Knight Of Beauty 🌹

Huevember 10-12: Journey

Whats funny about this is that Anon specifically said tarantulas

woukd you consider tarantulas Bugs

No, they are their own species. 

here

I am so in fucking love with the stairway to heaven animation and the only ways I can express that is to either say I am bricked the FUCK up, or I give in to the uber instincts of my uber autism and write an essay on what I THINK are some of the references/inspirations used in the animation. I chose the essay because I need people to know why I am "bricked up."

I am fully willing to accept if I am wrong/reaching for some of these but even then, I think it's cool that I can still connect certain moments with things I enjoy. With that out of the way, behold my analysis/breakdown of Stairway to Heaven!

Spoilers below the cut not just for the animation, but also minor spoilers for Kane Pixel's backrooms series, Liminal Land, Skinamarink, and Mandela Catalogue. Also just a warning for the incoherent ramblings of a guy who's abnormal about analog/indie horror. Please please please please PLEASE go watch the animation if you haven't.

First, "subject 087" is in reference to SCP-087, the never ending staircase SCP. I actually didn't even catch that the first time until I scrolled down to the comments lmao. In my defense, when SCP was blowing up in the mid 2010s I wasn't really old enough to appreciate it or find the format interesting (and honestly it is still hard for me to really get into it, but that's more of a me thing. Conceptually a clinical approach to horror like with SCPs or in All Tomorrows is fascinating, but it can be a bit of a slog for me), so I only knew the main three's numbers. (173, 096, and 682).

"Motion detected" has been used in just about every analog horror series now, but Mandela Catalogue is probably the main series that popularized the trope when analog horror first started getting popular.

The backrooms is, obviously, the backrooms. You can probably assume it's Kane Pixels' backrooms because his version really blew up but it feels more like early days backrooms before we got all those monsters and almond water stuff. (Which btw it's so funny we got "almond water" from whoever the first person to say the air smells like almonds was. For reference, almonds smell like cyanide. OP was trying to say the air smells toxic, not that almonds are the safest thing to consume in the backrooms.)

This shot just reminded me of The Oldest View, ALSO from Kane Pixels. Tbh that's probably just me but I thought it was neat.

Next up, the door. Aside from the obvious 333 angel numbers which also appear very prominently in Mandela Catalogue (this series is going to pop up a lot, I'm sorry), but for some reason it reminded me of the Silent Hill 4 door. Again, that's just the tism probably.

Skinamarink ahh shot, was honestly expecting the door to just poof, disappear.

Next, the shot with all the houses. While KP's Backrooms do have that creepy neighbourhood, this exact shot and set up feels closer to H.O.M.E. from Liminal Land.

And then our most darling biblically accurate horror icon Columbina would make False Gabriel proud, and just... she is so fucking cool and creepy in this and I love her so much.

This whole sequence was for one absolutely horrifying and beautiful, but what caught MY attention were the settings and locations shown. These are standard creepy liminal spaces and analog horror gore censorship, yes, but they also reminded me of the locations Trevor Henderson uses in his art pieces, so suffice to say I think Columbina looks RIGHT AT HOME regardless of how you wanna look at these shots. And the animation on her face opening up into wings and eyes is just an absolute chef's kiss moment. Props to the animators, man.

This trope, the whole main character monologue overlaying the screen moment, very common in analog horror but for me, again popularized by its use in the Mandela Catalogue.

The smudged picture is a reference to one of the ending shots in Skinamarink, where it pans over the childhood photos only for their heads and faces to now be missing, which most agree is the movie's way of saying these kids were trapped her for so long they eventually just stopped existing/faded into nothingness.

And finally, the classic ending scene of KP's first Backrooms video.

I know for a fact there are probably other references to liminal spaces/analog horror that I either missed or they're like general concepts/tropes used in analog horror. I did almost mention the mill in petscop because of Columbina's "two in the mill, one taken, one left" because that phrasing felt really specific, but it doesn't quite fit the vibes of all the other references. Also her only being seen in the camera is a trope used in all manner of horror media. My first thought was the forest scene in VHS (2012) where the murderer could only be seen in the film static.

I just wanted to get the especially cool/unique moments out there. I didn't even touch on the storyline but that's because it seems pretty straightforward. I'm also aware not many people are gonna read my red string corkboard ramblings, which I'm fine with. I just needed to get this out of my system, but I do appreciate those who did take the time to indulge my ramblings!

That's all for now, back to whatever the hell I had planned for today.

people are saying his accent sounds russian??? he does NOT sound russian. i can't say much on it but it's not 'stereotypical' american/canadian,, pls elaborate on the transatlantic accent?

ANON I LOVE YOU gladly!

Russian is one of many guesses I've seen. I've also seen French, German and British. The reason people can't pin point or agree on what accent he has is because it isn't an accent from any particular place. It's not even a real accent, really. It's a transatlantic accent, a learned accent taught to entertainment personalities during the 1930s and 40s which has very much died out nowadays. He sounds old fashioned, because he's definitely meant to.

It's like a mix between an American and British accent. Apparently, Directors of the past favoured this accent as it was neutral and so you could use it in films that weren't specific to one setting, but it was also seen as a more sophisticated accent overall and held high prestige and became the standard accent in American Film, Radio and TV. Frustratingly, there isn't a great deal of information on the accent, but if you've ever watched an old black and white film then you'll definitely have heard it.

Another theory is that filmmakers were trying to create a way of speaking that could be understood clearly across multiple different English speaking countries since talkies were a new form of media, hence the merging of an American and a British accent together into one. A different potential reason for it's existence and use in media is that the enunciating of vowels made the voices of entertainment personalities easier to understand over old TV, Radios and Film who didn't have entirely clear sound at the time, plus it's non geographical placement makes the accent good for characters that aren't from a specific area such as angels or the voice of God or aliens.

In a nutshell, it's an accent created for entertainment personalities and was taught in affluent schools and Hollywood Film Studios, and that's why he speaks with it, and why he sounds like he's from the 40s or 50s. He's meant to sound that way, it's a conscious choice.

characters that lose the most important person to them and are devastated by having to live in a world without them and get stuck in a futile time loop that turns them crueler and crueler and more and more fervently obsessed with the person they initially lost because they just want a world where that person is alive and are initially written off as heartless before the sickening realization that their devotion is so painfully human. you will always be dear to me.

y’all ever see a piece of fan content about your favorite character that is so horrifically different from what you personally believe and you just

the bride and the ugly ass groom

tense spiteful homoerotic parkour yaoi. Signed me