timwburke

Have a look at Patti Normand’s work. She says her intention is to show how nature and humanity coexist with indifference, and how that creates an unsettling expectation. I note that characters make drastic choices without presentation of a context. Why the moosehead? This helps with the unsettling.

Is there a victim? Is there a criminal? Sometimes lives veer away (as in the woman fleeing the relationship in “Gone With Dear Trevor” on her website) and we cheer despite the resultant anguish of Trevor left behind, or sometimes the dinner becomes diner (see the recipe for “Lake Monster” accompanying “What Lies Beneath” the bottom image). Part of weird fiction is pulling the camera back so far that the idea is in the forefront of the emotion.

When framed in the trappings of bygone times like 1960s Ontario, the unsettling becomes even more cerebral. This is how “Stranger Things” and “Twin Peaks” and “X-Files” can take child murder and make it palatable.

I think right now horror is chasing “unsettling”. Times are pretty horrific, true.  Unidentifiable horrors and serial killer antiheroes distract us from our frightful obligations toward tribe and nation. How can the faceless or inaccessible pay for their crimes? The police are ineffective, the lawyers too smart, the Gospel too clear. Let Cthulhu, Hannibal Lector, or the rogue FBI agent handle it.

I am disappointed by contemporary society. If the evangelicals are correct, all the nice people I know are going to Hell (which should always be capitalized). If there is no God, then I am part of a failing justice.  I can’t be the only person feeling this. I’m sure this is why weird is doing so well and that low-budget horror is in another golden age.

Touch the weird stuff up top to see more, or just go here:  http://www.pattinormand.com/