The Lure of the Dark

[i_kender]

When I was about 15, I was hugely into Stephen King. After writing a couple of strongly horror-themed short stories for English class, my teacher kept me behind after a lesson. Frowning, she told me that my writing was very good... remarkable, given my age... but she was worried that so much of what I was writing was quite dark and disturbing. She put it tactfully. She was, she told me, just concerned that I seemed to be dwelling on the negative too much. "There's a lot of goodness in the world too," she said... or something to that effect anyway.

Considering I was an introverted angsty teenaged boy who was lonely and depressed much of the time, I think she put it quite mildly. I don't recall that her words had much impact at the time, but I remembered them. (Plus ca change and all that).

So this article here is all about how Hollywood films are getting darker... it points to things like the recent revamps of Batman and Superman, and even the new Spiderman film with the Black Costume. Apparently Emo is the new goth, and Emo is in... even in the film industry.

This other article takes it a bit further... (SPOILER ALERT - the article unfortunately spoils most of Grindhouse, as well as giving away significant plot details of Hostel )

It's talking about the new wave of horror films, from indie fare like Hostel and Wolf Creek to mainstream stuff like the Grindhouse film(s) aka Planet Terror/Death Proof. And it's claiming that these films are bringing with them something rather unpleasant... what I've heard referred to as "torture porn".

This is nothing new... in Hollywood there is nothing new under the sun. It was the same in the 70s and 80s, with splatter films, video nasties, films in which scantily-clad women ran through the woods pursued by a unstoppable killer with a huge knife, who eventually rapes her and drives a power-drill through her head.

Guess what? "They're.... ba-ack!"

Now, I'm a horror fan. I loved Hostel, I thought it was a great idea, a thrilling film, and it kept me on the edge of my seat throughout. I didn't think it was exploitative or misogynistic... I thought the gruesome violence was pretty equably shared out ;) But I have noticed this element of nasty voyeuristic torture creeping into other films. Notably the remake of The Hills Have Eyes which I watched recently, which has a really nasty (and in my mind unecessary) sexualised violent scene somewhere towards the beginning of the film. And Wolf Creek, which has a terribly dismal downbeat ending, and not in a good way. And I'll admit they made me feel uneasy. It's not the violence... I'm fine with gratuitious violence, thanks, with added ketchup. It's the sexual side of it that gives me the creeps, and makes me wonder who would get off on that. Worse, I wonder whether it's true that things have a tendancy to spread out into society. Desensitisation to violence, to sexual imagery, and to the oozing Venn diagram where they meet. Like my teacher said, I worry about the dark side of human nature.

I'd be interested in your thoughts.

And because that was all very heavy, it's Poll Time! Which superhero would you be?

Comments

[nightxade.livejournal.com]

Haven't read the spoilery articles because, well, I don't want to be spoiled. How odd of me O.o

But yeah. Darkness prevails. There's a movie that's been advertised that is meh can't remember details but I know there's a line in it comments about the events within being snuff. Way back when, we had 8mm, which was about snuff.

We all know that emo is the new chipotle, so Hollywood has caught on. What comes to my mind though is the fact that Hollywood is usually all about the happy endings. How are the execs sleeping at night without Steven Spielberg adding happy blue fairy endings to everything?

[blankbadge.livejournal.com]

It is a tricky thing. I'm a horror fan too and I like me some serial killer stuff. But I've got to agree with you that the sexualisation of it can be deeply disturbing because it is presented as something for people to get off on.
I think that there is a difference between ones from the 70s and now in that they weren't mainstream films, the modern films seem to be.

[i_kender]

I think there is a problem there, I've seen some disturbing scenes in some films recently. Mind you, I don't think this is anything new. It's the same thing people were complaining of, oh, twenty, thirty years ago...

[blankbadge.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this stuff has been going around for a while. And it probably does have it's times of popularity and times of unpopularity. It just feels different this time, possibly because it's involving bigger stars and budgets than before?

Maybe it's a backlash against women getting more interested in men looking pretty, there's a bigger group of men who feel inadequate because of higher standards and it seeps out into this kind of fiction. Who knows?