My Favorite Horror Franchise Is “Reality”
The call is coming from inside your brain.
BOO.
Did I scare you, friends? Sorry. I know you’re already dealing with a lot. I, for one, had to crawl out of my coffin to send this. Someone get Stephen King on a rewrite because these vibes ain’t IT. Too many tricks and not enough treats makes for one dead bitch.
Halloween always reminds me that there really are two types of people in this world of ours, those of us who find consciousness frightening enough as it is, and another differently deranged group who have the constitution to willingly terrify themselves with horror movies. Shrieking at what I see on a screen does nothing good for me, and when I do see the rare horror movie, I cover my eyes for huge chunks because there are so many things that I simply do not need to ingest visually. But these days, it feels like I have no choice but to concede. You don’t need to press play on a slasher movie to see masked men do horrible shit, and if you’re into gore, then great, enjoy a man getting shot in the neck from multiple angles you never consented to see.
The breadth of content the horror franchise known as “reality” is serving up this season is way too much for me.
Looking for a ghost story? Well, here in Los Angeles, we have Waymos driving themselves around the city. A steering wheel that turns itself with no one in the driver’s seat is undeniably ghostly. I have seen one acceptable use of this technology — two teenage boys ripping a massive joint in the backseat while they flew past me at a red light. But this week, a Waymo in San Francisco, the city most haunted by the poltergeist of uncanny tech, killed a beloved bodega cat, which obviously has devastated the community. That feline tragedy came mere days after the Waymo co-CEO told a tech conference that society was ready to accept a human death at the hands of these weird fucking robotaxis.
We’re still in the first act, lady. I think that’s TBD.
If you’d prefer to sit on the edge of your seat and watch the next outbreak of a devastating plague, because the last one didn’t get ya good enough, then allow me to introduce you to the truckload of diseased monkeys that escaped a crash on an interstate highway in Mississippi. It was originally reported that the monkeys were aggressive and infected with hepatitis C, herpes, and (trigger warning) Covid, but Tulane University, where the monkeys came from, later said they were free of disease. That story doesn’t match what the driver told cops at the scene of the accident, where a few of the monkeys were found and destroyed and another few escaped to a wooded area and haven’t since been seen.
Who knows what to believe? Maybe this story is actually a psychological thriller about our collective lack of media literacy. That’s the real viral threat we’re facing, honestly.
If the darkness you crave is zombie-adjacent, the contingent of people who are willing to outsource their brain to ChatGPT just grows by the day, and these machines aren’t just feasting on unlicensed written work in an affront to human thought and creativity, they’re also feasting on our brains. A recent study out of MIT found that people who used an LLM to write an essay didn’t retain ... anything. That feels like a good omen for the future of critical thinking in what is passing for “society.”
And what exactly is passing for “society”?
Here in America, the government is trying to incite the purge by starving its citizens willingly. I keep waiting for Mike Johnson’s head to spin 360 degrees while he’s gaslighting the nation. And with the way Mitch McConnell is falling on camera, it seems they’re continuing their reverse Midsommar campaign where instead of old people letting go when they’re past their prime, they just keep going indefinitely.
Speaking of old people allegedly at death’s door but showing no promising signs of getting weaker, we already know that Donald Trump’s presidency is generational horror comedy; he’s Gladys from Weapons for soulless people who don’t understand that he’s not a campy villain, but an aspiring dictator.
Don’t worry, though, more bot farms are literally being built as we speak, a cursed supernatural thriller to further haunt public opinion. And if you want to get out your bullhorn and scream about any of this? Be careful, sweetie. The government is trying to mark you as a terrorist so you better keep your mouth shut like Emily Blunt and John Krasinski.
That’s just a small taste of the horrors we’re dealing with collectively, but when it comes to my work life, torture porn seems to be the dominant subgenre. You see, there’s no lack of people writing about how fucked up social media is or how addicted we all are to it, or studies coming out about how it’s destroying our psyches. But I’m chained to its pipe in a dingy basement, enduring the torture of keeping up with internet culture and platform trends, professionally.
When your livelihood is shackled to gaming these algorithms, and you do it well in this world of endless content on little screens, you have no choice but to keep rotting your brain past the point where you can focus on an episode of TV.
I am grateful to be employed and that I literally get paid to make memes, but I also have elaborate fantasies of a benevolent entity rescuing me. Someone better show up in Act III with a pair of bolt cutters so I can stop scrolling through barbed wire and finally be set free.
Even better if it’s this kind police officer who recently attended a Zoom court hearing with no pants on, a glorious throwback to the nightmare of 2020.
Have fun this weekend, my goblins and ghouls! I think it’s safe to eat whatever anyone gives you this year, no one has cash for razorblades in this economy.
And if you can’t decide which scary movie to watch tonight, I suggest staring at MSNBC. As for me, the only news I need is these lovebird divas hard launching in Paris:
ROMANTIC COMEDY, honey, now THAT’S the genre for me.
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz
Happy birthday old friend (not saying we're old 😅)! I love reading your missives. Love and hugs from Toronto
The other day, when I glimpsed the news headline about the diseased monkeys, my brain read "donkeys" instead of "monkeys" and I didn't think for even a second that that was weird... Right about now, diseased donkeys escaped from a research lab just doesn't sound strange at all... Anyway, my dyslexia is just like my lactose intolerance — it came out of nowhere, and it's getting worse... with brain flatulence and everything...