Happy Halloween!
and while you’re munching your candy corn, take a look at this bit of Christian writing on horror films (”How Monsters reveal what Matters Most):
From Halloween, to Predator, to Silence of the Lambs, to Terminator, even to the supernatural mayhem of The Evil Dead, when the “good guys” win it feels less and less like a noble victory and more and more like survival of the fittest. And, thanks to the tiresome preponderance of the “double ending” — in which the psycho sits back up again with fifty bullets, two butcher knives, three cork screws, and two pipe bombs in him — the “good guys” almost never win. No matter how spectacular or artful the film may be, one leaves the theater — virtually every single time — feeling like you’ve barely survived a bone-crunching car wreck. Not like a spectator who found himself drawn into a soul-stirring battle.
This is partly because, under the shadow of materialism, there is no place for the moral “absolutes” that once gave fire and dignity to Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing in the Hammer vampire films. As Tom Hutchinson has noted, “A deeply sincere man, [Cushing] once said that he fervently believed that the reason the kind of horror films in which he was involved had found such favor with the public was because they were about the eternal conflict between good and evil; something he thought was too often dismissed in the other arts of contemporary days.” Well, the anti-philosophical, materialistic element only present in the “other arts” at the time of Cushing’s major films (late Fifties, early Sixties) has finally caught up with the horror film. Today, officially, there are no eternal, objective standards of good from “on high” to back up Van Helsing’s unflinching condemnation of Dracula’s corruption. (Nor is there a Christ to back up that crucifix he is carrying). Thus, even if materialism isn’t an obvious theme in modern cinematic horror, the influence is still there. And this is shown by the painfully obvious fact that filmmakers are losing their belief, not merely in the power of good to overcome evil, but in the credibility of any good at all.
