C1: Halloween Special – Spoopy Season
- What are the similarities and differences between
these two images?
- Which of these images do you find the spookiest?
Listening (Part 2) VIDEO – The Messed Up Origins™ of Jack-o’-Lanterns
Listening Exercise
https://www.topworksheets.com/t/u97yPJvfwYK
Reading and Use of English (Part 7)
Read the
text and choose the correct paragraph from [A]-[G] to fill in the gaps [1]-[6].
There is one extra paragraph, which you do not need to use.
ADAPTED FROM
CULTURE DESK – San Francisco Chronicle
What is
spoopy? Your guide to the Internet’s favorite Halloween aesthetic
For the past
few years, October has not only heralded the return of Halloween
and pumpkin spice lattes, it has also marked the dawning of spoopy season.
For a small group of people who belong in the center of a Venn diagram of
mellowed-out goths and the “extremely online,” the spoopy aesthetic has become
a source of joy and comfort in turbulent times.
[1]
“Spookiness is
campy, but spoopiness is campy in a very specific way,” says John Paul Brammer,
a New York City writer and advice columnist whose popular memes about the
demonic goat from the movie “The Witch” are more of the former. “Spoopy’s whole
thing is that it is not frightening. It’s not threatening, not arcane, but uses
the trappings of the threatening and the arcane to make the joke: OoOoOooOo!!!
SpoooOOoooOOooky!!”
[2]
Its origin is
much more straightforward than its meaning. In 2009, the word was spotted on
a skeleton-theme sign displayed at a Ross Dress For Less store.
Though its ascent took some time, the term gained popularity on niche social
media communities like Tumblr until it finally reached escape velocity to
spread even further.
[3]____
Though it might
seem random, the delight of this sort of banal creepiness stems from the desire
to look an object of fear in the eye — and laugh.
[4]____
In political
discourse, Prevas points to anti-transgender activists using the image of
Frankenstein’s monster to demonize transgender people. Historically, monsters
have often stood in for types of people who were undesirable: racial
minorities, immigrants, queer people, anyone outside the “normal.” “I love
the unsettling part of (spoopiness),” Prevas says, “that
disconnect between seeing the creatures which we expect to see in a horror
scenario in a perfectly quotidian scene.”
[5]____
I don’t think
it’s a coincidence that it resonates so well right now, at a time when
marginalized people’s status feels extremely fraught and political rhetoric
insists on estranging us from polite society. This aesthetic defies the
imperative to be afraid: Instead, we embrace the monsters as part of
ourselves, as neighbours. To let the monster out is, in a sense, letting
oneself out.
[6]_____
When we look at
the skeleton riding a bike, it almost feels aspirational: This is what life
could look like if our cloistered selves were set free. As it turns out,
spoopiness might be just what we need right now.
[A] Because I’m
a restaurant critic, my gauge of whether or not something has
hit the mainstream is “The Great British Bake-Off.” In the 10th season,
currently airing on the British Channel 4 and Netflix, Spanish contestant
Helena Garcia has emerged as a fan favourite thanks to her memorably
macabre but cute creations like a chocolate orange tarantula flanked by
macadamia nut spider eggs, eldritch horror pies and bloody green “witch finger”
biscuits.
[B] What is
“spoopy”? It’s the coupling of wildly absurdist humour with terror — an
aesthetic unto itself that, like camp, can be hard to articulate.
[C] Spoopy is a
reclamation and reframing of these monsters, a mind-set that boasts, “You say I
should be scared of this? Hilarious!”
[D] In fables
and literary fiction, monsters are the embodiments of
everything that society represses: a “warning system” of sorts, says Christine
Prevas, a Columbia University Ph.D. candidate whose research focuses on
applying queer theory to contemporary horror. The monster is a taboo made
flesh: A prepubescent girl turned foul-mouthed, vomiting demon in “The
Exorcist”; a bad sexual encounter run amok in “It Follows.”
[E] When I look
at this stuff, it reminds me of how I like to “watch” horror movies by reading
their plot summaries on Wikipedia: a digital version of peeking at Medusa’s
face by holding up a mirror.
[F] This
disruption of the narrative of otherness mirrors the way
people actually want to be seen. For instance, queer people can be queer
outside of designated contexts like gay bars and the privacy of one’s bedroom,
Prevas says. “We’re also queer in the grocery store. We’re also queer on a
bicycle.”
[G] Much easier
than defining it is sorting through what is and isn’t spoopy. As a start, think
of it as friendly and somewhat sarcastic horror: A skeleton
isn’t, but a skeleton riding a bike? Definitely spoopy. The
Babadook isn’t, but the memes that claim that the monster is a proud
gay man? Super spoopy.
Reading Worksheet:
https://www.topworksheets.com/t/AYdXzekb7AX
Vocabulary Exercises
Collaborative Vocabulary Exercise:
https://wordwall.net/es/resource/81020759
Individual Vocabulary Exercise:
https://www.topworksheets.com/t/tTZp3Pvt-_c
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