Do people today want chilling and thrilling story-lines?
If Emma Sinclaire was a real person...And yes Emma is modeled after Bridget Fonda's character in A Single White Female. Every time I see her in this film, I think of my character. She's perfect. If I were ever going to do any directing myself based on the characters from my own work. She would be my first pick to portray Emma. The only problem I have though....Well I am several years too late....Bridget is in her 40s or 50s now. So she wouldn't be able to portray a younger Emma. Although I'm sure there are some women I could find that have the look. But I'm not a movie director.
Today we're going to explore Thrillers but I'll be using some horror content too. This blog relates to a theme that influences my own artwork. Sometimes I talk a lot about the dark arts a genre of art I invented myself aimed at adults. I have had the conversation with others who have never really thought about it much. And I talked about Thriller movies and psychological films from the past that gave me good ideas for creating fictional Thrillers. What does the Dark Arts mean exactly? The Dark Arts is mostly steep in mystery, think about the most strangest thriller or psychological film or book you have ever read or watched. You loved it so much you repeated re-watching and reading it didn't you?
What was the best moment in that story? When I use the term "Dark Arts" I'm not referring to anything demonic, Satanic like. No, I'm referring to anything that's associated with Thriller and Horror themes. But that term doesn't reflect my action thriller series, Raizen Fury. I only use the term to compliment the art I create for Shadow Hill And Yurei Yokai including any non-story driven scenes I might come up with not related to any particular series.
I find a lot of inspirations from films, art, and media dating all the way back to the Renaissance, Victorian era. Then there is the 70s, 80s, and 90s that gave me the encouragement I needed to invest in three of the greatest decades of all time. Sometimes I feel as though people who write novels or produce movies have a lot more freedom to explore specific ideas and concepts than me...Maybe it's because I create from a visual stand point and I have a tendency to want to take things "too far."
Every day we get closer and closer to living in a society that does not acknowledge freedom at all. Where would I be today if the brilliant minds of all those creative artist and film makers never existed or were allowed to create? I would probably be someplace lost. That doesn't mean I wouldn't be able to come up with anything. It's just that certain timelines give me the extra boost I need to feel that it's even worth it to continue going on. When I day dream about the 90s era I get a boost of joyfulness from it. A man with my poor mental health condition desperately needs this...Any moment to experience a small ounce of happiness is worth it....I do have a history of suicidal attempts.
Emma and her family terrorized by Sadako, Kayako, and Kuschisake. Yurei Yokai is a cross between thriller and horror.
Difficult subject matters are often explored a lot in thrillers and horror story-lines throughout cinema, and novels written by serious individuals that understand how to draw us into their complex world on a psychological level. The type of freedom novelist such as Stephen King have is how good stories are made. But I'm not a fan of his work, the only story of his I liked was the movie titled Misery and I enjoyed the graphic novel series The Stand.
As a kid growing up I was a major RL Stine fan and Fear Street was my go to source for murder mystery stories. As a matter of fact I started out with RL Stine as far as thriller stories go, the fear street series introduced me to the very beginnings. RL Stine was pretty much the Stephan King for teenagers. His Fear Street books were much better than the Goosebump ones which were intended for a much younger audience than the Fear Street series. Fear Street stories explored murder, jealousy, revenge, death, and so on. The stories were still quite tame though, they never included sexual violence in them and the murder aspects weren't so detailed that it shocked you the way death moments in adult murder stories were written.
I still read them even today at least the 80s and 90s books. Netflix came out with that disgraceful TV series and it was total garbage but RL Stine praised it anyway just to save face. I don't even want to know how he approaches his new 21st century material today since we live in an era of self defeat and guilt. Which I find painfully sad. I'm sure if RL Stine was still making Fear Street novels, he would get it in his head to criticize his old work from the 90s "Gee why did all my books in the 90s have only white teenagers on the covers? How racist of me!" I wish this kind of negative tiresome as hell way of thinking would die already...But it's not entirely their fault....I know who's fault it is for why so many think this way but I won't get into it.
When I look for any inspiration for how I decide to explore Dark material there is a lot to discover from the past to help me on this journey to bringing the best story driven content to my audience both new and old. There are a number of dark stories about abductions and kidnappings that often catch my attention but I have no interest in themes that do this for cheap revenge reasons. Although they are always told from the same perspective and I find them usually boring at times...
