breakindishes.mp3

I’ve seen so many posts like this lately and it’s like, I understand the sentiment to some extent. I get that it’s very annoying when people insist hays code style that media needs to be uplifting and morally correct or it shouldn’t be produced. But I’ve seen this sentiment used to express frustration about any political/ethical/analytical framework being applied to gothic horror like “well it’s gothic horror!! It’s supposed to be fucked up!! Stop analyzing it to death!” But gothic horror, any horror, is about conventional morality. It’s about violation of the boundaries between what is normative, “correct” behavior and what is taboo. Something has to feel “wrong” to us, the viewer—whether it be bodily, socially, psychologically, etc—for us to be scared of it. If everything is permissible nothing is scary. All horror is a reaction/rejection/affirmation, which is to say an exploration, of the morals a given culture. Like horror is asking moral questions by it’s very nature. To have any meaningful analysis of horror at all “morality” has to be a part of the conversation. And if you don’t want to have that conversation, fine. But it seems like people do, they just want to use the term gothic horror selectively to dismiss things they don’t feel like addressing

Bedevil, stylised as beDevil, is a 1993 Australian horror film directed by Tracey Moffatt, the first feature directed by an Aboriginal Australian woman.

The film is a trilogy of surreal ghost stories. Inspired by ghost stories she heard as a child from both her extended Aboriginal and Irish Australian families, Moffatt created a trilogy in which characters are haunted by the past. All three stories are set in Moffatt's highly stylised, hyper-real, hyper-imaginary Australian landscape.