[vampiric-appreciation]

Greetings!

This is a sideblog dedicated to all things horror and gothic! VERY slowly moving from my vampire hyperfixation to being a horror fan, so if you have any recs for someone just getting into the genre lmk!!

My main is @i-am-an-omniscient-snail.

Tags so far:

#croaking from my coffin - original post

that's it that's the taglist

I'm going to add a link to a post with all the horror media I like because it's a short list and I need motivation to read more 😭

[slimepost-generator]

it’s ok to keep secrets, everybody has some skeletons in the closet. Wraiths in the attic. Ghosts in the bedroom. Mummy in the kitchen. Enchanted armor on the stairs. Slimes in the basement. Maybe a giant spider in the backyard. Beholder or two in the garage. Vampires are also in the closet

[homophobla]

okay now imagine vampire elves that live in advanced tunnel societies underground

[charl0ttan]

whats even the use anymore.

[charl0ttan]

i mean why even bother at this point.

[homophobla]

You just have to keep going on. You have to imagine them.

[saintduvide]

gothic aesthetic save me

[frogdivorce]

LESBIAN VAMPIRES !!!!!! (crowd starts clapping and cheering)

[mysteryofvampires]

| | <- your neck

| : | <- your neck after you met me

[1995lahaine]

horror is a romance genre

[obsidian-sphere]

Interior art by an uncredited artist from 1922 of a "Flapper Vamp."

[annabelle--cane]

imagine a vampire creeping along oh so stealthily with their magic powers of quietude. okay now imagine said vampire tripping on the edge of a table cloth and eating shit all the while still in complete silence due to the aforementioned magic powers. okay now good day to you.

[vamplire]

[maidthings]

my 37 year old vampire girlfriend keeps telling me i simply don't understand the woes of immortality as if I didn't also own a VHS player or visit a blockbuster a few times as a kid

[maidthings]

she keeps staring off into the distance saying those shit like "those as youthful as you know not what horrors lie in your past" even though we both know damn well she's talking about the 2008 financial crash

[homunculus-argument]

Using a shredded strip of a book page as a bookmark is like making a horse harness out of horse leather.

[homunculus-argument]

Ghosts are a form of a fossil. Something that's shaped like the living thing that was once there, but which was not able to decay in the normal way, but was, tiny piece by tiny piece, replaced by something unliving, taking the exact shape, reverse impression, of something that was once alive. There is no trace of a human soul left in it, only the photo negative, imprint of the thing that was there before.

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

saw a post about how a universal queer reading of vampires in all art falls very short, which it does, but figured I disagree with enough of the specifics that I should probably not reblog it with a wall of text in the tags. anyway vampires can represent many things in different texts and any sort of blanket “vampires represent x” statement is going to simply be untrue!

with queer readings, what tends to frustrate me is the refusal to pick up on the homophobia inherent to the queer subtext in a lot of vampire classics. being unable to separate that a dynamic is like personally fun and sexy to you vs what the actual text is doing is… well not going to have any major repercussions but it will annoy me. I don’t really subscribe to the representation framework— I don’t think minority characters should have to represent anything— but like the way people will genuinely point to Carmilla as a positive example of queerness in classic fiction is insane to me! or like Dracula’s preying on Jonathan isn’t sexualized because yay bisexuality (lol!) it’s just another facet of how the character is meant to be perceived as a deviant, corrupting foreigner

the other problem with forced positive readings is that it often means people will just refuse to talk about the inherent predatory angle of these dynamics. and there is of course always the clean splitting of sexual violence vs positive romance. so a good and positive queer reading means that the romance must be wholly uncomplicated and only about repressed desire which means that there can be no elements of sexual violence or predation— no matter how textually explicit that may be

and well the moral of this story is that art can be about many things and include all of these things at once rather than a single reading or metaphor pushing everything else out. but try telling the internet that

[romanceyourdemons]

it’s a pretty well-known phenomenon that you only get a couple seconds with your horror creature fully visible onscreen before it gets “chuckied,” a term coined by yours truly referring to the shift between the first and second acts of child’s play (1988) as the audience gets used to seeing the little chucky puppet moving around and consequently can no longer buy into the film’s serious slasher tone in the absence of the horror of the unknown. the tuunbaq in the terror and the dogomorph in alien 3 (1992) are also famous victims of chuckying—just like how lovecraftian horror usually falls flat on the screen, too much visibility and your scary, amorphous creature will become a very morphous puppet or cgi’d in picture. the easiest way to combat this is of course to keep the creature obscured for as much of the piece as possible; for instance, despite their oppressive presence throughout their respective works, the beast in over the garden wall is shown for less than six frames and the eponymous kaiju of cloverfield (2008) is never properly shown, allowing each to retain their mystery and danger. another route is to simply lean into the campiness of it, like the later child’s play franchise and alien resurrection (1997). in the case of the blob (1958) a mere satirical title sequence song is enough to completely transform a fairly standard creature feature into an enduring masterpiece of hokey fun. the third option to combat chuckying is for the horror creature to constantly transform—the thing (1982), the fly (1986), and aliens (1986) show their creatures in loving detail, but there is always something the audience hasn’t seen yet, something they don’t know to brace themselves for. it’s a fine line to walk, of course, but that’s the nature of the game when you want to turn the concept of the unknown into something knowable enough to bite you

[normal-horoscopes]

[mrspider-deactivated20221213]

i think if the “classic vampire” like dark, brooding, cloak wearing was a phase all immortals went through before eventually settling down and becoming like, a cat lady with mysterious amounts of accumulated wealth and an aversion to sunlight

[mrspider-deactivated20221213]

like count suckulots comes to granny wrinkletons house in hopes for easy blood and instead shes awake at 3 AM and invites him in for “tea” and is like “i remember my cloak wearing phase, do youngins these days even have castles anymore?”

[casteliacore-deactivated2018080]

What if the sun doesn’t actually hurt vampires?

Vampires are just nocturnal, the same way we are diurnal. A vampire could go out during the day, but they would just rather be sleeping.

Vampires are just afraid of the light, the same way we are afraid of the dark. Their eyes are meant to see in the dark, so they just can’t see very well in the light. It hurts their eyes and they can’t see what’s around them, so it’s just scary.

Some vampire was probably too afraid to admit that he was afraid of the light, so he made up a fake allergy to the sun. Word got out to mortals, so we just assumed that all vampires are allergic to the sun. You know how mortals like to stereotype and whatnot.

But imagine pop, sunny vampires that are the vampire version of goth, dark humans. They like to go out in the sun and wear bright clothes, and the other vampires think it’s metal as fuck. “Oh, you know Victoria Anne III? Yeah she’s totally pop. Her friends call her Susan.”

[writing-prompt-s]

I fucking love this