Welcome...and initial guidelines...

This blog will be used in the spring of 2008 by 80+ students at Drexel University to investigate the effects of Iraq on culture and the reverse. Our goal will be to better understand why the US is in Iraq, and to question whether literature can help us on this journey.

Weekly plans and other materials will always be posted in Vista, not this blog. So go to Bb Vista to get the discussion prompts and other instructions.

I intend this blog to manage our discussions and track our collective investigation.

You should have received an email from me inviting you to become a contributor to this blog. The email was sent Monday afternoon to your official Drexel email address.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Gore Fest

As far as gore is concerned in being the main appeal to horror movies is for the weak minded of our society. A good horror movie is not just disembowelment or dismemberment. Horror comes from what could actually happen to someone or unavoidable doom and attempting to put a clever plot on it in a movie.

People raved over the Saw movies. People raved over it because of how gory and more original it was. At least they saw the originality, but the true reason for it actually being a good horror film is the genius behind the plot. The movie did not consist of people just trying to escape. As the movie progresses and they try to escape the world projected evolves as more is figured out and many images of dismemberment, not just a gore fest.

Another although bloody yet genius, by its time unoriginal, horror flick was The Descent. This movie was more so was a true horror movie should be because most of the events that happened are possible to happen or things people actually fear in reality. For instance, more of the fright in the one of several cave movies from that year came from the scenes where people were either about to get crushed by the cave or overcoming some other obstacle. The rest of the movie then plays with the viewers fear of the dark, what they cannot see and furthermore their helplessness.

The fascination with a movie based on gore is like today’s fascination with completely idiotic and nowhere near funny teen movies. Mindless movies for mindless movies. Given, some of the teen movies do deserve credit for, like the horror films, have a sense of genius to the plot or concept of the movie. Originality is scarce. All either genre shows in audience turn out is the degradation of society, and the continual lowering of standards. This is seen through most aspects of today’s society. Someone had commented on a previous post about fads in dieting. My response was that most people today are like cattle; they see a line and join it.

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