Dear Andrew:
As an aficionado of horror and editor of both a book and a special edition of Film and Philosophy on the subject, I might suggest that your cavalier dismissal of an extremely popular and thought-provoking genre is rather closed minded. Not everyone likes horror, or kung-fu splatter films, and if you don't by all means don't go see them.
But there is a satisfying pleasure that some of us take in watching, e.g., Hannibal Lecter kill the two guards in The Silence of the Lambs. He is a throwback to earlier times, at home in the Medici's Florence, as "Hannibal" made so clear. That pleasure comes from vicariously enjoying both the preternatural power he exerts over everyone around him, and his aesthetic tastes, that make of his murder scenes true grotesque works of art. Furthermore, the genre is one of the few that permits us to confront death and dissolution, which, aas Heidegger pointed out, we otherwise spend a good deal of our time running away from. For more on my Nietzschean power centered theory of horror, see the excerpt from my book Dark Thoughts (co-edited with Steven Jay Schneider)at www.lhup.edu/~dshaw/book.html
Besides, I think Haneke's Komische Spiele (Funny Games) is a much better film (indeed, his best), in part because the house invasion by the two psychopathic killers is one of the most riveting dramatic setups I have ever seen play out.
Dan Shaw
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