The Horror of Horror Movies

Yesterday I came home from work and plopped myself on the couch in front of TV. I don’t watch TV much, but last night I was so exhausted that I simply did not have energy for anything else.

I channel surfed for a while until I came across a commercial about an upcoming horror flick, “Shutter” (http://shutter-movie.com). The 15-second trailer pretty much summed up the movie – a couple gets married and on their honeymoon the ghost of the husband’s ex begins to haunt them. This plot is not very original, nor particularly engaging. However, I am positive that millions of people will go to theaters to see this movie and that most likely “Shutter” will be followed by “Shutter 2”, “Shutter 3” and eventually, “Shutter 57”.

The “Saw” managed to squeeze out 3 sequels, one gorier then the previous. The “Ring” managed one sequel. With modern digital technology and advancements in special effects, horror movie industry has been raking in the money, making one crappy movie after another, relying more on how scary the monster looks rather than on the plot.
Personally, I despise horror movies. Before you call me a sissy, let me clarify – I am not afraid of horror movies, and no, they don’t give me nightmares. What turns me off from the whole genre is the fact that our society has become completely desensitized to violence and human pain.

A few months ago a friend of mine asked me to hang out with their 12-year-old son. They told me that they rented a bunch of movies for him, so he’ll keep himself entertained. When I came to their house, I realized that the movie the kid was watching was “Hostel”. I was appalled by the fact that a 12-year-old found gruesome killings fascinating rather than disturbing and disgusting.

Why do we need horror movies? Real life is much more horrifying than anything that even Stephen King with his fucked-up imagination can come up with.

I went to MSNBC website, and the first thing I saw was a headline that read “1 in 4 teen girls has sexually transmitted disease” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23408145/from/id/23574940/). That was disturbing, but not quite scary yet. So, just to amuse myself, I did a search for “murder” and received 106000 search results. I ran a few more searches, and here are the numbers:
Rape: 35500
Theft: 21500
War: 271000
Paris Hilton: 8410

If you don’t find these numbers scary, you probably don’t qualify as a human being. Horror movies are scary? Please, they are nothing more than fantasies of fucked-up minds brought to the silver screen. Go to any news site on the web, or open a newspaper, and I guarantee that you’d be a lot more scared than if you watch “Saw 57”.

The argument had been made violent videogames teach children violence. Same could be said for horror movies, although this argument is flawed. I don’t believe that movies and videogames promote violence. However, they do something just as harmful – they desensitize us to pain and suffering and take away our humanity one little bit at a time.