What's Groovy

Becky Cloonan's Sluts of Dracula. (Good call, Sean!)

Shaenon Garrity on perennial Groovy Age favorite The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist at TCJ.

Interesting roundtable on queer horror at Dark Scribe. (via Chad Helder)

Hushicho defends the view that implicit horror is scarier than explicit horror. Here's what I take to be the most persuasive paragraph:

To me, the most horrific thing that an audience can be made to do is to confront themselves. Most people have aspects of themselves that they find distasteful. For many, it is the dark side, the side that could imagine all manner of horrors that they have tried to avoid. The things they would never do, the things they would never say, the situations they hope never to be in...and yet they exist in the mind, and the possibility exists that they might. It is frightening to make the connection in one's own mind, much more frightening. It is easy to laugh or to dismiss a costume that you find silly or uninteresting, but it is much more less easy to dismiss what your mind has shown you. In many ways, it is almost an accusation, a call to the audience to confront themselves, throwing open the doors and defences that have been so carefully crafted, to protect them from the aspects of their mind that they fear. They would like to deny that these aspects are there. But, even for a little while, they must confront them and accept their existence. That, to me, is horror.

That sounds good; the question is, is this an accurate account of what happens when an audience encounters suggestive horror? I have my doubts, which I'll explain as I continue gnawing over this topic in future posts.