Webspinna

            Both of us might designate Webspinna as the most challenging of this class. This is, in large part, because it demanded performance. But the nature of the project also required time and meticulousness. I think that the best performances were the most obviously strategized, and intricate. The project asks for a broad sense of meaning. Some sort of conflict must take place. But these broader strokes are comprised of sonic intricacies that take time and effort to shape, like with pointillism or mosaic art.

            The most enabling thing for us was to have a subject that we not only love, but are well versed in. Hopefully our project made it clear that this subject is horror movies, something we have both loved since a young age. The specific tension that informed our battle is the struggle for supremacy between slasher films, or otherwise non-fantastical horror, and horror of fantasy. The latter consists of ghost stories, some urban legends (think of It Follows), fairy tales, most science fiction, and the horror of folktale beasts like the vampire. Basically, it is The Shining and The Exorcist vs. Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

            Due to our shared genre affinity, there was a mutual feeling of vast material to draw from. Thus, the challenge was to filter. Filtering consisted of choosing what might add to a larger statement. We used The Goblins soundtrack from Dario Argento’s Suspiria, because the eerie breathing captured the spine tingling nature of that which is supernatural. The other major source for the supernatural side was Disasterpiece’s main theme for David Mitchell’s aforementioned It Follows. This song was meant to express a sense of beauty and adventure that can be found in horror films, as opposed to the horrors of life. This was meant to underscore the idea of horror film as inherent fantasy. Art is a simulation of true emotions (I hope that is not read disparagingly, it is not meant that way), and the idea of horror based on things most people do not believe in is an important part of that conversation.

            We also included samples of dialogue from Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining. These samples derive from a conversation between Jack Torrance, an increasingly insane father, and the apparition of a man called Delbert Grady, who is known to have killed his family and then himself. He tells Jack that he has “always been there”, in reference to the haunted Overlook Hotel. That was meant as a chilling addition to the ascent of the Disasterpiece song. It was also a kind of love note to supernatural horror. Ghosts are less immediate, less manageable than the terrors of films like Scream or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In Stephen King’s novel The Shining, the Overlook Hotel is destroyed. But the characters specifically take note that the area still feels lethal. Its evil could not be destroyed by fire. It has always been there, and it always will be.