Moral Horror

Posted on 15 February 2010

Happy Friday!  Wait, it isn’t Friday?  It’s Monday!?  Where’d my weekend go?  Oh . . . my kids.  Duh.  Need to start advance writing these things so I don’t get all temporally lost.  Anyway, today (tomorrow and Friday’s) blog, is on why I hate American Horror films.

See, it is rather simple.  American Horror films are morality flicks.  Don’t believe me?  OK, who is the survivor?  With rare exception, the chaste, semi-religious, generally all-around good person.  Who dies?  The characters who are, typically, two dimensional pastiches of a sin or vice.  Oh, they usually die because of their vices, too.  Tell me that isn’t a morality film.

So, why does this bother me?  Well, aside from the rather thin veneer of sloppily put together story, I can’t say I really care for heavy handed morality in the fire-and-brimstone fashion.  I am already an a. moral person (not amoral, just ambiguously moral), and my rule-of-thumb is “who’s it gonna hurt?”  Oh, and yes, I consider damage to others, and myself, on spiritual/mental levels in addition to physical.  So having people doing things that, in most cases, are rather harmless things (enjoying a frolick with someone, taking a shortcut, occasionally looking out for themselves first, even being a hair bit cowardly, or being (really) brave).  All these things, while not the most “moral” of activities, really don’t hurt someone, and even have advisedness to them sometimes.

Now, notice that I made the distinction of American Horror.  This fable-like nature seems to be oddly missing from things from across the seas.  Japanese horror is much more psychological in how it messes with the audience and the protagonist, and what European horror I’ve seen tends towards the straight up bizarre.  They don’t overly rely on sudden shocks or flashes to get a scare, and their monsters, while not always the best looking CG wise, can evoke a certain sense of dread that is what Horror should be about.  Not a lesson on who to be.

This is oddly converse to the heavy handed morals of Star Trek, which I love.  Maybe it is because those are less puritanical and more humanitarian, and perhaps it is because it is a positive reinforcement instead of a negative one.  A hopeful, wonderful future where the main characters are good people for the most part and prevail, or a dark world where people die for straying from the straight and narrow.  Not a hard choice, as I see it.