Aisle 34 and 1/4

Aisle 34 & 1/4: The Bargin Movie Shelf

So I had my first class on Freakshows, interesting stuff. Now I'm not going to go through everything that we talked about, actually I'm not going to touch on a single thing discussed in class. What I want to get down is mearly an idea for some future work. So with that preamble out of the way...

Horror films. We all know I like them right? Right. I am thinking about re-examining how we view/create the villians in horror films. Over the past century there have been a number of horror films and many, many different types of monsters. Some have been serial killers who were twisted from the inside by a multitude of affects. Others were unearthly, or mythic, creatures that when we examin them we can see archetypes that resemble the very core of the human condition. Then there are the villians who express are fear and repulsion to those that are different from us. The "freaks" of nature that go forth and create a world of pain for unsuspecting teenagers.

I know of a few studies on the psychological construction of cinematic villians and a small handful of works that look at the cultural symbols located in horror films. The later of these works tend to look at the overall horror film as a symbol for moralistic Western theories. Horror films, in this view, are placed on the level of moral stories, parablles and cautionary tales. If you want to survive a horror film and have premarital sex, drink heavily and partake in one or two drugs that are frowned upon by the establishment then your hopes of survival are slim to none. Some serial/slasher villians can be seen as anti-christ characters. Anti-Christ in the way that they cause missery to those around them and when killed tend to rise from the grave.

I want to look at the killers. Examine how they are created, villified and how they work as symbols in our society. I hypothosize that when you view these characters in a non-moralistic way you can see these films as a key to infer how our society looks at those that are different from us.

I'm not planing on discussing sci-fi or any films involving aliens as that can open a whole new bag. A film's portrayal of aliens and their interactions with humans can inform us on how we view immigrations or on a totally diferent plane, in films where aliens make use of mind control of a populace (see Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Pod People, among others) might be able to be seen as a visualization of our fears of an over controlling government that is alien to us (the nation that cries out for freedom of speach and equal rights, regardless of how our government actual conducts itself these have been two ideals that we as a people have strove to make a reality). These are all things I could look at, but for now I just want to focus on the horror genre.

Take the incredibly crappy film Wrong Turn, in which a group of city folk get stuck in the wilderness and are hunted by monsters that turn out to be mutant imbred mountain people. Honestly it's a bastardization of the story Deliverance only less ass raping and more axe chucking (rape is replaced with savage killings, interesting change when you look at America's adversion towards sex but embracement of violence). The monsters of Wrong Turn are an overblown stereotype held of backwoods country folk (i.e. they all be a breed of imbreds who have little morals, of course this is hardly the case in reality). The same could be construed to a more recent horror film The Descent where we find rural C.H.U.D.s (Canibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers) which we can asume came about from a group of mountain folk retreating to the deep recesses of the caves and slowly evolution and imbreeding creates the pasty, monsterous troll like creatures we find in the film. All of this is my interpritation of the film as it made no attempt to explain the origins of the "Crawlers" (as they are refered to in the credits)at any point (possibly why this film doesn't fall flat on its face as a scary movie, and why Wrong Turn failed horribly, the explination of the origin of a rediculous monster).

I think this may end up being two studies. One on the cultural symbolism of the villians in horror films and the second on how the films choose to villify the "monsters." Then again both topics inform eachother and would be interesting to combine. Though that will be a long ass paper I think.

Question is... would any of you read something like that? Do you think that any of these arguments have any credibility or am I just blowing smoke into the wind, or up my ass, which is a feat as I'm not entierly super flexible.