In the meantime, I went to the Secret Affair event mentioned yesterday, and...yep, I was right, parts are extremely cringeworthy.
Don't get me wrong, Gothika is one of my favorite films. Along with Session 9 and Shutter Island. Jacob's Ladder (upon which Team Silent based much of the look of the original Silent Hill games) haunts me to this day. But are these honest, open portrayals of how most mental institutions operate? Not really.
And depictions like this don't help. While there have been some really horrific abuses of the mentally ill--Willowbrook State School immediately comes to mind--by those who should have had their best interests at heart, by and large places that care for the mentally ill are at most, understaffed and run-down. These days, you won't find bloodspattered psychopaths armed with cleavers skulking the halls, eating live rats and screaming about the ticking of burning clocks.
In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in a mental hospital armed with anything more damaging than a taser. Most orderlies rely on communication skills, or just muscle and help to calm someone down, and even a childrens' ward housing only extremely violent patients would never feature one wandering the halls brandishing a knife longer than her forearm.
Sure, in abandoned institutions--some, in which, truly terrifying things took place--you will find signs of decay, broken floors, broken windows, rust and vermin. But while they were operational? No, nothing like that. And even in the abandoned ones, the only rotting corpses you'll find are homeless men who crawled in and died of an overdose, or too much time outside.
And oh, how I loathe game rips. I count three in this room alone: the patient Alice from Alice: Madness Returns (the other big Alice game rip across the grid being the Crying Alice fountain), the floating caged corpses from the first Silent Hill, and the caged, 'Flesh Lip' monsters from Silent Hill II.
So no, I'm not thrilled by something playing to the norm of 'mentally ill people are scary'. It's a trope I think has been more than played out, right up there with 'if it has brown skin it's a terrorist' and 'lesbians will bathe in your blood'. None of these things are true, they're all just lies of convenience.
(If anyone still has doubt about the link between stigma against the mentally ill and horror films, try these articles on for size:
Movies Misrepresent Mental Illness in Every Way;
Horror movies portraying the mentally ill as violent;
Horror Movies and the Exploitation of Mental Illness; and
Why the Depiction of Mental Illness in Horror Films is Damaging.)
That being said, I did track down Adam n' Eve's 'cell' and buy at least one more color to start from their shoe line.
This is the red version, which isn't specifically haunted, but I'm tucking it into the Hallows folder anyway, because they're built to last and will go with a lot of my red Hallows outfits.
And this is a look at the soles and the heels. Near as I can figure, only the white shoes have the bloody variant, which I suppose makes sense--the darker tones, like this red, wouldn't show blood, after all.
(Both of the shoe shots were taken at Carrie's, by the way, where it was much less grim.)
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