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Word

Los Camp! ref?

Oops, interiority*

Saw this at TIFF. The Q+A was enlightening. Leigh was asked how he encouraged such revealing improv and how he avoided stereotype. His answer: there was no improv. Not only was every word written but so too every silence. His goal as director was to consider and respect his characters’ inferiority.

I’d encourage you to keep the post up and apologize if my words discouraged you! I agree that the org landscape is fraught and think it’s useful to have a platform on which to discuss them. I didn’t want to discourage your effort, only to provide the context of my personal experience.

Unfortunately J Street was a leading campaigner against BDS during our push for a resolution during my undergrad. I can’t speak to the organization as a whole but the chapter with which I had experience would file false bias reports against campaign leadership in an attempt to discredit them.

I also enjoy the comedy and visual artistry of pulp/Hollywood horror but imo horror is at its best and most powerful when it engages the idiom of its medium to not only startle us but also engender dread. Those three titles are each of them examples of media at the height of its power.

Most Lovecraftian stories content themselves with the pulp of depicting “a Shuggoth.” Bloodborne leverages its interactivity to undermine players’ power fantasy. The weirdness we feel as our place in the world grows more inscrutable the more we come to understand it is the essence of cosmic horror.

For all our power and intellect, though, the powers, goals, and motivations of the beings who control Yharnam remain categorically inscrutable. We can slay gods and imagine that we know why but the laws governing that act’s consequences make as much sense to us as a funeral would to a plague rat.

The player’s avatar in Bloodborne feels more powerful than that of any other Soulsborne title. Aggressive and flashy, it carves a bloody trail through Yharnam’s apocalyptic streets. Like a cat observing humans, observant players can eventually intuit a reason for the apocalypse and their role in it.

Bloodborne is the most traditionally horrific title on this list and also the most fun. It’s perfect cosmic horror and the rare game that leverages its status as an interactive medium. In Bloodborne, you the player are equal parts archaeologist and pawn of forces beyond your comprehension.

There are horror sequences, monsters, and jump scares in Midnight Mass but—like all of Mike Flanagan’s work—they’re visual metaphors used to express the horror of living in a world dancing toward fascism.

Between that slow death and a quick one masked by the fantasy of better times and powered by violence against the island’s scapegoats, the islanders choose the latter. Without the dream of a better world, the community eats itself in a frenzy of autoimmune-disordered violence.

In their struggle to halt their friends’ and neighbors’ death drive, these characters—doctors, scientists, those of the professional managerial class—fail to address the nihilism at the heart of the frenzy. Their alternative is continued adherence to the slow death of the status quo.

Opposing them is a small cadre of technocrat-coded characters who recognize factually that the myth of rejuvenation that’s captivated the island is just that.