When I was becoming an adolescent, as I felt my body change and get hairier it wasn’t odd to think that I could be a werewolf or a vampire. Saturdays I stayed up late to watch the classic horror movie double features on Philadelphia’s Channel 6 with the likes of Karloff and Lugosi from the 1930s, or the end of the world atomic bomb sci-fi from the 1950s with lizards like Godzilla or the radioactive giant ants in Them—these were the monsters I knew and grew up with.
And these movies left everything to the imagination. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, for example, when the creatures he created put Charles Laughton on the operating table, we only see their hands taking up the scalpels, not the evisceration of the doctor, not even one little drop of blood.
When I saw Psycho at the age of eleven with my parents at the drive-in, the iconic stabbing in the shower that is initially frightening, turns out to be a montage of naked skin and a thrusted knife, and is very sanitary except for that little bit of blood disappearing down the drain at the end.
Janet Leigh’s demise in Psycho, upon examination, happens in our minds and is left to our imaginations. But when her daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis comes along in Halloween a decade later, we see Jamie Lee get stabbed in a closet full of hangers, and she bleeds as the blade goes in. When the slasher movies started in the 1970s, after the 1960s gave us Charlie Manson and Richard Speck, grim death became so personal that it could knock at your door and expect you in; life was horrible enough and I just didn’t want to watch.
I was happy to read Final Girl Mythos by Noah David Roberts, poetic homages to the damsels in distress in the slasher flicks, because the poet brought me back to my imagination again. You will see what I mean when you read the endings of three of the poems that follow:
There are tragedies unimaginable
that live within us and
everything is beaten to death.
Then a blade touches a bone
……….it has two options
break or be broken sometimes
……….we can do both
……….…I was in love
with a man
……….and you killed me
In the Vimeo below Noah David Roberts does an excellent job reading two of these poems. Imagine and enjoy.
Final Girl Mythos is Noah David Roberts’ fourth collection of poetry. You can check it out here:
https://www.noahdavidroberts.com/finalgirlmythos
Final Girl Mythos is published by Legitimate Business Press. You can check them out here:
https://www.facebook.com/Legitimate-Business-Press-106320265550994
I really like looking at the collages of Noah David Roberts and they were nice enough to let me include a dozen of them here.
With Love, Some Collages by Noah David Roberts
