Eh? Sounds like you misunderstood me completely. How does my post
'label the authorities as something evil'?
Henry
Hans Heydebreck:
> --- On Mon, 8/25/08, Henry M. Taylor <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> In the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers it is at
>> least
>> suggested that the federal authorities (FBI) are able to
>> contain the
>> threat. The Birds is ambiguous, while in NOTLD evil clearly
>> triumphs.
>
> That is an amazing statement, because it seems to have taken you
> very little to label the authorities as something evil, regardless
> of basically the same narrative - the "monsters" threatening normalcy.
>
> Concerning the question if there are intellectual horror films: I
> doubt it requires an intellectual approach to make an intellectual
> horror film or something that´s worth to be taken seriously.
> (There are of course directors like Cronenberg who can elaborate
> thoroughly on what they are doing, and studies like Riepe´s
> "Bildgeschwüre" dealing with Cronenberg´s metaphors in the light of
> Lacan, no translation yet to my knowledge).
>
> The same question is raised in "Schlock! The Secret History of
> American Movies". How could there possibly be an intellectual notion
> when there are first timers at work, having no intellectual
> background but a ridiculous time schedule and a shoestring budget,
> and the primary intent is to end up with a commercial product.
> Interestingly, the showings of horror films in the duck-and-cover
> age were often combined with those of ultrarealistic footage e.g. of
> child birth.
>
> Someone already mentioned the different readings of the Body
> Snatchers metaphor, but the audience being the one attaching
> changing meanings not relying upon on pregiven auteur´s intentions.
> And I´d like to understand it that way, that the strength of the
> horror genre is producing and overwriting images - or more precisely
> cutting the meaning of an image from its meaning taken for granted,
> certainly like in comedies as The Great Dictator.
> On a visual level, there´s a juxtaposition of the order being
> reinstalled in The Night of the Living Dead with the army regaining
> control, the same horror typical approach is at work when you show a
> policeman knocking at someone´s door and the image is suddenly
> stripped bare of the metaphorical "to protect and to serve" layer to
> reveal a potential threat - a total stranger carrying a gun.
>
> To diminish the value of the "exploitation flicks", very often the
> anecdote that the poster artwork was created prior to the actual
> shooting, is brought up. But if you return to The Excorcist and look
> at the accompanying onesheet: Horror films don´t carry titles like
> "The Hero Comes to the Rescue" or "The Monster Gets Killed" and they
> don´t show the solution to a threat. It´s been a while since I have
> seen the film, but if I remember correctly, all the monstrous events
> occur after the excorcists have appeared, with the torturing
> (hospital) scenes of a relatively average innocent girl already shown.
>
>
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