emily’s Reviews > Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love > Status Update

‘But maybe I’m looking at this wrong. Things that aren’t a choice aren’t always a burden. Who hasn’t wanted to be stripped of agency but in, like, a hot way?’

‘—of pain and transformation—in life—what is done in the name of desire—power—cruel want—things—shift us. But I also see the chance to transform—alter into things more powerful than we can believe—in—different ways—throughout—I'll certainly continue to shift—’

‘Texas isn’t North Carolina—but at that moment I started to see both—not just ugly but gorgeous as well—There, there’s nothing that doesn’t promise to bloom—And who hasn’t felt nostalgia for a place because it was where they first realised who they truly were? Who hasn’t found themselves in something they didnt even realise they were looking for? Despite—beauty—still an unrelentingly cruel film—Even the heroes—cruel’

‘Swamps are known for keeping their secrets—parts—I tried to shed until the protests reminded me of them again—were still very much a swamp—teeming—beautiful—waiting—to be found again. They were like my city—holding its secrets with care and love and community—and violence—just beneath the waterline—Person after person made space for me in their life—and I—continually shot back instead to the violence that made me—’

‘It’s a world where race doesn’t exist, where class doesn’t exist—Scream is set in a world, somewhere, where the only thing you have to deal with is trauma. Avery and I only saw some of the wealth in LA: blithe hipsters in Echo Park, a set of acquaintances who lived in a Fallingwater of a house up in the hills. But the way this wealth barely concealed the poverty and structural racism present there, too—’

‘Underneath the text, The Ring paints—a whole society—guilty of Samara’s death—In Ringu—radius of guilt is narrower—but the rage Sadako feels—if not her humanity—is affirmed. This is—mirrored in the movies’ relationships to water: In Ringu—we focus on the ocean—immense, uncontainable—But in the American remake—the well, damp and dripping and limited—’

‘—Piepzna-Samarasinha calls disabled people caring for one another together “revolutionary love without charity.” I love—this—argument not for a positive representation of disability to shift the mainstream’s paradigm—but for a different paradigm entirely. If there isn’t a supremacist culture to view things through—does monstrosity even exist? Certainly, life got—easier once I stopped hiding every affliction—’

‘To watch a scary movie—is to surrender yourself to the impulses of your body—the extremity of shock or fear overriding all other emotions. Through this surrendering, I believe, you open yourself to other experiences more complicated—repulsion, one of the foremost responses to horror, is mainly a mark of recognition—and I also believe anything you can see yourself in so intimately can be turned into a kind of care.’