I've just finished watching Don't F*** With Cats on Netflix. It wasn't what I expected, and I think I might have hated watching it. This is not a recommendation. But I wanted to see how it ended, and as someone who's worked with both Jack the Ripper and Shakespeare I felt maybe I should keep abreast of contemporary developments in self-mythologising monstrousness. One of the problems of course is that everyone always joins in with the mythologising, and this documentary confesses to being as guilty of that as the next ghoul, but in its adoption of horror tropes it brought to my attention one I'd never considered before, even though I as a writer have also used the trope (and I can't find it on tvtropes.org either), namely that of the Scary Number.
A camera cranes in onto the "19" on the door of an apartment in Paris for example, or an internet café owner in Berlin will point to a stall and say "This is it. Number 25." The cliché is that certain numbers have a power, but they all seem to, just the fact of them - the factiness even. 10 Rillington Place. Room 237. Inside Number 9. Arithmobia is a fear not of specific numbers, but of numbers in general. And that's what I can't work out - whether the Scary Number is simply a horror trope borne of True Crime, or whether it speaks to something more primal... The Matrix.... The Prisoner... Like shadows, snakes and skeletons, have we always just, secretly, found numbers inherently evil?
Because if we have, I can see that becoming a problem.
If anything, I find 'mythologised' numbers fascinating rather than scary - something like a riddle or a cipher, with the potential to reveal some hidden truth, should you be able to crack the code/solve the underlying equation. But then again, I'm not familiar with any of the examples you mentioned above, nor am I a big fan of horror, so I may be missing the point entirely.
ReplyDelete(Speaking of the number 19, I love how it accidentally became such an iconic Cabin Pressure catchphrase among the fans, after Ipswich. Which quite possibly makes it the least scary number of all to me.)
"10 Rilington Place" is a film about a true life real actual murderer. "Room 237" is a documentary about fans noticing things in "The Shining" (in which something bad happened in Room 237). "Inside No. 9" is a winningly try-anything dark comedy anthology.
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