The Horror! The Horror!: Torture porn and the state of scary movies
From: newcityfilm.com
By Tom Lynch
We all have nightmares. For some, it's a dusty leather glove with knives attached to the fingers, a torn green-and-red striped sweater. Others, a hockey mask and the woods, or an eerie white mask shaped in the likeness of William Shatner. The overwhelming buzz of a chainsaw in the dark. For me, it's a little girl spouting obscenities and oozing split-pea soup.
Read The Horror! The Horror!: Torture porn and the state of scary movies
i posted this to new city film already, but i like this site so i wanna yammer here too.
“Simone Muench, poet and professor at Northwestern and Lewis University, where she’s also taught horror-film classes, agrees. ‘I do think the political climate infuses itself in the general psyche, whether we choose to think of ourselves as political or not,’ she says. ‘I find that films now in the twenty-first century have been a return to a lot of the filmmaking of the seventies, not in terms of the filming style, but that the filmmakers are really trying to recreate the extremist filmmaking in a way that shocks people out of their apathy. But instead you get things like ‘Saw,’ which has no narrative, no character development, just a boring string of executions.’”
how about this- in the seventies, the horror of what our government was doing or what was going on in the world was personal. everyone knew someone who was in vietnam. it was in americans’ houses that way. the draft kept us honest- we don’t know the people at war anymore. now, we are just sponsors of horrors and torture onto people we don’t know and will never meet. i think the distance, anonymity, meaninglessness and identification with the torturer rather than the tortured makes perfect sense for today’s horror movies. (and that fear of becoming the possessed rather than fearing the one who is seems to have been prophetic.) i bet the horror movies in iraq are different. i bet they’re more story and character-oriented. just a guess.