Week Four: Old and New Weird

For this week, I read a few of the short stories from China Medville's Three moments of the explosion. I'm familiar with the new weird, as I have been exposed to this genre for quite some time now. The short story The Buzzard's Egg stuck out to me as both weird and very intriguing. Its told through the eyes of a prison guard for prisoner of war gods. The tone is dark and melancholy as the prison guard describes the various gods that he watches over and had previously encountered. He is a peculiar man whom talks with a slight sense of insanity. It is the oddness that pulls us in further. I watched both the Troll Hunter and Cabin in the Woods and the appeal becomes evident pretty quickly. Its the unusual turns that make the weird intriguing, not wanting to see how truly odd something is but continuing to watch it anyway.  Psychologically we like to fit in or follow what is considered the normal way of things, whether its staying up to date with fashions, or technology, or reading and watching programs that are accepted by society as a whole. With the Buzzard’s egg it is the weirdness of insanity and implausible events that make it an interesting read. In a movie such as Sinister or Insidious, its that weirdness of events beyond our understanding that brings us in. Both feature Supernatural beings that try to come in to our world and take souls back to them. Events like this do not occur in regular life to our knowledge and it appears very odd. With the troll hunter, what makes it weird is that Trolls exist, and that there is an individual who hunts them down with UV Cameras and lights to kill them. It is the break from what is expected that pulls us so deeply in to this new weird, as well as the old weird.