2020 Topics

Shitty year, for a lot of reasons. My brother died of COVID. So did hundreds of thousands of others. Trump was a person I had to know about.

But: for the privileged, “quarantine” isn’t the worst thing you can imagine. I’ve done a lot of reading, and thinking, which I enjoy, and I’ve seen a LOT of movies and gone in a bunch of new directions.

This year, I spent a while reading about the dire state of the environment and looking for “clear-eyed” explanations of the climate crisis. Then, my forever investigation of movies led me to think about the kind of movies I like, and to think about the uses of pastiche, and I watched some seminal John Waters movies, and it got me thinking about camp and satire. I had also been watching a bunch of Takashi Miike movies and it got me thinking about the same shit, and other shit, like horror.

Horror is pretty fascinating—there is always the question of why people enjoy being terrified by a film (that is, the “art horror” effect, that we feel even though we know we are “safe”). Considering this question and related questions over the years (such as the difference between fairy tales and horror, the potential uses of horror, the politics of horror and the construction of major horror tropes) has become a long-term project for me. It fits neatly alongside my study of Gothic tropes and meanings, related to a long-planned narrative project, as well as my general fascination with genre filmmaking.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my rewatching of certain horror “classics” brought me back around to my consideration of camp.