What's your reckoning on this topic? We've come a long, long way from the days of good guys were white hats and bad guys were black hats, vampires arent depraved, perverted and unnatural revenants anymore so much as X-Men like and romanticised figures of human love and affect or at least envy.
I've read in the past about how all the traditional horror writing and universal studios style monster flicks and their emulators are a kind of anthropomorphism, we depict the worst of human attributes in an objectified "other" which is eventually subdued, overcome or killed by the best of human attributes in the form of an objectified "hero". If that's the case then what's happening now? Is it just a more mature recognition of that old say that:-
There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly behooves any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
Edward Wallis Hoch, Marion (Kansas) Record
(1849 - 1925)
Or is it just a sort of post-modern cynicism? I tend to find the abandonment of black-white reasoning too quickly to be alienating, often a more ambiguous, amorphious, either-or and its all six and half a dozen (or two sixes as I've heard said recently) reasoning is cowardly.
It makes me think, I only recently saw all the Nightmare on Elm street movies, when I was younger they terrified me, even the cardboard cut outs in the video shops but I still rationalised the monsters featured in them as monsters, as fitting the traditional frame of good vs. evil but as time went on the monsters themselves became kind of celebrities (something that Wes Craven tried to portray with Freddy meeting his fans in New Nightmare) which confused things.
Now there's movies like Saw which contain monsterous acts but have seriously blurred lines of good and evil, the content seems real S&M most of the time. Anyone got a view?
I've read in the past about how all the traditional horror writing and universal studios style monster flicks and their emulators are a kind of anthropomorphism, we depict the worst of human attributes in an objectified "other" which is eventually subdued, overcome or killed by the best of human attributes in the form of an objectified "hero". If that's the case then what's happening now? Is it just a more mature recognition of that old say that:-
There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly behooves any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
Edward Wallis Hoch, Marion (Kansas) Record
(1849 - 1925)
Or is it just a sort of post-modern cynicism? I tend to find the abandonment of black-white reasoning too quickly to be alienating, often a more ambiguous, amorphious, either-or and its all six and half a dozen (or two sixes as I've heard said recently) reasoning is cowardly.
It makes me think, I only recently saw all the Nightmare on Elm street movies, when I was younger they terrified me, even the cardboard cut outs in the video shops but I still rationalised the monsters featured in them as monsters, as fitting the traditional frame of good vs. evil but as time went on the monsters themselves became kind of celebrities (something that Wes Craven tried to portray with Freddy meeting his fans in New Nightmare) which confused things.
Now there's movies like Saw which contain monsterous acts but have seriously blurred lines of good and evil, the content seems real S&M most of the time. Anyone got a view?