Greetings friends, you may call me Mythos. On this blog, you will find my honest reviews and thoughts on many different types of horror media.
This blog is mostly going to cover different movies and books, but I am open to anything.
Main: @mythosmediablog
Favorite horror movies: Scream 1996, The Shining 1980, The Thing 1982
CURRENT PROJECTS! LOOK FORWARD TO..
80 80's Horror Movies (WIP, 80 short form movie reviews)
The Thing and Masculinity (WIP, long form essay)
YouTube Channel?
Book I'm currently reading: Exquisite Corpse
THIS BLOG WILL DISCUSS MEDIA WITH DISTURBING CONTENT! POSTS WILL INCLUDE TWs, BUT I WILL NOT BE CENSORING MYSELF! IF THE MEDIA IS GROSS, I WILL BE BLUNT ABOUT HOW GROSS IT IS! IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE, PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF!
ALSO TERFS/NAZIS/MAGAS FUCK OFF!
Feel free to send me requests! Just please understand that I am very busy, so it will take me a while to respond to any. I also can/will say no
NOTE: I do have my own limits. I will not consume content that is illegal/snuff/true crime. If it is real, I don't want it. Fiction is fiction.
PLEASE don't request anything of me with extreme animal abuse.
Hashtags-
Book reviews: #mythos reads
Movie reviews: #mythos watches
WILL BE UPDATED
But besides all of that... please sit and stay with me for a while... <3
TWs (DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT): Severe violence, animal abuse, graphic sexual content, usage of homophobic slurs, severe misogyny, hard drug usage
To be clear, I watched the extended, uncut, NC-17 version of this film. There is a mildly censored version where the sexual content was cut down. However, I will always recommend the uncensored version if you can handle it.
A movie review is not a substitute for watching the actual film. If you are interested, please purchase the film, watch it yourself, and support the original director/actors. This post will contain a non-spoiler and spoilered section. All criticism is made in good faith and is not an attack on the original creators.
TLDR: As a black comedy with rich themes and a horrifically wonderful psycho of a main character, I did enjoy this film. It clearly has a lot to say, and that’s what I find the most interesting. I have more fun with the movie, discussing the themes rather than actually watching it. If you consider that a positive or a negative is up to you.
SPOILERS/LONGER REVIEW BELOW CUT
(Reader discretion is advised)
This film is a black comedy psychological thriller that's made to criticize toxic masculinity and office culture from the 80s. Patrick Bateman is our main character, and we watch him harass women, do drugs, and murder his competition to release his anger, all in the name of being a stereotypical, wealthy, high-class man.
I enjoyed a lot about this film. It had very good music and cinematography, and a lot of the scenes were just pure eye candy in creativity. The film knows how to fill you with dread as we watch Patrick Bateman be the worst possible stereotype of a masculine working man. The theme of how classic, American masculinity is a performance done by insecure men competing in the most pathetic dick measuring contest is on full display and it’s displayed wonderfully.
The strongest part of this movie was the main character of Patrick Bateman. Played by Christian Bale, Patrick Bateman is a wonderfully ghoulish, well-acted character. Bale overacts in all of his scenes, which works well surrounded by more grounded actors, as it plays into the movie's themes of how high society masculinity is a performance that people fit into so they don't get beaten down. You can tell that Bale is acting; he isn’t trying to be realistic, which actually works in this type of movie. To keep his place with the wealthy, Patrick must act like the rest of the people, and because it's so clearly a performance, it just emphasizes that fact even more. It feels closer to on-stage theater acting than realistic moving acting, and I mean that as a compliment.
There is a lot of violence in the movie, but my favorite scene and the most iconic scene is when Patrick kills Paul Allen. It's so brightly lit, almost sterile, as Patrick dances around the room in a raincoat as he rambles on and on about people not understanding the lyrics of music before swinging an axe into his victim's head. It’s almost like the director looking at the audience and saying that people will misunderstand this film and not understand its themes.
I will say, the ending did leave me just a bit puzzled for a while. It seems that Patrick didn't actually kill any of the people in the movie, but instead, he simply got lost in his delusions. It's left ambiguous, which I understand how some people can enjoy that, and it does make sense in this film, but just personally, I wish that they had committed. I do feel as if taking away the open-ended ending does diminish its themes a bit, but I still would have preferred an ending that didn't feel like such a cop out to me. It’s conflicting.
Honestly, my main issues with the movie are strange. I do think that movie is very good and I understand why people really enjoy it, but to me, it's more fun to talk about the film than actually watch it. Patrick Bateman is a cruel yet genuinely interesting character, and he is the full highlight of the film. We love an unreliable narrator. He's most fun when he's able to be at his most unhinged. There is a reason he quickly became an iconic horror character. For me personally, I enjoy him the most when I can pick away at him under a microscope.
I did like watching this movie! Would I watch it again? No. Would I read multiple articles analysing the themes? Absolutely.
TWs (DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT): cannibalism, gore, body horror, misogyny, sexual violence, physical/emotional abuse, dehumanization, child sexual abuse, animal abuse, homophobic slurs
A book review is not a substitute for reading the actual book. If you are interested, please purchase the book, read it yourself, and support the original author. This post will contain a non-spoiler and spoilered section. All criticism is made in good faith and is not an attack on the original author.
