The Morbid Imagination

I recently received notice from Google AdSense demanding that I change the content of one of my blog posts, a review of Suspira (1977). This was due to a gory picture of a woman with a big chunk of glass bisecting her face, from the movie. Apparently this is a violation of Google Adsense’s terms, no gory stuff.

OK, fine. Google has every right to set standards for what type of content their ads for dating services and laptops appear next to. Advertisers have a right to expect the same, as well. I have no problem with that.

But…

This is a site about Horror. Duh. Google didn’t figure that out back when I first was accepted by them for Adsense? Didn’t their scurrying little Matrix-bots report back that I spent most of my time talking about icky stuff? And that some of my imagery was kinda disturbing?

The funny thing is, the post in question is critical of Suspira and Italian Horror in general, for relying too much on gore and violence. And this blog has generally promoted horror that relies more on psychological tension and disturbing suggestion rather than gore and special effects. If The Morbid Imagination isn’t safe for Google Adsense, then no Horror website is.

The upshot is that I have removed the Google ads from The Morbid Imagination and replaced them with Amazon ads. I will not allow advertisers, or anyone else, dictate content on this blog.

But the really maddening thing is that all the time Google ran ads on The Morbid Imagination, for the most part, they were not directly relevant to the content of this site. It’s a Horror site, there should have been ads for video games, Horror movies, Horror novels, etc. The mighty Google brain thought my readers were interested in computer training and Japanese dating sites. I would have made more money (I didn’t make much) and Google would have been happier if their ads were better targeted.

So I’ve moved on to Amazon. I hope you find these ads of interested; if you want to support this blog, click on a few of them, especially if they are for products you are genuinely interested in.

And you lonely horror nerds looking for hot Japanese chicks: get a life and go to to a horror convention, chat up some of those gothy gals, I bet they’re awesome!

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) is the kind of intelligent horror movie that I have been praising and elevating in The Morbid Imagination from the start; how could I not like it?

To be sure, Antichrist is not a perfect movie.  Unnecessary pretension rears its ugly arthouse head from time to time and there are moments that don’t work, either as art or horror (the talking fox – ouch!). But overall, Antichrist is a thoughtful horror film in the tradition of Peeping Tom or Repulsion.

The movie opens with a lyrical sequence depicting the death of a toddler, who falls from an open window while his parents are having sex in the next room. His mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is traumatized and paralyzed by anxiety. The father (William Dafoe), a therapist, pushes a form of shock therapy on her in the hopes it will convince her to confront her grief and move past it. Eventually, he convinces her to join him in a remote cabin in the woods where she spent a summer alone with her toddler. Things don’t go as expected, of course, and his attempts to force her to confront her inner demons backfire spectacularly.

Antichrist is brutal and sexually explicit, in a way that is more daring than recent artsy horror films like Irreversible, High Tension, or Inside. Those films either failed to rise above genre forms or were undermined by pointless technical wizardry. There is a story behind Antichrist, a story that is believable, sad, and terrible. The time that von Trier spends developing his characters and the story pays off when the horrors begin to arrive; unlike the typical modern horror film where people die without ever developing beyond shallow, quickly sketched props.

Von Trier and Antichrist in particular have been attacked for their misogyny. So what? Do all stories have to have happy endings – particularly horror movies? I wouldn’t want to spend an afternoon watching von Trier’s films, but a downbeat slice of the underbelly of humanity is a nice palette cleanser every now and then. I loved von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) even though it is one of the most depressing stories I’ve ever seen. But as sad as it was, you cared about the characters, even the bad ones, because von Trier took the time to let you get to know them.

This is exactly what is generally lacking in the horror movie market today: intelligent and challenging movies that don’t conform to overly familiar formulas. I don’t care how big the actors are, or how slick the effects are, or how dazzling the director is, if filmakers aren’t getting the audience to invest in real characters and aren’t willing to take chances that keep them off balance, then it’s just disposable mass production.  You can get away with more in horror, anyway, so why not take chances?

Ann Radcliffe, The Supernatural in Poetry

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakspeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one ; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?

Devendra Varma in The Gothic Flame (1966):

The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.

Sigmund Freud

Religions continue to dispute the importance of the undeniable fact of individual death to postulate a life after death…Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter of surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation.

I saw this on the National Geographic Channel last night and it just really creeped me out. It’s the mummified body of Rosalia Lombardo, who died in 1920 and is entombed in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy. I could not get this image out of my mind, which may have led to my nightmares last night.