Week Four: The New Weird

The genre of the "New Weird" is definitely... weird. For this week, I read Lovecraft's "The Unnamable" as well as "What the Moon Brings". As a classic writer of weird fiction, Lovecraft's two short stories both gave off a sense of the surreal and the supernatural. In both stories, we can sense the presence of an outer supernatural force, a kind of cosmic power that exceeds the capabilities of our human understanding. This feeling of the "inexplicable" and mystery may be what categorizes these stories as "weird". Yet I feel that this feeling of the inexplicable is also what draws the audience into the story, and what captivates the audience to stay. I liked "The Unnamable" especially because it was truly best told by word as a story, its medium is fitting of the subject. As an artist, I tend to interpret things visually in my mind, but "The Unnamable" was purposely visually ambiguous. Thus, when told in the form of words, we- the audience- only experience the "unnamable" through someone else's account of the monstrous encounter. We experience the narrator's experiences second-hand, and the "unnamable" monster's appearance is thus passed through a filter if sorts before it reaches us. That element of writing has always fascinated me, and a concept that I hope to play around with in my future artwork.

Another interesting aspect of "The Unnamable" was its sense of irony and even self awareness. One of the main characters eventually commits the same character trope that he was disparaging moments before. Such a twist reminds me of other self-aware horror films such as "Scream" or "Cabin in the Woods" in which they poke fun and even satirize common tropes of the same genre that they occupy. This not only provides witty commentary on "genre fiction" but can also be entertaining to an audience jaded by the repetitive elements of the horror genre. I personally enjoy this type of irony since it seems to give second wind to a category of film and writing that is so riddled with cliches. Of course, I also enjoy it because its humorous when done well and can turn something that should be scary into something to be laughed at. When works don't take themselves too seriously like that, its not as intimidating to the audience and also acts as a great area of respite between all the other "edgy" pieces out there. As long as speculative fiction continues to exist, so will counter-fiction and satire, and I hope to consume many of both categories in the future.