‘Blood is life, lackbrain. Why do you think we eat it? It's what keeps you going. Makes you warm. Makes you hard. Makes you other than dead. Course it's her blood.’

William the Bloody



Another musical entry this week, because I just can’t stay in my own wheelhouse apparently. A fitting choice however, as we’ve now moved on from bones to blood; aka that good red stuff that hearts crave.

Light Shadows’ Bloody Sticky Stuff is a synth song, very much in the vein (yes, there will be vascular puns in this. Or, you could say, there will be blood) of what we used to call darkwave and/or industrial back in my day. Basically goth meets EBM, (electronic body music) a sort of warehouse gothic with elements of dark disco. Light Shadows’ particular take on the genre (which likely has a different name nowadays) expertly threads the needle of being a stylistic throwback without ever feeling stale or gimmicky. Carrying forward the mood and vibes of goth’s heyday, as well as its clarity of purpose, while remaining contemporary in its outlook and presentation.

It’s also all about blood. Specifically, the unavoidable, ever present reality of the flesh, which underpins all human activity, even when that fact is (intentionally or unintentionally) obscured. Bloody Sticky Stuff is an acknowledgement of the beating pulse which drives us, no matter how socially, intellectually or technologically mediated out existence becomes. The telltale heart beneath the floorboards of contemporary existence.

Humans are, despite our frequent pretensions to the contrary, made of meat. And far too often, when someone goes out of their way to remind us of this, it’s in an effort to either justify, or compel us towards, ‘primal’ drives and actions which ‘polite society’ has rejected. And this is a shame, because most of this so-called primalness is in actuality just a repackaging of shitty behaviours that are entirely socially constructed, such as ‘tribalism,’ cis-masogony, white supremacism, sociopathic greed, and other such dogshit activity that we have allowed to be categorized as ‘human nature.’

A significant part of the Neoliberal agenda is to convince us that without the ‘proper’ structures of state and capital we would all be violent, destructive and ignorant. That that is in fact our essential nature, and that all of the violence and control of the dominant power structure is therefore justifiable because it holds back the tide of yet greater horrors. This is, of course, bullshit. We know, from both historical and current non-capitalist, non-hierarchical social groups that it is the very structures which promise to eliminate these qualities in people that breed them in the first place.

And it’s because of this propagandizing, this fear-mongering in regard to human nature, that blood is so vital within works of horror. Not all horror is explicitly bloody of course, but if you were to show someone a single frame of film, depicting dripping red blood, and ask them to guess what type of movie it came from, they will, without fail, guess horror every time. Blood is the genre’s (there’s no avoiding it) lifeblood; an ingrained staple of what makes it tick.

It represents, in the most visceral of ways, the rupture from established normality that the genre requires to operate. It is the reaffirmation of our humanness in the shadow of forces too vast, too powerful, and too terrifying to contend with on a human scale. It spells out for us, in sticky, oversaturated red, all of the ways that we are not safe, are not free, and are not allowed to be the version of ourselves we should be. It breaks, in other words, the illusion of reality that has been cast onto our very unreal existence. Even more powerfully, it reminds us that all we need to see past this illusion for ourselves is already inside us.

Even when works of horror are trying explicitly to reaffirm the Neoliberal lie, such as the often blood-soaked films of the late 70s and 80s that sought to breed in us a fear of sex and criminality and non-whiteness, they could not help but overreach. By showing us the absolute devastation that a single shadowy stranger, or teenage experimentation, of scrap of forbidden anti-christian thought could wreak upon ‘polite society’ and those who reside within it, they in turn are making clear just how fragile and precarious that society is. By making heroes of cops, and exorcists, and over-muscled straight men wielding weapons, they reveal that in the end they offer nothing more than further violence and control; that they are ultimately of the same stripe as that which they want us to fear.

But blood tells all. It is an unalterable metric of precisely where the boundary lies between the human and the anti-human; a line that, once crossed, spills forth the visceral, bloody truth. The spilling of blood arouses fear in us, but also the innate compassion and community that we feel for one another. It reminds us of our shared fragilities, and reveals all violence equally. Not only the violence we rightly want to run from, but also the violences we are meant to accept and be willfully blind to.

All you need to know your labour is being exploited is your own bloody palms and aching back. All you need to know that the cops are your enemy is to see the bloody head wounds of peaceful protestors on the news. All you need to know that the system is fundamentally broken is the pulse in your veins and the beating in your heart. We are, all of us, Bloody Sticky Stuff, and horror, both bad and good, reminds us of this.

So why blood? Because blood shows through; blood makes us warm, and hard, and other than dead; and because blood can only bear so much. And when that dam breaks, all that makes us ourselves, makes us human, spills out onto the floor, staining everything. A permanent reminder of what we already know deep down.

It’s got to be blood.