An interesting article on the unprecedented popularity of horror movies in America and what thsi says about the demoralisation of American culture, with particular reference to Vietnam and the post-9/11 "War on Terror".
Of course I post this as a discussion point and not because I necessarily agree with everything in it. Two points
(1) The author is an observant Jew and his view of God thus seems to be based more purely on submission to God and on the concept of divine justice than Christianity, which rests on the Incarnation. (I am not of course suggesting that this makes him or Judaism particularly wicked, as anti-semites often do when commenting on this difference. I'm simply noting that there is a difference. I would also imagine there are different schools of thought within Judaism on this subject.)
(2) The author is a political conservative and he thus tends to play down the most destabilising element involved in the change of sensibility he describes. He talks as if war simply involved innocent Americans being brought into contact with evil adversaries and that the answer must be to reassert that America is fundamentally righteous - whereas the most destabilising aspect of the war experience has been the sense that in order to defeat evil enemies one must do things that are themselves evil and so become morally compromised. (The more I contemplate twentieth-century Irish history, the more I think the brutalising effect of the Civil War has been underestimated.) This was part of the impact of World War II on the American mindset as well though knowledge of it was contained (it has been argued that the slow breakdown of the old Hollywood Production Code began after 1945 because of the impact of the war experience on the American self-image; and in retrospect the traumatised Civil War veterans who inhabit many postwar Westerns can be seen as coded references to this).
The sense that America was committing war crimes was key to the impact of Vietnam on the American psyche, and while the author mentions the torture debate in passing he does not note that many of the "torture porn" films specifically reference the knowledge that Americans were committing torture, that everyone knew it, and that it seemed unavoidable if the country was to be preserved.
I have sprinkled a few other minor observations through the text
www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/MI08Dj02.htmlEXTRACT
The "horror" genre supplied one out of 10 feature films released in the United States in 2009, according to the International Movie Database. During Universal Studios' heyday in the 1930s, the proportion was one in 200; only a decade ago it was one in 25. Vampire teen heartthrobs meanwhile take first place on some lists of best-selling books.
By way of contrast, 716 horror features were released in 2009, compared to 39 Westerns, a ratio of almost 20 to one. During 1960-1964, Americans saw more Westerns than horror movies. The earlier date is pertinent because it includes two of the most fearful events in post-war American history, namely, the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of president John F Kennedy.
Westerns invariably portray a well-understood form of evil and contrast it to the courage to stand up to evil. Horror films involve an evil that is incomprehensible because it is supernatural and so potent that ordinary courage offers no remedy.
Americans never were more frightened than during the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war might have erupted, and never more affected by an act of violence than by the murder of a president. But in the 1960s, Americans thought they understood what they most feared; today they appear to fear most what they cannot understand.
What has horrified them?
The element of incomprehension, that is, of the supernatural, distinguishes the horror genre from mere gratuitous violence. It is not the spurting blood or mangled flesh that defines horror but the presentiment that the world itself is disordered: Demons abound in the absence of a beneficent God, who is somehow absent. [THIS DOES NOT NECESSARILY REQUIRE THAT THE KILLERS/TORTURERS BE SUPERNATURAL BEINGS; SERIAL KILLER MOVIES OFTEN HAVE AS SUBTEXT THE IDEA THAT THE EXISTENCE OF SUCH PEOPLE SHOWS GOD DOES NOT EXIST OR IS INDIFFERENT OR MALIGN].
There is nothing new in the monsters that infest popular culture, indeed, nothing particularly scary about them compared to the lurid products of the pagan imagination in antiquity. What is new is the unprecedented way in which they have proliferated in the American popular media.
In biblical terms, we may define horror as the presentiment that the forces of chaos have escaped their appointed bounds and that a good God no longer exercises mastery. Fear and awe of God differ radically from horror: We fear God's punishment and stand in awe of his presence, but we are horrified when we no longer believe that God will do justice...
There is a radical difference, by the same token, between Christian apocalyptic literature and the corresponding subgenre of horror films: In the former, God manifests himself in the world and his mastery over the fearful apparitions never is in doubt. But God remains inexplicably absent while hell rampages in The Omen or Rosemary's Baby...
The answer to the question of suffering of the innocent is a renewal of activity on the part of the God of Justice. In light of the answer, it becomes clear that the question is not an intellectual exercise but rather a taunt intended to goad the Just God into action." Jeremiah recounts dreadful events, but he is outraged rather than horrified. That is the decisive difference.
The faith of the West too easily devolves into philosophical rationalization about divine justice rather than persisting as faith in the covenantal relationship with a just and loving God. We then become vulnerable to a neo-pagan foe that wielded horror as an instrument of policy.
What produces monsters is not the sleep of reason but the absence of faith. God's creation metaphorically banished the monsters from the world in the biblical creation story. If we cease to believe that God will rise up as of old and fight our fight, then we will reify the world's evil in the guise of fictional monsters. That is the secret of our morbid fascination with the horror genre...
Hollywood gave us a small run of exotic-origin horror films in the 1930s, all drawn from European fiction: Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Portrait of Dorian Grey. After World War II, however, these nightmares of tormented Europeans were mostly naturalized as sight gags for American adolescents.
