"Horror Fans" for Dummies

[FourthBase]

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Now, Drama... that I can't watch. Who wants to feel that bad? I really dislike movies where bad things happen at just the wrong time to people who really don't deserve it - tragedy, in short, which seems to be the defining characteristic of most dramatic movies. Emotional suffering, even if obstacles are overcome, is just so painful. I can see the value of some of these things as motivational - if they can overcome THAT, surely I can deal with my little problems - but what I don't get is junkies of this genre. Being scared isn't that bad... when you know you're safe. Seeing people dismembered isn't that bad... when you know that those people never existed. But hearing terrible things is always painful. I'd like to get by with a minimum of that. I'd rather go to bed with the light on than cry myself to sleep.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><br>Wow, that's a really interesting take. Kind of the reverse of how I feel. Except I think that we're oversaturated with drama, too. It's not just gore/horror to me, although that's what this thread's been about, and I consider the ramifications of horror/gore to be just a <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>little bit</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> more serious than emotional drama.<br><br>I'm curious, though: If you can acknowledge the unreality of the horror (they're just actors, that's just fake blood) why is it harder to set aside the reality of drama? Seems to me it would be easier...?<br><br>Too much horror <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>and </em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> too much fake drama.<br>Why do we need it? What does it do to us? <p></p><i></i>

[FourthBase]

I have no idea. Maybe you could come down from your holy citadel and tell me? Sure is a funny picture, though. <p></p><i></i>

[JerkyLeBoeuf]

I don't know why I'm even replying to your hostile, impudently worded request -- especially since I don't think there's anything wrong with artists using the inextricably human tendancy towards violence in their art -- but here's a list of goreless horror films. <br><br>None of these feature more blood than you can expect to see on the tissue after your first shave.<br><br>Altered States <br>The Andromeda Strain <br>The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms <br>The Blair Witch Project <br>Blue Velvet <br>Brainstorm <br>The Bride of Frankenstein <br>The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari <br>Carnival of Souls <br>Cat People (1942) <br>The Changeling <br>Communion <br>Creature from the Black Lagoon <br>Cronos <br>Dark City <br>The Day the Earth Stood Still <br>Dead Ringers <br>Dementia 13 <br>Don't Look Now <br>Donnie Darko <br>Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1920) <br>Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931) <br>Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1941)<br>Dracula (1931) <br>Duel <br>The Entity <br>Fahrenheit 451 <br>Frankenstein <br>Ghost Story (1981)<br>The Haunting (1963) <br>I Walked With a Zombie <br>The Incredible Shrinking Man <br>Island of the Lost Souls (1933) <br>It Conquered the World<br>Monkey Shines (198<!--EZCODE EMOTICON START 8) --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> <br>Naked Lunch <br>The Night of the Hunter<br>Nosferatu (1922)<br>Parents <br>Rosemary's Baby <br>The Sentinel<br>Session 9 <br>The Sixth Sense <br>Targets <br>The Hunchback of Notre Dame <br>The Mummy <br>The Thing From Another World (1951) <br>Twilight Zone: The Movie <br>The Vanashing <br>White Zombie <br>The Wicker Man <p></p><i></i>

[Et in Arcadia ego]

Good list.<br><br>Session 9 belongs up at the very top with Blair Witch for peerless quality. <p>____________________<br>Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.</p><i></i>

[FourthBase]

OK, now we're getting somewhere. Thank you for the list, now I have about 50 films to add to my Netflix queue. Seriously, thank you.<br><br>Now...those movies don't feature gore, but they do feature simulated trauma, right? With the gore (if any is implied) happening off-screen? My concern still is that the trauma and off-screen gore is damaging our collective psyche (maybe you two have such rock-solid minds that you can withstand anything, but I'm talking about the general public, myself included).<br><br>I'm basically bringing up a argument that must be pretty common, that we're overexposed to horrific and dramatic stimuli, and that even though most of it's fictional (except for the news, which is still somewhat fictional of course), today's media technology is capable of making the fiction sometimes seem even realer than real life. Which to me makes the horrific stimuli more dangerous than the dramatic kind, simply because of the sheer violence -- which might be capable of making people suffer the violence as if it happened to them (bad), of desensitizing people to violence in general (bad), or of making violence seem attractive to people (worse). <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=fourthbase>FourthBase</A> at: 8/22/06 11:53 pm<br></i>

[Et in Arcadia ego]

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>which might be capable of making people suffer the violence as if it happened to them (bad), of desensitizing people to violence in general (bad), or of making violence seem attractive to people (worse).<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>You're wrong. <br><br>Even the over-gratuitous slasher genre bases it's thematics on the premise that the victims are exposed to a deadly threat as a consequence of their own actions, ie: negative reinforcements against teenage sex, drug use, etc. <p>____________________<br>Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.</p><i></i>

[FourthBase]

