Friday The 13th...Two Weeks Before Halloween

This is a rare event...A Jason Voorhees holiday on the same month Michael Myers usually goes trick-or-treating... The Exchange on NPR had horror movies as a topic. It provided a potted history of the genre from the Thirties up 'til now...I especially like how horror is usually indicative of whatever societal anxieties are lurking beneath the collective surface...Dracula, for example, reflects fears of sexuality and passion, Frankenstein belies a discomfort with technology...The Fifties gave us atomic horror...The Seventies slasher flicks were almost like a neo-conservative yearning for proper values...giving birth to the all-important rules that Randy(Jamie Kennedy) cites in the Scream movies. Drugs, Alcohol, Sex equal being racked up to the body count. It's almost like America was in this confused state post Viet Nam/ Watergate/the Sexual Revolution...In some twisted way, the slashers depicted what happened if the Leave It To Beaver moral code had been broken. (Why am I reminded of the Brady Bunch? It was a sitcom that wanted to BE like the earnest simple sitcoms of the Fifties after all of the aforementioned cultural upheaval...The it evolved into Mike Brady's afro and bell-bottoms and his childrens' groovy-hipness...The Brady Bunch movies of the Nineties skewers these like a slasher-movie victim...But I digress. Horror. I'm of the opinion that horror serves a purpose...a safe, cathartic way to deal with our primal fears...pain, death, the threat to "normality". And a good point was touched upon in this program...Why IS it that the Christian faith(ESPECIALLY Catholicism) provides a springboard for so much horror? THE EXORCIST, ROSEMARY'S BABY, THE WICKER MAN? Never heard of a Buddhist horror movie...Or a Hindu slasher flick... Watch your skies and watch your backs in the post-millenial times...GaP