Amapola Press: Romantic Horror Continued

Continued from yesterday...

If you Google “horror romance” you will get results that include lists of horror movies with romantic overturns. There are such lists here:

Certainly, there are titles that repeat in a few of the lists and I find that many of these fall under Gothic horror and romance, simultaneously. The themes of subhuman or otherness are repeated (again and again). The paranormal romance is a very popular novella formula in the age of the e-book—from ghosts to vampires and a multitude of demonic creatures...

"Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992)

These elements have been in literature for centuries, but the “horror” I was referring to is, as I defined earlier, the “gory kind full of glitter and blood and awkward pandering.”

I’ve seen more than one work depict violence against its female character[s] in the name of some sort of misunderstood romance. I’ve read books that casually describe rape as nothing more than an exciting date. At some point in the last few decades, a stolen kiss has transitioned to sexual assault.

Any attempt to debase and humiliate a potential partner, to force or manipulate them into an emotional or physical relationship, demeans the humanity of all involved. That, to me, is horror (pure, unadulterated horror).

I am not blaming the genre for creating the trend. Rather, I think the popularity of these things in literature is but a mirror image of what is happening in “reality.” Art is doing what it does best: imitating life.

At the same time, perception is reality; and these days, that is dominated by the Internet.

From Facebook to Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest and other online fora where memes are born and disseminated, the evidence suggests that few of us know how to relate, less understand the idea of true commitment, and broken hearts are tragedies that equate natural disasters (not rainy days but monsoons).

We seem to have engendered a generation of predators and weaklings that can’t handle rejection. Of course, that can’t be right. And it isn’t. It’s just what it looks like online. The Internet is the new frontier where the obsessive-compulsive and other members of the fringe go to roost. The Internet is the new “underground.”

The thing that most people don’t consider is that a lot of the memes come from what is predominantly a YA audience (from the aspirational prepubescent little superstars to the arrested-developed mid-twenty-something black holes of emotional turmoil).

The true horror is that our culture is being driven and rewritten by and for children, and not just our media-ready version of romance… Sit back and consider that statement.

Soon, the children shall lead and you will all become slaves to their whims and misappropriations of common sense. What if "and a little child shall lead them" was a warning?