31 Days of Nerd Horror: Day 12
Welcome to Day 12, friends. For Day 12 of our 31 Days of Nerd Horror series, we’re diving into some pretty freaky shit. Hold onto your head- because you might lose it! We’re psyched to highlight an absolute classic: Stephen King’s novel IT and the 2017 movie adaptation directed by Andy Muschietti. In addition, we’ll touch on Sony’s Bloodborne for PlayStation 4, and the lore of Mohawk Valley’s Kanontsistontie.
IT BY STEPHEN KING (1986)
Between the late 1950’s and 1980’s in the small town of Derry, Maine, this horror novel follows the lives of seven friends and their traumatizing childhood experiences with the yellow-eyed demon, Pennywise. Known to the audience as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, this creature is a greater evil than a singular clown; this entity takes the form of whatever its victim fears most.
IT (2017)
For those of you who say the book is always better, I have a bone to pick. Whether it be a director, a particular actor, wardrobe, or set design; sometimes there’s something about a film that speaks to an audience in a way that a novel cannot. A novel opens the reader up to an endless array of possibilities, of imaginative sequences and scenarios. A film tells you exactly what to see, what to feel.
While the novel starts in the 50s and ends in the 80s, The 2017 film adaptation of IT starring Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Martell, Finn Woldhard, Sophia Lillis, and Jack Dylan Grazer starts us off in the late 1980’s and does a great job of tapping into that Gen X nostalgia. IT Chapter 2 (2019) picks up 27 years later, in the modern day. For any viewer looking for gore, nostalgia, and some serious character development- this film is for you, year-round!
BLOODBORNE (2015)
This action role-playing game is based on the literary works of H.P. Lovecraft and Bram Stoker, two of the best authors in gothic horror history. The storyline of Bloodborne follows the player’s protagonist through the Victorian-inspired city of Yharnam, where the townspeople are infected with a blood-borne disease, transforming them into unspeakably monstrous creatures.
THE FLYING HEADS (Mohawk Valley)
Like all great apocalypse movies, it starts with the undead. From the legends of the Iroquois tribes, the Kanontsistontie, or Flying Heads, are disembodied heads that fly through the air with fiery eyes and long, dread locked hair.
Flying Head by OnHolyServiceBound on DeviantArt
“The origins of Flying Heads vary greatly from story to story. In some tales, a Flying Head is created from a violent murder scene-- the severed head of a victim grows to enormous size, or the head emerges from a mass grave. In others, a human is transformed into a Flying Head after committing an act of cannibalism. In many stories, the origin of Flying Heads is not remarked on at all-- they are primordial monsters whose nature is to eat humans, but occasionally have other motivations of their own.”
Read more here: Flying Head (Whirlwinds, Big Heads) (native-languages.org)
