In the spirit of Halloween (Somhain) this week I feel the need to do a blog post on Scary Movies. My roommate and I love scary movies and all weekend whenever we were home we would turn on the TV and watch whatever scary movie happened to be on. However, this week on AMC they mainly showed the Halloween movies. Paloma (my roommate) and I have never really seen them so we sat down and decided to see what all the hype was about. Paloma thinking I always know everything ever in the world asked me 100,010 questions. However, there was one question that really got me thinking about the development of older movies.
Paloma asked me “Why are older movies always so raunchy?” Oh course, if you did not know majority of the Halloween movies are just people having sex, screaming and then dying in gory ways. This is when it occurred to me the true meaning of old fashioned scary movies. One of the main points always stressed in these movies is always “Sluts Die.” It is always the ones having sex that are killed first. It stresses that sex is dirty, it is sin and for that you will be punished and thus, they die. If you thinking about it too, it is always the women that die. So now it comes down to gender and a debate about women’s sexuality.
This got me thinking more and more about jokes that are always brought to my attention about the sad truth of scary movies. This first one that usually comes into play is “the black guy always dies first.” A joke used for many years but, it got me thinking. Why does the African American always die first. When looking back at old scary movies we can see the hints of the idea that black people are just too stupid to live all the way through the movie. Now this brings race into picture. African Americans are portrayed as the perfect victims who cannot survive due to their inability to outsmart the killer.
Thus, I have concluded that old fashioned scary movies are just sexist and racist. Maybe this Halloween season you should look more closely at the movies you are watching and what they are really trying to teach you.
Hello Lori,
ReplyDeleteI do believe that this is a fair observation of how the majority of scary movies are constructed. I have always wondered why? Yes, all the Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street movies all show that common theme. However, there is one movie that came to mind as an exception.
The one exception was the original horror movie night of the "Living Dead" directed by George Romero. In the movie the Protagonist is an African American man whom survives a bombardment of zombies throughout entire movie, only to be killed at the very end by a white southerner. In this movie the sex scenes or anyone acting on sexual urges are not shown. So if this is the anomaly at least the poor African American character at least makes it to the end.
Thanks, Alejandro