THREE MOMENTS OF AN EXPLOSION / FREAKS

                                                                   NEW WEIRD

Three Moments of an Explosion by China Mieville is a book which contains 28 short stories.  The New Weird fiction is different from horror or fantasy fiction.  It mixes the supernatural, mythical, and even scientific themes.  In this book, stories are created in an arrangement of different worlds and settings.  The stories psychologically create panic and demonstrate weirdness of the world.  They represent a world where mystical and dull coexist and feed on each other.  I found some of the stories to be confusing.

An example of weird fiction is presented in the short story Polynia, where the sky over London is taken over by floating icebergs.  It represented a ghostly haunting.  I believe the theme is the destruction of the earthly humans (global warming) by environmental mismanagement.  A second example is a story named Covenhithe, which starts out typically with a man and his daughter walking along a beach in England.  A destroyed oil rig comes to life and crawls out of the ocean.  This is symbolic of the ruins of industry.  Most of the stories use backdrops of surreal images and anti-real strategies.

I believe the future trend in genre of horror will deal more with technology.  The fear of the power of network effects such as computer hacking and the dangers of connectedness.  This will happen as privacy and information security concerns increase.  The need to always be connected by a phone or the internet and the need to check-in shows a fear of isolation or being stranded.  I also believe that issues such as terrorism, the economy, and global warming will generate themes aimed at post apocalypse fiction.

Movie:  FREAKS (1932)

This film by Tod Browning upset many people in 1932.  It is a horror film in which the characters were played by actual carnival sideshow performers that had real deformities.  Freaks provides an opposite view.  The physically deformed individuals "freaks" are really trusting and honorable members of society.  The real monsters are the two normal members of the circus who plan to murder one of the freaks to get his large inheritance.  At the end, they both get punished, one by death and the other becomes a freak herself by loosing her beauty and becoming a bird girl thanks to the sideshow performers.

Freaks tends to horrify the viewers rather than frightening.  In 1932, this film really puts disabilities and differences in people on the screen to the point of being a shocker.  It made people open their eyes and realize the "freaks" were real people and absolutely normal.  Today we do not see these people as being weird or freaks.  There are many birth defects and accidents that have created people with disabilities.  They are accepted and actually helped by many organizations.