When the frightful horrors of film beccome the fearful terrors of life

Since the beginning of postwar babyboomed America, a suburban living culture used to sleeping with the safety and security of a nightlight while the nuclear monster thing lived under the bed, sparked a unrequited love for film noir, horror movies and spook flicks in the later 1950s and early 1960s. That love created a counterculture that changed the confidently progressive and productive attitude and lifestyle into one less sure, more challenged and thus became regressive and aggressive in its attitude and lifestyle. Starting from Psycho to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror and Halloween to Friday the Thirteenth, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Poltergeist to Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Blair Witch Project, the production, consumption and greater cultural interpretation of the cinematic horror genre has become less about enjoyment and entertainment an area of life not lived and more about epexegesis and enlightenment into a livelihood we all now live. Hauntingly, the lives we live are like those out of Night of the Living Dead, where day in and day out, we do our daily bidding, waking up, eat, do work, drink and go to sleep, but forget the humanity of it all, or rather the reasons and rational behind just being created in the first place.

One thing I remember from my mini film school studies, both at Redeemer during the spring summer session History, Philosophy and Religion of Films program thoughout the mid 2000s and following the Hollywood Old and New Saturday Night at the Movies on Television Ontario film studies program from York during the early 2000s, was that while the myth behind the art sometime alters, corrupts and distorts the magic behind the science, at the end of the day, the reel behind us replicates the real before us.

The plot, theme, setting, character, conflict and consensus of these films have become less exaggerated, with its bloody graphic violence so brightly painted on the big screen that a nation so silently shockingly watched in the dark while it ate its buttered salty popcorn, instead mirrors exactly what is happening outside our own windows. Perhaps like the film Night of the Living Dead, we can see it more in a modern, or postmo, light of the real nature of things through its more recent update from across the pond, Shaun of the Dead. Alienated, in a brand new world that is void of civic community centres and production towards the commonwealth giving being filled by the establishment of bigbox supermarket centres and consumption towards the individual buying, Shaun is unable to move forward in life as an adult, within his various relationships locally and thus remains in arrested development, until a nation wide crisis being a global zombie invasion allows him to stand up, man the deck and preserve the great wave of undead as he and the others try hard to keep living on. During the hard economic times we all live in and struggle through day after day, I would have to say this frightful horrors of film may likely be the scariest for most, mainly because it probably tells of those fearful terrors of life we hold the most, including that ever looming dark shadow behind us, we sometime in the morning see in the mirror, that is just us ourselves.