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Originally a monthly newsletter, Project Orange is a suite of essays dedicated to my pursuit of feeling at home in myself and in the world. Consisting of personal essays, Project Orange explored in bittersweet detail the lodestars that made up my personhood.

An official declaration of surrender

"I am blessedly flawed, endlessly complex. I don’t know why I still punish myself for it. Why do you punish yourself for it? We’re such soft creatures, and only here for such a short amount of time. Why don’t we surrender to it more?"

Sex terrifies me

"Bits of me died trying to find closeness with another human. How does one grieve that loss? How do I reconcile with the possibility that something will always be wrong with me?"

My love takes the form of my mother

"In my cavernous capacity for love lives nothing but echoes, just my own voice trailing back to me. An anxious vampire love, terrified of the light. Of the living and of being seen. Really, all I desire is a cozy room in everybody’s lives."

Horror is my origin story

"Horror does not work in the long form because it demands a severance. The killers must die. Vengeance will be had. The house must burn. Or the devil must have his way. The hero must fail, one way or another. The story will find death, eventually. It always does."

Because I could not stop for Death –

"Is it strange for me to say I’m excited to meet Death when he finally comes to fetch me? I’ve been transformed and guided by Death so much, I feel like I’ll be in for a treat. Whichever time that might be, I am looking forward to seeing his face again."

thank u, next

"What all this is teaching me is that I deserve love – good love. Love that doesn’t bind nor limit. If the love that I receive on a daily basis from myself is bountiful, then why would I settle for lukewarm love that I have to beg for?"

The ballad of me and my tooth

"I put off sending texts, I wait until my sink is filled to the brim with dishes and greasy pans, I delay joy for fear of a momentary discomfort. I wait until something is searing and threatening to burst until I do something about it. To my brain, there is no difference between discomfort for the sake of betterment and discomfort for the sake of discomfort."

I used to like music

"Someone, somewhere, is doing something really interesting with nothing but a guitar. There’s a band that stopped making music in 2011 but gave their last album their all. All the world is crawling with beautiful music that sounds unique, and lovely, and hopeful."

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Talks & Poetry Events

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Theo writes about films, culture, language, and several other topics that might catch her fancy.

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Tell me your collaboration ideas, secret wishes, and perhaps your much-desired thoughts about my work. Thank you for being kind.

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And other grizzly confessions

