Unquiet
Things

Most longtime readers know the basics of how Skeletor is Love began: a moment of personal crisis, a nostalgic YouTube suggestion, and the absurd inspiration to pair screenshots of my childhood nemesis with self-help affirmations. How this silly project would eventually reach hundreds of thousands of people. Or that I would receive messages from followers telling me that my ridiculous mash-up of a skull-faced villain and positive affirmations had helped them with their depression, addiction recovery, and self-harm. Or that Skeletor is Love would become a tiny, weird community of people finding comfort in the most unlikely of places.

What I’ve rarely discussed, however, is why this particular, preposterous character might have resonated so deeply as a vessel for healing, and how this project seemed to share some interesting parallels with how we experience and process horror. As a lifelong horror enthusiast, I can’t help but wonder if there’s something about Skeletor’s particular brand of dorky darkness that speaks to the same part of us that finds catharsis in ghost stories and monster movies and things that generally freak us out and scare the crap out of us.

As a child, I was terrified of everything. The dark, thunderstorms, the pool filter, mysterious noises…and especially the villains of my Saturday morning cartoons. Chief among these nightmare-inducers was Skeletor, with his purple hood and grinning skull face, his high-pitched cackle echoing through our living room as he plotted the downfall of Eternia. I was simultaneously terrified and fascinated.

With his perpetual rage and thwarted ambitions, Skeletor embodies a primal form of darkness different from sophisticated villains like Hannibal Lecter or cosmic horrors from Lovecraft. He’s emotional frustration in periwinkle, swollen-muscled cartoon form. His plans always fail. His minions disappoint. His existence is defined by perpetual dissatisfaction and disillusionment—the human condition distilled into primary colors and dramatic posturing.

I’ve often wondered if there’s something about juxtaposition that makes both horror and my Skeletor project resonate. Think about it: a suburban home invaded by supernatural forces, a picturesque small town harboring unspeakable secrets, a birthday party interrupted by masked killers, a peaceful summer camp stalked by an unstoppable force. Something about placing the terrifying within the every day creates this unsettling cognitive dissonance that keeps us coming back for more.

Skeletor is Love plays with this same contrast by placing gentle affirmations alongside images of cartoon villainy, but I think it creates a different kind of dissonance—one that opens something up rather than closes it down. That fear response somehow transforms into something unexpected: laughter, recognition, and comfort.

There’s something about that gap between Skeletor pompously declaring “I WILL DESTROY YOU ALL” while text overlay suggests “I deserve love and acceptance” that creates a strange space where healing might sneak in, almost accidentally, disguised as a joke. I wonder if it’s not so different from how we sometimes find ourselves laughing during a horror movie—that sudden release of tension that reminds us we’re still human, still alive, still processing.

What surprised me most about the response to Skeletor is Love was how quickly it formed a community. Some came for the nostalgia, others for the humor, and a surprising number because they genuinely found comfort in these messages. I probably should have anticipated this community-building effect, considering how horror fans tend to find each other.

There’s something about that shared willingness to look into darkness that creates instant connection, isn’t there? Whether it’s spotting someone’s Freddy Kruger tattoo at a coffee shop or bonding over a shared childhood trauma from accidentally watching Burnt Offerings too young, horror enthusiasts recognize each other through our willingness to face what frightens us.

The Skeletor is Love project seemed to tap into that same energy, creating a space where people could acknowledge their darker feelings through the protective shield of irony and nostalgia. It became a sort of ritual where the frightening transforms into something celebratory through shared experience.

I found it telling which images resonated most. Among the hundreds of memes I created, the most shared weren’t the funniest or most absurd, but those featuring Skeletor at his most vulnerable: raging at the sky, crying out in frustration, or alone in his sanctum. In these moments, the villain becomes a mirror, reflecting our own moments of impotent rage against circumstances beyond our control.

This mirror effect seems similar to what draws many of us to horror. Whether it’s the grief-stricken madness of The Babadook, the suffocating paranoia of Rosemary’s Baby, or the inherited family trauma of Hereditary—these stories reflect our inner turmoil through external monstrosities, giving tangible form to intangible suffering.

By pairing Skeletor’s emotions with gentle encouragement rather than judgment, these memes validated feelings many struggle to acknowledge. The character’s exaggerated expressions made it safe to recognize similar emotions in ourselves. This combination of ridiculous cartoon villainy, earnest self-compassion, and painfully earnest self-help affirmations provided the perfect silly contrast for therapeutic laughter – a coping mechanism humans have relied on since time immemorial.

