Midweek Rambling
I read this at Reddit's Today I Learned page: "The budget for the original 1978 film Halloween was so small that the actor playing Michael Myers was paid $20 per day and the original Michael Myers mask was purchased at a local costume shop for $1.29. The film grossed $47 million." The blurb posted to this link.
I stopped watching horror films shortly after reading that T.S. Eliot refused to read Flannery O'Connor's fiction because he found it unsettling. I thought to myself, "Yeah, why do I want to do that to myself . . . get those nasty images in my head?" I've made occasional exceptions, but for the most part, once I swore them off, I stopped watching for good.
If you like horror films, cultural analysis, and a Catholic worldview, I highly recommend E. Michael Jones' Monsters from the Id,in which he proposes an interesting theory: a culture's horror films reflect its sub-conscious. Frankenstein was fear of the
unknown energy known as “electricity.” Dracula was fear of syphilis. The rise of slasher movies in the 1960s reflected our culture's disgust with (and horror of) the sexual revolution. My earlier words on the topic:
When sexual freedom rose, horror rose with it. Deep Throat came out in 1973 and Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1975. Both were low-budget long shots that brought its producers millions of dollars. Maybe it was coincidence.
Maybe it was also coincidence that Blood Feast, a movie that signaled the official birth of the gore film, came out in 1965, just as America was beginning its full-scale tumble into the sexual revolution.
But you ever notice how it seems that the pretty and promiscuous girls are always the victims in the horror movies? David Hogan noticed it in his book, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film, criticizing horror films for working “from a surprisingly Puritan morality” that punishes fornication.
Mr. Jones and I grabbed lunch together once. Interesting guy. Eccentric, but I really liked him. We didn't see eye-to-eye on capitalism, though, and my subsequent veer into the Misesian universe would have separated us even further. Although I haven't kept up with his writings, I'm pretty sure he'd view the Tom Woods and Jeffrey Tuckers and Lew Rockwells of the Catholic world as heretics.
Random Blurb: "We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war”¦ our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." Tyler Durden.
Tyler Durden is the lead character in Fight Club. Durden and the film are the guiding cultural light of the angry young men I wrote about yesterday.
