“I began to dread, vainly proposing to myself the dogmas of science that all life is material, and that in the system of things there is no undiscovered land, even beyond the remotest stars, where the supernatural can find a footing. Yet there struck in on this the thought that matter is as really awful and unknown as spirit, that science itself but dallies on the threshold, scarcely gaining more than a glimpse of the wonders of the inner place.”
- Arthur Machen, The Three Imposters.
The modern age has made monsters of us all. We know it, feel it in our bones, see it on the news. We live suspended in an age of the biological gothic, where our bodies and minds are failing at the same rate as our countries and planet. We can feel the end coming, and the death throes will be hideous.
That stark, horrible awareness that everything has gone terribly wrong, that the future is a nightmare we cannot wake up from, forms the backbone of acid horror. It is, put most simply, an attempt to capture the exact moment of terror when you realize that your trip has turned bad, and worse… that there is no coming back.
But what is Acid Horror? A subgenre? A mood?
Acid Horror is science-fiction horror with a focus on psychedelia and hallucinatory nightmare imagery. It includes shades of body horror and cosmic horror, along with a drop of the bizarro and the raw, character-driven emotional core common to J-horror. It is the fear that the world, its people and institutions, are melting, and no one is coming to help. If we are to survive, what must we become?
What are some examples of Acid Horror? Like many subgenres, it’s a spectrum. On the more grounded end, you get movies like The Thing, The Fly, the 70s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. On the stranger end, you get Altered States, Videodrome, Phantasm. Somewhere in the middle sit J-Horror classics like Kairo and the Ringu series.
Mankind cannot survive the world that we have made, not in our current form. We must change, we must be changed, but that change will not be pleasant. We have bought the ticket, and now we must take the ride.
Strap in, and hold on tight… but know you will not be the same on the other side.
