Cat People. Village of the Damned. The Horror of Dracula. Night of the Demon. The Exorcist. Even though we watch some of these films and find some of the scenes to be comical, all of these movies were viewed as extremely scary when they first came out. Audiences were shocked at some of the things they saw in the theater. Some people fainted upon first seeing The Exorcist because they had never seen anything like it.
How could people have reactions like this if they do not believe that it is actually happening or could ever happen? Carroll’s explanation for this paradox of fiction says that it is the thought of something that arouses our emotions. In horror, the thought of the monster inspires us to be art-horrified. We do not have to suspend our beliefs so that believe that what we are seeing is real or pretend to be afraid. We are actually frightened by the thought of the horror. All of this is not based on the reality of a vampire or werewolf that is attacking people, but on the thought of the impure creature and what it could do.
In the past, psychological horrors such as Cat People were very successful at invoking fear in the audience. When Cat People first came out in 1942, audiences were able to imagine the threat of Irena turning into a dangerous cat and were frightened. Similarly, although Dracula is never shown actually sucking anyone’s blood, audience members have to use their imaginations in picturing how the vampire really takes his victims.
Watching more recent horror movies is an almost completely different than watching earlier ones. People are used to being scared now and the shock value of many films has disappeared. Films are saturated with guts and gore, and because of new technologies, they have more realistic looking monsters. This leads to us becoming immune to the effects of horrors. We have no imagination and are not affected by suggestions of monsters because we do not see them.
When we see a movie such as The Horror of Dracula today, we laugh at scenes that were once horrifying. Certainly the thought of a vampire inspires some fear in us, but that fear is dispelled when we see the lack of special effects in the movie. Exposed to sunlight and a cross made out of two candlesticks, Dracula turns to dust and disappears. Past audiences may have seen this as horrifying, but today’s audience thinks it is comical. Many other B horror movies had a man in a rubber suit as a monster. Obviously, we do not see this as scary today and often laugh aloud. This is because we are used to much more sophisticated animation and special effects.
Horror has entered into a new era as a result of the immunity of audiences to any monster they can produce. In the movie Targets, Boris Karloff is shown as an old man with no place in horror movies anymore because Gothic horror is being replaced with modern horror. It is the same with horrifying, supernatural monsters today. They are being replaced by serial killers and psychopaths. To many people today, it is much scarier to think about a person whom they cannot explain than it is to think about a monster they cannot explain, but know is fictional.
Hopefully this shift to being unable to be horrified by horror movies does not go any further. What would happen if teenagers who long for the thrill and fascination of horror did not feel any art-horror while watching scary movies? If audiences become immune to even the blood and guts in movies and violent video games, where will the genre of horror turn then? With no imagination to entertain the thought of evil things, maybe the only thing that will cause people to feel horrified is an actual serial killer, and then eventually that probably will not even affect them anymore. Since audiences viewing old horror movies find them comical, I wonder what will happen when the slasher movies of today become old and the genre has to find another way to art-horrify people. Will they be able to do it, or have we just become immune to that kind of stuff?
Erin Baumgartner
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