The Condition Of New Death

Okay, this will not be written like the other blogposts because these stories are right up my alley and I’m really jazzed about it. Three Moments of an Explosion: The Condition of New Death is not the weird people these days are used to. In my humble opinion, I think this is the new horror. I think the upcoming generation will create even more things in this category until it is the new horror. Things that don’t describe the unfathomable creatures that make up our universe, but cater to the everyday person who are subjected to the uncanny valley. In most contexts, I think the uncanny valley usually applies when we’re talking about horror and how you can barely make out the face of the shadow in the corner of the screen, but China Mieville is blunt about it in this story. Corpses whose feet orient toward you no matter where you’re standing in comparison to them? And on top of that no one questions anything about this new evolution of ‘death’ either. That’s genuinely disturbing. Things like skeletons and ghosts have outgrown their welcome in the new generations, I think. We’re craving something more, and I think this is just that. One of my favorite horror movies, Cabin In The Woods, is also a part of this category, which is probably why I’m so excited about it. Both are good examples of taking a normal sounding scenario and adding a pinch of something being off, and then voila, you have the New Weird. In Mieville’s story it starts with an older man who comes home one day to find his wife dead on the floor. Seems normal, right? But then she reorients herself so that her feet are always rotating to her shocked husband no matter where he moves. Okay, now it’s no longer the thing we’re used to seeing. It has a new twist. Same thing with Cabin In The Woods, the movie starts with a normal plot of silly and horny college students who want to go stay in, you guessed it, a cabin in the woods. But, the entire time we have shots of these other people working in some sort of lab talking about sacrifices and then all of a sudden it’s more interesting. These are some of the best scenarios I can think of that are using the uncanny valley as a plot point rather than honing a focus on visuals.

I have absorbed a lot of media like this, actually. There’s a short film that’s eerily similar to it, I wonder if it was inspired by The Condition of New Death? It’s called This House Has People In It and it can be found on YouTube. Additionally, there’s a sequel to that video called Unedited Footage of A Bear that also falls under the category of the New Weird, and even my favorite horror artist Junji Ito would be considered the New Weird. I’m actually really glad that I have a title for what this genre is so I can keep looking into it.