Mindless Ones

This is the first in what will probably -HAHAHAHAHAHAHA – be a series of regular, if shortish posts about good, scary moments in superhero books.

This week:

From Dante’s Inferno and Fungus the Bogeyman to the much maligned, because capriciously fatal, Chasms of Malice the megadungeon has, for me, an eternal appeal. But because I’ve always found it such a comforting fictional environment, films like 127 Hours and Touching The Void really fuck with my head. They take the safe, endlessly sheltered, endlessly contained and controlled space and aggressively insist it’s anything but. The endless shelter, the roofing, becomes nothing but a granite sky as uncaring, if not moreso, than the one in the stock quote. Because unlike the sky above us it can cave in, trap arms, pulverise shins. Can go on forever…. until it tapers into a little hole where the star of The Descent is still trapped, alone, left to rot and go mad in the dark. Dungeons jostle about like this in all our minds, I think. Humans seek refuge. We instantly anthropomorphise enclosed spaces. Potential homes. But they may resist us. Perhaps they *are* homes – but not ours. Filled with… things.

Or perhaps they’re not homes at all.