Moose

thinking abt horror as the aesthetic of political failure, abt the baudelaire who fought on the barricades and baudelaire the disciple of poe, transplanting the moldering aristocrats of poe onto the street and witnessing there a similarly frozen kind of object world, the arcade as gothic mansion, a way to acknowledge the results of that earlier failure while also keeping at arms length the possibility of re-fighting it, a possibility which must have felt curdled and strange, like the memory of a dream. and abt all those little horror games about working the night shift at a supermarket, at a gas station, a video store, about being alone in the mall after dark. the first five nights at freddys game was 2014 but i remember it being more like 2020 when all those lowpoly workplace horror games really solidified into a form, busy hunting for ever more variants of dead location and empty tasks to replicate.. truly never before have there been so many games about making coffee or working a cash register. the aristocrat trappings of the decadent movement worn away but still flaneurs in a way, wandering around a vast and crumbling museum, digging through back rooms and forgotten videogames and children's shows in hope or fear of stumbling on something with enough charge to illuminate again the grimacing face of history.. (the aristocrats voice) walking simulators!!