Dark humor has always been humanity’s response to the unthinkable. War veterans joke about death. Emergency room staff develop gallows humor that would shock civilians. Bereaved families sometimes laugh more than they cry at wakes. (My sister and I have a funny story about when our mother was Baker-Acted. Hilarious!) There’s something about confronting the horrific through laughter that creates just enough distance to process our fears without being consumed by them.

Horror often thrives in this space, from Evil Dead‘s slapstick gore to Shaun of the Dead‘s zombie comedy to Cabin in the Woods‘ meta-deconstruction of the entire genre. These stories understand that laughter doesn’t diminish fear, it contextualizes it, making it manageable without removing its power. The sudden shift from tension to release reminds us that we contain multitudes—fear and courage, darkness and light, trauma and healing, all coexisting within the same frame. These moments of absurd humor amid existential predicaments are precisely what make horror such a cathartic experience.

Skeletor is Love worked on this principle. It transformed not just my personal relationship with childhood fear but created a space where thousands could perform the same alchemy with their own darkness. Like the best horror-comedies, it found the absurd humor in our darkest moments without diminishing their emotional impact.

I never intended it to become a mental health resource. I’m not a therapist. My only qualifications, as I often joked, came from “living in a family full of depressed alcoholics.” And yet, there I was, inadvertently creating content that people incorporated into their healing journeys.

I’ve come to think there’s something inherently frightening about the healing process itself—the vulnerability, the uncertainty, the fear that confronting our wounds might destroy rather than repair us. We often approach emotional health with the same trepidation as the protagonist entering the basement in a horror film. We know something waits in the darkness. We’re not sure we want to see it.

Maybe horror fans understand that sometimes you have to go down those stairs. You have to open that door. You have to follow the strange noise in the attic, venture into the abandoned hospital wing, or check out what’s making that scratching sound in the basement. You have to face whatever waits, even when every instinct screams to run. The genre has taught us to face fears rather than flee them.

Skeletor is Love provided a strange guide for this journey, a grinning skull-faced Virgil holding a lantern, leading followers not deeper into hell but gradually toward light. The absurdity made the journey less frightening. If we could laugh at Skeletor’s existential rage while recognizing our own reflection, perhaps our inner darkness wasn’t so terrifying after all.

In the end, isn’t this what horror at its best might be doing? Giving shape to shapeless dread. Naming unnameable fears. Transforming the unbearable into something we can hold in our hands, examine from all angles, and eventually set aside.

The genres I grew to love as an adult, whether it’s Clive Barker’s fusion of ecstasy and agony, Junji Ito’s inescapable spirals of obsession, or Thomas Ligotti’s philosophical nihilism, helped me process complex emotions that I couldn’t otherwise articulate. They gave form to formless anxiety. Takashi Miike’s unflinching extremity that forces you to look when you want to turn away, Jean Rollin’s dreamlike eroticism where desire and death become almost indistinguishable, George Romero’s unflinching social commentary lurking beneath the zombie apocalypse—each offered a different vocabulary for understanding the darkness within and around us.

And sometimes, in the weirdest twist of all, childhood nightmares transform into unexpected allies, helping us face the real monsters that lurk in the shadows of adulthood: loneliness, despair, and the fear that we aren’t enough. The skull-faced villain becomes not the source of our terror but the companion who helps us navigate it.

Perhaps it’s fitting that Skeletor—a character who never succeeded in his quest for power—finally found his purpose by failing at being frightening and accidentally becoming a conduit for healing instead. Not through some grand design or cosmic purpose, but through the messy, often absurd ways we repurpose our fears.

“Be afraid. Be very afraid,” as Brundle’s doomed girlfriend warns in The Fly. But maybe the wisdom isn’t in avoiding that fear, but in allowing yourself to feel it fully…and sometimes, finding a way to laugh at it too. Who would have thought a ridiculous villain from an 80’s cartoon would end up being a weird little touchstone for people navigating their darkest emotions? Not me, and certainly not this bumbling, skull-faced, blue-skinned sorcerer.  If that’s not the strangest hero’s journey of all time, I don’t know what is.

[For new readers who want to see the Skeletor is Love project, you can find archives here.

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