me as a diamond. The woman that was allowed to be a disgusting, sleazy, horrible menace to society. Mona my beloved.
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