It's been a long time since I saw a horror movie. That's not to say I don't like to be spooked. My DVD collection includes such modern hide-behind-your-fingers, don't-open-that-door flicks as The Changeling, The Others and Sixth Sense, and older chillers like The Innocents. Anything that promises a well-executed glimpse of the unheimlich will get my bum into a theatre seat, or my money into Blockbuster's coffers.
But a contemporary, entrail-filled, skull-exploding movie? Nope. As Bob Dylan might say, “it's not my cup of meat”.
So when I read the reviews for the new wave of horror movies, I'm a little concerned. Actually, I'm really concerned. This stuff is inexplicably horrible. Isn't there something culturally sick about the blasé acceptance — even celebration — of films that lavishly depict torture, mutilation, and pain? Have we crossed some line, somewhere, and not noticed?
I'm a writer, so I know that human artists are capable of creating (or re-creating) the truly horrible. It's only natural to imagine the worst: to share our fear of pain, death and monsters, and of nature red in tooth and claw. Heck, I've written horror fiction myself…mild stuff. So who am I to judge where that bright red line is, between what's art and what's just plain sick?
That's the problem with calling everything “art.” It can be a cloak for truly sick people. A few years back, some purported “artist” made a film of a cat being skinned alive. He was charged, and eventually convicted, of cruelty to an animal. But many people in the “art community” came to his defence. They said what happened to the cat was no worse than what happened to animals in slaughterhouses every day, and the “artist” was using his “art” to challenge society. What crap. Those of us who want to do something about slaughterhouse cruelty work to pass laws and change societal acceptance of meat-eating — we don't make snuff films and pretend we're artists.
Are today's “splat pack” directors using the “art” shield to cash in on young people's fascination with the über-gruesome, by indulging it? Even though what they're indulging is something that should be, perhaps, treated — or at least, outgrown? Surely the worst aspects of the juvenile imagination shouldn't be fed such rich food. Shouldn't the fodder for such twistedness be thin gruel, not the crème-de-la-crème of gore?
The market for these films is almost entirely youthful. 'Twas always thus. Back when I was a kid, the Fright Night movies (like Island of Terror and The Blob) beamed out from WKBW-TV in Buffalo were a Friday night pyjama-party treat. We would scream in terror at the black-and-white sight of James Arness stumbling down a wooden walkway in The Thing. Nowadays, we'd be renting DVDs of people eating each others' intestines. Apparently, we'd be okay with such a sight. As children of today, we'd be used to it.
I don't know of any evidence to support the idea that kids who like the horror movies of today are any sicker than the kids of years gone by. Maybe the taste for viewing torture is a phase we go through. But the makers of these films aren't kids. One “splat pack” director was recently quoted in Time magazine as saying he'd “tear his own eyeballs out” before he'd go see a film like the Keanu Reeves weeper, The Lake House. Obviously he was exaggerating, or trying to be funny. But his choice of phrasing is perhaps revealing. Such a fear in that man, that he finds a corny B-grade flick about love so disturbing, that he'd make such a dramatic statement about what he'd do to avoid seeing it? To avoid seeing a picture of love?
Like the kids who go to see these flicks, contemporary horror film makers probably have not survived true horror. None of them has been tortured. None of them has lost a relative (or a child) to a murderer. Perhaps that's why they still are okay playing games with horror, and shuddering at the thought of something sweet and sentimental. Maybe horror films are, and always have been, a childish game — and these “artists” have yet to grow up.
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