Let me begin with this: my emotions are bright and vivid blue, red, and yellow. I pin them to my shirt when I go to the grocery. I’m often certain of them and I wear them true. The issue is that they dwindle into dullness when it matters. I am drained of my colors when it’s time to ask for help, for counsel, for refuge, for forgiveness. My verbal arsenal is stacked to the brim! I am a one man armory ready to battle thousands when I’m alone. But I cower into a ball the minute I am touched. When seen by others, my emotions become shameful. They are the blush of my nipples, the hair on my cunt. I have never managed to spit out the words “I love you” to my father without trembling. Never uttered “thank you” to my mother without hesitating. I choke on the words “I need you.” They’re still lodged in my esophagus, and I am a purple shade of bruise. The truth is I don’t know how to release my words casually. I always feel the need to make a festival out of them, dress them up. They’re easier to say that way, the truth nearly drowned in the spectacle of it all. Drums raging, gongs clanging. The small voice that sings my chorus is subdued. I suspect this is why man created the metaphor; it’s much gorier to put the truth on the table plain and simple as the truth is so often hideous and unbearable to look at.Putting my words out into the world terrifies me. I am pushing forth my wonderful, dazzling children knowing the kids in school will be mean, and the math would be hard, and the classroom will feel foreign. It makes me weary. I am a helicopter parent to my writing. I hover, ceaselessly. Today, I am liberating them all, wolves be damned. If there’s one thing I’ve never tried, it’s to be reckless in my nakedness. So it’s difficult to open my rusty windows. So the door might come unhinged if I try to open it. So what? My eyes are so adjusted to the dark that I forget I’m not actually blind. I can be brave, and without armor. I tremble looking at a jar labled “fear” but when I look inside, there’s really nothing there. Just a shadow of what I thought would be scary. A star still twinkling its light, long after it’s dead.This newsletter is a celebration of my brain; the orange fruit that it is. Won’t you peel it with me? Won’t you push your thumb into the soft spot of my head and pull back my porous coat? Peel back the piths strung around me like ribbons and chew me, delicately. I’d like to be open so I can learn that there’s really nothing quite shameful inside. It’s all pulp and juice and fructose; just an orange, really.Let me begin the exercise now: I am Theo Montero Itchon. I cackle at my own jokes and I sing Moon River when I shower. I have never climbed a tree in my life and I misspell the word “ceiling” six out of ten times. My greatest shame is failing an English literature class in college because I didn’t attend half the lectures and didn’t show up for the midterm. It was unacceptable to me that I could allow myself to neglect something I truly loved more than anything in the world. Even joy had become a chore. Watch me now: I forgive myself for what I failed to do for myself in times I was too sunken, one foot already in the grave. I’m not a terrible person for what I failed to do in the times I felt spent. The truth is I am quick to anger, I somersault into rage like an olympic gymnast. And I bask in my self-pity, it might not be so surprising to you how easy it is to fall into comfort with it. I am blessedly flawed, endlessly complex. I don’t know why I still punish myself for it. Why do you punish yourself for it? We’re such soft creatures, and only here for such a short amount of time. Why don’t we surrender to it more?The goal of this newsletter is not to preach, but to suggest. I don’t have any of the answers, I only have approximations based solely on my very limited reach of the world. These are nothing but essays from someone trying to piece it all together: the cosmos’ penultimate puzzle. Be warned that it’ll be unapologetically Theo. It will draw conclusions from pretentious horror films no one has ever heard of. It will be overly sentimental about a line in a book, about a painting of hands, and a (most likely) Tumblr post. It will cry over strangers, missing buttons, and chipped paint. It will mourn a summer day eight years ago, and long lost pets. I’ve spent eons folding my heart in on itself, trying to make it smaller but I feel everything deeply. No more shrinking. I surrender to my heart’s gravity.Embark on this project with me. I want to master being myself and I want to write about it. I have an inkling that the real purpose of my life is to tell how I lived it through the art that I weave and the lessons I teach my kids. Indulge me and please read about it. In so doing, I hope it sparks a small candlelight’s worth of illumination in your chest. I hope it feels like catching a glimpse of yourself on a reflective surface. I hope it feels like peeling an orange for the one you love: “I love you. I want us both to eat well.”To write can be such a lonely endeavor, to live even more so. Let’s do both together.Welcome to Project Orange.From the precipice of a new beginning,Theo

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There, I said it.

