GOOD READ: Mourning Through Horror Movies – The New Yorker:
Aaron Orbey actually summarized why since my own childhood I also took more to horror movies than other genres.. And I agree with him, the goriest movies actually were not the scariest, instead the deem and dreadfully painfully accurate horror movies are among those that I can only watch one time..
The money quote from his very well written article in NEW YORKER:
We say of most tragedies that enough time will distance us. As the years have elapsed, I’ve continued searching for the worst I can witness onscreen, testing myself with images of agony that seem crueller than my own, worlds in which the unthinkable is valid. I’ve never gotten around to seeing “Forrest Gump,” but I’ve savored “The Forest,” in which an American woman tracks her troubled twin sister to the haunted woods of Aokigahara. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” is still on my list of films to see, but I rather liked “Dead Snow,” in which Nazi zombies terrorize seven Norwegian vacationers on the slopes of Øksfjord. No carnage can startle me these days, but smaller sights—a toddler asleep, slanted on his dad’s chest—might bring me to tears. When I Google my father, the Turkish word for murder auto-fills after his name.
The worst pain still takes me to theatres, where I sit alone—no snacks—always by the exit, in case of emergency. Since the mass shooting in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, I have begun watching for gunmen, turning around as each latecomer sneaks in during previews. The most frightening movies, I’ve found, are rarely the goriest. In “The Babadook,” a black-hatted monster torments a grieving woman who struggles to raise a son after the sudden death of her husband. In the film’s final scenes, the widow locks the Babadook in the basement, where she must retreat, daily, to bring it something to eat. Like most haunting spirits, hers doesn’t ever vanish. She has to keep seeing it, keep feeding it, in order to leave it behind.
