11/18/2023 0 Comments Master bdsm tumblrPurely based in how they looked, they awakened within me a species of wide-eyed, magisterial terror close to that which Edmund Burke identifies in his 1756 essay “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.” But it wasn’t until I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved that I truly gasped what a monster could do. I savored the jolt of their sudden appearance. I marveled at the details of their strange physiognomy. Like the child rewinding Pumpkinhead, I returned to these monsters, again and again. Or when Clive Barker, in his novella The Hellbound Heart (popularly adapted into the 1987 film Hellraiser), describes the arrival of BDSM interdimensional entities, “The Cenobites,” one of whom “” “by the motion” of its speech a series of “hooks that transfixed the flaps of its eyes and were wed, by an intricate system of chains passed through flesh and bone alike, to similar hooks through the lower lip…exposing the glistening meat beneath,” I swore I could hear the light clash of those chains, my dread blossoming at that mention of “meat.” Lovecraft in “The Call of Cthulhu” describes how a ship of monster-hunters “ on relentlessly” toward a creature of a “vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind” rising out of the waves before it, and the creature subsequently splits before the ship’s prow, only to “ in its hateful original form,” I longed to be flicked at by that “mass of feelers,” feel the breeze from those “long, narrow wings” on my cheek. Monsters are beautiful-this was my truth. Some part of me must’ve always sensed this. “Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.” “Beauty, in some ways, is boring,” writes Umberto Eco in his book-length treatise on the grotesque in art, On Ugliness. The Rancor is enormous with T-Rex like claws, its maw bristling with crooked teeth. When I was recovering from a tonsillectomy at eight-years-old, my father showed up at my hospital bedside with a get-better gift, a hard-plastic rendition of Star Wars’ “Rancor Monster,” who Luke Skywalker kills underneath Jabba’s palace. Cohen, bound the pages and spine with super-glue and made a laminated dust-jacket with a werewolf drawing on it. In second grade, I “published” my first monster story, a book about a werewolf (whose title could’ve doubled for a book about a gigolo): “Night Man” my teacher at Beth Israel Day School, Ms. In kindergarten, I usually spent my free time in class hunched over scotch tape, scissors and construction paper, Frankenstein-ing together corpse-kings and chimeras. In truth, I’d always been that kid, the one who’s just a little creepy. And always, with zeal, I rewound to the scene where Lance Henriksen conjures the titular demon-its bizarro flesh hardware, its loaf of a head. Reader, I rented this film and I watched it, I wish I could say less than dozens of times. Though maybe, if you’re near my age, you’ve seen the VHS-display box: the monster in question among twisted tree roots, framed against a harvest moon. Released in 1988, starring Lance Henrikson of Aliens and Near Dark-fame, and marking the directorial debut of creature effects makeup master, Stan Winston, Pumpkinhead is deeply stupid. Lovecraft’s cephalopod or Toni Morrison’s pregnant vampire ghost, there was Pumpkinhead. It moves all herky-jerky, its tail and claws snapping, this ambient rattling hiss coming off it.įor me, before Mary Shelley’s sorrowful creature or H.P. It has strange armature on its shoulders and back that at one point in time might’ve fluttered with wings. Its head is roughly pumpkin-shaped because that’s where the monster gets its name, though the head really looks like some sort of batard, channels of mold running through it like veins. Its unblinking eyes stand out spider-egg white. Its musculature heaves and gleams, as though flayed.
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