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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

"Holy shit!" - The scariest movie you've ever seen

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15:41 / 19.06.06

Why is violence always more acceptable than sex?

(almost a rhetorical question)

Our culture places violence as less offensive than sex through systems of conditions or morality plays. Violence is the stick to keep people in line. Stories which show this are currently acceptable.
Righteous violence (war propaganda) and the uber nasty 'deserved' violence due to crossing a line (scantily clad=rape/teen sex=death) are sadly seen as permissible because they are reaffirming a social taboo.
Where it came from is most likely a judeo-christian value system at the roots of our western cultures.

makes me recall the line from Apocalypse Now about not being able to write 'fuck' on the bombers....

17:53 / 19.06.06

My own thoughts on violence being more acceptable than rape in movies:

Violence can lead to death which is inevitable for everyone. Thus violence can be seen as accelerating the occurence of something which is not variable. Guns just cause Death to chokeslam you.

Sex, on the other hand, can lead to rape. Rape is seen as an unnatural occurence of sex and one that shouldn't have to happen.

Thus, violence is an unnatural increasing of the natural. Rape is just unnatural.

21:29 / 19.06.06

I'm suprised the Innocents hasn't been mentioned yet - it normally does when we get round to Teh Horrors. One seriously eery film.

It was on at the NFT for those in or around london. It's finished, but I think it may be extended - try and check it out on the big screen!

Without giving too much away, the film centres around a governess/nanny (as copied by The Others) who, in charge of two children, starts to think they're possessed by the previous nanny and the old head groundsman, who were lovers and are now dead. The beauty of it, a little like the book (The Turn of the Screw) is that you never know what's real and what isn't. Are the kids possessed? Is the sexually repressed governess putting her own frustrations onot teh children?

What really makes it creepy is both the watching and staring of the ghostly apparitions of the dead lovers (note that the governess only sees them after she has seen photos of them, and that every time they appear, no-one else admits to seeing them). The paranoia is built up by some great imagery (finding a cherub statue in garden only to have a beetle come out of its mouth) and some touches that I suppose are now cliche (a smiling clown in one scene), but they are done perfectly (except perhaps the sequence when she has the candle, which is a bit too much in favour of the supernatural) and the noir lighting works perfectly to add to what you don't see - its all in your mind: and possibly hers too.

What really makes the film though are the kids, especially Miles. For a child, he manages to put across a sinister knowing maturity behind his innocence. The scenes that show miles' sexual urges are quite disturbing for a 1961 film. It all adds up to a psychological build up and climactic ending that leaves you smacked around the gob. The only problem with that is that you forget how much your hairs stood up on the back of your neck whilst you were watching it.

15:23 / 20.06.06

On the violence vs sex thing, I suspect it has a lot to with violence being the force behind power, and sex being something that power (often) seeks to control. Hence the grand tradition of frowning upon but not entirely condemning violence, and the not so grand tradition of simply frowning upon sex. I reckon there's probably something in there about women enjoying sex too, but I'll leave that for those better versed in the mysteries of Feminism.

Trips, what about hideous acts of violence other than rape? Why are they let off lightly (and I would contend that they often are)?

15:34 / 20.06.06

Kay, a little more detail on your shortest scary moment might not go amiss. I suspect I know to what you refer, however.

Anything to do with toy soldiers?

The Natural Way

17:19 / 27.06.06

The bag lady, being everything Hollywood is not DEFINES Hollywood. That's why she's 'controlling everything'. She's the ghost haunting and demarcating the margins.

The Natural Way

17:19 / 27.06.06

Above w/ reference to Mulholland Drive stuff.

17:51 / 27.06.06

1) I'm a HUGE chicken when it comes to scary movies, so I hardly ever watch them, but my cousin made me watch the old Twilight Zone movie with him when I was twelve. My pants had to be burned. It's that trapped, paranoid, what's real and what isn't thing that gets me. Pet Cemetary also left me crying and huddled in my cousin's arms.

2) The birthday party scene in Signs. You KNOW that something is about to pop up, and you think you're ready for it and will manage not to scream like a little girl, but you do anyway.

3) The Blair Witch Project. The fact that you never actually see anything, no gore, no deaths, no witches, added to being told beforehand that it was real had me sleeping with my parents for weeks.

4) Dawn of the Dead and all the other zombie movies of long ago and far away. Gore and mangled limbs and staggering drunk zombies are scary when you're ten and the most blood you've ever seen is from a papercut.

I'm aware that all of the movies listed above were about the least-scary movies in the history of cinema, but like I said, I'm the world's biggest chicken when it comes to scary movies

17:54 / 27.06.06

Violence more acceptable than sex?
Well in the horror movie genre (slasher pics etc), historically, those women (well it's usually women) who are deemed to be sexually deviant are punished, aren't they? The heroine follows a pretty strictured codified set of behaviours and is normally more akin to the good wife in film-noir as oppossed to the femme fatale. And thinking of film-noir sexually aggressive women get a pretty bad deal there too (but that's really another thread).

But isn't a certain type of horror movie all about virginal purity versus base misogyny? Christian instinctual renunciation in women versus a pagan bloodletting in men? These type of movies even have a massive dependency on the phallic imagery of the knife.... and the whole thing is usually a big caveat about the dangers of sex, not taking candy from strangers etc.
Maybe.....

Why someone might be sent out of the room for a sex scene rather than one filled with violence I couldn't be sure. Unless the movie sets up illicit sex as the real social ill/danger? It seems too easy an answer, though.

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