{"id":78849,"date":"2014-10-31T13:36:09","date_gmt":"2014-10-31T17:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=78849"},"modified":"2014-10-31T14:46:40","modified_gmt":"2014-10-31T18:46:40","slug":"what-scares-the-paris-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/31\/what-scares-the-paris-review\/","title":{"rendered":"What Scares The Paris Review<\/i>?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"1939-E.Lukcs\"<\/a>

From a 1939 Dutch workplace safety poster by G\u00e9 Hurkmans.<\/p><\/div>\n

The book I find myself most often recommending\u2014Grace Krilanovich\u2019s The Orange Eats Creeps<\/a><\/em>\u2014is perfect reading for tonight, or for any chilly\u00a0evening, when the fallen leaves outside have begun to mold and decay in wet piles. I may originally have read it in the summer, but so thoroughgoing is its tone of paranoia, cold, rot, and subsumed violence that you can\u2019t easily separate yourself from the refracted narrative of the book\u2019s protagonist, an ESP-endowed teenage girl running with a group of \u201cvampire hobo junkies\u201d in the Pacific Northwest. She\u2019s searching for her foster sister, Kim, along the \u201chighway That Eats People,\u201d and the novel reads like an Orphic descent into a bad dream within a bad dream, with the physical landscape\u2014loamy, waterlogged, and dank\u2014doubling as the psychic landscape: \u201cThe land was not to be trusted. Its climate had the potential to make those teetering on the edges of decency spill over into murderville \u2026 Psychos tried to plug up cracks with bodies, cloth, whatever\u2019s at hand.\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scary things I remember: a hand coming out of a box on The Electric Company<\/em>, the dying boar on the cover of my parents\u2019 Four Seasons LP (made them skip the Autumn movement), \u201cOde to Billy Joe,\u201d reading The Dead Zone<\/em> by flashlight under the blanket at camp, The Shining<\/em> (movie), The Exorcist<\/em> (book), the prophecies of Nostradamus (had to hide the book), Let\u2019s Scare Jessica to Death<\/em> on TV on a Sunday afternoon (Sunday afternoon movie), the Twilight Zone<\/em> movie (had to leave theater), Eraserhead<\/em> late at night alone in my parents\u2019 bedroom (\u201cYou are<\/em> sick!\u201d), the diner scene in Mulholland Drive<\/em> (the compressed audio), the distortion of Laura Dern\u2019s face in Inland Empire<\/em>, \u201cDon’t Crash\u201d by Front 242, in the listening room at the school library (do these still exist?), Don\u2019t Look Now<\/em>, Francis Bacon, Fleetwood Mac, The White Ribbon<\/em>, the dream sequence in Amour<\/em>, and the scary-doll movie Sadie made me see last month. The other things I\u2019ve managed to forget. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Taylor Swift\u2019s \u201cTrack 3\u201d recently made it to number one on Canadian iTunes. The track was a glitch, eight seconds of white noise<\/a>. I\u2019m open-minded, so I gave it a try, and by lunchtime I realized, rather suddenly, that \u201cTrack 3\u201d was stuck in my head; Swift seemed to follow me into the void, filling it with something familiar yet indefinable. In \u201cTrack 3\u201d she\u2019s mastered the Freudian uncanny, something that\u2019s frighteningly unknown but brings us back to something familiar. Freud once quoted Ernst Jentsch: \u201cOne of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the [listener] in uncertainty whether or not a particular figure \u2026 is a human being or an automaton.\u201d I maintain that Swift released \u201cTrack 3\u201d in all its uncanniness to confess that she is, in fact, an automaton. If you think your costume is good, stew on that: Swift\u2019s has been better, every day, since 1989.\u00a0\u2014Alex Celia<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alex jests, but I do not: I really adore Taylor Swift. And that\u2019s scary. She\u2019s just released the best pop record of 2014: the most exhilarating, the most addictive, and also the most inscrutable, the most frustrating. Carl Wilson, the best pop critic writing today, understands\u2014his review of 1989<\/em><\/a> uses Swift\u2019s famously undisclosed bellybutton as a metaphor through which to apprehend the entire Swiftian zeitgeist. He gazes into her navel \u201cas umbilical nub,\u201d \u201cas median point and sore spot,\u201d \u201cas Jell-O shot dispenser,\u201d \u201cas contemplative locus,\u201d \u201cas camera aperture,\u201d \u201cas teen-pop erogenous zone,\u201d \u201cas pretty hate machine,\u201d \u201cas the whitest thing on Earth,\u201d and \u201cas the omphalos of capital,\u201d among others. No one has better identified the qualities that make her such a vital force in pop, so lucid and so obscure. \u201cYou could tug forever at the ends of Swift\u2019s elusive, invisible abdominal bundle of avarice and sentiment, art, ego, envy, love and hate, drought and flood, truth and fiction, savior and monster,\u201d Wilson writes, \u201cand it would never come undone.\u201d If that\u2019s not horrifying \u2026 \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

