Developing a website always seems fun and cool until you’re sitting there with about 100 tabs open on your web browser trying in vain to figure out how to do something simple like center some text on the page, after having spent hours battling dependency errors and just trying to work out the file structure of the theme you’re using earlier that day.

Excuse me while I scream.

Yelling at computers aside though, this week did bring a lot of progress, even if it was hard fought. Programming is inherently an unpredictable pursuit. When you write something, the words usually come out as you expect them too (unless you’re writing on a really messed up keyboard). Writing is just a matter of figuring out exactly what you want to say and how to say it. Literally putting the words on paper is the easy part. But when coding, you can know exactly what you want to do and how, and you can still be foiled by something tiny you overlooked somewhere. Making a typo when you write? It’s fine, maybe someone will laugh at you a little, but that’s the worst that’s going to happen. Making a typo in code? Whoops, the whole thing might not run now!

So yeah, coding can be frustrating. Especially when you have to do it with a deadline. But! When you do finally get something that works and looks cool, then it’s a great feeling,  like you’ve reached the light at the end of a long and spooky tunnel.

Of course, sometimes the light is a trap. Anglerfish are known for lurking deep in the dark zones of the ocean, shining their lights like beacons. And when small fish draw near, eager for a little light and warmth – the anglerfish chomps down on them. In horror, this kind of twisting of expectations is common. One example of this that we’ve encountered repeatedly in this project is horror around motherhood. Stereotypical depictions of mothers paint them as nurturing and loving. This is an image that stems from the expectations placed onto women to manage the household and remain devoted to their children above all else, even while the children’s father might go out to work and barely see the kids. But as Barbara Creed’s feminist horror archetypes show, motherhood can also frequently be scary. According to Creed, the figure of the mother in horror can represent a primal terror that seeks to consume what it once birthed, a manipulator molding her children in her image and using them for her gains, or a progenitor of evil who births monsters, willingly or not. These archetypes, though still pushing women into narrow boxes in some sense, also push back against the idea that women love being mothers and are happy to suppress their own senses of self for the purpose of caring for their children. It takes this in the extreme opposite direction, by showing us mothers who want to kill and consume or use their children as tools. And that last archetype, what Creed calls the “Monstrous Womb”, depicts women who give birth to terrors they may not want. I can imagine seeing horror like that being quite cathartic to women who were pressured into motherhood or who felt there was something wrong with them for not feeling only positive and nurturing things toward their children. Because sometimes even normal kids can be like monsters, and the depiction of the monstrous womb legitimizes that feeling for women typically expected to just be docile and happy.

Anyway, that post went all over the place. I guess my conclusion is this. Your kids might act like monsters. The websites you make might crash. No matter how much mothers are traditionally depicted as kind and perfect carers for their children, or hackers are depicted as techno-magicians who can effortlessly get computers to do what they want – in reality, there’s always the chance of something going wrong, of terror to befall you no matter how hard you work to fit into your designated role. It’s just another way that it’s interesting to explore horror as an exaggeration of the mundane.

The website is working though! For now. The terror of debugging will return though, no question about it.