Censorship and Horror

The moral argument goes something like this: just because it happens in real life there is no reason to replicate it on film. There is no redeeming entertainment value in watching violence.

People are offended by extreme gore and violence despite knowing that horrible things happen every day. Right now, not very far from you, reader, there is a car-crash with something very bad inside. Somebody in pain and guess what? Wes Craven didn’t come up with it. It wasn’t the work of some Hollywood screenwriter, it’s real life. Also not very far from you somebody is dying on a hospital bed, in pain and fear. Welcome to reality. We know that bad things happen, but nobody wants to look at them, which is their choice, but worse than wanting to go into denial, they want you to go into denial with them. They want to force you to join them in the pretense that young women do not get raped, that serial killers do not dismember corpses, that coldblooded murder is not an entirely human and fairly regular occurrence.

Is there a redeeming value in the horror genre? Yes, it is the depiction of the things that people who are uncomfortable with life’s ugly bits seek to ignore. It is an attempt to show the nature of human existence to you, not for your amusement, but to cause the unease, the shock, the sweaty discomfort we have labeled “horror”. Yes, some people will show amusement at fake blood and fake suffering on a movie-screen. It could be that these people have no idea how bad life really is, it could be that this is their way of dealing with the knowledge of their own mortality. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what you are supposed to feel, the intent of the artists, meaning the director and the writer.

The fact is that if you can’t deal with it in your fiction then you probably can’t deal with it in real life either. You are a cowering, sorry little jellyfish who cannot handle the fact that here you are, grown up in a world full of ghouls. You are the kind of person whose kid gets abducted because you have pretended that there are no dangers for so long that you forgot to make them cautious.

The issue of torture came up recently, with a certain set on one side of the political divide advocating it. This set, coincidentally, includes the people who want the ugliness censored out of movies. They have no clue what torture is, or what the human mind can come up with when given the freedom to be cruel. They don’t know because they have kept their imaginations free from all the things that would inform it on this matter. You can argue that movies cannot adequately relate the obscenity of torture, but it’s something, it’s a template, at least. A picture of a bad thing has power, that is the argument for censoring it in the first place. The say that the picture will do bad things to the minds of the young, I say it can do good things. If you can feel disgust for the rape of a young girl in Last House on the Left or The Hills Have Eyes, then maybe you will feel disgust for the act in real life, something more than pretending that it never happened.