I think something is going to give very soon. I mean, when Fangoria, which is a magazine I’ve loved for many years now, on the cover–maybe in relation to “Hostel 2,” and I’m not sure–has the headline, “Has Horror Gone Too Far?” From Fangoria magazine? I mean this is–hello. This is outrageous, an outrageous thing for Fangoria to be asking. But I believe it’s asking for a legitimate reason because what I’m gonna call horror porn, which is what I think some of these torture pictures are, the “Hostels” for instance…And “Saw.” This is stuff which presents–you’re there to see one thing and one thing only, just as you are when you see a porn movie. Don’t tell me you’re there for the story, mate, ’cause I ain’t believing you. [Laughs.] My point is that the “Hostel” stories don’t begin until somebody has already been caught and tied up or whatever else. In even the Camp Crystal Lake adventures [the “Friday the 13th” movies], there was an element of excitement as to, is she gonna get away? Are they going out to the same woods to make love as the two who proceeded them? There was that tension. There’s something about the “Hostel” movies–I’ve only seen the first one, though I’ve seen it two or three times partly because I admired Roth from “Cabin Fever”–that I thought “Boy, is this a cynical exercise or is this somebody being very smart, or both? Or is it something where he’s just decided that this is the best way to scare people?”…And I found that I wasn’t scared so much, just slightly disgusted at myself. Now, that’s just me. Everybody makes their own judgments. But I think eventually people are going to say there just isn’t enough to hold me for 90 minutes to watch this. There isn’t enough humanity in it. Do you know what I mean?
–My hero Clive Barker, characterizing Hostel in a way that I don’t think is at all fair, in the latest installment of a truly epic interview with N’Gai Croal of Newsweek‘s video game blog Level Up. As you might have guessed from the venue it focuses primarily on Barker’s new game Jericho and his ongoing debate over the artistic merits of video games with Roger Ebert, but from there it branches out into pretty much every conceivable place it could go. It’s a must-read conversation with a guy who’s not just one of the best horror artists around, but also one of its best thinkers.
And there’s at least one more part in the offing, apparently.
(Via Ken Bromberg.)
PS: Click here to find out why Barker is wrong about Hostel.
Carnival of souls
* The same IRL issues that have prevented me from doing a lot of blogging over the past few days have also prevented me from seeing Iron Man, which I think makes me one of five people online who haven’t….