TLDR:
This book has a very blunt writing style, so it doesn’t hold back on the disturbing scenes. Also, the concept is very interesting, and it does play with some very interesting world-building. Due to the book being so fast-paced, it’s hard to keep track of all the characters and fully understand what’s happening. I also don’t feel as if it's characters and world-building are developed to their full potential.
Though if you are willing to extend your disbelief and not think super hard, it’s a quick and interesting read for those with a strong stomach.
SPOILERS/LONGER REVIEW BELOW CUT
(Reader discretion is advised)
In this dystopian world, a disease has spread throughout the planet that has made all animal meat poisonous. It only spreads through animals, but it can easily kill a human. The government has killed off all animals and transitioned into breeding humans for meat. The timeline is rather confusing, because the disease only occurred a few decades ago; however, the author describes this world as if this has been reality for centuries?
The story explores a man named Marcos who works for a meat processing plant, and how he has poorly adjusted to the world transitioning into eating human meat, his father having dementia, and his wife leaving him due to the death of their child. Soon, he is given a female head (a head is what they call humans made for meat) that he is meant to butcher, but he can’t seem to, and eventually falls in love with her.
Marco clearly has stopped seeing humans as humans and sees all of them as just possible meat, but he’s honestly not a well written character. He’s just rather boring and the book can’t seem to decide how he is supposed to develop.
However, everything fell apart for me when I got to the time skip. If you read the book, you would know.
When I first heard about this book and started to read it, I was most interested in a few things, 1) how our main character slowly grows attached to this human head he is supposed to feed on, and how that changes his worldview 2) the world building. For me, both of those are rather disappointing. I find both of these are disappointing for me because of the writing style.
The writing style is very blunt, which I can see turning some people off from this book. It doesn’t pull its punches. The sentences and chapters are generally very short, and it’s very fast-paced. However, because this book was not first written in English, it seems like the translation wasn’t very good. Some words are very strange and don’t always make sense. Due to the fast-paced nature of the writing, it can be a little hard to keep up with what is happening, as the author doesn’t give the reader much time to digest what’s happening before moving on to the next scene.
Also, because almost every single important character in this book is a man, sometimes without names, it can make it hard to tell what character is saying or doing what, which makes it even harder to follow. Some chapters are only a page long, and I just have to wonder why the author thought she needed to cut it up? Sometimes the sudden short chapters sort of break the follow of the story and the immersion of what’s happening.
There are a lot of brutal scenes in this book. As for world-building, it feels like the author is talking right to the reader to drop and explain the world, and not weaving it in naturally. I also feel as if the author is adding in new ideas to the story instead of expanding on the already interesting ideas she already has. Yes, it can help expand the world, but it mainly muddles down what is already there. I wish the author had focused on a few interesting parts of the plot and characterization instead of just adding in every new idea to the world she thought of. I wish it would focus on the main character and how he slowly grows to get attached to the head, how he becomes almost toxicly attached, and how this new woman affects his previous marriage. But the main character is just so nothing…There are a lot of scenes that I feel could have been cut, but I also feel that with another editor and 50 more pages, this book would immediately be improved
This book plays with the definition of who in this world counts as a human, and, as I stated earlier, doesn’t hold back on the descriptions of what the factory workers and meat processors do. That’s because the author wants to draw comparisons with the actual meat industry, mainly the beef industry. Characters in the world often compare how they used to work with beef or how they had family who did, and how the process is similar. They use very similar terminology, like calling the person about to be slaughtered a “head”. Some characters hunt humans, and some do brutal experiments on humans; the author is not holding back on how deranged the people in this story are.
I, however, as an animal welfare activist/nature conservation student, will say that this theme does kind of fall apart. I personally never enjoyed this idea that if we as humans treat animals poorly, we could as easily treat fellow humans this way. While no, don’t twist my words, I don’t support the unethical treatment of animals, animals are not humans, and treating them the same will only do more harm to animals and humans. That is a different post, however, and I don’t have the energy to fully expand on that at the moment.
For the sick freaks, I’d say the most disturbing scene for me personally is a scene in which rich businessmen have just finished hunting humans and proceed to eat them. One of the humans they ate was a pregnant woman, and the other was a famous rock star who was hunted for having too much debt. In this dinner scene, they describe in great detail how the human meat is presented. One of the rich men eats the penis of the rock star, saying it improves his own sexual health? However, the paragraph that made me put down the book for a few minutes was a paragraph describing how one of the rich men raped a 14 year old trafficking victim to death, then procceed to eat her. I could feel myself going pale.
Finally, the ending… is very controversial. After seeing a few other reviews online, it seems as if fellow readers either love the ending or hate it. I am personally in team hate. It doesn’t feel like the story comes to a satisfying conclusion. The story doesn’t finish; the book just stops.
I’d say if what I said didn’t dissuade you, and you have a strong stomach, this book could be an interesting read for you. It’s rather short, only 200 pages, so it would be a quicker read.
