On The Genre of Horror

[JohnTrent]

I never read "Paperbacks from Hell," but I visit the author's blogger once in a blue moon.
http://toomuchhorrorfiction.blogspot.com/

His entries are trite but informative, and his autistic commitment to collecting paperback horror books is somewhat commendable. If anything, it shows the florid—if hackneyed—variety of covers publishers were willing to use to attract eyeballs. A confluence of artistic daring, desperate advertising, and readership expectations provided an ideal situation for unique and intricate book covers.

I am conflicted when thinking about projects like this. As you have said, there is something commendable about the archival of these things; such paperbacks are very time-bound to whenever they were first published, and most of them are nothing special in isolation, so to dig them up does take work. I actually don't take issue with such a project so long as there is initiative and vision to assess it. Other time-periods such as the Victorian Era surely have works to be unearthed, average or bad (or an unknown rarity that should command the world's attention). The issue is who will be attracted to the effort, or who could tolerate the time spent on works found to be wanting. The thing about this effort is that it doesn't involve a lifelong attention — if the mind of the critic/writer is sharp enough, it can penetrate through all those vapid airs and produce something of far greater value, and then they can return to whatever they like.

"Plutarch, nowadays, would write the Parallel Lives of Losers" - E.M. Cioran, All Gall is Divided.

[Unformed Golem]

"Horror" is about inspiring fear in the audience.  Fear has many different flavors (dread, horror, terror, shock, even anxiety).  The ability to instill fear is a neutral tool, there is nothing inherently reactionary about it.  Rosemary's Baby, in my view a perfect leftist info-wars munition, with virtuosic ability it manipulates its [female] audience into fears of pregnancy, childbirth, marriage, historical architecture, staying at home, Catholicism, men, husbands, friends, and old people.

[BillyONare]

Imo Rosemary’s Baby is very right wing. Everything is about trusting your instincts vs society/the longhouse/liberals/Jews/doctors e.g. kike doctors, nosy neighbors, a husband who sells you out for the 10 silver shekels (abusive men are real; they are just abusive in a different way than libs say)etc. I watched it in 2021 or 2022 and it was literally the same exact thing as people in real life pushing the vaccine onto you. The baby is sweet and she loves him; the villains are the Jews trying to drug her and take the baby away.

[BillyONare]

Maybe it’s been a long time since you watched it? I found it extremely True and not leftist propaganda at all.

[Unformed Golem]

No -- Rosemary's Baby just is an op to create hysterical women.  You can try to counter-subvert this (although the ship has long sailed) but you shouldn't be blind to either its intent or its actual effect.  Busybody neighbors and abusive men are real, yes.  But feeding paranoia that your nosy neighbors are secretly conspiring with your husband to get you raped by Satan in order to advance hubby's career while you're stuck at home is simply creating a paranoid narrative that being married and getting pregnant are bad and the people closest to you in life secretly just want to use your innocent nubile body for their own foul ends.  This kind of paranoia is absolutely a common form of female discontent and feeding it is one of the ways that love is destroyed in this world. 

If you want to watch an actually good film about a husband trying to parlay his young wife's nubility into career success by the way, watch Godard's Contempt.

[NuclearAbsolutist]

No -- Rosemary's Baby just is an op to create hysterical women. 

Who hired the man who latter fled to France due to statutory rape charges for being too #groyper to run this "op" and assuming such a case exist, what is the number of people who were fed into this view you allege compared to say, the massive legal moves now celebrated as a great social reordering? There are few views of art more asinine and self defeating than the one you state here.

[BillyONare]

“Busybody neighbors and abusive men are real, yes. But feeding paranoia that your nosy neighbors are secretly conspiring with your husband to get you raped by Satan in order to advance hubby's career while you're stuck at home is simply creating a paranoid narrative that being married and getting pregnant are bad and the people closest to you in life secretly just want to use your innocent nubile body for their own foul ends.”

This literally happens. It’s the platonic form of leftism. You are mistaken if you think men and husbands dindu nuffin for leftism/satan. How many pregnant women got vaccinated or aborted their kids or just chose to delay having kids because their husband is a weak striver and everyone around them in the longhouse are completely corrupt?

“Staying at home” and “getting married” are not the villains. It sounds like you are seriously reading leftist interpretations of this movie. The villains are LITERALLY (no metaphor/“spooky vibes”/), JEWS, DOCTORS, JEWISH DOCTORS, JEWISH LONGHOUSE NEIGHBORS FORCING A PREGNANT WOMAN TO TAKE A MEDICATION THAT IS MAKING HER SICK, A WEAK STRIVER CUCK HUSBAND, and A CABAL OF WEAK PEOPLE WHO SOLD THEIR SOUL TO SATAN AND ARE TRYING TO TAKE HER BABY AWAY. You can’t get any more right wing than that, especially after COVID VACCINES (getting raped by Satan) happened. It’s almost as prophetic as freakin ATLAS SHRUGGED.

[Unformed Golem]

Of course striver cucks have pimped out their wives in the past.  Roman Polanski literally did this.  What's going on with this film is that Polanski is taking his own world of Satanic Jew deviants and essentially saying: this could happen to you, WASP woman.  You, a sophisticated young man, are not the target of this media.  The target for audience is slightly neurotic women who have been hearing about ("people are saying...") insane 1960s second-wave feminism.  The desired effect is to maybe make them wonder if they have a point that The Patriarchy really is out to get them.  It worked.  It might not work as well now, in 2016+8, but 1962 + 6 was a different environment.

Now, there is an esoteric (as in, not apprehended by the majority) point to all these weird Jew doctors.  After all, Polanski could have made them anyone he wanted.  There's definitely one reason to do this, which is that he's basically mocking the more-aware viewer.  "Look what I'm doing goy!"  Portnoy's Complaint actually has something similar going on, it's not really that unusual in cases of willful subversion.  The author/creator wants certain viewer to know what's going on.

Edit @NuclearAbsolutist: Sorry, I don't have any peer-reviewed meta-analyses of how many women were converted to the vile cause of catladydom by this particular film.  As for the massive legal changes you write -- Rosemary's Baby was just another part of that same propaganda offensive.  Do you really not see how "your husband is an evil cultist and you are currently pregnant by Satan" might just possibly maybe be construed as reducing psychological resistance to no-fault divorce and abortion?  Again, the key here is that the target audience is not viewing this film as a detached observer -- they are self-inserting, or at least identifying with, Mia Farrow's character.

[cats]

Saying that a film, directed by a Jew and based off of a feminist Jew's novel (the same one who wrote The Stepford Wives), about the benefits of birth control is "right wing" because the doctors are Jewish is equivalent to a leftist saying Doom: Eternal is left wing because its audio log lore deals with corrupt corporations. Rosemary's Baby presumably has far more of a clear authorial intent one can find in the final product because modern American video games are made by committee, but I doubt Polanski would've put much focus on the ethnic background of side characters. Maybe he made the doctors Jewish because lots of doctors in America are Jewish. Polanski doesn't strike me as particularly intelligent. There are things infinitely more important to the message of a film than "lore". What it portrays and how. Lorefaggotry and taking characters at their word is how you get the leftist interpretation of Death Stranding being about "trusting your government in a time of crisis".

Regardless, I personally am more than glad to give Polanski over to the left. It would greatly embarrass me if an Afro-Semitic feminist agent who nonetheless enjoys raping little White girls because he's also a high time preference pervert shared any substantial views of mine. I don't care that supporting him is some sort of Submarnite signal -- those people are retards.