Day Three: Film

I was watching Last House on the Left with my mom and her sister (and they might as well be twins they look and act so much alike) and the movie was horrifically graphic and awful. Our reactions were much the same -- we all got up at various times or hid behind pillows. I held onto my dog and hid in her fur when it got particularly bad.

In general, I love horror films (some might say I am unnaturally obsessed with horror films). This, however, was brutal and disgusting. The little revenge that the victims do exact is minor in the face of what they had to endure; not to mention that the girl who was the true victim was able to exact no revenge at all except that she survived which, maybe, is enough.

It got me thinking though. At what point does horror become "torture porn"? And at what point do we sit back and look at ourselves and say Jesus, with everything that is going on, this, this made over $40,000,000? Really?!

New York Magazine ran an excellent article which discussed the recent popularity of movies like this in American cinema.

As for me, I didn’t understand why I was in that place either, watching through my fingers—or why I’d found myself in similar places many times during the past few years, at The Devil’s Rejects, Saw, Wolf Creek, and even (dare I blaspheme?) The Passion of the Christ. . . As a horror maven who long ago made peace, for better and worse, with the genre’s inherent sadism, I’m baffled by how far this new stuff goes—and by why America seems so nuts these days about torture.

Edelstein goes on to ask "Is there a masochistic as well as a sadistic component to the mayhem?"

And I think, maybe there is. I agree, also, that we are, as a society, a little numb. After 9/11 and Katrina so close together, after Bush and the economy collapsing, after being lied to so often about so many things we are a little numb. Maybe we are turning to these films to say "Hey, it's bad, but you know what? It ain't that bad. . . not yet."