I’m a little more than half done reading, “From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media and the Supernatural” by Lynn Schofield Clark, I’m really enjoying it and highly recommend it. The book has me thinking about horror movies… a genre I’ve never been able to handle… I don’t like to be scared.
I remember hearing E. Michael Jones talk about horror films as a direct challenge to modernity – his book on the topic, “Monsters from the Id.”
Jones sees the genre as a direct critique of the enlightenment as a system of control. Jones says that the exoteric message of modernity will always be freedom and liberation but the esoteric message is always bondage and control.
So, why are so many people so fascinated by horror movies?
Horror seems to counter a number of enlightenment presuppositions. One the main presuppositions the films counter is that sexuality is no big deal. In modernity sex is not sacred, it’s not intrinsically connected to offspring, or to lifelong commitment it’s just the movement of fluids and good feelings.
When I first heard Jones talk about this I thought, wait a minute there is so much sexuality horror movies, and now I am beginning to see that was Jones’ point. Horror movies assume the enlightenment ideals of sex (its just body mechanics, no one gets hurt by sleeping around, etc.) and then while the teenagers making out in the backseat of the car, or while babysitting, the “monster” gets them.
Jones argues that horror movies show that when people assume modernity’s ideals, people get hurt. And since modern Western culture as a whole cannot admit the failure of the enlightenment, sub-cultures, and alternative media, like horror films, rise to show those with ears to hear, the critique of the enlightenment.
So Jones argues, that if modernity worked we’d have no need for horror. Horror movies show that when you put the enlightenment practices to work you’re going to get hurt. One the one hand culture says “sex is no big deal,” while on the other hand it says, “hey I got hurt by this,” or some girl commits suicide after breaking up with her boyfriend, etc; two incompatible assertions. And so horror films have been created to resolve these competing notions. A fiction which states the situation as it really is but in a kind of veiled way so that the culture can still receive it.
None of this is my area of expertise, I’m just finding it interesting, at the moment.
Peace, dwight
