for real naked old women in horror movies always take me so out of it because it’s like. okay the only thing separating me and any other young woman from her is time so you’re just explicitly telling me that when i stop being young and fuckable you’ll view me as a monstrosity. noted 📝
god this… makes me settle more securely into my usual feeling of not wanting to watch horror
…not specifically because of ageism or sexism, but more generally like… Yes, all that separates me from being old is time. And all that separates me from being dead is also time. And all that separates me from being a half-decayed corpse or a crumbling skeleton is …different amounts of time.
And all passing of time means being closer to dead and rotten and forgotten. And all aging and all injury and sickness, however small, is a reminder of that
And is there any point where it should not be horror? Is there anything that can happen to a body that is not body horror? and if so, in what way is it different from the things that are body horror, and why?
And would any of these explanations convince me? or will my mind simply put the description of it into new words that perfectly fit whatever definition you’ve given me of horror, without changing one single thing about how accurate it is?
i think maybe I don’t watch horror because it makes me think about how everything is horror, and i can only handle so much thinking about that.
Idk
But yeah i think the point is that if everything is horror, if there’s some body horror in everything about having a body – then there can also be ordinary joy in learning to live with that.
In being just as alive in an old or sick or injured body as you could be in the type of body that these movies idealize. Maybe even loving the monsters that are typically cast as horrors themselves
And the horror genre doesn’t often take that road. It more often just “others” what society already tends to consider horrifying, and artificially separates it from what is considered normal, and evades those questions about why one is different from the other.
Which my mind responds to with stuff like, “so if this is what’s scary, then why isn’t my life already considered horror?” and i get depressed
But i don’t watch horror enough to know what movies are exceptions to this