Date: 2009-01-07 11:42 Subject: Horror movie meta Security: Public Mood: thirsty Tags: meta movies

I just read a great article by Simon Pegg about zombies (here). It's particularly interesting to me because I was just thinking about horror movies and what makes them scary this weekend.

See, I hang out with my sister and brother-in-law every weekend. Saturday night, Ken was flipping through the channels and came across the movie Vacancy. Now, I'm generally all for watching horror, but the thirty minutes or so of this film that we watched really bothered me; not because it was particularly scary, though. Gruesome, yes, scary, not really. The reason it freaked me out was because it was all too plausible.

I have to confess, I'm not a huge fan of slasher films. It's not that blood and guts bother me: I watch zombie films with very little qualm. It's the fact that that shit could happen. There are some freaky fuckers out there, you know? And some of them want to hurt people. And that... Yeah, that scares me.

Now, my sister, on the other hand, is terrified of zombies. She watches slasher movies with no problem, but flat out refuses to watch anything with zombies outside of Shaun of the Dead (at least we got her to watch that!). And I don't get it.

Zombies and other corporeal monsters (vampires, werewolves, are entirely unscary to me. Now, if I were to see one, that would be a different story, I'm sure. But that's not going to happen. Zombies don't exist, at least not that I've ever seen. Until I learn otherwise, there seems to be no point in getting myself all worked up about them.

Now, spiritual or non-corporeal monsters are a different story for me. Although those are my favorite horror stories, they're also the ones that genuinely scare me the most. I do believe in evil, and spirits/ghosts/whatever, so, the way I see it, that's the stuff that could happen, but you can't see it coming.

Now, the cool thing about the Simon Pegg article was that it made me think about psychological associations of monsters that I hadn't actually considered before. Zombies, to Pegg, represent the inexorability of death. Ok, I can actually get that. To me, though, the monsters represent the dark sides of humanity. Zombies are indicative of the mindlessness that drives people to do horrible things. Vamps are symbolic of the way one person can emotionally and psychologically drain someone else, eventually turning them into a monster like themselves. And werewolves... Well, I'm not really sure what I think of werewolves, to be honest, since I've never really cared for them.

Anyway, I'm not saying my interpretation is right or anything. I understand that mythological creatures have always been a part of society, and symbolize different things for different people. I'm actually trying to figure out what my interpretation says about me. Anyone want to psychoanalyze? :P

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