Sicko Canon

Not for the faint of heart, but definitely those sick of soul

What do I mean by Sicko Canon?

Sicko, to me, isn’t solely horror. Sicko contains the wide range of aberrant and inexplicable, something that fractures the societal norms and protective weave meant to keep harm at bay. It must be a splinter slid underneath the fingernail. Sicko sits in the fine intersection of “this horrified me/this unlocked something in me/this will haunt me”; it pushes against some internal boundary you never dared cross and put enough of a hairline crack in it that you were never the same in tastes. It has become a badge of honor on its own in media I devour.

me on an average tuesday night, tbh

(Oh, and of course this list is entirely subjective and no, I haven’t seen The Substance yet.)

Below, ten entries into the sicko canon:

Mangas by Junji Ito

Picture this: you’re 20, browsing tumblr, when someone posts a panel from a manga you’ve never read. It immediately unsettles you, and you scroll past it, hoping to forget. But it lingers, festering like a strange question. You end up googling it, reading it, and you feel a strange twist in your gut and an inflammation in your mind. It’s horrific, twisted, cursed… And it’s perfectly sicko.

And that was my introduction to Junji Ito, a mangaka whose artistry and twisted sense of creation never ceases to draw me in: from Umineko to Tomie to The Enigma of Amigara Fault, there is a thread in all of them that goes deep into the unknown and splits the world apart without remorse.

Junji Ito in many ways came to put a form and name to the horrors that crawled in my nightmares, but somehow made them even worse. Whenever I pick up a volume of Ito’s, I know I will be feeling oddly ruptured in the aftermath.

Health (the band)

For months, my friend talked about a group whose name I found incredibly weird: Health. I looked up some of the album covers, thought, okay, this isn’t for me, and promptly forgot about them until said friend brought them up again. This time, I decided to actually listen, and well. I felt possessed.

This isn’t even the typical genre of music I listen to. That’s a breach of neatly laid parameters of my life. That’s sicko. (It helps that their lyrics hit the nerve, too.)

I felt like their harsh sound cut my skull open, and the vocals burrowed in like worms. Is there a greater badge of honor for a new group in one’s personal canon than to immediately start listening to them on repeat while writing on a novel? And to intimately come to associate the music with how the characters you write think? I doubt it.

Add to that the cult status worthy love the fans have for this band, the frankly amazing merch line (including a butt plug!) and there’s just a certain je ne sais quoi about Health that makes them linger.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez

This short story collection, rife with wild ideas touching upon the morbid and unhinged in life, is the definition of a text that has re-arranged me. Within it, there’s a short story about a person who has a heartbeat fetish, obsessed with listening to heartbeats — and it ends on such a dark note I gasped, put the book down and went for a walk in the sunshine to let it fully ferment.

Each of these short stories brings something to the sicko table, depicting some of the darker traits and drives we humans engage in, but they do it so delightfully and deliciously that you can’t stop reading.

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

Another short story collection, and The Collection that made short stories click for me after many years of trying and failing to understand the art form. After reading this interview with Murata (highly recommended, if only to understand her odd mind at work), no twist or quirk of the stories truly unsettled me but they all fascinated me. Of course, let’s break down the bodies of the dead and re-use them! Of course, let’s eat the ones who have died and turn it into a fertility party! Why not! Murata follows a question of what if? to the point of absurdity, and yet makes it work each time. If you tired of Murakami’s casual misogyny but miss his weirdness, try Murata’s deep delves.

Park Chan-wook’s stunning filmography

It’s hard to pick a single movie of his, because all of them shamelessly yank at the supposed safety surrounding its characters and pulls back the curtain, saying: you were never safe. What now? To which the characters respond in increasingly unhinged ways, lined with clever plots, fine violence and goals like knives in their mind. Every year I get to introduce a new soul to Decision to Leave; earlier this year a watch of Sympathy for Lady Vengeance made me fester in its evocative mood for days — and a highlight of this spring was watching The Sympathizer once a week with a friend as episodes released.

