#surprise! sometimes i ramble about things that aren’t critrole related!

[nellasbookplanet]

Sometimes, being a fan of supernatural horror is a strange thing. I love me some demons and witches and what have you, but I cannot watch these films without being aware that, in real life, witches were innocent women burned at the stake. Possessed people were and are regular humans who're either different in a way those around them refuse to accept, or in need of actual medical care.

So many movies approach these ideas in an unquestioning manner. 'The ghost of a which from ye olden days is trying to murder us!', 'poor innocent girl is possessed and must be exorcised, and anyone who suggests medical care is naive!' There is little to no examination of how these beliefs have impacted real people, even when the films are supposedly set in the real world. Christianity is used as a weapon but never examined in neither a positive or negative light. It simply Is, a supposedly neutral weapon against forces of evil. Modern science is naive and helpless.

It's rare to find something different, but a little while ago, I watched the 2019 Carmilla adaptation, in which (spoiler warning, I guess) there are no actual vampires. There is, however, a belief in vampires as something monstrous and corrupting and inhuman, a belief projected onto those who are different (in this case, queer women). In this version, Carmilla is simply a slightly strange human girl who ends up being Laura's sexual awakening. She's perceived as an evil, corrupting influence, Laura as a naive innocent who must be protected at all cost. In this story, Carmilla is the victim.

In the Babadook (again, spoilers), the demon like monster is a manifestation and a metaphor of guilt and mourning and depression. It is a very real thing, but it cannot be fought with crucifixes and holy water, can never truly be defeated, only ever managed and lived with in the manner of true grief.

I don’t really know where I'm going with this. I love supernatural horror, love films about possession and demons. I just wish the use of such tropes was more self-aware, or leaned more into the fantastic over the religious. How does one even make a possession film without implying that exoricism trumps medical care? A film about evil witches without implying that the witch hunters were on some level justified? A sceptic-believer dynamic without either making the sceptic right, thereby losing the fun supernatural element, or the believer right, thereby leaning into superstition over science? (you could make neither right, and land yourself with an open-ended and often unsatisfactory story, I guess) So many of these tropes have their roots in a very different real life type of horror, and the films all pretend not to realize that.

#i know that going into simple horror movies i should not expect them to be introspective and deep about the state of the world #they are just meant to be cheap thrills #yet somehow i still hope every time that the creators will look at these tropes with compassion and scepticism #rather than use them as check lists with little to no thought #i started watching this show about demons a while back #and a character said that demons are simply metaphors for mental illness #and i really like that! you could go the babadook route of having them be real manifestations #yet keep away the exorcism and instead fight them by helping the possessed get better #the show as a whole leaned very heavily into the christian idea of demons and possession tho so i ended up dropping it #long post #nella talks #surprise! sometimes i ramble about things that aren’t critrole related! #i think the babadook is the closest I've found to something that does this really well #without either fully cutting the supernatural aspect or giving no real answers about what is/isn't real #but it's also a kind of depressing film. i love it yet rarely feel the urge to rewatch it #pls give me fun and spooky yet self-aware and introspective horror!