From the Guardian this morning:
Children who have nothing to do with Bryn Estyn have also contacted [children’s commissioner for Wales, Keith] Towler wanting to speak about what had gone on there. One teenage boy told him that he had been struck by the diamond shaped windows above the front door of the home and said it appeared to him that the house was looking at him. “He said it should be knocked down. I hadn’t thought about that,” said Towler.
He hadn’t thought about it? How remiss!
But hang on a minute. What is being suggested here? That this teenager had been abused not by the staff of the Bryn Estyn children’s care home, but by the home itself – by the bricks and mortar, as it were? Has the children’s commissioner nothing better to do than indulge the morbid fantasies of some unfortunate, attention-seeking, individual?
What are things coming to? Must every sad loser like this dictate national policy? As a big-time loser myself I sympathise, but there is a limit…
In a long line of predominantly-Anglo Gothic-horror popular fiction, is a modern Anglo-pubescents’-adolescents’ favourite film ‘The Amityville Horror’ – with scary-face house frontage. The 2005 movie is a U.S.biographical horror-flick directed by Andrew Douglas, it is a remake of the 1979 film of the same name. Which itself was based on the 1977 horror-novel of the same name by Jay Anson, documenting the ‘alleged’ experiences of the Lutz family after they moved into a house on Long Island which had been the scene of mass murders committed by Ronald DeFeo, Jr. who shot six members of his family there in November 1974. Anglo Gothic-horror fiction – just more big-biz exploiting immature, irrational fears, panics and mass hysteria for mainstream greed, careers, ratings profit !
The ever scapegoat-seeking, bogey-witch hunting Anglos have to have a scary ‘other’ on which to relieve their self-loathing psyche. Established late-16th century by their archetype serial psycho-killer king Henry Tudor V111 with arrogant-bully self-justifying proclamation “Dieu Et Mon Droit”. Which then went out and abused the whole world with an empire in which the bullying, bullshit, bible and bullets never stopped . Now come home to roost, with the world wized-up, they largely have only their own people left to bullshit, bully and abuse. Though with less-Bible in a now token multi-cultural phoney-Anglophonia UK/US/CA/OZ/NZ/SA/IE.
Indeed the post-Reformation Anglos invented the Gothic-horror genre with Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’ (1764), often regarded as the first true Gothic romance. Walpole was obsessed with medieval Gothic architecture, and built his own house, Strawberry Hill, in that form, sparking a fashion for Gothic revival. Surely, the post-Norman, Gothic chapel/church/cathedral curved arch entrance/portal/vestibule, is the late-medeval male architects’ phallic-steeple/spire natural counterpart – the fascinating-feared-and-revered vagina! (Comments/corrections welcomed.)
While among the leading 19th century Anglophone masters of the Gothic fiction genre was, good-pedophile Edgar Alan Poe.