Park Chan-wook’s filmography is stellar, from the cinematography to writing to directing, and all of them deal with a failure/disappointment of society and what it means to navigate the margins — and all with such a deft touch and sympathetic approach.

Indolic perfumes

Indolic scents are a strange aberrancy; found in white florals such as jasmine and tuberose, it also reminds the human nose of decay — and most potently — the sweaty carnality of sex. Done wrong, it’s a dreadful scent that makes even the strongest gag. Done right, it evokes the smell of pleasantly warm skin, of petals crushed between hot bodies. Some describe it as dirty. It treads the fine line between death and fertility, that duality it is so easy to become obsessed with. Try Lust by Lush or Sarrasins by Serge Lutens to experience it yourself.

Sharp Objects (2018), directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

Making me feel the sweat dripping down my back as I watch a series unfold, episode by episode, is no small feat — making me obsessed with the depth of threads and reflections in a decaying small town? Massive. Huge. I don’t think a year passes where I don’t end up rewatching Sharp Objects from start to finish, enraptured and picking out new little details as my eye wanders along the margins of the screen.

Camille’s investigation of a murder forces her back into proximity with her mother and younger half-sister, and soon she begins to wonder if her family has any involvement in the dark happenings of the town — and she feels the poison of familial bonds bubbling underneath her skin when with them. It creeps, hot and vicious, like tangling vines taking over everything, and Camille begins to doubt if she can ever escape her mother’s reach… Or if she should simply succumb.

Serial Experiments Lain (1998 anime)

Lain came to me at a time where I was floundering hard. I hadn’t gotten into the program I wanted, I couldn’t find any sliver of enjoyment in my back-up plan, and I was dead broke. Lain touched upon a lot of the feelings of disconnection I felt at the time, though not in a comforting promise type of way… Just in an odd unnerving and yet comforting way.

Lain’s growing obsession with the internet is spurred by bizarre events in her life, and her descent (ascent?) into the virtual reality has aged remarkably well, if a bit on the nose. It soon takes a turn for stranger, Lain slowly dissolving into the internet and out of reality — a feeling I’m sure we have all grappled with to some degree, but here played to its extreme. It’s a beautiful and fascinating anime, well worth a watch even today.

Goya doing whatever we call this, nightmare fodder elite

I may not have taken art history, but I still love art. There’s nothing quite like wandering a gallery and getting to spend time up close to the works you’ve only been able to see through a computer screen before: the colors rendered more vivid, the texture becoming apparent. We all have the strange little gems that define our experiences like this, be it Warhol or Rauschenberg or Karin Mamma Andersson (who I simply have to write about some day).

But Goya unnerves me. There’s no way around it. In the most intense paintings, I feel like I’m being eaten. I like that sensation in art, of finding something so personally provoking that it disrupts your way of viewing. In Saturn Devouring His Son (c.1820-1823), we strike upon that perfect dark balance of prophetic despair, horror at a crime against nature, and the impossibility to Not: it is a perfect mythological tragedy, and it makes my stomach clench up and turn — as well as my mind. A direct connection between gut and thought.

Breakcore mixes on YouTube

I wanted to end on a note of finding the oddest surrealities in the simplest places. My YouTube recommendations are a strange place, from Basinski’s loops to Aphex Twin, and it should hardly be a surprise this popped up. I have always had a fondness for the new niche trends of various music cores that crop up and disappear on the platform, listening to mixes while I do something else.

This one hits a strange precise point where the music is so overwhelming I can’t be anywhere but in my body, in the precise moment I am in. No escape. I do some of my best, most focused deep work listening to this. I don’t quite know what to do with that knowledge, that a mix fronted by a scantily clad anime girl has me more productive than any technique I’ve tried for decades.

I do find it wildly amusing though.

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As you can see, I have allowed for a great deal of plasticity when it comes to sicko and its definitions. I want sicko to stay deeply personal, because what is sick to you is normal to me and vice versa. No two sickos can be exactly alike, and that’s the beauty of it.

But what do you think? Do you have any recommendations? What would you put in your own sicko canon? Let me know below!