[Sethomas]

Actually, I watched a documentary a few years ago called "The American Nightmare". It talked about the age of horror films from roughly Night of the Living Dead to Halloween or Day of the Dead or whatever the most recent was, and it talked about the level of social consciousness that was displayed in them. The element of fear was used as a cultural medium. This is why Night of the Living Dead was seriously one of the most culturally stirring movies of all time--in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, they made a movie about a black man that takes charge in an insane environment and ultimately gets killed by white trash. Day of the Dead, was that the one that mostly took place inside a mall? Anyways, that was a harsh commentary on how materialistic society had shifted ASAP after the radicalization of the Vietnam Era.

The present horror situation is just retarded. I've seen few such films, most recently The Hills have Eyes. It's just pornography for a different kind of masturbation, except it doesn't have the integrity of self-awareness as seen in sexual pornography.

If you aren't already aware, I was put on a bad combination of medications years ago that caused me to be batshit insane for a while. I had to suffer visualizations of eviscerating random people, often while I was holding conversations with them. I couldn't concentrate while listening to one guy because every time he talked I was fixated on what his face would look like with his cheeks ripped off. Having a young buff professor once, my attention span was limited in class because I couldn't look at him without wondering how I'd cook his pectoral muscles. See that obese guy? I wonder how long fat would drip from his fingers if he were burned at the stake. I had one medication change that fixed this, but when I went to yet another change I lost any sense of free will I had and drove 150 miles to murder an essentially random target just so I'd stop thinking about it. Thank God, I was stopped by two police officers that pulled me over for having a burned-out tail light. I knew that the right thing to do would be to admit to these problems, and once I did I probably permanently fucked up my future.

So, really, I've seen enough gore to last anyone a lifetime in my mental theater. When I see it recreated under the guise of "cinematic art", I just get the impression that some people never grew up out of middle school gore fantasies. Tarantino isn't an artist, he's a 12-year-old with a talent for dialog.

So, yeah, the obvious retort is "so what, not everyone is as fucked up as you". Whatever. Obviously people are going to do whatever makes them money, but that doesn't mean society isn't a collective of morons in allowing them to do as much with computer-generated brain splatters.