#RedesSociales: Interview with Horror Losers

Interview with Horror Losers

By: Iván Farías

For the past few years there's been a name that keeps coming up among horror fans, that fans share, and that sparks discussion online and in line to get into screenings: Horror Losers. Whoever these anonymous heroes/heroines may be, they write genuinely interesting Twitter threads and smart reviews, and they bring real substance to the discussion around new releases, going well beyond facts pulled from Wikipedia.

According to your social media, you started in 2014, right in the midst of print magazines' decline. What mainly encouraged you to start these Twitter threads?

Actually, Horror Losers started around 2015, even though the account had been created a while before that. The idea was to create native content across social media—Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (also @horrorlosers)—but the truth is that Twitter's immediacy opens up a lot of possibilities for cascading storytelling. Threads are a core part of the account and you can't find them on Facebook or Instagram, which is why Twitter has become the perfect medium for combining text and graphic content that lays out our hypotheses side by side at a glance. That said, Horror Losers also covers the culture surrounding horror more broadly, from film to real-life curiosities that have something dark about them.

These days the "easter egg," the "wink" to the audience, is trendy among YouTube commentators; you, however, go further, making genuine meta-references and weaving together information from painting, film, and literature alike. How do you manage to go deeper on social media when the prevailing discourse is just "I like it" or "I don't"?

A film is ninety minutes that a group of people has thought through, steeped, and curated to put something with an intention on screen, whether aesthetic or meaningful. Whether something is liked or not doesn't cancel out the value of what can be seen and observed. Devoting yourself to unpacking the references and details within a film isn't just a hobby, it isn't a game to see who spots the most things, and it isn't a competition to find out who's more well-read. Tracing influences or homages often tells us a lot about a film and its aesthetic intentions; relating it to its past helps place it on a family tree and clarify the lines of the tradition it belongs to. Social media lets this kind of study, in small doses, spark interest in these works beyond just whether we enjoyed them. For example, Horror Losers' review of Luca Guadagnino's 'Suspiria' was pretty lukewarm, but the resulting thread ended up being one of the most rewarding for the account.

I'd like to know a bit about how you work. Do you prepare topics in advance? Is there a creative brainstorm? Do you make schedules?

It's pure momentum. If there's a topic that might spark interest because people are talking about some new release and there are connections that could build a little mini-thesis, we start developing it with the first tweet and fill it out as ideas come to us. It's all intuitive and undisciplined.

You've adapted perfectly to social media; your content wouldn't have a place in print magazines—you drop links, post gifs, recommend videos.

That's right, it's impossible to adapt it with the multimedia possibilities a social network offers. Just as our blog posts are too dense and long to work in thread format. It would go on forever.

Some people believe that if it doesn't scare you, it isn't horror. Could you give me a definition of what you call horror/terror?

Terror is a very specific reaction, an intense fear, almost a personal one, we could say. It's often confused with suspense, other times with sheer shock impact. Horror is much broader. A sense of horror might not produce much more than disgust, revulsion, dread, obsession, or simply an observation of the macabre as something beautiful. That's the hardest part to get people to understand. Horror can be beautiful; it can live in a painting with elements of darkness, tenebrism, the gothic, and the fantastic. Horror can be the inexplicable. Horror can be the senselessness of surrealism, the lack of logic in how a body's parts are arranged in a work of art. It's very broad, and often it neither scares you nor has anything to do with terror. We use the label horror cinema to define films, but nothing guarantees a film is or isn't horror just because it doesn't scare you, or has no deaths or blood. A children's Disney movie can be horror unintentionally. That's why we prefer the Anglo-Saxon term that, in Spanish, gets applied to terror—that is, horror.

How do you keep this daily work financially afloat?

By working on other things until all of this work can start generating some income. It's possible that Horror Losers will propose some kind of collaboration in order to start dedicating more time and resources to it.

Are you familiar with Mexican horror cinema? Could you tell me about a director or film you like?

Of course, in fact it's an incredibly rich filmography for the genre, with true masterpieces that deserve far more international recognition. From the tremendous 'El fantasma del convento' (1933) to 'La maldición de la llorona' (1963), there are gem after gem of classic gothic well worth revisiting. Even lesser works like 'La invasión de los vampiros' (1961) have some tremendous closing images that anticipate the zombie visual approach of 'Night of the Living Dead' (1968). As for a director, it might seem obvious, but Carlos Enrique Taboada is a true master who was ahead of even James Wan when it comes to supernatural horror.

What plans do you have for the future?

Horror Losers is going to grow. The website will probably be the first thing to appear, and from there other channels and sites will come along to pour content into and adapt it for. For now, on Instagram there's news in the form of stories, and who knows, maybe at some point there will be video reviews.

That would be all, thank you.

Thank you, and it's a pleasure.

https://horrorlosers.tumblr.com/post/187492026370/it-chapter-2-2019-review-frenes%C3%AD-macabro-de (abre en nueva pestaña)