You know movies like Taken and the recent one I heard about called The Sound of Freedom which explores human/Child trafficking which I have no interest in at all because I feel these kinds of films just like to prey on people's emotions. The world is pretty much aware of these things in real life but I feel that movies only exploit them to make people upset and angry while pretending to expose the people behind these things. There is only one story I liked that had the kidnapping theme, the movie MISERY starring Kathy Bates.
It's just that stories like this can either be entertaining or boring depending on how they are told. There's a lot going on in the real world today that make the real world a very dull, uninteresting, and a dangerous place. So I use my art to tune out the real world even though I don't entirely try to ignore reality since I have to still live in the real world.
There are a lot of things going on today that effect me and my mental health to the point where it can't be ignored. I indulge in dark fiction so much because it's the only way I get to enjoy a lot of the things I want to do with my wild imagination. My imagination has no limitations on where it can go and because of that
I am able to create these ideas that no one else can even dream of! I even started working on producing J-Horror like content with a series called Yurei Yokai formally known as Ghost Runner. The reason I changed the name is because Microsoft stole the name and gave it to a video game they were making.I could have disputed it but just didn't care enough to.
Anyway when I'm free to entertain the audience and create stories that aren't infringed upon by policies that violate my freedom of expression rights to completely go all out to produce whatever I want. Well then I can come up with the best damn story-lines ever told through fiction. I think people today want chilling story-lines but at the same time trendy mainstream ideas is what often spawn a lot of the same tiring ass junk. It's also one of the major reasons why I kept thinking about retiring and just working on normal stories if the pornographic market is just going to be limited to what's popular.What I want is to create is edge of your seat material, if my ideas aren't popular enough that's perfectly fine with me. I honestly get a lot out of being a niche artist, it means my content remains original vs everyone following the worse kind of trends.
There are a number of artist on Pixiv I usually run into that try to impress me with their creepy ideas and to some extent we share some similarities to each other. These sort of artist are often overshadowed by the popularity of other artist. Some of these artist don't even produce or create explicit content at all, but even if they don't I still find them fascinating enough to follow them around to see what else they come up with.
One artist in particular that comes to mind that I've been wanting to get a hold of I believe he is Japanese or just creates a lot of disturbing Japanese-esque school girl horror content, he goes by the name Fracoco. It's even better that he isn't cheating with AI which would allow AI to create the ideas for him. But these wonderful images he created on Pixiv are his own ideas, not the computer AI generating them out of a bunch of photos that belong to other artist that it's stealing from.
Fracoco come up with some of the most brilliant ideas I've seen so far on Pixiv but he's not the only one. And even though his art barely gets much attention that doesn't discredit how unique his mind really is at conjuring up impressive ideas. Generally it's the artist that don't do any kind of explicit content that have the best content compared those who do.
Because of that I have a great deal of respect for artist that can come up with psychological concepts that are new to me, ideas I've not seen before. It's because of this I have this consistent desire to search for artist I can strongly relate to vs all the artist who are dead from the Victorian and Renaissance age. If I can reach out to them in hopes that I get to talk about the type of artwork they've created usually we form a long term relationship where we talk about these things. Fracoco have ideas that would make fantastic psychological thriller stories in written context.
It was such a dark movie based on a book written by author Laird Koenig. Like a lot of these films that started out as novels first I had some issues with it. Mainly the protagonist and how she handled certain situations. I couldn't tell if she was intended to be an evil character or not. Although the character Rynn somewhat reminds me of my Gretchen Wolf character in looks.
But Gretchen wouldn't watch a man die in front of her and is likely to tell him that the cup he switched was poisonous even if he blackmailed her with sexual favors. Anyway the movie is considered a horror movie but it's not a horror movie.
It's a mediocre psychological thriller film with
some horror inspired elements but not a full blown horror movie.
Aside from a few death scenes, and the character Rynn watching a man that blackmails her for sexual favors die in front of her with a evil merciless stare in her eyes when he starts blacking out after drinking from the wrong cup. It's not all that intense, just boring.
