The horror genre seems to be showing up more around me. I am fine with that. I don’t have anything against it other than a lack of understanding why people would want to expose themselves to it. I know people do and I accept that. But I have to be very careful what I let into my experience.
I saw the trailer for the Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd with Johnny Depp last night. I am familiar with the basic idea of the story from being around the theatre. The trailer looked interesting and, hey, it is Tim Burton, I should be able to handle it. It looks cool.
But my mind has other notions. I dreamed I went to see the movie and was so completely creeped out I had to run out of the theater. I have a very clear visual of Johnny Depp’s version of Sweeney Todd pushing an upright body through a spinning saw blade splitting the body in half. That part wasn’t that bad. It was that Todd used his body to do the pushing and the blade cut into his sternum and he found it fascinating. That he was doing all this killing and cutting to see what it was like and with each one, he got closer and closer to doing it to himself. I had to leave the theater at that point because I couldn’t take any more. And I felt horrible doing so. Like I was abandoning something or someone. Like I would be stuck at that point of the story from then on and it would never end. But I couldn’t face the “real” ending. So I was left in a horrible limbo.
I still have a hard time figuring out which images my memory has that is from the actual trailer and from my dream of the movie. They have the same quality. My dream was that vivid and well produced.
My imagination is just too good. It will take things and run with them and sometimes there is no difference between memories of reality and fantasy. Typically I will have to consciously have to put a mental marker on things and say “that was a dream” to make the designation. And I can still be haunted by images that are horrific. I don’t like being scared.
I realized how low level my horror threshold is when I saw the Horror/Comedy House in the 80′s and had nightmares about being caught in the vines in the jungle in Vietnam. Turns out I was tangled in the sheets on the bed. I have very few nightmares so this is significant.
The odd opposite of this is that I don’t seem to have a problem with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Something about it makes it ok for me to read.
So these are some of the reasons I can very careful about what I let into my head. The idea of wanting to put Horror in there strikes me as a bad idea.
I’m more of a suspense person myself…and a few years back I discovered I can no longer watch any of the Aliens films or a wake up screaming….which is too bad cause the first two films are great!!
So with you here… my mind is just a little to fertile and creative… we were watching some dumb “the planet is over heating” doomsday movie on sunday and it just got to be too much… that whole humanity has gone ferral and nasty stuff gets me quick. *yick* blowing things up I can do – it was why we were watching the stupid thing in the first place – SciFi channel was doing “destroy the earth” day apparently. And when the booms happen all is good… but this thing was all gory and yick.
I reeeeaaaaly want to see Sweeny Todd… but I am betting that a movie theater is the wrong place to do it… something that intense takes spoons to watch these days (for me at least) … *le sigh*…. at home, with the remote and the lights on I think I will be ok.
Actually, House, for all the comedy in it, has some pretty suspenseful moments to it, and is highly underrated as a horror movie.
Now, House 2: The Second Story (which has nothing to do with the first, actually), is a movie you might be able to handle.
Horror films, the type that require several gallons of blood to tell their story, are simply the make-a-big-buck-for-the-producers movies that cater to an audience that is jaded beyond belief.
Some movies actually have a valid reason for guts and gore. The opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan set-up a story and character development that are required to make the movie something more than a traditional war movie.
Horror movies that don’t have a reason, other then the need excite the people who enjoy buckets of blood, are trash and should be avoided.
And, I note with a wry smile, that the people who proclaim porn as the ‘ultimate evil’ have not a single pause in accepting splatterfilms as “okay”
You aren’t alone in your feelings, trust me.
I’ve long said that I don’t mind going to a movie and being scared – that’s what some sorts of movies are designed to do. However, any movie I see that make me feel like I wanna lose it in the popcorn bucket just isn’t my type of flick. As a result, I give a pass on pretty much all of the horror genre unless there’s something quite remarkable beyond the gore to make me want to see it. (Army of Darkness comes to mind here. ;D )
That said, I have watched a number of the splatter films – Hellraiser and the like – on video . . . I hit fast forward whenever it starts to get icky and, once the footage is racing past and the people are moving like Keystone Kops, I’m not squicked out. Now, mind, I’ve still not seen whole bits of the Alien movies as I start checking out the upholstery of the seat in front of my and looking for loose change on the floor whenever things start to get icky.
(Oh, yeah, and ask Valentina some day how she enjoyed Jurassic Park the first time! She was still a preteen and I’d already read the book. I had the gore in my head from the printed page so, whenever the music got particularly ominous, my hand was in front of her eyes! She *may* have seen half the movie in the theater the first time.) (She later went back on her own and came home to tell me – to my horror – that she’d seen it and it wasn’t bad at all. Did I mention that *I* was also averting my eyes when I blocked her view?)
Those of us who grew up with books have this annoying thing called an imagination! ;D
I’m in pretty much the same boat. I have to be careful what kind of humorous horror I watch.
And I understand the if-I-don’t-see-the-end-I’m-stuck problem as well, which is why if I watch enough of a horror movie to learn the plot, I really do need to know how it’s resolved in order to let go of it.
I’ve seen a couple movies all the way through that I wish I hadn’t, but I had to follow it through to the end.
–Ember–