by streeb » Tue Aug 22, 2006 10:37 pm
I've been a horror fan my whole life, but I find it hard to get through many new films, of any genre. When Silent Hill was released, I posted a blurb from the Toronto Star about it, because I thought the wording was so interesting. There's no way I'll find it now with the EZ Board search (dys)function, but in effect it said something about the growing "spooks got my kids" genre. To anybody here, the double-meaning should be obvious (albeit inadvertant). It made me think about inoculation, as laid out tirelessly by Hugh Manatee Wins. The former film critic for Slate, David Edelstein, has been harping on Hollywood's booming obsession with child abuse, infant death and so forth, for a couple years now. It's a chicken-egg relationship to me, but the theme of children in peril is definitely a dominant one these days, which might further be traced to a mass loss of innocence that has occured in the last six years, and the struggle I think most people have in trying to ignore the horrible truths that are emerging every day.<br><br>I'm not really addressing your question, Et in Arcadia - just thinking out loud. But I dig horror movies, and am left cold and disgusted by many new ones. "Cabin Fever" was interesting if you read it as an indictment of America's health system (er... so far, I'm the only person I know whose done that..). No matter what they do in that film, nobody can get medical help. Not even at the hospital. It's excruciating. Meanwhile, movies such as the Hills Have Eyes re-make seem to have no such thematic co-ordinates, and really exist as pumped up versions of the original, which is too dilute for modern audiences. And yet - no amount of grue, or lactating mothers being suckled by mutants while a gun is held to their baby's head - no amount of that can seriously match the opening shot of the original, which depicts nothing more than a red sky and a mountain in silhouette, and yet is tremendously unsettling.<br><br>Fourth Base - I understand your visceral reaction to the very idea of 'horror fans', because I've encountered it all my life, but I think you have to remember it's about a great deal more than slicing people up. I suspect many of the readers here are Lovecraft fans, for one thing. The more I think about it these days, the more I'm convinced he's one of the towering figures of our time! Horror makes things manifest that would quite likely damage us if we didn't contemplate them. But it's not for everybody. <p></p><i></i>