NAME

y2mate.com - What horror monsters can tell us about ourselves Louise Zhang
TEDxYouthSydney.mp3

DATE
March 13, 2021

DURATION
13m 15s

START OF TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:03]
Oh.

[00:00:21]
The blood. Alien. Dracula, Annabel. I love horror, and it's not just me.

[00:00:33]
I know a good number of you here today love horror to. But what is it that we love about horror? Is it the monsters? Is it the scars? Is it
because it's slimy and sometimes you're just watching it and you're like, what the hell is going on here?

[00:00:52]
Well, yeah, it's all those things and that's what makes her so great. You see, horror is this ambiguous and slippery thing. And it's
monsters manifest anxieties we have in our world.

[00:01:09]
I believe that if we can better understand a culture's monsters, we can better understand a culture's anxieties. And as an artist, rather
than be conflicted by this, I think we should embrace it and see what we can create from it.

[00:01:30]
And why should we embrace this? Well, let me start by telling you a few things about myself. So I'm a third culture, kids.

[00:01:41]
A third culture kid is someone who has, for the most part of their life, growing up in a culture other than their parents, and as a result
of their upbringing, you develop a culture of your own, a third culture.

[00:01:57]
Mine was a confusing blend of being Chinese, Australian of religion, desire, fantasy and anxiety. Sir, when I was about 20, I was
diagnosed with social anxiety as well as my upbringing. Because, you know, when you're growing up in a different culture than the
one that you look like you're supposed to fit into, it kind of makes it quite difficult to figure out where you belong. And so when I had
my social anxiety as a result, it made things like going on the bus, going to university, things like this talk really, really, really difficult
to manage. So a great theorist once said that we can read cultures by the monsters they engender. You see things that we fear. Our
desires, our anxieties and fantasies, these things all give life to the monster.

[00:03:02]
And for me, exploring the idea of the monster and the monstrous has come way for me to exercise my anxieties through art. I come
from a personal place and horror was my safe space.

[00:03:20]
Coming from a conservative and religious background, my interest in Hara was seen as more harmful than helpful, but that sort of
negative response to something I really, really enjoyed. Naturally, we may be more curious. It was a way for me to rebel against the
image I was supposed to live. So social anxiety controlled my life and I spent a lot of time afraid to leave the house, so I just spent a
lot of time at home. And when you're spending time at home, what do you do? You're on your laptop. Sorry I spent so much time
watching horror films secretly. And I found that I actually sympathize to empathize more with Western horror than I do with Eastern
horror, because those narratives, those images. They did actually scare me. It was more comfortable for me to see a white person on
the screen than the Chinese looking person because that was the last thing I wanted to be confronted with, with being Chinese.

[00:04:37]
So why do we watch horror?

[00:04:40]
For me. I like being disgusted for me, has allowed me to be curious, to check out disgusting and fantastical things without actually
getting a lawyer for myself, think about like people popping videos and things like that. You know, I'm talking about. Right. Sahara
holds its allure. That makes us want to turn our heads away. But in that act of turning our heads away, we want to see more horror
monsters in particular are not only designed to be threatening, but threatening based on the current fears we hold. So let's take a
Nightmare on Elm Street, for example. Writer director Wes Craven was inspired by a series of news articles he read in the 80s about
a group of Southeast Asian refugees who mysteriously died in their sleep. As a result, many people refused to sleep. And Craven
took that and translated that fear into something uncontrollable. Nightmares were seen as killers and Freddy Krueger was born.

[00:05:54]
If we put ourselves in the shoes of those people at the time, the anxiety to sleep is very real. What happens if we fall asleep? It's the
fear of the unknown that drives the anxiety and horror.

[00:06:12]
80s classic The Blob was also apparently inspired by a news report from the 50s about a sergeant and a patrolman who stumbled
across a mysterious slime, sir, when they touched the slime, because literally you attach the mysterious slime, it began dissolving.
And by the time the FBI came, the slime had fully dissolved and all was left was a stain on the ground. That report then led to theories
of dissolving flying saucers, then aliens and of course, invasions, but that group. We now know that that group was most likely a slime
mold called Star Jelly, a natural phenomenon that still surprises people today. See, that anxiety felt in the 50s, a time where sci fi and
horror translated the threat of Cold War invasions and the end of the American way of life into flying saucers and invasions can be
explained by logic now. But back then, it was a very real anxiety.

[00:07:31]
Sea monsters like Dracula, The Walking Dead, The Blob embody anxiety so well because they are complicated. They contradict
what we know of species.

[00:07:47]
They are either dead or alive hybrids or just completely impossible to categorize. I find the most complex and exciting monster to be
the type of monster that flies through our fingers when we think we finally caught it, the blob monster type.

[00:08:09]
So slime becomes a symbolic of an ungraspable, ambiguous, slippery hard in my work.

[00:08:19]
It changes shape, it's slippery and messy and multilayered.

[00:08:26]
Third culture, I would argue, instills anxiety because in and of itself, it disrupts what's complete and pure, because it can be so many
things at once. But if we think about it, slime is also super sexy.

[00:08:47]
It's shiny, it's sticky, it's seductive, and it's not necessarily threatening in itself.

[00:08:57]
You know, things like ice cream and honey and chocolate, all can be described as slimy but aren't threatening.

[00:09:07]
I mean, they're quite attractive.

[00:09:11]
So if we mess it up a bit and combine it with the threatening slime, with the attractive slime, we are confronted with the complexity
that pushes the threatening into the alluring and the alluring into the threatening. I think this is my way of dealing or accepting anxiety
in my work to get that tube of chocolate strawberry topping and smother the whole thing with it. To bring symbolism from my culture
and distort it with the hope of understanding it by confronting it. Here I've used the peach, which is a popular symbol of love and life in
my culture, it's an optimistic symbol, but I've manipulated it to become a bit more squirmy by covering in a texture that looks like it's
oozing blue saliva out of its paws. I want my work to party in the center of the threatening and the attractive.

[00:10:20]
So to embrace that complexity and translate anxiety as my normal.

[00:10:29]
And although we can represent the monster, their film, literature and art, it never actually resolves the anxiety.

[00:10:38]
Sure, the monster can be defeated, but he often returns, whether it's escaped or smuggled as the undead or a sequel, it's able to shift
just as our social, psychological and environmental anxieties do.

[00:10:58]
Just like my anxieties do as a third culture kid. I just never fully reconciled, the result is we are left to embrace anxiety. So what can
we do with this? We can appreciate it and create something productive in that difference.
[00:11:21]
In the case of the fly, Jeff Goldblum character, Seth Brundle, he goes to this crazy transformation, he essentially goes through like
adult puberty from human to human fly. He starts losing limbs. He starts mutating. He loses genitalia, but he doesn't freak out. He
instead embraces that difference and turns it into a productive difference. He Lesseps himself with a new name, Rundell Fly. He
turns his bathroom cabinet into a museum of his own bodily transformations. He checks himself out in the mirror with exciting new
possibilities. With my work, the intention is to use the threatening and attractive sides of slime to reveal the darker sides of culture so
that we can rethink how we read culture and comfort by taking what is traditionally defined as cute, seductive and it into something
alien. Then kind of and then a little taste of our. The result will be something that sits in the position of Brundle Fly, where kind of just
hangs out in the middle of what's attractive and what we find repulsive. See horror monsters draw from the opportunities. Ambiguity
contains any sense of being uneasy about the unknown, the uncontrollable. Let's explore what we can create with the.

[00:13:00]
That was it. Thank you.

[00:13:09]
Oh.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

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