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San Francisco, 10:11 AM
Sat Nov 28
16 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/02/09
11/01/09
The Shining also has that brutal moment that toys with hope - Dick makes the difficult journey from Florida to the Overlook and there's the brief second when you think Wendy and Danny are saved, which is all quickly dispatched with an axe. #heartbreakinghorror
11/01/09
I also watched Shaun of the Dead on DVD yesterday and I cried when Shaun has to kill his mom after she was transformed into a zombie. His stepfather had already transformed. That scene gets me everytime.
The Shining was one of the scariest films I have ever seen.
All good choices! #heartbreakinghorror
11/01/09
11/01/09
As Jean Cocteau put it:
"Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless. It has nothing to do with melodrama -- with wicked villains, persecuted maidens, avengers, sudden revelations and eleventh-hour repentances. Death, in a melodrama, is really horrible because it is never inevitable. The dear old father might so easily have been saved; the honest young man might so easily have brought in the police five minutes earlier.
In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. That makes for tranquility. There is a sort of fellow-feeling among characters in a tragedy: he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it's all a matter of what part you are playing. Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul deceitful thing, has no part in it. There isn't any hope. You're trapped. The whole sky has fallen on you, and all you can do about it is shout. Don't mistake me: I said 'shout': I did not say groan, whimper, complain. That, you cannot do. But you can shout aloud; you can get at all those things said that you never dared say--or never even knew till then. And you don't say these things because it will do any good to say them: you know better than that. You say them for their own sake; you say them because you learn a lot from them."
Now, that's great horror.
11/01/09
It's really a crushing film, emotionally. Plus it has vomit that eats peoples hands off. #heartbreakinghorror
11/02/09
11/02/09
11/01/09
In those classic horrors, the drama derived from the idea of a universe so frightfully full of meaning, where a very real battle between very real Good and Evil was going on, that the fate of each soul was of the most paramount importance. What happens to Mina, Frank Stanley, Larry Talbot, the Frankenstein Monster and the little girl he accidentally kills is really, really important. People are important.
In modern horror, we get the opposite senario, where the drama is supposed to be derived from the idea of a universe so frightfully devoid of meaning, where we're all just meatbags, that all that is left is the bittersweet curse of survival. But even the best examples of that begin with the premise that people are important in order to undermine it. We have to care about Ben in order to be horrified by what happens to him and what it means for us.
Too much modern horror forgets this and begins with the premise that people are not important so that it can entertain us with the creative ways in which it finds to destroy meaningless human lives. Who cares about the people killed by Michael Myers, Jigsaw or Roland Emmerich?
However, without getting real human characters, it's just pornography. It's bad drama. It's not horrifying... at best it's just gross. I personally can't stomach it because it's an outright affront to how I experience my own life and those of the people around me. Even the horror of it: to stop and really consider that each person you see on the commute to work has their own life, loves, tragedies, and hopes is frightening and beautiful all at once. People really are important. I can't pack that in to a film with characters who are less human than real people I know. #heartbreakinghorror
10/31/09
I can't tell you how many times I've tried to explain concepts like this to friends of mine. For me, watching horror films always evokes deep gut-wrenching sadness well before any feelings of fear.
I think for me, at core, it's the depictions of blatant, intense and miserable suffering. #heartbreakinghorror
10/31/09
11/01/09
11/02/09
I usually don't have a problem with death, even violent death in films. But being tortured slowly... no thanks. Don't need to see that. #heartbreakinghorror
10/31/09
Obviously the worst culprits are slasher movies, where the giant, usually taciturn, always (sooner or later) undead, masked murderer obligingly makes sure to mop up all the pot heads, fornicators, stuck up snobs or token blacks before getting round to the lucid, virgin tomboy who's too outwardly vulnerable to be stuck up.
The one time I finally sat down to watch Rob Zombie's bitchslap to John Carpenter (better known as Rob Zombie's Halloween), I stopped watching halfway because I kept seeing this same thing over and over again. Nearly every victim is made to "deserve" their death, from the abusive father, to the rude nurse, and then Dr. Loomis calls the Michael Meyers a psycopath.
Psycopaths don't need a reason to kill, and they don't care who deserves their wrath. They strike without provocation and, like Republicans, usually go after "likeable" people first, because they`re usually vulnerable.
Wow, that was a long post. The point of it (I hope) was ultimately this:
Most slasher (and many other types of horror) movies actually sabotage any chance of creating any actual horror by dehumanizing the victims, almost more so than the films supposed "monster".
Also, exposure to water may leave you wet, and smoking is bad for your health. #heartbreakinghorror
10/31/09
A word about Barbara. She may rub feminist viewers the wrong way as a sort of helpless Fay Wray type (a criticism I never understood, by the way--if you are being lugged around the Empire State Building by a 40 foot ape, screaming your head off seems the logical reaction) but her descent into catatonia is remarkably realistic and actually a direct contravention of the idea that the female lead in any horror or action film can witness depravity and violence on a World War III scale and still be up for a kiss with the hero at the end. Oh no she fucking wouldn't be. #heartbreakinghorror
10/31/09
Now every time another young person is brutally murdered in some horror movie, part of me is saying "Yay! One less horrible kid in the world" - (and let's face it, they are all horrible, my own included) - but another part is saying "What about their mother?" #heartbreakinghorror
10/31/09
11/02/09
10/31/09
10/31/09
10/31/09
Why didn't the paw just murder a bunch of people? It makes just about as much sense as to grant a wish in whatever insane way you want. #heartbreakinghorror