Today I’m caught at the crossroads where Project A, a novella, Project B, a table-top role-playing game, and Project C, a short story prospect that’s caught me somewhat by surprise, all meet. Project A is currently at a pause because I’m trying to decide just how grody I want it to be. Significantly, that grodiness has to hinge on the journey of the protagonist, who is not just a good person but a very good person, but who will be driven to introduce grodiness into the life of a particularly noxious antagonist. I have to decide how far that antagonist would need to go in order to spur our heroine into doing what I’ve imagined she’ll do. The TTRPG is on the docket du jour, as it will undergo a bit of alpha-testing this Wednesday in a class I’m taking on The Art of Gamecrafting with Eloy Lasanta of Third-Eye Games (an opportunity I’d highly recommend, and which I think will be on offer again next year). I’ve got a draft of a pretty expansive list of game skills in the folder for a game I’m designing, and I’ll need to trim it down and finalize it in order to round the next corner. The newer project, Project C, is one of those blindside delights, a short story inspired by a call for urban stories in the horror and dark fantasy genres. I’ve got the location and the premise already locked in, but the aboutness of the piece is still a little wriggly.

Though I routinely teach about the intentional fallacy in a few variations of our Intro to Lit class, the basic understanding that what a writer wants you to get out of a work of art doesn’t necessarily bind the reading or gaming experience, I think it’s still pretty important to have some sense of intention penciled in before one begins. If I’m going to guide a reader across a landscape reddened with blood, I want them to have some way of making sense of that expedition. I’m thinking about this keenly today, as this evening (while my partner is going to a play with friends) will likely involve the screening of a horror movie. I’m thinking about watching a movie from my backlog of educational viewing, probably Terrifier (2011) or something like it.

Broadly speaking, Terrifier isn’t my usual cup of tea. Though I have seen more than my fair share of gory flicks, I generally won’t watch movies where the aboutness of what occurs onscreen eludes me. This is at this juncture purely speculative on my part, though I’ve seen a glimpse of Terrifier‘s villain, Art the Clown, already in an anthology movie called All Hallow’s Eve. I had the same suspicion about Wolf Creek back in the day, and my guess was spot on in that case. The villain in that movie is a feller named Mick, who commits ghastly acts of violence for reasons I couldn’t entirely fathom. Back in that stretch of the 2000’s we had a spate of movies in that vein, though in many of them I could guess at some vestige of intention. In the case of Hostel, for example, there’s a dark critique of class privilege with some sidelong ironies about the mad rush to make films inexpensively in Central Europe. In Wolf Creek the point eluded me. There’s of course always a chance to pin down a transgression yields punishment motif in plenty of horror movies, but in the case of Wolf Creek it seemed a little more nihilistic. What I’ve seen of Art the Clown make me believe he might be a villain cut from the same cloth. The clips I’ve seen of the various Terrifiers depict Art as a kind of committed but frequently exasperated sadist, someone who inflicts torture on his victims and becomes increasingly frustrated as he runs out of ideas to make them suffer as much as possible before they perish. It makes for spectacular brutality and a chance to showcase some genuinely grisly special effects, as you might imagine, but I can’t quite pin down the purpose of it all. This tribute to Art the Clown in some ways pins down what I mean. The commentator explores an “Art the Clown as a modernized Michael Myers” analogy, but at about the 5:40 mark he offers us a quick gloss on the meanings of the various Halloween movies that center on the character of Michael–they are meditations on evil, on dreams and nightmares, on avoidance, and on intergenerational trauma. Perhaps with a bit of historical context I’ll be able to get a better feel for Art the Clown, but right now he just occurs to me as “a delivery system for hyper-violence,” as the commentator calls him. I’m genre-aware enough to get that that simplicity might be the point, that Art might be a commentary on our cultural need for simulation or excess and our futile fumblings for a sense of purpose behind acts of violence, but if that’s the case, the movies are still probably not for me.

I tend to think of horror as an especially ethical (if not always moral) genre, broadly speaking, one that has a great deal to say about the world we live in and about the things we do with and for and to one another. That’s how I usually try to write it, at any rate. But on some counts I’ll defer to my intuition, which currently tells me that there are some films I don’t actually have to watch (I’m looking at you, Cannibal Holocaust) to suss out the underlying intentions.