This is how it goes.
A camp counsellor impatiently waits for her hunk of man to return from taking a leak so they can resume their sensual picnic away from their camp duties.
The sun is setting, casting a glow across the nearby lake. A glow that reaches up out of the waters lapping the lake edges and falls across this camp counsellor’s – let’s call her Jenny – body.
Shadows stretch out from the trees above, casting Jenny and the plaid picnic blanket she lays on in darkness.
She’s undressing down into her skimpy underwear, a deep purple. Her panties hug her ass and her bra shows off her tan lines.
But she keeps undressing.
She lifts off her bra, throws it aside, reveals her freckle-kissed tits.
Giggling, she wriggles out of her panties, revealing untamed pubic hair.
This will surely be a surprise for him – let’s call him Kevin – when he gets back. This will knock his socks off.
Suddenly the masked killer appears! Jenny can’t see because she’s rolled over and sunbaking.
She only catches on when the killer grabs her roughly in a way so unlike Kevin and whirls her around so she’s on her stomach, fully exposed to this stranger.
Before this killer plunges down his weapon – let’s go with a classic and say Machete – into her chest, maybe he’ll be forceful with her – grab her tits, twist her nipples till her brain misfires over whether to choose pain or pleasure.
Eventually though, the kill will come and with it…a release.
So why does this appeal to me?
A NEW BEGINNING
When I was 12, I began to run naked.
It was innocent at first. Just me feeling the long grass whip my legs and the breeze against my body.
I don’t know where it came from, that idea, I just knew that I wanted to do it.
And the feeling was exhilarating.
This was partially, I think, due to being raised Catholic – there were rules to follow and hell to pay otherwise – and partially to just exploring a whole other side of..well, me.
In my teenage years – that’s when it got to be sexual. Or perverted. Or weird. Or all of the above?
I distinctly remember going for a run one afternoon after it rained and being charged by the bush around me – the sight of the lush bush, the smell of rain, the freedom, I collapsed to the ground and began to grind my cock into the earth. It was wild, feral, animalistic. I felt different, like I was in touch with something deep and primal – something I had never heard discussed.
My teenage years was also where I REALLY got into horror. Aliens, Predator, The Thing, Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th. I devoured anything I could find – namely American slasher films but also a lot of Asian Horror and French Body Horror as well.
Horror was always a part of me, I think. I remember being scared by Gremlins or ghosts in Ghostbusters I and II as 6 year old. There was just something about…the unknown. The things no one talked about to me as a kid – folklore and monsters and the metaphysical. Sure, being Catholic meant I knew about angels and God and satan. But that was all regulated to pretty thin, safe stories about good and evil and it didn’t feel as personal as, say, a one on one discussion.
Horror was also probably one of many elements that would factor into my anxiety disorder so there’s also that. But that’s a cliff note right now.
But an interest in the horror genre was also the effect of something else – of experiencing the darker side of life, humanity and our feelings. It was me looking at the world and fascinated by the dark and the weird and the supernatural.
I was 14 when I first saw John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). I remember a friend of mine pulled me into her room and showed me her list of horror films on VHS excitedly – and I’ll never forget my experience with it.
Where my previous experiences with a killer – Freddy Krueger or Jason – felt fantastical and sensationalised, there was a disturbing stone-cold reality to Michael Myers that chilled me to my core.
And in the opening moments of the film, when he, as a child, peeks into the bedroom of his sister and saw her sitting in front of her mirror topless, there it was: unglamorous, unsensational. Just nudity and sexuality in a horror film.
But it did something. It was disturbing, yes, but it lit up something else in my mind and touched on something psychological. Something that found this voyeuristic moment alluring and erotic and arousing. What was it about watching this naked woman? About her unsuspecting self?
Slasher films became my go-to horror film. Not only was I a film enthusiast and loved looking at effects work, I was always drawn to why they were the way they were. Even when their own filmmakers admitted to moments of nudity and sexuality as a way to sell tickets- and what sells better then the build up and release of sex and death! – I was still fascinated and confused by the reaction the films had in me – this slight arousal to the moment – the voyeurism. The chase. The climax.
I wasn’t aroused by the bloodshed and gore, you see. It wasn’t about the violence, it was about the build up – and the Predator and the prey.
PART II
With me realising I liked that part of myself came the realisation I liked dominance. I liked verbal degradation and humiliation. It came out one time during intense play with a girlfriend and we both were drawn to it. It was just a big pot of all these ingredients and I had no idea what to think about any of it.
I buried the feelings.
And long story short, it was only when I was 26 that I began to properly explore my kinky side. And with that came the realisation I was primal.
Suddenly it all made sense. Suddenly I knew why I loved being naked, why clothes felt restrictive, why I wanted to run and fuck and pump her cunt with cum in the forest – it was that term, that damn umbrella term. All these crazy feelings of lust and love and excitement and rage and sadness were me getting in touch with these primal feelings.
It was all primal. That was the attraction to the horror film. The Predator stalks the prey. There’s a thrilling chase and a struggle, there’s gratuitous nudity and things that were forbidden to me – sex and violence. It all came together.
Okay, sure, the reaction is scientific. It’s the build up of adrenaline – a totally normal physiological response in the body that people can and do experience when watching horror.
But am I wrong in feeling that it runs deeper then that? That there’s also a reason to being drawn to the stark sensuality and visceral voyeurism of the horror film? Or is it because I’m what is labelled primal that it triggers a response in me? OR does it go back to a very animalistic part of our humanity? Something that links back to our history as cavemen? Is it the mind’s way of racing to understand what’s on the screen? Kinda like how in Stephen King’s IT and how the mind perceives the entity as a giant spider because that’s the closest it can understand it?? I don’t know. I’m just a writer, don’t ask me.
All I know is that the tan lines of the victims, the exposed skin, the forbidden sex, the forbidden watchfulness of the killer – it’s all very, deeply, visceral and erotic.
THE FINAL CHAPTER…?
So is this about nature or nurture or both? Did my love for the horror genre not only develop my sexual taste but my anxiety? Is horror responsible for the anxious dominant I am today? Where does it begin?
Am I alone in that attraction – to the horror genre, to the slasher film, to the Predator and the prey hunt?
And why does feeling primal feel lonely? There are other people out there, other primal beings on their own journey. So where on this plane of existence did that come from?
This is how my mind goes.