There is nothing more foreboding to me than the feeling that stirs inside my chest after having sex with someone. The blanket of filth that coats my intestines, the inevitable feeling of my persona splitting away from my body, eager to run elsewhere, back to a time and a place where it had been untouched. It’s not a feeling I can pinpoint with a vernacular I have access to, I typically would only refer to it as “the asexual feeling” to other aspec people to which they would nod their heads solemnly: yes. I know exactly what you mean. This territory is vast and full of quicksand. It’s unfortunately not as cut and dry as: sex terrifies me therefore I’m just not going to have sex. Inside me exists a web of contradictions and a thousand cubby holes where I compartmentalize my selves and the things they feel. Block one contains my lust, block two my guilt, block three my fear, block four my insecurities. They all rattle in their compartments; whether they are eager to be let loose so they may grow larger or if they are eager to be let loose so they may destroy the others, I don’t know. I am afraid to know.At the tender age of 13, my boyfriend pressured me into having sex with him. While I know it’s typical of victims of assault to look for reasons to scrub away the blood of it all, my awareness of this does not save me from feeling it all the same. For many years, I said to myself: it couldn’t have been rape if you didn’t struggle against it. To lay there is to consent to it. Of course I know now that violence need not be gory, the same way love need not be tender. One could wear the face of the other and to the indiscriminate heart, it can for a very long time, feel like the real thing. I allowed violence inside because it posed as love. I want to say this incident a decade ago doesn’t hold me anymore. That I am not prisoner to the dehumanization of it. I want to say sex now isn’t just a mere shadow of what happened when I was 13, but it is. Tragically, it is. My lust was baptized in violence and I’m not sure how to undo it.I’ve never had sex with anyone I was even slightly fond of. The light of the next morning shines on my grimy, disfigured self so brightly that I never called any of them back the next day. For the most part, these dalliances have been symbolic of my hands reaching for someone, anyone to hold me. They’re gambles I took, hoping for rest at the end. Intimacy is difficult. I don’t know it very well so I either hide from it or force it. I have grown very comfortable with my lonely, and other forms of communicating my vulnerability. My alone is both haven and armor, but really my body is set on fire by the slightest touch. While getting my last tattoo, my artist’s arm rested against mine for a few blissful minutes and I nearly cried at the sensation of it. I didn’t pay attention to the needle rapidly dipping in and out of my skin. All I could really feel was his arm, covered in infinitely more ink than mine, kaleidoscopic with the harsh white light beaming down on us, a wash of arm hairs over his tattoos. I had forgotten what that felt like. Someone’s skin pressed so tightly against yours, you can feel the ripples of their body hair. I remember Bea’s three day old leg hairs growing back from getting shaved, how they were prickly against my own. I remember my high school friend Rai, who mandated a time of day every day when we would hug for at least two minutes. I remember JM’s hand, instinctively grabbing mine when we had to run to a jeepney, or if we had to cross the street. I remember the gentle crash of my student Zaira running to embrace me after a summer apart, her skinny, fragile arms open and ready for landing. I interrogate myself for answers, asking why I allowed these fleeting moments of touch to pass me by. Why I hadn’t let myself bask in them. Why I had convinced myself that I was unworthy of them, or that I didn’t need them. The truth is I so desperately want to be held by someone who loves me. The weight of that desire is so overwhelming I flail frantically all over the place as if I’d just eaten something very spicy, looking for relief.Perhaps I’m just far too sensitive to lay with other people. As in, I don’t feel human when I am in a sexual situation. As in, I am far too consumed by the performance of it all. As in, I only came here because I thought it would make me feel like someone desired me. As in, I didn’t realize I was just looking for proof I still have a body. As in, this is nothing but a rehearsed dance; there is a gleam to it but ultimately, it is sexless. As in, we are fucking but we are not having sex. As in, I want to feel something but I don’t know what.I don’t really have any answers about my sexuality. People have questioned it many times, friends and lovers both. I just know I am not really a whole person, part of me never made it past 13. Bits of me died trying to find closeness with another human. How does one grieve that loss? How do I reconcile with the possibility that something will always be wrong with me? That there might always be a cruel barrier between my desire and its fulfillment? Where does my trauma end and my desire begin?I don’t have an enthusiastic, logical conclusion to this. I only have permission to give myself to let all these questions answer themselves in time. My sexuality has no guarantees, it is a shapeshifting force. I only have the earnest hope that I will soften in the waiting, that I will be patient in the discomfort, and brave enough for the conclusion.Standing with you before the unknown,Theo

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I don't need anyone. I just need everyone and then some.