There once was a time when the scariest thing imaginable was what one never saw: creaks in the floorboard, the rustling of branches against the window, whispers floating in the wind. It used to be that the monsters in horror films were never seen, which got under your skin: think of the spiral staircase of the original The Haunting<\/em>, the eerie sobs of an unseen woman in The Uninvited<\/em>, the psychological violence in later films like The Entity<\/em>. Then slasher flicks and the \u201cvideo nasties\u201d of the early 1980s came, and we evolved into the terror porn of the Hostel<\/em> series to laughable films like The Human Centipede<\/em>. These films are indeed horrific, but are they scary? It\u2019s pretty unlikely that I\u2019ll stumble upon some sadistic German surgeon, but I turn the lights off every night. So it totally makes sense that The Blair Witch Project<\/em> made millions of dollars\u2014that last image in the basement is still ingrained in my head because\u2014besides being absolutely terrifying\u2014you never know who was behind the terror. (I still can\u2019t go camping without thinking of the film.) One recent film that stands out, and one that gets better with repeated viewings, is The Orphanage<\/a><\/em> (2007). There\u2019s nothing innovative in the storytelling\u2014haunted house, missing child\u2014but it expertly builds the atmosphere of the remote orphanage and the characters who inhabit it. There aren\u2019t as many thrills as something like The Descent<\/em>\u2014a great example of what is still possible within creature features\u2013but when the scares come they are genuine. The rest is waiting, anticipating, dreading; there\u2019s nothing scarier than what haunts one\u2019s imagination. \u2014Justin Alvarez<\/strong> <\/p>\n

A gory horror flick can disquiet even the most courageous moviegoer. But I\u2019m more haunted by 1950s women\u2019s film, a genre that explores female dramas and dreams: romantic entanglements, major wardrobe malfunctions, and domestic crises of all shapes and sizes. Jeanine Basinger (of no relation to Kim), a film scholar and the author of A Woman\u2019s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women<\/a><\/em> (1993) shares my horror, and investigates this shiny pink brand of cinema, deftly placing our favorite heroines\u2014Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Jeanne Crain, Jean Arthur, et al\u2014under a microscope. What does a love triangle really signify? Why is the vixen wearing red, and the virgin bedecked in floral? Why does the has-been actress\/mother resent her ambitious daughter? With conversational ease and acerbic wit, Basinger reminds us of the many ways that writers in Hayes Code\u2013era Hollywood spoke subliminally, with cues and winks. \u2014Kate Gill<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Foster Wallace\u2019s \u201cMister Squishy\u201d (from Oblivion<\/a><\/em>, 2004) has mirrors, masks, and poison\u2014three of horror\u2019s tropes, deployed here to clinical, even banal, effect, which makes them all the more terrifying. The story follows a midlevel advertising exec as he conducts a focus group for a new line of superbly chocolatey snack cakes called Felonies!; he\u2019s so fed up with his career, and indeed with the trajectory of his whole life, that he\u2019s elected to turn his focus group into act of terrorism against the advertising industry. His methods, as you\u2019ll see, are the stuff nightmares are made of. And Wallace\u2019s alert, anxious prose taps into our deepest fears about society: about the loneliness, estrangement, and resentment produced by corporate culture; about the way that language, in such a culture, functions as an alienating, dissociative tool rather than a way to communicate; and about the sense that under late capitalism we\u2019re all complicit in a kind of hypnotic consumerism, that we\u2019ll never get out from under \u201cthe jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted.\u201d \u2014D.P.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I recently rediscovered Lisabeth Zwerger\u2019s selected and illustrated fairy tales<\/a> by Hans Christian Andersen on my bookshelf. It\u2019s a beautiful collection with some of Andersen\u2019s most treasured stories. For me, the most bizarre is \u201cThe Tinder-Box\u201d (1835), about a witch with an under lip that hangs down on her breast; three dogs with eyes as large as teacups or windmills or towers; a tinderbox that, with each spark, summons the elephantine-eyed dogs; and a soldier so avaricious it\u2019s chilling. What\u2019s most intriguing is the story\u2019s princess: she\u2019s locked in a tower, as most princesses are, kidnapped and kissed by the nefarious soldier as she sleeps soundly, and when her parents are slaughtered, she sheds not a tear. By the end, fear reigns, the soldier becomes king, and it was all \u201cvery pleasing to her.\u201d Now, this could be another display of the vilified damsel. But what if the princess was in on it all?\u00a0\u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The book I find myself most often recommending\u2014Grace Krilanovich\u2019s The Orange Eats Creeps\u2014is perfect reading for tonight, or for any chilly\u00a0evening, when the fallen leaves outside have begun to mold and decay in wet piles. I may originally have read it in the summer, but so thoroughgoing is its tone of paranoia, cold, rot, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[15870,154,2633,15868,1146,4220,9036,15872,15869,15867,6887,15871],"class_list":["post-78849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-carl-wilson","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-david-lynch","tag-grace-krilanovich","tag-halloween","tag-hans-christian-andersen","tag-horror","tag-jeanine-basinger","tag-michael-haneke","tag-scary-stories","tag-taylor-swift","tag-the-orphanage"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Scares The Paris Review?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This week\u2019s Halloween-themed staff picks, including Grace Krilanovich\u2019s \u201cThe Orange Eats Creeps,\u201d Taylor Swift\u2019s \u201cTrack 3,\u201d and \u201cMister Squishy.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/31\/what-scares-the-paris-review\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Scares The Paris Review? by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 31, 2014 \u2013 The book I find myself most often recommending\u2014Grace Krilanovich\u2019s The Orange Eats Creeps\u2014is perfect reading for tonight, or for any chilly\u00a0evening, when\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/31\/what-scares-the-paris-review\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" 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