0:00:00.5: “History of Horror”, and “Horror Noire” are two of my favorite things to consume during October. Both are documentaries. In the case of “History of horror”, it’s a docuseries branching across three seasons. But “History of Horror” is like… we’re frenemies, “Horror Noire” is really where it’s at. For me, I love Robin Means Coleman’s book. And when I heard that it was getting the documentary film, I was like, oh, well, yes. And I watch both things every year on Twitter. I used to live tweet and I will port those threads over to my website whenever I remember that’s a thing I wanna do because I actually really loved the experience of tweeting through my experiences with media. And I can write an essay sure. But the rapid fire pace of here’s a thought, here’s a thought, here’s a thought were like really fun.

0:00:57.9: But yes, I’m rewatching “Horror Noire” right now. Yesterday restarted “History of Horror” and did a TikTok about just how we misunderstand Frankenstein’s Monster, the creature as a zombie. Yes, he’s undead, but actually more importantly, he is an amalgamation of different corpses, which is not what a zombie is. A zombie is just a corpse that has come back to life, but whatever, not bitter or anything like that. Today I’m doing “Horror Noire” and I’m gonna go do some more “History of Horror”. But what I find really fascinating, and I’ve talked about this pretty much every time that “History of Horror” and “Horror Noire” comes up, is that, we’re seeing two things happening at once. We’re seeing people in fandom or media consumption spaces decry making any meaningful connections between pop culture and sociopolitical anything and our behavior offline or out of fandom.

0:02:01.9: Like you… They decry making connections between what we create, what we consume, and how we act. And I understand why, but it is really frustrating because those connections can be made because media is made intentionally. You see it all the time with that, like that meme where it’s like what the author meant, what the teacher says the author meant. And it’s just mocking the idea of analysis and acting as if there’s no intentionality to media. In my case, one of the things I really love thinking about is how much Frankenstein owes to Mary Shelley’s miscarriages and stillbirths and just the horrible things that happened with her with childbirth and trying to become a mother. And how Dr. Frankenstein’s obsession with new life stems from her inability at the time to have what she wanted a child with Percy Bysshe Shelley.

0:03:02.0: Even though he was a dick, and I hate him. And you can read into it. Part of the thing with media analysis is that you’re not usually picking up on things that aren’t there. Modern fandom does it all the time with the whole, Loki was being treated, exposed to racism in Asgard. He literally wasn’t. But what I mean is fandom now misreads on purpose and layers themselves into the text when really they should be layering the author into the text and talking about the connections they make across time and space despite what is separating them. I don’t know if that makes sense, but the other thing we’re seeing are people who are insisting that there is a one to one-ish ratio. If you like Splatter, Gore, Sex Pesty Yanderes, whatever, you are bad, you are wrong.

0:04:02.3: You are consuming media the wrong way. And they’re happening in the same spaces at different peaks and lows. And it is just really frustrating because it is really easy to look into this stuff and think for yourself. And one of the things I think of when I watch “Horror Noire”, is that you’re getting to see the very real impact of kind of racial stereotyping in horror. The monster coded Black, the monster hunter being White, you’re seeing a very racialized, very gendered portrayal of who is a monster, who gets to hunt monsters starting in early history of film with Tananarive Due I believe talking about the role of “Birth of a Nation”, shaping or further shaping stereotypes that Americans in 1918 already had about Black Americans. But it’s kind of really similar to what we see in other forms of fiction and how that’s interpreted and digested.

0:05:10.8: Because one of the things of all the time is that for countries where you’re not really likely to see Black people. A really good example is South Korea. South Korea is a largely monoracial country. Foreigners are mostly in city centers of Seoul where they are teachers or working in media, not much in town and country areas of Daegu, Busan, they’re sticking close to where the happening things are. And depending on how old you are, depending on what you do for a living, you’re not likely to have a deep relationship with a Black person, whether Black from North America, South America, anywhere in Africa right? So your media consumption informs your idea of blackness. And we’ve talked about this, that the United States really does export anti-blackness on a really large level, it’s a thing. And you see that in things like “Birth of a Nation”. First movie screened in the White House, really just an overt White supremacist, White nationalist piece of media building on fear of Black masculine sexuality attacking and tarnishing the innocence of White womanhood. And that informed the history of film, that informed the films that came after, not just in the content, but in how things were shot, what stereotypes were layered into Black people. And it informed what the viewers understood Black people to be as.

0:07:01.2: And it is really important to balance this rejection of like, “Oh, well, I like blank so you think I’m a blank” like you can balance that annoyance that disregard with the reality that the world doesn’t work the way you think it does, or the way you want it to. So someone shouldn’t get their understanding of Black people from watching “Birth of a Nation,” or any of the other blackface minstrelsy works of the early, like the first-ish half of the 1900s. Right?