I grew up encased in a cushioned, fragrant shell of love. I was passed around, loving hand to loving hand, absorbing adoration like a sunflower in the light of day. But I don’t think I experienced it in a way I could understand. I was raised by my mother, a heartache veteran, sorrow’s great soldier. She’s a woman of action, while I so very clearly am a person of words. As any salt of the earth Asian child would attest, our mothers did not apologize. Instead, they cooked us nilaga. Or afritada. Or got us iskrambol in the summer, with the extra powder on top. My mother did not tell me I did well, or that she was proud of me. She’d say, “Good. Now do it again.” She did not tell me I was beautiful, not once. Instead, she gave me the mystical comb she’s owned since high school. The comb she’d misplaced over a dozen hundred times and would somehow magically resurface. The comb I inevitably misplaced twice as many times and is now in its final resting place, tucked in a box somewhere in my old bedroom. Instead, a barrage of semi-real gold chains, and pearl earrings. The prom dress she picked. The red lipstick and the motion she would make with her lips indicating I should press mine together to transfer the pigment from top to bottom lip. Oh, my lovely mama. I’m sorry she only ever got the one pearl.My mother’s cursive language was a foreign tongue to me and some days it’s still lost in translation. She raised me to be as tough as she is. Whenever I fell and scraped my knees, she would not help me stand. Instead, she would stand by and watch me push myself up, her face resting, not unlike the expression on the face of my tennis coach as he watched me hone my backhand (he’s a retired sergeant, funnily enough). It was many years later when I realized this was her teaching me to be without her; that there were many battles ahead where she would not be there to pull me from the ground. She was a commander teaching tactical warfare. She built me my armor, some days I think she built it too well.Ang bilin ni mama ay: “piliin mo mabuti ang mga kaibigan mo.” Over and over again she told me this. Every year before the first day of school, and one final time before sending me off to college. I took this advice seriously. My upbringing, no matter how colonialized, was still distinctly Filipino in values (distinctly probinsyano, at that). My mother had to know all the names of the kids I hung out with, and she had to approve of them, too. The long oral history of my “best friends” through the years is set in stone by my mother; ask her who my best friend was at any given point in time. Her answer is probably the correct one. Pre-school was Chelsea, her teeth one or two spaces apart, whose brother was the playground bad boy I had the slightest semblance of a crush on. First grade was Mary, who taught me an interpretative dance to Give Thanks With a Grateful Heart which we performed in matching white dresses, white flowers braided in our hair in front of the whole school. Third grade was Kim, who was the first my mother told me to stay away from (her mother and mine agreed on that. Cheers, Kim if you’re reading this.) On and on the list goes, each one vetted by my mother. Of course, none of the boys I liked were good enough. Not Mav, who was too ugly. Not Eros, who was too brash. Not Tyronne, who was too rude.The truth, perhaps is that it wasn’t my mother’s protection that made me so picky with my friends. It was my preference for solitude. I have always been on my own. The remnants of my lonely childhood are engraved on my habits as an adult. I have mastered the art of it. I remember Dr. Aguila telling my Group Dynamics class one day about how being an adult can be lonely: “You should probably start getting used to eating alone.” Frankly, that was the first time I ever realized not everyone did alone as I did. By that point, I went everywhere and did everything by myself. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, strolls to the bookstore, midnight trips to the cinema, grocery shopping, and writing in cafes. I did it all on my own and I reveled in the solace of my company. Alone is easy. My brain is a massive swimming pool, blue and sparkly under the summer sun, and I would swim until my fingers wrinkled, until my skin burnt pinkish brown. To be among others, however, would be more comparable to a two-hour-long hike along a very steep hill. Emily Dickinson wrote:“I can wade Grief—
Whole Pools of it—
I'm used to that—
But the least push of Joy
