The theme of last week’s edition of This American Life was “the fear of sleep.” One story was an adult remembering his two-years of fear-based insomnia after accidentally watching The Shining at the tender age of six. This is a fairly common experience – children being exposed to horror movies.
But is it simply a case of exposing a child to something for which he or she is not ready? Or is something deeper wrong with horror movies? I’m mature enough to acknowledge that not everyone has the same values as me, and it is obvious enough that many nice people enjoy that particular genre, but it all seems fairly disgusting. The nicest thing I can say about the writers, producers, and consumers of horror movies is that they seem to me to have something terribly wrong with their desires.
When I see a commercial for a horror movie, I often think of Paul’s admonishment to think about things that are beautiful and praiseworthy. Of course there is a time to face hard truths. I recently saw Slumdog Millionaire, and have thought a lot about the scene where the kid gets his eyes burned out so he will be a better beggar. This is horrible to be sure, but there is a fundamental difference between these sorts of movies and horror movies. In the former case, the problems are problems that we can hope to solve. We can give money to organizations like the International Justice Mission who break up this kind of human trafficking. Movies like Slumdog heighten our desire to lighten the suffering of others.
Horror movies, on the other hand, are usually about things that are imaginary. Hauntings, vampires, Freddy Kruger killing in dreams, blood rushing out of the elevator (that happened on The Shining, apparently). These are things that we can’t do anything about. It appears then, that lovers of horror movies love meditating on evil – not for the sake of conquering that evil (Slumdog), but because it brings them pleasure.
What can we say about someone who gets their jollies from meditating on horror and evil? I wish I could be nicer about this, but lovers of evil have always made me think of lovers of child pornography. In both cases, the lover has desires that have been twisted and are incomprehensible and sickening. I wonder how many children have been damaged by horror movies?
Sorry if I just called you a pervert. If you would like to talk about it, my cell is 555-555-1234.
