Edvard Munch's Screamo by Elijah Rah
Analog horror is subject to quite a few exaggerations. It’s an internet medium and the internet loves spectacle. Romanticizing your life is one of these trends driven by spectacle driven by an image one has of the other as having something simply for appearing to have it. Appearance is what matters most. Critics like to speak out against this but the individual is always in a state of needing more and needing to maintain the illusion of a wholeness absent from all things, absence that comes from the stripping of the Real through language. Society pre-internet loved spectacle with mass media but now things are click driven. People seek out things and are brought things through an algorithm. You want traffic to get more traffic and possibly profit. The thing is that analog horror is never haunting me or giving me nightmares and rarely scares me. When I was a little younger, it did manage to scare me. Petscop made me lose sleep but for a horror to create a lingering feeling like that nowadays would be an accomplishment.
There is one moment in an obscure series called Tryred Witness Archives that doesn’t scare me or give any lingering feelings but watching it in the moment is uneasy. It involves an early 2000s looking tribute to characters in the universe that have gone missing with a repetitive loop. It’s meditative and lulls you into unease. This moment works better than any of the attempted scares within the series. There’s nothing that pops out. There’s no scary face. There’s the melancholy of the unknown missing. I’m not even particularly invested in the emotional landscape of the story. I’m watching this on a computer while laying down in my bed in the daytime running an idle game on my phone in the background. A disturbance rumbles underneath the surface while I occasionally peak over to my phone to purchase stuff with in-game currency to make numbers climb faster. I’m not immersed in this moment and somehow it will stick with me.
Sometimes analog horror likes to present mangled faces and these mangled faces often bear a resemblance to art’s most famous mangled face: Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Edvard Munch was plagued with death as both his mother and sister died of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was noted by Susan Sontag as being a romanticized illness. It’s hard not to feel a romanticized angst in the paintings of Munch due to the very expression through art leaving an unmistakable mythos and aura to it. For Munch, it must have been far from romantic to see his mother and sister die from the same disease. The story of The Scream seems like a mythological portrait of angst. He saw a blood red sky and trembled with fear.
The Expressionist movement was not just a painter’s movement but a musical movement. Igor Stravinsky's Rites of Spring with its overbearing dissonance and time signature changes was seen as horrifying and caused riots to break out. On the opposite end of the chaotic expressionism while still on the edge of experimentation is a genre called Drone which consists of long droning notes. It can also create dark soundscapes many would see as terrifying through creeping terror as opposed to sonic assault.
Drone to some, is the sound of doom. The avant-garde music scene appears to prefer darker moods. It is not absent of brighter works or even danceable beats but a sense of darkness is at least slightly edges out the happier or brighter works in quantity. Despair seems to push the boundaries of what it means to be human in ways that happiness doesn’t. Music is a gift for humans. Maybe it’s not enough to make being human a gift but it is a gift nonetheless.
Mental hospitals take the mortal reminders of death and add stasis. You are not going anywhere even as time ticks away. You are not dying. You are not getting better. The droning fluorescent light becomes the hospital’s soundtrack. During a stay in a mental hospital, one of my least favorite things they tried to teach us is to listen to happy music when you are sad. This understanding is exactly what I expect from those who have traded psychoanalysis and any semblance of humanity for clinical trials. They had no understanding of catharsis or the cleansing of tears. The advice of happy music is particularly useless when I am angry. If I’m angry I’d much prefer whitebelt grind (also known as sasscore infused mathgrind).
Sasscore was born out of a similar impetus that emo was born out of. They saw that the punk scene was too macho and toxically masculine which meant less of the original ethos of punk. Emo was the contemplative answer and later the emos who were dissatisfied created sasscore as the flamboyant response full of angular chaotic riffs and sassy vocals while much of the lyrics parodied or attacked macho attitudes. Sasscore split into two variants: the post-hardcore, dance-punk, and screamo influenced punk and whitebelt grind taking from mathcore and grindcore. Whitebelt grind is my favorite kind of metal. It’s often progressive in song structure and avant-garde in composition. It captures spiraling anger and mania better than any other genre. It’s my catharsis. It’s what clinicians who know nothing of humanity and take clinical studies provable through the scientific method find repulsive.
Whitebelt grind feels like a Romantic Expressionism filtered through 21st century avant-garde metal impulses. The Romantic movement was about values we associate with art today: individualism, creativity, emotional expression. Sasscore would horrify these people given that people further down the line were horrified by Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring. It’s headache inducing for many people today. Expressionism nowadays could slot into many horror films or tense movie scenes. Whitebelt grind doesn’t have the cultural association to theatrics and cinematics. It doesn’t hold any space in the public consciousness. Sasscore fits into my own little niche of angry shrieking catharsis.
The music of sasscore isn’t about the sublime beauty and power of nature but it feels theatrical even if not precisely Romantic. Analog Horror is very far from romantic and often eschews emotional moments and arcs for its characters which it often lacks in the first place (with some great and notable exceptions). Sasscore isn’t terrifying but it would terrify a kid or a parent if they found their kid listening to it. It’s more cacophonous and unpleasant than unsettling to an average listener though. Analog Horror is able to scare the young even if very few are effective for adults. It romanticizes an older age through terror for those who never experienced it. Romanticization is a search for meaning. It’s a way to take suffering or mental illness or death and make it meaningful, beautiful, or perhaps even enjoyable. It seems like this narrator finds comfort in the darkness of these subcultures as outlets for their own rage. Tie everything in by lifting the veil of where the narrator is in this moment.
I’ve rewatched Petscop. It doesn’t hold the same unsettling power it once had. I could describe the black bars that blotch out ambiguous sections of the video as terrifying but is it? Whitebelt grind has given me a new catharsis. At one point in time, I was recycling the same songs and artists but I could never use the popular exaggeration that it saved my life. There’s no romanticizing the power of music for me. It would extol an impact art has never had for me. I had listened to grindcore but the erratic angularity of whitebelt grind and mathcore remained a blindspot for me. I tell myself that experiences and their potency come and go.
