It was a dark, rainy night, on a long-forgotten back road in the mountains of West Virginia. Mary Ellen finally had enough of her abusive husband’s drunken beatings and mustered up the courage to leave him, once and for all. With a mere $30 in her pocketbook, she slipped out of their bedroom and into the night, not knowing exactly what to expect, but understanding deep within her heart that leaving was the only thing left to do, short of murdering the drunkard where he slept.
As thoughts of slipping a kitchen knife between his second and third ribs flittered through her mind, a sputter and hesitation from the car she was driving jerked her back to reality. She hadn’t noticed the "Low Fuel" light was on when she left the house and now the car’s engine gasped its final breaths of life, then stalled altogether. She muscled the car to the shoulder as the windshield wipers swept back and forth across the rain-spattered windshield in the cold, wet night.
"Fantastic," she thought as she turned off the car’s ignition. "Now all I need is some ax-murdering psycho to come bursting out of the woods and -"
Mary Ellen never finished her thought. As if on cue, a gloved fist burst through the driver’s side window, grabbed her by the hair and pulled her upper body out of the car. She never even saw the knife as it plunged into her chest, ironically right between the second and third ribs.
There was a time when those few paragraphs could have been the beginning of a very frightening horror movie. Sadly, by today’s standard, it’s old, weak and somewhat pathetic in its attempt to scare. In today’s horror movies, their success is often measured in the gallons of fake blood used to create the bloody special effects. What ever happened to movies that plant a seed of fear and allow the viewer to fill in the blanks? Why do movies today need to show you every grim detail of a decapitation, evisceration or full-body explosion?
Let’s use society’s ever-changing standard of accepted dress to find out. At the end of the 19th century, men wore hats and women covered their bodies from ankle to neck with a large hat to "cap it off". When men went swimming, you might catch a glimpse of shin or forearm, but the hat usually stayed on. When women went for a dip, there was little point in changing their clothes at all, since the swimsuits of the day were about as revealing as a mummy-wrap. However, as time moved on, standards changed and soon women were showing off their ankles and wrists, then their calves and elbows and by the fifties, it wasn’t too uncommon to see a woman’s midriff – even on television.
Today, women at the beach (and, unfortunately, men too) are wearing little more than 6-8 square inches of suit to cover their bodies. So what has changed, our bodies or our mindsets? When someone draws a line in the sand and demands that no one cross it, most people will not cross it – at first. But soon, someone comes along who pushes the line a little and if they are not crushed for doing so, someone else will then push the line a little further. And so on until the line is just a distant memory.
As for horror movies, it used to be enough to tell a story in a frightening way. People would imagine much worse than could be shown on the big screen and come away with satisfaction. But after decades of the same tired stories being told over and over, people want more and the producers and directors of these morally-lacking films seem happy to provide it. It’s no longer enough to imply murder and torture, you have to see every intricate detail in all its nightmarish glory and that’s where my understanding starts to fail. Why, with all the unspeakable horror in the world, would anyone be interested in watching someone get faux-mutilated by a faux-psychopath? Is it an escape for certain people? Is it a stress-reliever of some kind? Is it a way for people to deal with all the real abominations that occur so regularly around us while knowing that what they’re seeing is not real at all?
I do enjoy a good psychological thriller – something that makes you think. I don’t enjoy a "good" slasher film because I don’t believe there are many out there. I personally don’t find "in-your-face" destruction of a human body, real or otherwise, entertaining. I have no desire to see people being torn apart, cut up, tortured and abused, burned alive, or any other nauseating method of execution. There is far too much of that happening around us all the time for me to derive entertainment from a silver screen dramatization of these crimes. Watching people graphically killed in movies isn’t too far a cry from watching it occur in real life – yet another thing I have no interest in viewing. However, if you’re heading down to the beach, count me in. There’s no such thing as too much skin.
Well… OK, that’s not true – I’ve seen my share of "abominations" at the beach as well, but they weren’t nauseating. Well… OK, that’s not true either - some of the sights were stomach-turning, but they never gave me nightmares. Well…