I still felt that Stephen King's Misery was a much better psychological story than The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane which I thought was kind of dull for a 1970s film with potential about a young girl living by herself at the age of 13 in a strange town that almost looked deserted. It's like Silent Hill but without the monsters, but I hated the Silent Hill movies also. I seen the film Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane once and was curious about buying and reading the book.
Stories like Little Girl Down The Lane are just too predictable..First these films always rely on the same stupid overdone trope where some adult male makes a pass at an underage girl. 80 percent of the time when a movie does this, they'll try to make it a father and daughter relationship just to shock the audience. But in actuality it's a very weak plot device.
The only movie that didn't do this came out in 2003 called THIRTEEN. Instead of going for the predictable "they are all innocent because of their young age" route they depicted the girls as manipulative assholes who were always up to no good. The movie had some very rough scenes and controversy themes that got criticized which is not surprising. I remember back in 2003 when I first saw the trailer, I was actually puzzled by it thinking "what is this suppose to be about? A bunch of shitty teenage girls?" The trailer was quick, but it was showing all the controversial parts to convince you to watch it "Look how adult acting these girls are!"
I was 14-15 years old myself at the time when that movie came out. But it wasn't a thriller film, it was a drama about reckless teenage girls living life in the fast lane. I think the movie was competing up against the thriller movie titled Monster at the time and was getting it's ass kicked at the box office by it brutally hard. So cinema had these two dark and gritty films going head to head, one a Drama the other a mixture of both Drama/Thriller.
Monster was about a real life mentally ill female serial killer that murdered 8 of her jons although the real story of Aileen Wuornos is extremely sad and painful as hell. Never in my life have I read about such an extremely broken person before....You can already bet which movie won the battle....And It wasn't the movie Thirteen. Although I never saw either film from start to finish, only bits, trailers, etc they didn't look like films I'd find appealing enough to want to sit through entirely and watch. I've seen a lot of drama movies, and a lot of thrillers. But nothing in the 2000s was able to compete with thrillers of the 90s and 80s.
Thrillers and Dramas enjoy controversial moments..There are a lot of cult classic thriller and even horror films with controversial scenes and moments. The Bad Seed (Spanking scene), Mother Dearest (Clothes hanger beating scene), Orphan (Seduction Scene) IT (Orgy scene), Private Lessons (Maid seduces boy).
All of these films have their moments of challenging comfort zones. I honestly feel that sensitive people should stay away from them, but the other problem are also annoying Christian groups that are often on a mission to get rid of everything they condemn to be offensive. Overbearing Christian groups who did most of the complaining, and protesting about these scenes in movies attacked them viciously and even tried vilifying the directors. Today they currently attack ordinary artist for "offensive" material on top of harassing film makers.
Maybe it was because Nicholson looks crazier, and did that "HERE'S JHONNY!" when he stuck his face partially through the door after ripping a big hole in it...Thinking about this now, Wendy could have easily stabbed him in his face multiple times during his "HERE'S JHONNY!" Routine. Right in the eyes..
The Christian crusaders also complained about a lot of scenes in movies involving adults as well. Their constant "battle" to take out "offensive" elements in entertainment wasn't just limited to them attacking scenes where a character was under a specific age involved in scenes condemned as inappropriate. Thriller films known for being Erotic Thrillers with erotic themes were also becoming obsolete by 1998 after they were constantly attacked by religious fanatics, and the irritating MeToo types. Audiences were also losing interest as well, they had outgrown their "usefulness" to some people who found other ways to get their steamy sex scene fixes.
So many factors killed The Erotic Thriller genre that ended in the late 90s, including such films having to compete against pornography in the early 2000s and the feminist activist movements blaming heterosexual white men for objectifying women and making them "sex victims" in these movies. It got to the point where people weren't even allowed to use their imaginations anymore without being slandered or accused of doing something wrong....
After 1999 Erotic Thrillers like Basic Instinct were officially dead up until the mid 2000s when films like the movie Thursday tried to bring it back when it depicted a scene involving a woman sexually assaulting a man she attempted to seduce but then strapped him into a chair at gun point, cucking his wife...Well not exactly she placed the photo of his wife up right to make it look as if she was watching her husband being assaulted by a vicious woman.
