Monday, March 23, 2009
Ahh! Fake Monsters
I was thinking about the Joe Hill book today and I started thinking about monsters. I don't know if anyone ever watched Scooby Doo but remember watching it when I was little and I would get mad because everyone of those monsters just turned out to be some creepy old guy trying to steal some money. I never really thought about that till now. I also remember seeing The Village in high school by M. Night Shyamalan. Those red cloaked monsters were so scary and cool till it turned out to be the paranoid elders of the village trying to keep people from leaving. I know this is a completely random blog but this is stuff that has always bothered me.
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I know, right? That has bothered me as well. Why can't they just be terrifying, unexplainable things? Why does everything have to have a cut and dry explanation....This is why I liked The Sixth Sense and quit watching M. Night Shyamalan after Signs. Bruce Willis' character found out he was dead, but it did not change the fact that he and the others were still dead...there was only an epiphany on Willis' part. The fact that Haley Joel Osment sees dead people and that the dead people are even there in the first place is still unexplainable. But I like it. What a twist!
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw The Village in theaters, I was pretty put off as well. Night was definitely one of my favorite directors, so all my friends gave me a hard time when the ending kinda blew. I didn't want to give up on him though, so I rented the movie and watched it with my dad, and I liked a a whole lot better the second time around. Also a random comment, but I feel like the monsters didn't have to be real to make that story good.
ReplyDeleteI have not read 20th century ghosts yet, but you can also connect this back to The Shadow Year with Mr. White. The whole time we thought he was some terribly sinister devil, but in the end he was nothing more than a weak old man who enjoyed killing children. That's not scary, that's just sad...
ReplyDeleteI have never really reflected upon this concept of "fake" monsters til now either....it is very intriguing. In a way, perhaps we feel the need, while watching these horror movies or reading these scary novels, to embellish the thought of the 'monster', whether it be because we feel compelled to do so because of the genre (we kind of, force the image of the monster, per say to fit with the genre), or whether it be because these sources of media are one of our few escapes where anything can happen, anything can exist, so why not can it be something we don't encounter in everyday life? That is kind of confusing, sorry, i just don't know how else to phrase it...
And this is probably why we feel such great disappointment when our beloved villain or mythical monster turned out to be nothing but a guy in a sheet. (I agree Scooby Doo was highly annoying in this matter....just once, once, would it have killed them to let it be a real monster?)
I guess I am more partial to "supernatural" stories. I never really liked scary movies till I was older, but I'm really not that into slasher films. And I have never seen Signs but that is on my "I will watch that one day" list. Talking about the explanation of things, I don't know if any one has ever had the desire to watch this but I feel like "The Exorcist" is one of those movies that doesn't explain things. I feel like it leaves lots of questions like why did this happen to her, why did those people have to die? Maybe that is a bad example for this class, but I feel like it leaves things unexplained.
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