The Horror Genre: Mindless Entertainment or Morality Tale?

Society as a whole has taken on a very puritanical stance in the past few years. Everyone is asking "what about the children" and preaching family values. Why is it, then, these same people are so quick to try and silence movies and shows that are (possibly indirectly) promoting everything they're all about? Until recently, I never really cared enough about the debate to really think about the things I was watching. I always saw the horror genre as mindless, sometimes well-written gory fun. Looking back now, I see that they were actually teaching moral lessons.

Take the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example. Conservative groups were angry at the show for promoting witchcraft, demons, etc.; yet they never seemed to see when the show was sending a good moal message. The main characters, known as the Scooby Gang on the show, were teenagers who decide to take a stand and help out when they discover their new friend is sworn to save the world from evil. Each week these characters risked their lives to make sure the world woke up the next day. Buffy even gave her own life willingly to stop an apocolypse once. What better message is there to send then this? When Willow gets involved with magic, she ignores the advice of the group's mentor and jumps too fast, too deeply into her studies. All around her, people were warning her to step back but she refused to listen and ended up almost ruining her life. When Buffy decided to sleep with her vampire boyfriend, he turns into a psychotic monster almost immediately after due to a curse placed on him a long time ago after he killed a gypsy tribe's favorite member that prevents him from really experiencing happiness. Year after year, the scoobies worked to defeat evil and always won. Seems like a great message to me... if you look beneath the surface

The series Tales from the Crypt is a series full of moral lessons. In one episode, a husband who kills his wife's pets and stuffs them suffers the same fate when she discovers what he's done. A woman who kills her husband for the insurance money ends up falling victim to a deranged Santa on Christmas. Yet another episode features an extremely vain and greedy woman who agrees to a procedure that takes her beauty, leavng her looking old and wrinkled looking. She goes so far as to kill her boyfriend to get the money to buy her beauty back, but finds out she can't because the cops are on to her. She has to stay ugly to avoid going to jail.. bottom line? Bad people always get what's coming to them.

Slasher films are almost as good for this. Who are usually the victims in a slasher film? It's the people who are nasty, rude, doing drugs, having pre-marital sex, stealing, etc. Only the hero and/or heroine (who have done none of these things) end up surviving the killing spree in the end. The movie Jason X even makes a very pointed joke about this. In one scene, the characters Jason is stalking use a hologram of several women asking if he likes drugs and sex to distract him. As soon as the question come out, you can almost SEE the killer's rage through the infamous hockey mask as he immediately sets his sights on the "wicked" girls in the hologram, forgetting all about the real people he was stalking. Another movie, Scream, has a self-proclamed horror movie expert in it who lectures the others on this and similar other "rules" of the genre. A Nightmare on Elm Street is the same way. In the fourth film, one of the only characters to survive was the virginal and sweet Alice, a quiet girl who spends most of the movie trying to cope with a abusive parent and her increasing guilt over the loss of her friends.

So why are these movies and series considered to be bad for people and part of the corruption of today's youth? Because they contain material that some may find offensive. The people who carry on about the values these movies/shows are (possibly indirectly) promoting are not looking beyond the surface to see the symbolism in them and explain it to their sons and daughters. To me, that is the real problem with today's society: the inability to look beyond appearnace and see what's really there. Maybe then, society would improve.