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Horror Films & The Mystery Of Evil

Commenting on The Exorcist at 40, Tom Hibbs contrasts that film with its successors in the horror genre. Excerpt: The modern horror film is usually traced back to the release of Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960 and to the appearance that same year of a lesser-known British film, Peeping Tom. But the horror film as we have come to […]

Commenting on The Exorcist at 40, Tom Hibbs contrasts that film with its successors in the horror genre. Excerpt:

The modern horror film is usually traced back to the release of Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960 and to the appearance that same year of a lesser-known British film, Peeping Tom. But the horror film as we have come to know it dates from the late Seventies with the release of Halloween, a low-budget film with a very slender plot that features a seemingly unstoppable malevolent force, void of personality and emotion, that engages in serial acts of inexplicable terror. This genre, in which the evildoer is often the only interesting and compelling character in the film, is subject to the law of diminishing returns. What once surprised and tormented the psyche of viewers becomes well known and expected. There are only two avenues left to the horror filmmaker at this point. Either, as happens in what is now known as torture porn, he can engage in a contest with previous filmmakers and increase the quantity and explicitness of graphic depictions of slaughter; or, as happens in the Scream trilogy, he can play upon the jaded irony of the audience and turn the horror film into a form of quasi-comedic entertainment, which spoofs the horror genre from within.

The problem with the contemporary horror film is twofold. First, abandoning plot, it relies exclusively on the surface aesthetics of evil. Second, it ignores the fact that evil can be taken seriously only so long as goodness also is.

This, he goes on to say, is because The Exorcist is not really an ooga-booga movie. It’s actually a film about the mystery of evil, and how it is that extreme malevolence lies beneath the calm surface of civilization — and how we confront it and cast it out.  Read the whole thing. 

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