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Kitty Turner's avatar

I’m all about the Heathcliffs of the world. Vengeful, abusive, amoral, and damn sexy! In a novel I’m working on now, my antihero monologues, “Most people think transgression means freedom to make macrame underwear for a living or have deviant sex in public. What I’m showing is it can also mean murder, suicide, theft, domination, hatred. Pain, pleasure, good, bad, it’s all meaningless and ultimately the same. Transgression’s boundaries are the limits of human capability. I’m not planning on eating human babies any time soon, but what you did is against everything I represent.”

Now that I paste my character’s rant out of context, it’s a little heavy-handed. However, it illustrates why horror and the macabre are so wonderfully delicious. It’s coloring outside the lines of the acceptable human experience.

To me, horror is about power, control, transcendence, and detachment. As you pointed out, Chuck, it’s also about spirituality and morality. (Watch Midnight Mass on Netflix if you want a clear example of that!) As a kid, I loved jump scares, body horror, and gothic ghost stories (enter Wuthering Heights). I didn’t make sense of it until my fourth decade. When I feel anxious or depressed, I immerse myself in a horror marathon. I finally discovered that if I cheer through the jump scares or laugh at the fingers getting chopped up with the carrots; then I have mastery over my own fear and inevitable death.

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Colin's avatar

I empathize with this, hard. Er, I emphasize this, hard? I empathize there for I am, hard.

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