And that was how it was supposed to be. The monsters had a different meaning in their Old World provenance. The pagan sees nature as arbitrary and cruel, and the monsters that breed in the pagan imagination personify this cruelty. Removed from their pagan roots and transplanted to America, they became comic rather than uncanny. [THIS IS NOT QUITE TRUE OF THE 1940S RKO/VAL LEWTON HORROR CYCLE, WHICH INCLUDES FILMS SET IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA - BUT EVEN HERE THE DARK FORCES EITHER ORIGINATE ABROAD OR ARE MARGINAL, RATHER THAN BEING DOMINANT AND ALL-POWERFUL].
America was the land of new beginnings and happy endings. The monsters didn't belong. After 1946, Adolf Hitler had been crushed, and that was that. Americans did not want to think about it anymore [OR ABOUT WHAT HAD BEEN NECESSARY TO DEFEAT THE NAZIS]. And at the height of the national self-confidence that followed, the horror genre almost disappeared from American film. In 1950, for example, Hollywood managed only four films in the genre, all B-movie filler.
Horror recolonized American culture during late 1960s. The genre jumped from 2% of all films to 6% between 1968 and 1972. The homegrown American horror film, moreover, evolved from summer-camp slashers to truly disturbing portrayals of torture and madness. ..
What motivated so many Americans to subject themselves to such torment? Perhaps the explanation is that, with Vietnam, horror had returned as a subject in American life. United States troops were engaged with an enemy that made civilian populations the primary theater of battle, fighting a different and terrible sort of war. The images of civilians burnt by napalm transformed my generation. Until our adolescence - I was already 12 when John F. Kennedy was killed - America's civic religion was taken for granted. In 1963, my peers and I put our right hands over our hearts when the flag passed; by 1967 we did not flinch at flag burning. Horror over a war in which civilians could not be distinguished from combatants destroyed America's civic religion [I.E. THE SENSE THAT AMERICAN PATRIOTISM AND ITS RITUALS/TRAPPINGS WERE SOMEHOW SACRED, BLESSED BY A NONDENOMINATIONAL GOD, AND WERE ENTITLED TO DEMAND UNIVERSAL OBSERVANCE], and it was, I suspect, also the beginning of the end of mainline Protestantism...
But what accounts for the six-fold increase in the total number of horror films released since 1999? Subgenres such as erotic horror (mainly centered on vampires) and torture (the Saw series, for example) dig deep into the vulnerabilities of the adolescent psyche. Given the success of these films over the past 10 years, the number of Americans traumatizing themselves voluntarily is larger by an order of magnitude than it has ever been before.
[THIS I MIGHT ADD GLOSSES OVER THE FACT THAT IN MUCH OF THE CURRENT VAMPIRE FICTION AND FILM THE PROTAGONISTS THEMSELVES ARE OR BECOME VAMPIRES, THE VAMPIRES ARE CLEARLY EVIL OR AMORAL, AND THE AUDIENCE ARE SUPPOSED TO SYMPATHISE WITH THEM. SIMILARLY, IN MANY ZOMBIE FILMS THE ZOMBIE HUNTERS ARE AS UNPLEASANT AS, OR WORSE THAN, THE ZOMBIES. THE IDEA THAT MORAL CORRUPTION IS UNAVOIDABLE, EVEN DESIRABLE - THE BASIC MINDSET OF THE PORNOGRAPHER - IS KEY TO THIS]
There are any number of possible explanations for this phenomenon. What the bare facts show, however, is that moviegoers are now evincing a susceptibility to horror. People watch something in the theater because it resonates with something outside the theater. To see the cinematic representation of horrible things may be frightening, but the viewer knows that it is safe.
And the sense of safety we derive from watching make-believe things helps us tolerate the prospect of real things. What in the world today horrifies us the most? The horror that attended the Vietnam War had far-reaching cultural effects even though not a single shot was fired on American territory. [THIS GLOSSES OVER THE RACIAL CONFLICTS OF THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES, WITH THEIR SENSE THAT THERE WAS AND ALWAYS BEEN SOMETHING ROTTEN AT THE HEART OF AMERICA WHICH WAS NOT OPEN TO SIMPLE SOLUTIONS. IN NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD THE VIGILANTE ZOMBIE-FIGHTERS WHO APPEAR AT THE END STRONGLY RESEMBLE A LYNCH MOB.] All the more so should we expect the attack on the World Trade Center and its aftermath to have such consequences.
Random acts of terror against civilians seem a new and nearly incomprehensible instrument of war to most Americans. That is why they have such military value: The theater of horror has a devastating effect on our morale...
How much damage the souls of Americans have incurred in consequence of this exposure to real horror, we cannot say. But the growing morbidity of America's imagination as shown in the consumption of cinematic horror suggests we might heed the tagline of Jeff Goldblum's 1986 remake of Vincent Price's The Fly, made famous by Christina Ricci in the 1993 spoof Addams Family Values: Be afraid - be very afraid.
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