One, two, you’re coming for Freddy

Mr. Krueger’s got two new weapons

If you ever watched horror films in the 1980s or 1990s and thought to yourself “Freddy Krueger’s OK, but what this keloid-deformed, ultraviolent, serial killing child molester really needs is fishnet stockings and a massive rack”, then today you have finally hit the jackpot, my friend. A Japanese company is now offering this bishoujo Freddy statue, or “stuatue” as they have it on their site. I know by now it almost goes without saying that if we discover a highly inappropriate item has been sexualised, then somebody Japanese will probably be responsible. I take a glass-half-full attitude towards this fact, though. These figures are very, very wrong but bless your filthy, weird, perverted Japanese minds.

Bishoujo or bishōjo (美少女) means “beautiful young girl”, and is usually taken to mean a woman younger than university age. Given the obvious intent behind this item, it’s reasonable to translate the figure’s Japanese name into English as Barely Legal Freddy Krueger. Their tagline plays on the Krueger playground rhyme heard in the films (i.e. “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you…”): 1つ、2つ、フレディが来るよ・・・美少女になって！ My Japanese isn’t great, but I think this could be translated idiomatically as “One, two, Freddy’s coming… and becoming a girl!”

They also point out that she’s standing in a pool of blood– which is always good fun, isn’t it?– and furthermore she has a “nice chest” and a “thigh gap”, i.e. the tops of her inner thighs wouldn’t touch each other even when she’s standing with her feet together. For those fortunate enough not to know already, it is my sad duty to report that this latter fetish item is the most recent body dysmorphic, mostly impossible beauty ideal being pushed by the fashion world and its related fucking-with-the-minds-of-women and normality-pathologising industries. It’s also worth noting that Freddy has used her trademark murder weapons to cut herself on the shoulder and thigh, because there’s nothing sexier than self-harming anorexic teenage girls, right?

Jailbait Jason Voorhees (from the interminable Friday the 13th series) is also available, and she too seems to have experienced some difficulty in dressing herself sensibly. Doesn’t she get chilly dressed like this, hiding in the bushes and spending ages inside cupboards or under floorboards preparing for that perfect kill? This relentless, remorseless killing machine has an axe, a machete, the iconic hockey mask, “powerful sixpack abs” and, most crucially of all, large breasts.

Oh, Japan.

How many men would a wood man saw…?

(… if a wood man could saw men…) I’m just going to leave this here because I don’t really know what else to say about it. It has the look of (French caricaturist) Grandville and the 19th century, but I don’t know anything about the authorship, the reason or the original context for this image.

Murder in the red barn (for fun and profit)

A write-up on this subject has been on my site that deals with my work as an artist and writer, because I’ve been sporadically researching it as a potential new film project. I’m repeating and expanding it here because I think the subject is interesting in its own right. It’s another in my series of Suffolk weirdnesses; see also Ipswich smells like space and my visit to the weapons research facility at Orford Ness.

Part of a Staffordshire pottery set exploiting the Red Barn mania: here Corder is enticing Maria into a ridiculously romanticised version of the agricultural barn where he will shortly afterwards murder her and bury her body.

In May 1827, Maria Marten was shot to death by the father of her child, William Corder, at a farm near Polstead in Suffolk. This was and is a bucolic location whose appearance can be judged from the many paintings done of the area by the Suffolk painter John Constable, he of ‘The Hay Wain’, who focused his attention only a few miles east at Dedham and East Bergholt. The illegitimate child had already been disposed of secretly by Marten and Corder. William buried Maria in a shallow grave in a barn on his tenant farm, where she was found accidentally nearly a year later by her own father after he ”put down a mole spike into the floor… and brought up something black, which I smelt and thought it smelt like decayed flesh.” Corder had fled to London, but was eventually caught and hanged.

“W.CORDER BEFORE THE JUDGE.” (Judge sold separately.)

What makes this typically sordid and revolting murder different from others committed before it is that “The Murder in the Red Barn“ was one of the first whose details were promulgated and elaborated by sensational media reporting of the kind that subsequently became the norm throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and into the 21st, leading to public hysteria and wild overestimations of how widespread murder and violent crime actually are in Britain.*