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Abstract
The Gastroliths of Saplo is a creative-rhetoric text presented in a Semitic structure of dueling narratives that: 1) explicates the buried history of slavery on Saplo, a Georgian barrier island, and 2) rhetorically examines horror film. In exploring these elements, the narrator discusses the differences between blue and white collar work, thresholds for acceptable violence, and the thematic construction of monsters. These meditations are concurrently relayed while the narrator unravels the islands dark history of Indigenous Peoples and African slaverytruths largely hidden from most historical accounts of the island. Utilizing horror film as a framework to discuss horror as a concept, the work visits what qualifies a death as horror, what does it mean to be a monster, where do monsters come from, how horror films respond to current social fears, and why the horror genre is intentionally limited in what can be called horrible. By juxtaposing these philosophies against vignettes of the islands buried victims, a telling of Saplo is created that rightfully presents it from the horror perspective missing from library shelves. Cumulatively, the work argues for the necessity of horror film in that one can only learn to see cruelty manifested in the real world by viewing the world through unpleasant lenses. In a larger context, the work explores cruelty as an inherent component of humanity and argues that cruelty, rather than being limited to extreme representations of death, torture, and the like, often is banal. The central argument for pointing out how humans engage in cruelty as an everyday component of life, and thus make it mundane through repetition, is that by limiting its scope only to the overtly shocking, people excuse/erase the cruelties committed that do not meet the standard writ large. When this occurs, problematic behaviors and ways of thinking go unchallenged, and it is through the amassing of these missed calls that great cruelties are committed.