Healthy Horror By
HENRY P. RALEIGH I’VE
JUST READ that a professor of psychiatry at Harvard’s School of
Medicine has come out in support of a recent spate of horror films
— “Saw” and “Hostel” are good examples though I guess most
films of this genre would fit the professor’s argument. There have
always been horror films. “The Cabinet of Caligari”, “The Golem”,
and “Nosferatu” scared the pants off audiences in the early ‘20s.
The first “Dracula” with Bela Lugosi had me hiding under the theater
seat when I was a kid. The professor, however, is particularly interested
in those films of the past few years that form a sub-genre popularly
known as “gorno” — an illuminating union of gore and pornography,
you see. Buckets
of gore are pretty much a staple of horror films; throwing in a
liberal dose of pornography apparently raises the artistic —
and according to the professor — therapeutic benefits. The
professor is a Freudian by trade, a Jungian when it comes to films
and you know what that can be like. He does have a son who is prominent
among the young bunch of gorno film directors so possibly the professor
has a stake in seeing the boys off to a good start. If he has paid
his son’s way through a film school, I figure he’d like to see some
return on a hefty investment. Having a son of my own in a similar
program, I know what it’s like and don’t blame him one bit. Curiously,
these filmmakers dislike the label ‘gorno’ yet they don’t seem to
object to the collective term for them used by critics — ‘The
Splat Pack.’ Now
the professor thinks that these films give us an outlet for some
downright questionable ideas lurking shamefacedly there in our unconscious
minds. You know, the kinds of things you wouldn’t want your mother
to stumble over when tidying up your room — and you most likely
don’t want to know yourself. Once they’re projected in the screen
though, boy, do you feel a whole lot better even if you’re not sure
why — maybe it was the popcorn or that Snickers Bar. I’m not
sure how this is supposed to work — the porno part sounds
OK. I suppose if the old “Dracula” had a few spicy scenes —
the vampire ladies chasing Renfield didn’t really cut it —
I wouldn’t have spent so much time under the seat. The professor’s
notion is that gorno films safely actualize to beat the band all
that grubby material that infests our dreams and has nothing to
do with Snickers Bars. He has a point there, all right. I’ve given
this some thought and it occurs to me that a very basic issue that
got tucked away in our unconscious is fear of camping out with teenagers. This
is an unusually common plot in horror films beginning at least with
Wes Craven’s “The Hills Have Eyes”, right through the “Friday the
13th” series and up to “Cabin Fever.” It must be, I figure,
that our ancestors long ago found that teenagers out in the open
were something to steer clear of and rather than worrying about
it all the time decided to bury the matter in the Id. And if you
want to consider cannibalism, another horror film favorite since
“Night of the Living Dead” and ever after, then we might guess that
some of those ancestors simply had enough of teenagers and ate them. There
are a few porno situations that really don’t actualize anything
for me. I can’t recall ever having been trapped in a bathroom with
a maniac and chainsaw, but I’ll ask around my relatives. There are
one of two that could fit the bill — well, the maniac with
the chainsaw, at any rate. Burning off faces with a blowtorch doesn’t
ring a bell either. The professor is more up to date on these things
than I am. I suppose there are younger generations who have been
adding to humanity’s hidden store of unspeakable acts so I would
have missed out on those. To tell the truth, I don’t believe the
Splat Pack would want to actualize any of my dreams unless they
could make something of a man standing on the downtown side platform
of the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station when what he wanted was the uptown
side at Borough Hall. Being lost in Brooklyn can be pretty terrifying,
you must admit. I have another in which Paulette Goddard is singing
the ‘Caisson Song’ but I suppose that would only be good for the
porno part. Fully
aware of the psychic service their art performs for filmgoers, gorno
film directors take considerable pride in their work. As quoted
in Variety by one of the Splat Pack, “When you watch people
scream and almost vomit, it’s all worth it.”
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