Breaks up my feet—”Similarly, I can wade seclusion, whole pools of it. I’m used to that. But the least push of companionship breaks up my feet. I don’t know how to do it. For as long as I can remember, I yearned to be important to someone. Some days, when I feel particularly petulant, I yearn to be important to everyone. It’s like breathing to me; first, an inhale then an exhale. But I struggle with feeling wanted. I struggle with feeling like someone wants to hear from me. My energy refuses to volunteer, it requires inviting. Over and over again, it has to be invited in; a weary vampire. A ravenously hungry but painfully reluctant immortal. I am afraid people receive my love the way I did my mother’s all those years ago. I feel that when love exits my body and transfigures into affection, it shapeshifts and morphs into an unsightly beast. Scaled and fanged, built more for shredding than mending. I can’t figure out how to communicate my love for my friends when most of what I do is in celebration or is in dedication to them. I don’t know how to give them my thanks, my apologies, or my revelry. Much like my mother, who sends them in the form of opening up my windows, flicking the light on when I write in the dark, and putting extra sampalok in the sigang when I am home. I know what you mean, mama but just tell me. I love you. Just say it.Part of me wishes I could unmeet all of the people I love. Find them all one by one and build back from the basics. What’s your favorite color? The last time I asked was when we were seventeen and I know it’s probably still green but I just want to make sure because you had a phase when all you wore was yellow. Who’s your eldest sibling again? I know it’s your sister that sent you to high school but I just have to make sure because I haven’t seen you in person to talk about your shitty family since last year. It’s these little questions I can’t ask through text, or pick up the courage to ask on Facetime. Why don’t I do that? Why is it easier to broadcast my love like this than it is to whisper them pointedly, deliberately? Hey, man. I’m proud of you. Five years ago you still had to ask me to ask the waiter for ketchup for you because you were too shy to and now look how far you’ve gone. Hey, thanks for sharing with me all these things that make you happy. I’m full of joy to receive your glee with you. See how easy that was writing them here? I’ve been keeping those inside me for months, all unsaid.In my cavernous capacity for love lives nothing but echoes, just my own voice trailing back to me. An anxious vampire love, terrified of the light. Of the living and of being seen. Really, all I desire is a cozy room in everybody’s lives. A homely pad I could crash in the night when the world is a shadow and my own light is flickering. Inside my head is a neighborhood and I want all the houses occupied. I need each window warmly lit at night, the smell of garlic on hot butter carried by the evening breeze hopping from door to door. The scent of it both a signal and an invitation: I am here, you are not alone. Come by when you need me. I’d like for love to consume me. I’d like my want to be unapologetic in its mass, and in its great pull. It’s an active practice, granting myself permission to leave bits of myself in other people and to let them stay there, whatever comes. But I need to be able to work through the shame that I have intertwined with expressing vulnerability and gratitude; to hold its face between two loving hands and tell it: no, we were wrong my darling. We got it all wrong.I suspect that to desire is a distinctly disgusting thing to undergo. It must be as how my mother felt in the aisles of toy departments when I, as a child insisted on a new one, crying when she denied me. I find it so shameful to be so grown and to still want something so persistently, all the while refusing to say something about it. It must be as how my mother felt raising me: I am sorry. I am proud of you. You are beautiful.She taught me all but the ability to drop my sword and strip myself of the chain mail. It’s no matter now, though. How could she have taught something she herself did not know how to do?Even now, I am just impressed that the love she did teach me has built up enough that it is able to identify its weak points. Seasoned fighters know where they are most vulnerable, after all. One day, when I am brave enough, I can tell her to her face that her pain in raising me – the great, insurmountable task it must have been – was not in vain. Not even for a second.With you in navigating love’s unrelenting topography,Theo

