* I’ve seen a lot of OUTRAGE from horror fandom about the recent successes of PG-13 horror movies, perhaps best represented by the Prom Night remake from a few weeks back. Most of it consists of mouthbreathingly simplistic “BLOOD AND TITS EQUALS WIN”-type extreme-mongering rather than any kind of informed consideration of whether PG-13 movies might possibly be scary. But B-Sol at Vault of Horror takes an entirely different view of the problem with PG-13: They’re slasher movies explicitly geared at young teenagers.
* Jim Henley defends 24 against the accusation that it’s directly responsible for torture at Gitmo and elsewhere, as recent reports have claimed. I totally agree with Jim: as with other cases involving movie-inspired violence, I think it’s a case of people predisposed to violence gravitating toward violent art, not violent art inspiring violence in the first place. And while I don’t give a good goddamn about the show itself, some regular viewers in Jim’s comment thread point out temporal discrepancies in terms of what was going on in the series by the point it was supposedly inspiring torture techniques.
* Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley reviews Cloverfield! I think he’s right about the film’s visceral impact and wrong in saying the characters aren’t vapid (man, that’s kind of leaving things wide open for people with the same complaint about SP, isn’t it?), but you’ve gotta love his disclaimer:
Note to complainers: don’t take this as an invitation to pontificate on why you hated this movie, because I don’t actually care
* This week’s Horror Roundtable is all about horror movies we remember watching as kids. Between the Roundtable proper and the comment thread, the moral of the story is clearly that everyone loves The Monster Squad and The Blob.
I appreciate the fact that the new PG-13 horror flicks are being toned down for a younger audience – and I don’t particularly much care about the defanging of a particularly useless slasher exercise like Prom Night either. But when I read that The Stepfather and Fright Night – two genre flicks that I enjoy for entirely different reasons – are on the list of proposed PG-ed remakes, I can’t help cringing a little.
I don’t think 24 is responsible for direct actions, as if you can make a straight line from Keifer to Gitmo. But I do believe normalizing something in mass media makes people regard something as more acceptable than they normally would.
Ah yes.. and I did take umbrage with PG-13 rated horror back in the day, but that was because of the rating’s tendency to defang the genre in order to score the sacred teenage dollar.
Horror films were being dumbed down for kids, and nothing was left for actual adults to enjoy
The thing to remember about 24 is that even if the show glorifies torture, the guy who does the torture continually pays a heavy price for saving the day. Jack Bauer, no matter how “cool” he is, has lost everything and then some since the show started.