The Gist 26: What We Can Learn

How do we lean on experience to survive this nightmare?

The entire point of Self-Scare and, by extension, horror in general is to understand what it is that makes us who we really are. We are the result of millions of years of evolution. A self-aware species seeking ot understand not only ourselves but our universe and our place within it. That’s no small task. We have survived precisely because we have a unique gift among other species, the ability to learn and pass that knowledge down to our descendants. The list of tragedies and near catastrophes our species has faced in the process is astounding. In need of a way to distill that knowledge and maybe protect ourselves from absolute destruction, we developed a narrative system, maleable, adaptive, and powerfully effective in our narrative-focused brains, to remind us how to prevent ourselves from making the same mistake twice…or three times….or ten. Sometimes we don’t learn right away.

Fight Back (With Whatever We Have)

With that in mind, I’ve started a series of videos based on what we’ve learned in this documentary, and we will use this medium to talk about what horror teaches us. In a moment that feels more critical than ever for the future of our species, I hope this small act will somehow help us all as we find different ways to make a difference. The first video is a little rough; I’m still learning how to do this, like the rest of us, but I want to continue doing it several times a week until and hopefully long after this threat has passed and continue mining our beloved genre for the powerful, essential wisdom it carries from generation past.

Episode 1 of 3: What the Purge Teaches Us About Surviving Fascism

First Impressions

For those following along with the progress of Self-Scare and reaching its streaming home, I want to share this little glimpse of what’s coming. There is still a lot of work to be done: Logo & Title Design, Audio Clean-Up, FX, etc., but I think it really gets the mood across, and I want to share this excellent opening theme with everyone.

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any".

- Alice Walker