I’m sure it says something about me that with the exception of Doomsday—Doomsday!–I can’t remember the last time I went to a movie that made me feel good. I’m talking about feeling good thanks to what happens in film, of course, not the film’s quality. I’ve certainly seen plenty of good and even great movies in recent months, movies that make me feel good the way all great art does. But the vast majority of films I’ve chosen to see in the theater since 2005–this includes The Ruins, Rambo, Cloverfield, The Mist, I Am Legend, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Eastern Promises, Hostel Part II, 28 Weeks Later, Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Host, King Kong, A History of Violence, War of the Worlds, and Land of the Dead–are about making the audience feel the emotional effects of cruelty, brutality, violence, and despair in some combination or other. Checking my review-link sidebar over on the lefthand side of the page I see that I also saw some movies that are slightly less interested in making one feel awful, like Dragon Wars and Grindhouse and Shoot ‘Em Up, but they were too crappy to make me leave the theater whistling a happy tune, and at any rate I’m stretching it with Grindhouse, while Shoot ‘Em Up is in many ways more bothersome than your average torture-porn flick, and needless to say all three were violent. Hell, even my feel-good flick contained a viral semi-apocalypse and dismemberments galore, while the most recent one before that was 300, which is in the same boat.

Looking back on all those movies, I would guess that becoming a horror blogger has influenced what I consider to be “must-sees” in the theater. And hey, that’s fine. Back when I did my first horrorblogging marathon while this was still mostly a comics blog, I very consciously was trying to reconnect with the genre that had given me so much enjoyment as I discovered it late in high school and throughout college. Making this a full-time horror blog was done with that in mind as well. I mean, I like being the guy with a Hellraiser T-shirt on at opening night of Cloverfield. I like being the guy my friends and co-workers turn to when they want an “authoritative” opinion about the adaptation of The Mist or I Am Legend. Moreover, I simply enjoy seeing movies in the theater. It’s one of my favorite things to do, and since horrorblogging (for me at least) is largely a subset of filmblogging, I do it a lot now, which is great.

But there have been times recently when the lights go down and the trailers roll and the opening credits finally start and I wonder to myself what it would feel like to have this experience knowing that I’m not going to see people get brutally killed in the next 90 minutes. I’ve actually forgotten!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.