Blue Light of the Screen Quotes

“I have learned to see myself as both a haunted house (a site) and as a vengeful ghost (an agent), but neither image is precisely right and now I am in metaphor again.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“If depression has a feature that redeems it, it’s that it can sensitize a person to the sorrows of the world. The suffering self, while trapped in its own prison, feels at the same time more porous and connected to the sufferings of others — though never to their joys. Boundaries blur at axes of pain. The image of oneself as a vital, intact object is replaced by something spectral and transpersonal. In the worst time of my sadness, I remember saying to my therapist: “I feel like I don’t have any skin.” The living human is a spirit too.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“we never know what kind of fire someone has at their back that makes them jump.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“Lilacs, frost, and orange blossom perfume. A white lace veil to trail her.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“To say that despair is from the devil lets us draw nearer to the lived experience of depression; to approach an irrational state through the mode of images rather than the distancing language of clinicians. This is one power metaphor confers: we meet a feeling on its terms.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“When suffering is moralized, whether for the poor souls in purgatory, one’s own self-growth, or the plot of a melodrama, it is also necessarily idealized.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“If depression has a feature that redeems it, it’s that it can sensitize a person to the sorrows of the world. The suffering self, while trapped in its own prison, feels at the same time more porous and connected to the sufferings of others — though never to their joys. Boundaries blur at axes of pain. The image of oneself as a vital, intact object is replaced by something spectral and transpersonal. In the worst time of my sadness, I remember saying to my therapist: “I feel like I don’t have any skin.” The living human is a spirit too. * Or am I simply describing the more mundane feeling that everything makes me want to cry?”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“I will state it plainly: one trick for getting pleasure out of horror is to feel afraid of something worse.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“when a psychic medium relays a message from a ghost, she does this not by talking to the dead, but by reading the mind of her bereaved client. Gleaming hair, refrain from gleaming. How sad this circuit of the living is to me.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“I make a series of sigils — charged magical glyphs — which are said to work through the power of your unconscious mind, like positive thinking or self-hypnosis. To make a sigil, you simply write down a statement of desire as if it has already occurred, then cross out all vowels and repeating letters. With the letters that remain, you create a design meant to estrange the writing from itself and cause you to forget what your desire was.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“When I was young, I’d sometimes stay up until dawn because I found the exhaustion to be like a mild narcotic: numbing my emotions, blurring what was tedious or painful. This method worked until it made me worse.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“You could argue that Catholicism, with its saints’ relics, prayers to the deceased, and eucharistic sacrifice, is a religion built on necromantic principles.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“It seems The Wolf-Man lived to ninety-two not because Freud’s “talking cure” solved the riddle of his sadness, but because so many years of such precise attention felt like care to him.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“and the boredom of his work in an insurance company. It seems The Wolf-Man lived to ninety-two not because Freud’s “talking cure” solved the riddle of his sadness, but because so many years of such precise attention felt like care to him.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“What I like about The Wolf-Man is that his problems can’t be solved; a person’s life exceeds the neat arrangement of a detective story. A mental image from a dream or memory does not lead to a corresponding fact, but only the creation of more images. The human mind is not a perfect index of observable reality. We are not machines made for recording and storage. Thus begins our fascination with photography and film…”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“We do not see ghosts. Rather, our senses of vision and perception are brought to a crisis by them.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“what if reinforcing one’s own genre — aestheticizing one’s own psychic pain — is dangerous. An error in the brain. Compulsive repetition born of trauma. A narcissism, certainly. And what if all the fictions we consume slowly determine who we are. If sunlight blackens the rosary string. If I don’t know which genre happened first.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“What if a person has a genre. If a personality can be structured around a genre’s tensions, themes, and tropes. All the streaming genres: Romantic Drama, Tearjerker, Crime Thriller, Dark Comedy, Supernatural Horror. And if that person reinforces their own genre by consuming only fictions that confirm it. And if that person seeks those fictions before realizing the genre that they are.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“We call spirits “apparitions” because they sometimes do appear. This means when we can’t see them, they must persist somewhere beyond our frame of sight.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“The digital image is not a physical trace: it’s a conversion of light into data. Unlike a polaroid or carte de visite, a digital photograph can never be an object in and of itself. It dwells inside the screen, only appearing when that screen is “on.” While it seems static to our eyes, it hovers in a state of constant scanning in order to remain perceivable. Within the screen, a boundless, deathless ever-present. But the light is real.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“Flickering between presence and absence, able to cross boundaries of space and time, this media is ontologically ghostly. It is as incorporeal as thought.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“Perhaps more than any other genre, horror gives its fans the gratifying daze of repetition. A ghost always begins by coming back against the calendar. Horror’s conventions are so ingrained that these films can speak in sketches — a narrative shorthand — where characters are types with familiar patterns of motivation, backstory, and behavior. This has been a major reason people criticize the genre, but I find the predictability of horror comforting. Each night at 3 am, I hear her weep outside my door. At home in the returning of a trope.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“It’s sad. The ghosts are sad. The ghost story: a genre about sadness. Horror: a genre about pain and fear of pain. Like melodrama, horror is a realm of excess weeping. Pain becomes a landscape.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“I’m a child at a charismatic healing mass where you are expected to drop back, filled with the Holy Spirit, when the priest touches your head with oil. I desperately want to fall when it’s my turn, but don’t. It isn’t right to fake it.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“If this is a memoir, it’s a memoir of a mood. If this is a story, it’s a ghost story.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“We feel afraid of the impossible in horror because we hold some flicker of belief in it. In a strangely backwards idiom, we say that this requires our “suspension of disbelief,” where doubt is a body that hovers or is hung and faith falls down to earth. It is fear’s twin.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God