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All blood and no guts...

**helen****helen** Deactivated Posts: 9,235 Supreme Poster
edited January 2023 in General Chat
...is how Jessica feels about horror films. Have a read of her rant and let us know your views. :)
Post edited by JustV on

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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I haven't seen Hostel, but in the case of Saw, the premise of the film isn't about getting people to do unspeakably disgusting and then watching them. It's about giving someone a dilemma which leads them to doing unspeakably disgusting things themselves. It's the psychological element that makes to an exciting film, not the gore. Whether it succeeds or not is another question, but to see it as "torture porn" misses the point.

    I agree that films which are purely about creating as much violence are shit, and there are a lot of film that are like this. Most of them came in the 70s and 80s though. The likes of I Spit On Your Grave and Last House On The Left simply set up a scenario for people to be killed in as gruesome a way as possible, and naturally you did this by making it a revenge movie. And what would they be getting revenge for? Another gruesome and drawn out act of someone being tortured (in this case, a woman being repeatedly raped and then killed).

    But most of these cliches surrounding horror movies come out of genuinely brilliant films that just happen to be gory. George A Romero's films inspired most of these sorts of films, and yet as a social commentary and a thriller, his films are outstanding. Then there's the likes of The Evil Dead and The Thing, where the horror is more of a comedic element, and so you get a whole host of copycat films that try for more and more gore. And finally, you get the likes of Saw, where the extreme levels of violence are used to provide an extreme dilemma for the character. And naturally, you get a load of copycat films in that vein too, that either do the same thing much more poorly, or fail to recognise that it's not the gore that makes the film good, even though it's integral to the plot.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    A lot of the more modern American films seem to focus more on torture and extreme gore. It is a form of pornography in a way. I find a film like 'Funny Games' a lot more horrific than any modern day horror, having to think about what might be going on rather than having it handed to you on a plate is much more effective.
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