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I ramble about horror films for 1,800 words

In the many years I’ve been writing, I don’t think I’ve managed to properly write a piece about horror. I think my craft doesn’t lend itself well to my affection for horror films. Poetic prose seems a bit silly juxtaposed to the slasher films I carry tenderness over, or maybe I’m just not creative enough. My excuse, I suppose, for not devoting my art to horror is that just like the subject matter, it rather likes to thrive in intimate spaces. It broods in the quiet like the nocturnal creature I imagine watching over me as I sleep, its hunkering form crooked against the ceiling. If my psychological ailments are my poems, then my love for horror must be the casual Ilocano I speak with my grandmother. It exists solely as an exchange; no ellipses to decorate the silences, no line breaks to indicate pauses, no italicized words used for emphasis. It is as ordinary as conversation. It’s the NoSleep podcast I listened to over lunch in college, the Scream Queens episode I play in the background as I wash the dishes, Haunt (2019) as I try to fall asleep. It’s the very same reason I don’t have any poems written about the glasses of water I drink or how I might put my dirty tennis shoes on. Maybe I’d tell my lover, but I can’t possibly write a full-length essay about it.Or maybe I can.If we were to trace my origins, à la Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), we might have a bit of trouble placing exactly what had me so enchanted about the genre. There were so many little things, the credit couldn’t possibly be handed to just one element of my upbringing. For a long time, I thought it was due in part to my mother’s casual love of horror. The Shake, Rattle, and Rolls that came out every year, Nginiiig on Saturday nights, the Kris Aquino horror films, T2, and Wag Kang Lilingon. I thought: it was those pirated DVDs and its tasteful selection of unwatchable horror. But no – that’s not all it is. It was also the books from my early childhood. The books that made me fall deep in love with reading. My closest friends as a kid were my ghost story collections; the cheaply written, sold as true to life books that my parents kept buying for me every week after church. It was the volumes of Goosebumps, with their beautifully illustrated covers, the Nancy Drew hardbacks that colored my bookshelf yellow, the copies of Fear Street I borrowed from the school library, up to the fat stack of Hercule Poirot paperbacks in my bedroom, the complete collection of Gillian Flynn’s work (except for Gone Girl, which Toby, our gigantic Labrador ate), tales of cannibalistic women, and cozy mysteries I read in July when it’s stormy every day. It was also Scooby Doo and Courage the Cowardly Dog. It was the obsession with cryptids and unsolved murders. It was the sleepovers at my cousins’ house when our aunts would let us watch horror movies and tell us ghost stories about our sleepy town afterwards. It was running around campus in grade school, my white socks caked on with dirt, my friends and I scaring each other shitless about nonexistent ghouls following us, investigating a murder that never happened. It was magazines about unexplained phenomena, headless priests, hitchhikers at midnight, creaky floorboards, and names you can’t utter. It was pure magic to me that the world I lived in might have a layer I could not access, and that the attempt to access it would be considered trespassing. I coveted what I could not know and what I could not see. And proximity to the unknowable: dark cinema, books about death, stories about poltergeists – transformed the world into a liminal space where I could exist in limbo, having access to both the tangible and the shadows.I don’t know what the first horror film I ever saw was. It’s lost to time, whatever it was. But I do remember watching 1408 (2007) with my dad. I vividly remember him singing along to We’ve Only Just Begun by The Carpenters when it played onscreen. To this day, we still reference John Cusack’s breakdown screaming “I was out! I was out!” whenever we find ourselves in a situation we’d rather leave. It wasn’t very long until I began venturing into horror films alone. At around age 10, I stayed up to 3am during the weekends watching Australian torture porn and creature features (notably Jeepers Creepers (2001) and The Mothman Prophecies (2002). And because I looked grown and was infallibly polite, the video rental store people would let me get whatever I wanted: B-movies, exploitation films I don’t remember the names of anymore, Sleepaway Camp (1983), the slightly raunchy Valentine (2001), the more embarrassing picks from James Wan’s career, and my then-favorite, Jennifer’s Body (2009). I went through so many terrible horror films, but oh how I loved them then. Upon the mention of horror films, most people would think of black and red, but my vision was tinged beautiful deep purple and dusty royal blue when thinking of those movies. Like the world was in constant twilight, and the milky way was perfectly in sight through the branches of trees. And how can I speak of my childhood that was so lovingly shaped by horror films without mentioning Scream. I still