Im trying to beat my own score at nyan cat http://nyan.cat/
This week i’ve been sick. Woes me bed ridden for all intents and purposes. Getting off stuff is hard. But, thanks to this extra time, i’ve been able to see and dissect more media. This entry will focus on Scream 4 (scre4m)
Being your own obstacle to writing sucks. I’m sitting here unable to put anything down on paper except that I can not put anything down on paper. Alas, I shall try.
So we all headed down to Melbourne central Hoyts on a Monday night. The moon was full and covered by a thin layer of mist. We joked about stabbins’ and murderous coming to get us. For us, the horror genre is funny, its kitsch and most of all it is not scary. It is exciting.
As the characters in Scre4m note, we are to savvy to find the rules and conventions of horror scary. Where it fails is that it falls back on traditionalist, bullshit moorings of omg, OLD MAN JENKINS- we never expected you could be the killer. The problem is not as simple as to reverse the reverse psychology. We already expect that, perhaps that is why Scream 4 is so funny. In the wake of the scary movie franchise (which was the Scream films original title) we are just too aware that there is going to be false starts, false endings, ‘fridge doors closing to reveal a harmless character’ . For much of the time we are at whim to the cues of the music. It tells us to feel anticipation, and depending on whether or not you allow it to suck you in, you will be horrified or not by the revelation of the anticipation.
(does it offend you yeah? is it that people consent to these things, or is it that someone took a photo of it? outrage is a fickle as belief)
The horror genre, which we also watched for our screening this week is a sensory genre, it works by its desired impact on its audience. So for some, scream 4 may be a blood bath, but for others with a larger macabre film knowledge it’s a self aware slasher with moderately, to lame killin’s. Simply, this comes back to no one seeing the same movie; individualism here plays the socially contrasted part in what each person sees on the screen. Whereas the innate biological fears of death bring out the collective shocks. Human’s fear of death can manifest in the fear of the unknown, the fear of the self, what you don’t know about yourself. Like the Freudian Ego, Superego and Id. The majority of oneself is hidden in the unconscious unaware part of your brain. Perhaps the failings of scream to be truly scary is that Ghost face is visible and we can see he is the shape of a human, and a relatively weak one at that, given that he gets kicked down by Neve Campbell every fifteen minutes. In the lecture some kid seemed disgusted at the idea of torture porn, but he also seemed very uneducated about it. I supposed this is what happens when people just jump into film degrees without any life experience. So like horrors base in literary beginnings torture porn too has been around for centuries. Caligula, Marquis de Sade, I mean Boodfeast was from 1963 for christsakes. The very idea that we linguistically add porn to the torture element is us subconsciously (and for some openly) admitting the sexuality that comes with torture and death.
Also been reading lots of blogs. Collections of peoples thoughts projected in such a way that their lives look really interesting. I often check Tavi and Gala, but recently I have found a trent in 17-21 year olds blogs to be this sort of fendi feminist riot grrrl amalgamation which don’t really gel with one another. So the blogs I’m looking at:
are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the overall number of blogs out there. http://www.blogherald.com/2008/02/11/how-many-blogs-are-there-is-someone-still-counting/
(an interesting article on the legitimacy of blogs)
(an interesting article on the legitimacy of blogs)
Now this relates to film because like film, television, books, radio- every medium before it the internet strives to be legitimized as a place where art, academics and theoretical practice can be observed. (much like a electrical micro-large-cosm of how the world operates) As if the internet has not been legitimized as a form from which we can extrapolate knowledge. My entire arts degree was foundered online, so much so, in final year of my history major our capstone subject has a task in which we had to find a primary source not online. Everybody groaned and the idea, what- like really got to a place where history dun happened? Are you mad!? The idea that a blog will one day be used a secondary source probably makes many historians cringe. Like the way it took decades for films to be accepted as texts, and examples of how people were at a particular time (or rather how people during one time, saw people as another) none the less, films are now able to be dissected as art, dissected as modes of reflexive social commentary and ultimately respected generally. Blogs will also become secondary examples of how people of this century chose to present themselves, their interests, and their language. Their interconnectedness and speed with which trends and memes develop and die.
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Bibliography
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis(London 1991) p. 139
The Transvestite as MonsterGender Horror in The Silence of the Lambs and PsychoJ Tharp - Journal of Popular Film and Television, 1991 - Routledge
The horror genre: from Beelzebub to Blair WitchP Wells - 2000 - books.google.co
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splatter_film#Torture_porn
Pictures
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