But porn was also another key player in eradicating these Thrillers that had explicit parts because softcore sex scenes couldn't compete with real pornography. As pornography was growing in popularity, people no longer had to settle for a racy 10-20 second long softcore sex scene in an erotic thriller movie
Erotic Thriller movies depicted a lot of softcore sex and teasing moments, these films were competing against pornography that were using actual hardcore sex scenes. Even though the 90s had plenty of hardcore sex to go around, it got even harder during the early 2000s when more extreme genres got introduced. In fact extreme sex scenes didn't really exist in the 90s, it was how they say "all vanilla." Today we have stuff like scat, gore kinks, there's studios such as Horrorporn.com that do quite a lot of disturbing things but even they try to keep some of it a little toned down.
What I wanted to do with my own art is bring back the thrillers from the 70s, 80s, and the 90s so I started working on my own Thriller and Erotic Thriller stories. I complimented and gave some credit to those three eras for where my inspirations came from. I do both erotic and non erotic thrillers because I keep a portfolio with art that contains explicit content and one that does not. So if I have to ever show off my portfolio to someone important with any interest in my artwork and they just don't care for the explicit stuff. I have plenty of non-sexual content I can show them. I usually get somewhat discovered on Art Station because of this. Yes, it's good to have lots of non-sexual art images in your arsenal versus relying on pornographic content.
Claire and Irene Meet Kuchisake, Slit-Mouth Woman. The Japanese legend of the 1970s. Yurei Yokai is a Horror Thriller inspired by J-Horror movies featuring iconic characters like Sadako from the Ring, Kayako from Ju-On, and many others. Originally I wanted Claire and Irene in the image to be Japanese girls being terrorized instead of two Scottish girls.
As an artist myself I understand that there are a lot of things that can be done with chilling storylines. Many have tried and attempted with a lot of the modern media and it doesn't work very well with the shitty filming today. There was a remake of The Bad Seed, and the original 1950s one is still better. Nothing can compete with how well films use to be shot for these elements. For one thing movies back then had a certain way of filming scenes that made everything appear more authentic looking. I am always looking for a new dark and chilling tale to create a graphic novel around or something from the past to be inspired by.
Censorship however is problematic and hurts my ability to unleash my full potential. I'm not some generic artist who goes around relying on shitty trends to be relevant or famous either. I conjure up my own ideas, and I come up with things that other people just don't even think about. I have many inspirations from the renaissance era, Victorian era, movies from the 70s, 80s, and 90s including the culture of those eras. I've seen some things from media in the 40s, 50s, and 60s that spiked my interest as well.
That's why I love developing thrillers, horror, suspense, etc these genres have a whole lot to offer when you take a step back into the 1970s, 1980s, and the 1990s you realize that during that time there was so much influential material and a lot of it really inspired some of the things I come up with myself. I believe the 21st century or at least the current generation of it is just pitiful...Nothing of this era catches my attention at all. I tried to watch The Nun 2 the other day because I wasn't aware they had a sequel, and I honestly hated it compared to the first one which I felt was a bit more entertaining.
I have talked to a number of therapist and psychologist about how my art helps me deal with real world suffering, pain, emotional sickness, depression, thoughts of suicide, and just controlling whatever else dark feelings I might have. Most artist such as myself suffer from a lot of mental health problems mainly suicidal related, so our thoughts are usually darker than the average artist. This is why there shouldn't be any regulations or rules on what we create because the things we produce help combat the problems we suffer from.
Oppressing what the sufferer is trying to create only makes the situation worse. The reason some people want chilling stories is because everything else is just, boring as shit. People love suspense, they like being surprised and anticipating moments that give them plenty to think about when its over. You're going to have the sensitive crowd who will hate your stuff, complain about it, and even make stupid accusations about you as a person just because your imagination is better than theirs. The thing about me is that I don't see things the way the general public see them.
The world I build is from a very dark mind, it's dangerous but I'm not a threat to society either, just a threat to my own well being. As a result of that, I wake up everyday wondering if I should hang myself...My art is the only thing keeping me sane and alive most of the time...I've gone days without creating and it's maddening. Still, I need a bigger purpose than what I'm doing.
