The Weird and the Eerie

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It makes sense of these quieter emotional ranges of creeping dread or inevitable doom which Gothic criticism, screaming about body horror and torture porn, has largely failed to address.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Mark Fisher is/was/will long be loved, missed and appreciated as a first genius of the 21st century. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. As Fisher puts it “The unity and transparency which we ordinarily ascribe to our minds are illusory. The "time-shifts" that enable all this, it's hinted, originate in the traveler's present (the year 2020, which was Aldiss's future as the book was published in 1973), but near the end of the book, having followed the Creature into the far North (as Victor Frankenstein did in Shelley's novel), he encounters a setting that seems to negate a difference between past and future and that suggests the questions of "agency" and emptiness/presence that Fisher sees as intrinsic to "the eerie.lucid and revelatory, taking literature, music and cinema we're familiar with and effortlessly disclosing its inner secrets. Gothic criticism, of which there is a vast boiling vat these days, has been rendering down the ectoplasmic energy of “spectrality” into sound bites for 25 years, while critics seem to arrive pre-loaded with cookie-cutter cribs from Freud’s “The Uncanny,” in which they laboriously explain yet again that the term unheimlich means rather more literally the unhomely in German, but that the “homely” is housed inside the “unhomely,” the outside in the inside, the strange in the familiar. He takes the eerie from lazy, everyday usage and gives it conceptual rigor: places are eerie; empty landscapes are eerie; abandoned structures and ruins are eerie. Something moves in these apparently empty or vacated sites that exists independently of the human subject, an agency that is cloaked or obscure. This kind of symptomatic cultural criticism can sometimes feel instrumental — how many times have you heard a version of the complaint that Žižek is simply incapable of grasping the basic syntax of a film, mangling it to rip out its political organs?

Both have often been associated with horror, yet this emphasis overlooks the aching fascination that such texts can exercise. What they both have in common is they’ve been associated as sub-genres of horror, both are preoccupied with the strange, unsettling, as something being wrong.Lovecraft’s fictions, at their evocative best, are about a steady dethronement of anthropocentric models. The ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’ are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties.