HORROR IN DC
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Home is Where the Heart is... WARNING: This post contains small spoilers from the movie: IT.9/11/2017 Yesterday, I went to the movie theatre and saw Stephen King’s IT. It was a highly enjoyable film that brought out many topics in our day-to-day lives such as sex, growing up and fear. Fear is the main theme of IT. Pennywise, the main antagonist in the film, feeds off of it and uses it as a means to grow in strength. The movie uses fear to corrupt the places where we feel the safest. And often times turning a symbol of hope, like a house, into a place of fear, anxiety, and death.
To put in plainly: a home is where one feels most comfortable. This doesn't have to be a house, it can be a place of rest, or even a workplace, like how we saw in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” when one’s home is intruded upon, whoever resides in it does all in their power to reject the invader. This is not something that applies to just the antagonist, that is an instinct that transcends all monsters. To a creature like Pennywise, from the movie IT, home is the sewers underneath Derry, Maine, where Pennywise collects various items and even children. For Usher, it is his mansion where he resides, battling an illness which strips him of the wonders of life, such as sight, sense, and love. His house reflects his illness, it looked shabby and unkempt with an air of death around it. It reminds us of disease, and once we met Usher, we understood what causes the house to fall into this state: his sinful behavior. Although Usher’s home differs from Pennywise in that the sewers were where Pennywise was strongest, Usher’s home feels more like a tomb. Both of these are terrifying to encounter because having somewhere so familiar feel like it's trapping you is equally as scary as treading into an evil being’s home where it will fight tooth and nail to see that you never return. Monster’s homes take the shape of cold, dark retreats where they often cling to some memory of the past. For Usher, it is the memory of his sister. For Pennywise, it is the carriage he travels around in. Even for them, their place of rest has a sort of comforting feeling for them, just as any protagonist has toys and memorabilia. For the antagonist, their home is a dirty, rotten, corpse of a house, where it seems all life has left long ago. Certain artifacts and other characteristics about one’s home might reflect the antagonist too. Often times, when the end of a horror story is near, we usually get a glimpse of the monster’s lair, or we get to go into it. When this happens, we tend to learn something new about the monster. For example: when Ripley is venturing into the Alien’s lair in James Cameron’s epic Aliens, she has to trudge through tunnels covered with slime and foreign alien material. Ripley discovers the Alien's means of reproducing is through a disgusting birth process, where the queen alien is revealed. Ripley then has to save the little innocent girl from the slimy, and slightly sexual Alien queen. In this case, the aliens represent a fear of sex, and at the movie’s release, AIDS was a hot topic. This relates back to Cohen’s “Monster Culture” where he talks about movies reflecting society's fears. We see this is nearly every good horror movie, where when we travel to a monster’s lair, it reveals not only something about the monster but about ourselves.
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