"Aaaaah a cute anime girl talking to me through the computer I'm going insaaaane!!"
BTW if you have access to X, last Halloween I participated in a space where I recited a few local werewolf stories from the 18-19th century, in a few of them the source of the curse was a wolf skin that the person was forced to wear by the devil and could be physically destroyed to free them https://x.com/Ancient_Daze/status/1983654998363054542
The argument linking Buffalo Bill's literalism to Renaissance skin-thinking is really sharp. There's somethign almost tragicomic about the way modernity gives us surgical tools to "fix" boundaries we can no longer psychically hold together. I watched Silence again last year and what stayed with me wasn't the procedural investigation but that basement waiting room scene, the way the film lingers on the victim behind glass, skin still intact but already treated as raw material. Its Enlightenment surface-reading meets assembly-line horror. The skin-ego concept cuts through alot of vague body horror discourse too, explains why some films land viscerally while others just gross us out without real dread.
Thank you! Yes, and the history of early plastic surgery is bizarre and at times, disturbing, constantly betraying particular anxieties. Noses have apparently always been a source of self-loathing. SotL is such a rich film, it can be read in so many ways, but I do agree that the skin-ego idea massively sharpens the concept of 'body horror', which is always a hand-wavy description. The term body horror doesn't really work unless you're also implicitly describing the context of selfhood, skin-boundaries, subjectivity etc. For example, so much children's media could be defined as 'body horror', with characters blowing up like balloons, flattening faces, being squashed into paper, as could many traditional animistic stories, but neither are 'horror' because the context of the subject is very different.
I've been saving this in my inbox for a while, finally got around to it. I'm glad I recently made the jump to paid, this was great! Looking forward to more, I'm consistently impressed by your insights.
"Aaaaah a cute anime girl talking to me through the computer I'm going insaaaane!!"
BTW if you have access to X, last Halloween I participated in a space where I recited a few local werewolf stories from the 18-19th century, in a few of them the source of the curse was a wolf skin that the person was forced to wear by the devil and could be physically destroyed to free them https://x.com/Ancient_Daze/status/1983654998363054542
The argument linking Buffalo Bill's literalism to Renaissance skin-thinking is really sharp. There's somethign almost tragicomic about the way modernity gives us surgical tools to "fix" boundaries we can no longer psychically hold together. I watched Silence again last year and what stayed with me wasn't the procedural investigation but that basement waiting room scene, the way the film lingers on the victim behind glass, skin still intact but already treated as raw material. Its Enlightenment surface-reading meets assembly-line horror. The skin-ego concept cuts through alot of vague body horror discourse too, explains why some films land viscerally while others just gross us out without real dread.
Thank you! Yes, and the history of early plastic surgery is bizarre and at times, disturbing, constantly betraying particular anxieties. Noses have apparently always been a source of self-loathing. SotL is such a rich film, it can be read in so many ways, but I do agree that the skin-ego idea massively sharpens the concept of 'body horror', which is always a hand-wavy description. The term body horror doesn't really work unless you're also implicitly describing the context of selfhood, skin-boundaries, subjectivity etc. For example, so much children's media could be defined as 'body horror', with characters blowing up like balloons, flattening faces, being squashed into paper, as could many traditional animistic stories, but neither are 'horror' because the context of the subject is very different.
Nice.
Or stealing the skin and wearing it as a literal skin-suit.
I've been saving this in my inbox for a while, finally got around to it. I'm glad I recently made the jump to paid, this was great! Looking forward to more, I'm consistently impressed by your insights.
Thinking "Dead Skin Mask" by Slayer...