remember old fan-made sites filled with “fun facts” about the original trilogy, and fake voice changers advertised as Ghostface modulators. My love for Scream warrants its own separate essay.When my parents raised a horror fan, they didn’t know they were inadvertently raising a poet too. Or maybe it’s the other way around. To love horror in the distinct way that I do, you have to have an eye for poetics. As in you have to know when to see past the blue of the curtain. The Haunting of Hill House (2018) says it so perfectly: Most times, a ghost is a wish. As in when is the object of horror not just an object of horror? Is it really a paranormal force, a cult, or a killer or is it an exploration of power? Horror, excellent ones, tend to paint the story in the language of extremes and then portray the world exactly as it is in said language. Did The Shining (1980) really spend two hours and twenty six minutes exploring cabin fever or did it tell you in painful detail the patterns of abuse and destruction men have perpetrated against the land, its people, and ultimately his own family? Horror, excellent ones, creates emotional and psychological depth. It renders the story no choice but to explore a character as fully as possible because the stakes of the narrative depend on it completely. In so many horror films, absolutely fucking nothing happens but a person completely losing their shit: the aforementioned The Shining, We’re All Going to the World's Fair (2021), The Blair Witch Project (1999), It Follows (2014), Unsane (2018), Incident in a Ghostland (2018), The Night House (2020), Gerald’s Game (2017), Possession (1981).Name another genre that can maximize exploring the gritty and the ugly and the disgusting and the unpleasant better than horror! Upon what other stage can we witness the depth of the human spirit? Horror is home to allegories and metaphors. Where else can we play with the darkness in us like dolls: now my sadness will transform into a huge winged thing and eat an entire village! Now my strength will feed on my tormentors, and my lust will grow spider legs, and crawl into the object of my desire. I am my teeth and my teeth are me. Horror is a matter of extremes! There is no such thing as a little fear in horror, we allow what could potentially devour us to be as large as life and this way we can play with it. This is inherent to us, after all. Why else would every culture have some form of ghoul? Some hideous, fanged thing that preys on children, on the weak and desperate.Not to mention the inherent queerness of horror; the way it was born out of the rhetoric of the queer body being monstrous and undesirable. If being a monster is being the “other,” being so horrific and atypical that you are shunned into the shadows, isolated without a friend in the world, then it is by definition a symbol for the voiceless. Horror has always belonged to the marginalized. For a long time, queer narratives needed to be masked in order to be told. We had to speak to each other in coded language to protect ourselves. It’s for a reason queer people bask in horror.The shocker is when you find out it’s never about the monster. It’s as inconsequential as the blood is. The Lost Boys (1987) is not really about vampires; it’s about youth being wasted on the young. Funny Games (1997) is not really about a family being tormented; it’s about you. Why are you watching this family suffer when you don’t have to? Carrie (1976) is not really about revenge; it’s about all the world making a curse out of girlhood, even other girls. The horror is in the fact that you do have darkness in you. You are haunted by something unkillable. The world is indeed plagued by something that’ll eat and eat and eat until all is ruin. The shocker is in how much you can survive without breaking. The final girl doesn’t stop fighting after the man with the knife is dead. The werewolf never lives past the full moon because she’s not allowed to be that powerful; that her delicate hands are no place for claws. The ghost has always been the grief you refuse to face, and it only grows larger in the dark. It’s all poetics; these films are mirrors. We all see a different foe out of them. Horror is a playground for the dark, something that’s inevitably part of our DNA. Even the kindest of hearts have the capacity to destroy when the right buttons are pushed. The true horror is in knowing that there is nothing more human than monstrosity. The darkness in all of us is primal. So is our survival. So is our willingness to help. So is our capacity to heal.The beauty of horror is that it promises an ending. This is why too-long franchises never work out. This is why horror series are always anthologies. Horror does not work in the long form because it demands a severance. The killers must die. Vengeance will be had. The house must burn. Or the devil must have his way. The hero must fail, one way or another. The story will find death, eventually. It always does. Isn’t that such a lovely message? The carnage, the suffering, and the pain will end. It has to. How else can something be so beautiful?With you from the void,Theo




Bonus: have a fun movie night on me. Tell me how it goes.

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