Ones I've seen in bold:<br><br>Altered States <br>The Andromeda Strain <br>The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The Blair Witch Project</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Blue Velvet</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Brainstorm</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> (when I was a kid, and I pissed and shat myself)<br>The Bride of Frankenstein <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br>Carnival of Souls <br>Cat People (1942) <br>The Changeling <br>Communion <br>Creature from the Black Lagoon <br>Cronos <br>Dark City <br>The Day the Earth Stood Still <br>Dead Ringers <br>Dementia 13 <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Don't Look Now</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> (Worst ending for a great movie ever) <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Donnie Darko</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br>Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1920) <br>Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931) <br>Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1941)<br>Dracula (1931) <br>Duel <br>The Entity <br>Fahrenheit 451 <br>Frankenstein <br>Ghost Story (1981)<br>The Haunting (1963) <br>I Walked With a Zombie <br>The Incredible Shrinking Man <br>Island of the Lost Souls (1933) <br>It Conquered the World<br>Monkey Shines (198 <br>Naked Lunch <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The Night of the Hunter</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br>Nosferatu (1922)<br>Parents <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Rosemary's Baby</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br>The Sentinel<br>Session 9 <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The Sixth Sense</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br>Targets <br>The Hunchback of Notre Dame <br>The Mummy <br>The Thing From Another World (1951) <br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Twilight Zone: The Movie</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br>The Vanashing <br>White Zombie <br>The Wicker Man <br><br>I might have seen some of the classic Drac/Frank oldies...<br>But I don't remember.<br><br>Interesting that you think Donnie Darko = horror.<br>I hadn't thought of it that way.<br><br>Don't Look Now's ending is definitely gory.<br>Especially considering how fucking random it is...<br>It was, as R.Kelly says, so damn twisted. <p></p><i></i>

[Rigorous Intuition]

and also an interesting discussion, please let's try to elevate the arguments above personal attacks. Thanks. <p></p><i></i>

[FourthBase]

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Even the over-gratuitous slasher genre bases it's thematics on the premise that the victims are exposed to a deadly threat as a consequence of their own actions, ie: negative reinforcements against teenage sex, drug use, etc.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><br>I don't know, when someone's head is being chopped off by a serial killer, I figure that most people aren't likely to keep in mind that the victim "deserved it" because of a sexual/narcotic sin. I think it's just like, "Holy shit, that person's head was just cut off!" Or as one gets desensitized, "Oh right, another head cut off, yawn". Or as some people grew to root for the villains (out of boredom or power-envy or just to be contrary), "Cut their fucking heads off, LOL!" <p></p><i></i>

[streeb]

Picnic at Hanging Rock might be an example of a horror movie with nothing overtly traumatic depicted. Talk about a "lingering sense of dread"... or The Last Wave. Now that I think of it: a lot of cool Australian movies from that period. Anybody see The Long Weekend?<br><br> <p></p><i></i>

[streeb]

Dude - get on The Wicker Man before the remake comes and takes a big dump on it. <p></p><i></i>

[Rigorous Intuition]

<!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Picnic at Hanging Rock</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> and <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Last Wave</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> are terrific examples.<br><br>I might also characterize <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Rapture</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> as a horror film. At least it horrified me.<br><br>And isn't much of <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>2001</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> a haunted house story, with HAL doing the haunting? <p></p><i></i>

[juno jones]

Horror films with no gore, hmmm, just watched 'Spider Baby' (recommended!) last nite, not much gore there but a subtext that was way too disturbing for the 60's, apparently. There are also a lot of very atmospheric japanese ghost movies that have no gore, unless you count the obligatory corpse-like apparition. I love horror, there seems to be a human need (well, MOST humans anyways) to scare the bejayzuz out of oneself upon occasion. However, I don't care for overt gore, I much prefer psychological subtlety...AND lurking old ones poised to eat our souls...( we need a cthulu smiley...)<br><br>I used to have roomates that watched gore films constantly, even to the point of watching stuff like 'Faces of Death' and 'Mondo Stupido' or whatever. I Couldn't really understand it, it seemed they were not so much being 'horror fans' as they were being 'voyeurs'. <p></p><i></i>

[streeb]

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>I used to have roomates that watched gore films constantly, even to the point of watching stuff like 'Faces of Death' and 'Mondo Stupido' or whatever. I Couldn't really understand it, it seemed they were not so much being 'horror fans' as they were being 'voyeurs'.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>I've probably seen an awful lot of those kinds of movies, and enjoyed them. Not so much anymore. But there's another thing at work besides voyeurism, and it's an attraction to aesthetic things. The quality of the film stock, the lighting, the hundreds of ways it captures its period. It's fanboy stuff. I watched The Toolbox Murders recently, and it's a vile movie, but my imagination had traveled to the filmmaker's milieu, and that's something that a writer like Bill Landis explains so well in Sleazoid Express. For him, it's a juvenile, romantic attraction to New York's underbelly in the 70s and early 80s. The content of the film is almost irrelevent.<br> <p></p><i></i>

[Quentin Quire]

I love Horror movies from 'Dr. Caligari' to 'Zombie Flesh Eaters'.<br><br>I've always found it strange how some people have a double standard when it comes to depictions of violence in other media and their knee-jerk reactions to Horror movies. My High School English teacher always talked about great the plays of Shakespeare et al Marlowe were - despite the huge amounts of rape, suicide, mutilation, murder and assault contained within them. Christ - I was taught Hamlet, Romeo And Juliet and The St Bartholemews Massacre - riddled with more violent content than most mainstream Horror flicks.<br><br>But this was all excused by the fact that it was 'cathartic' - the audience are confronted with visceral situations and content they may not experience in ordinary life, they take their own baggage and project it onto the text and come away cleansed after the experience. I've always felt that this applied to Horror films as much as accepted mediums like classic playstaught to teenagers.<br><br>BTW if you want to watch an awesome Horror/Thriller then 'Switchblade Romance' ('High Tension' in the US I think) is an awesome French movie - like Hitchcock Vs. Argento in the French countryside. <p></p><i></i>