Post by DTH on Sept 22, 2008 3:43:55 GMT -5
"Torture Porn" is the new horror.
The aim of a horror movie is to scare and go to places that are just on the cusp of taboo. The problem is that audiences become increasingly desensitized to the point where, what scared one generation, may well be laughable to the next.
My mother told me stories about when the Exorcist first came out: this film was so scary, that they had an ambulance on hand because people were fainting from the terror.
Can you even imagine anything like that these days?
There has been a spate of "scary children" horror movies over the last 5 to 10 years because children doing horrific things is still a boundary. But even that is now becoming "old" and "predictable".
So we go to the new boundary: torture.
They are the new "video nasties": gross out movies that advertise themselves by their sheer outrageousness.
I personally don't like them. I thought the very first Saw was interesting and novel but point blank refused to watch any follow up or Hostel or Vacancy or anything of that ilk.
I'm just not interested.
But there are those who eat this kind of thing up. Which is fine for them.
I just worry that once this boundary has become old and predictable that the next boundary will be something truly horrific. Like George Bush, Hilary Clinton and Bob Dole in a three way.
*shudders*
The aim of a horror movie is to scare and go to places that are just on the cusp of taboo. The problem is that audiences become increasingly desensitized to the point where, what scared one generation, may well be laughable to the next.
My mother told me stories about when the Exorcist first came out: this film was so scary, that they had an ambulance on hand because people were fainting from the terror.
Can you even imagine anything like that these days?
There has been a spate of "scary children" horror movies over the last 5 to 10 years because children doing horrific things is still a boundary. But even that is now becoming "old" and "predictable".
So we go to the new boundary: torture.
They are the new "video nasties": gross out movies that advertise themselves by their sheer outrageousness.
I personally don't like them. I thought the very first Saw was interesting and novel but point blank refused to watch any follow up or Hostel or Vacancy or anything of that ilk.
I'm just not interested.
But there are those who eat this kind of thing up. Which is fine for them.
I just worry that once this boundary has become old and predictable that the next boundary will be something truly horrific. Like George Bush, Hilary Clinton and Bob Dole in a three way.
*shudders*