0:07:36.4: But a lot of people did and they passed that down to their children, to their grandchildren to the point where the people keep saying, “Oh, well, racism will go away once the old generation dies.” But the old generation is who taught the new generation and they were learning from some shit. And it’s just I’m in fandom spaces more casually now and I’m seeing people consistently try to pretend that like bigotry specifically in media has no impact on real people that you can’t be racist to characters of color. And it’s like, how these characters are portrayed and how people talk about them inform the racism that permeates fandom that then gets stretched out beyond fandom to our interactions with other people. And I understand why it’s so scary to say like, “Yes, fiction impacts reality at these key points,” because you give an ant an inch, it takes a mile, you give a mouse a cookie he’s asking for your social security card the next day. I get it.

0:08:45.4: I get that fear of admitting that media matters, but not admitting it doesn’t change the fact that what we consume consumes us, it consumes others. A lot of people are really, really good at parsing the messages from media and keeping what needs to be kept, tossing what needs to be tossed but many more people aren’t. Media literacy, I don’t know about anywhere else, but in the United States is ass. And people can’t just enjoy a story at face value without taking on the burden of the story itself.

0:09:25.5: They can’t… You know, like I think we watched “Birth of a Nation” in my super undergraduate film history class. And we didn’t take it on. It was like, this is a really racist movie. Those film techniques were cutting edge because this was like the first movie, but this is a really racist movie. We kept an eye on how to influenced the rest of the films in our syllabus. But we weren’t thinking about it like, yes, this is super valid. This was a great film that needed to be made. It is correct, but there are people who do think like that, or who won’t say it but they do internalize its messages and they carry it on. Or they’re like, “Well, it did so many great things in the future film, I guess it has to be valued.” It’s like it doesn’t have to be valued. People get to say to mean things about it. People get to point out that documented like historians who’ve documented and historians also includes people who lived in the time period who grew up experiencing that shit.

0:10:28.0: It reified a belief that Black people were going to go out and rape White women, and that is a catalyst for many of the lynchings present across the south up to the central midwesty the areas for decades, for centuries. The fear of Black invasion of the White body of the White womb having body is something that wasn’t started with “Birth of a Nation,” but it validated and justified racist violence that killed people. And whenever people dismiss its value and are like “Well films can’t be propagandas,” please look at the way that things like Call of Duty actively dehumanizes people in Central Asia, and makes you a participant in murder, subjugation and the imperialist project of the United States and Britain. I think Britain, I just saw one of those like modern warfare Call of Duty things they’re putting Alucard in there. And he looks ugly.

0:11:38.5: So like even if I was into those war games, I wouldn’t even be into this one. But they’re putting Alucard from Hellsing into this. And Alucard is known for killing the Nazis. But I don’t know, I just think that there’s a lot going on here and media fiction, how we justify what we like, how fiction justifies violence. Those are really important things to talk and think about. And I think that fandom should be more open to doing so. I think that fandom should be more active and intentional in consuming and understanding media. So that so that our conversations aren’t two dimensional, so that we’re not alienating people. And so we’re not, accepting really bigoted media into our hearts and minds just because it’s interesting or supposedly necessary to the film canon. Horror is a really good way to unpack so many things, including the way that media is used to spread fear about marginalized groups.

0:12:48.0: If you are a queer or disabled horror fan, you probably know this already, because of how horror utilizes disability and queer coding to stereotype villains. Many villains in horror are visibly disabled. Mental illness is usually a reason for mass murders or extreme acts of sadism. Disability is one of those things that, you know, we don’t really talk about in horror. We as in like in broader fandom, not disability Twitter or the film reviewers. But I mean, like, culturally, we don’t talk about this. Same with the queerness, queer coding. Harry Benshoff’s “Monsters in the Closet” is my favorite work to go over this. So if you’re interested, buy it or hit me up because I have it. I have it. And again, I do recommend “Horror Noire,” the book. I recommend the documentary even more, especially if you’re somebody who’s like, “I do not really like reading.”

0:13:53.8: Watch the documentary, listen to the expanded interviews on the podcast, and just think about the fact that we have to subvert our media. But until we do, the media does replicate stereotypes about us as marginalized people in these situations. And just think about the fact that fiction and media do matter. They shape us, they mold us, they shape the mentality of the people around us who are also consuming the same thing. Everybody’s getting a different story, everybody’s getting a different stance. And that shapes so much of how we consume content, communicate our fears and exist in a world that has made monsters into many of us.