Rant: Horror and the Monsters Within

[Star Man]

Fuck a bunch of dragons and magic and shit. Fuck a bunch of horror stories and zombies. The real horror story is inside me. Inside you. Inside each one of us. Inside every American. These aren't dragons like on TV or on the big screen. These are shapeless monsters. They live in the mind. Mine. Yours. Everyone's They slither up from the mind void. They float just below the surface waiting to launch and seize and grab and bite and tear and rip and rend. Let the blood out of the meat bag. Crush the bones. Pain. Make pain, because it makes the meal taste better. Salty, sticky, blood and searing pain.

The inner monsters destroy individual lives. Mine. Especially mine. They also destroy other lives than the host's life. Like the serial murderers. Like Charles Manson. Sometimes they emerge into warfare. The Lord's Resistance Army. Boko Harum. ISIS. The U.S. military. Any army. All armies. Killing. Drones. Cluster bombs. Claymores. Mustard gas. Hydrogen bombs. Sometimes they emerge onto the TV and populate the shows with images of themselves. “Criminal Minds” manifests the inner monsters onto the screen where viewers can look at what they cannot look at inside themselves. The ghouls inside each of us destroy our environment, destroy our relationships, destroy our lives. The “Walking Dead” is a metaphor for TV, social media, and news shows that eat the brains of citizens in real life.

Horror is the experience of the prey and of the witnesses to the murder, to the dismemberment. The perpetrators do not feel horror. Alligators do not feel horror. The higher up the evolutionary ladder the greater the potential for horror. And the fascination. Watching an anaconda crush a deer to death and then swallow it whole is both horrible and fascinating. I cannot tear my eyes away from the life (for the anaconda) and death (for the deer) drama. The anaconda does not feel horror. It is merely surviving. It is doing what constrictors do. It feels no more horror at crushing the life out of the deer than humans feel chopping the head off a chicken for dinner. People horror-watch images of mass murder, bombs destroying villages, drowned bodies of refugee children, and they dissociate the horror using the electronic heroin of TV.

Horror appears to be associated with purposeless slaughter. The slaughter we humans perpetrate on our kind. Horror is what we feel when the ghouls slither up out of our unconscious and slaughter for the sake of slaughtering. The victims feel horror. The witnesses feel horror, anguish and horror. The fathers of the children bombed to death feel anguish and horror. The wives of the men dismembered by missiles launched from drones feel horror looking at the bloody gobbets of flesh that were once the intact, loving, caring husband who fathered children. The perpetrators, those who were overcome by the demons from their deep unconscious, do not feel horror. They have inured themselves to horror. They feel no more horror than the Komodo dragons who eat their young. They feel no more horror than the rattlesnake injecting venom in a mouse and unhinging it jaws to swallow its twitching victim.

[Thad]

Eat Horror, Shit Eden Compost