* 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.

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