Welcome to the 2024 horror special, which includes scary movies and a children’s story and combines philosophy with what’s under your bed.
Every year, I send a letter in homage to one of the genres I like the most: horror. In this latitude, there is not only Halloween but there are also ghosts that go around devouring the bread of the dead on altars.
Whether you are a fan or you avoid scary movies, today I bring several things on the menu that you might like: some movies 🍿 that are worth it, a story 🖊️ with a strange word as the protagonist, and some thoughts 💭 about how philosophy and fear are old friends.
Some horror movies
So you don’t have to search too much, I’ll highlight one film per platform, making sure it’s a recent one. Take advantage of this long weekend! I’ll leave you with honorable mentions that I’ve already talked about or that are unmissable.
Netflix
Late Night With The Devil
This year, it became my favorite horror movie. Not because of the fear it provokes but because of how well-set it is.
Everything happens in the seventies during a “Late Night Show.” So what we see during the plot is a television program. In each commercial break, we follow the production behind the scenes. What is the film about? About a TV host who, in pursuit of increasing ratings, decides to make a program that could be terrifying.
With terrifying moments, the only downside is that the special effects also look seventies-style and, for my taste, it takes away the total fear part.
Honorable mentions: When Evil Lurks (a Latin American gem) and The Witch (another one with a great historical setting).
HBO
As Above So Below
As a child, the word “catacomb” scared me. I felt like I had the ghost of a cave and a tomb. The must-see film on HBO takes place in the catacombs of Paris.
These tunnels are famous because they house the bodies of around six million people. What would happen if you had to find something to survive in such a network?
As Above So Below is a story to bring hell to earth. Or well, to take it underground, haha.
Honorable mentions: Hereditary (the most extraordinary horror movie ever: change my mind), Get Out (a great thing that you have to see at least once)
Prime Video
The Medium
I love exorcism movies. As Laura Díaz just mentioned in her newsletter, I love the clichés of upside-down crucifixes, priests full of fear, etc. My first novel, still unpublished (ha), has an exorcism at some point (I’m leaving a kind of promo that my best friend made for a class on the novel in question).
The Medium has an exorcism out of the ordinary. To put it into perspective, it is necessary to understand that in Thailand, it is believed that everything has a spirit: animals, plants, and buildings. If several evil spirits of all these possessed a person, how do you free them?
Well, The Medium has a lot of this in a brilliant fake documentary.
Honorable mentions: Jaws (what? Did you really think I wasn’t going to mention something with sharks?), The Descent (best movie for claustrophobics)
A short story
Nginyiwarrarringu
Selene heard something creaking in the darkness of her room and sat up in bed to see what it was. Her little eyes focused on unraveling the blackness. Little by little, the furniture in her room formed geometric and more or less familiar shadows. The closet was closed. Her breathing became rhythmic. Of course, there was nothing. Her parents told her that.
The girl was about to go back to bed, convincing herself that the noise could be some old wood. But at that moment, her gaze met darkness. It could be more darkness, although she sensed that it wasn’t, that the human-shaped gloom wasn’t her poorly arranged clothes. It was something else. Something with eyes that watched her bored into her and approached her. They came closer. They came closer. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she finally had the strength:
— Mom! — Selene screamed.
In a flash, the shadow was annihilated by the light in the room.
— What happened? — her mother asked in her pajamas, agitated, with her hand on her chest.
— There was a ghost.
The woman rolled her eyes.
— Selene… what did we say?
— I swear it was a ghost.
— Ghosts don’t exist, little one — said the woman sitting down next to her daughter. — Let’s see, I’ll leave the lamp on for you. Go to sleep now.
She was about to leave when she heard Selene’s voice behind her.
— Can I sleep with you today? Taking advantage of the fact that Dad is away.
— No, my love. You have to learn to sleep alone. Come on, tomorrow we have to get up early.
Selene covered herself and closed her eyes.
The night could have been normal. But it wasn’t. The lamp on the nightstand, out of the blue, went out.
“Mommy?” whispered Selene.
The girl sat down again and, once again, at the door, there was the shadow. It was coming closer, closer, closer. With its black eyes that enveloped everything.
“Mommy…” Selene managed to say.
But by the time her mother turned on the phone light, because the light had gone out, her daughter had vanished into the darkness.
Some thoughts
Why am I addicted to sitting in front of a screen and feeling fear tighten me for a couple of hours? Science tells me it’s easy.
It is interesting how, in real life, I hate uncertainty, but when I watch horror movies, I am fascinated by the unknown, and we are fascinated by it. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein talks about how there are things that cannot be talked about but must be shown or experienced. Meanwhile, Mr. Immanuel Kant, a few years earlier, proposed that there is a “noumenon” or “the thing in itself”: a fundamental reality that we can never fully know due to the limitations of our minds.
This epistemological barrier, that is, this barrier of knowledge, creates a space of mystery similar to that generated by horror movies: we know there is something there, but we do not know how to understand or explain it.
I think this coincides with the existence of an abyss between the reality that we can perceive and the ultimate reality, the real one. And this generates a particular type of fear. One that is not based on what we know but on that of the universe that we will never understand. Horror authors have used this concept for a long time. For example, Lovecraft created Cthulhu, who puts a face to that abyss. And even authors who are not exactly horror writers, like Tolkien, who had Ungoliant, a gigantic spider that represents the absence of good, the abyss.
In philosophy, there is a similar idea in the work of Nietzsche, who warned us to contemplate the void because…
“When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
My paradox is that I see the abyss in horror movies, but do I have the courage to do so when it comes to seeing the bottom of my own life? I don’t know. But these moonlit days of October, I want to discover it, will you join me?
(A reflection if you’re from Mexico): Imagine not being born here and never having smelled cempasúchil. Sad, isn’t it? Cempohualxochitl, twenty flowers. Cempohualxochitl, take me to my offering.
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Is it your first time? I’ll leave you more letters here.
With virus-free love,
J. McNamara, aka Geeknifer.
You can contact me on Instagram, Telegram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
