Horror, Violence, and Morality Tales?

As I have spent years watching horror movies, the good, but usually the terrible. I can say, I have always found one thing to be true for American made films in this genre. The bad guy may do many many bad things, kill, dismember, you name it (ie. Hannibal Lecter.) However if there is an act of a violent or sadomasochistic nature, the ‘bad guy’ must die (pick a US teen slasher film.)

I have seen some amazing films from Europe where they do not feel they need to abide by this de-facto standard. There should be no limit to the horror as a genre, because most things that are truly horrific are immoral and deviant. We have become so hardened and desensitized to murders and the like because it happens daily where we live.

The fact that we live with simply miserable people in our world has made us come to terms with the fact that people are murdered daily. This isn’t from movie violence or that found in video games, it is a reaction to our environment. That environment is a world filled with pointless violence and death that is glamorized by the news so they can get your attention long enough so you don’t flip the channel between snippets of ‘news’. Why? So you will sit there and be exposed to the commercials they are pounding you with before, during, and after the ‘news’.

We, as Americans, live in a country where it is perfectly acceptable to blame free speech for inciting people to kill other people or themselves. We live in a country where we say ‘The N-Word’ when discussing the word ‘nigger’ being used in a book as if we are five years old. We live in a county where politics are clearly infused into ‘newscasts’ (on both sides of the spectrum) to the point that some take to using unreliable or non-existent sources to push their agenda. We live in a country where an exposed breast on a national telecast is treated as a national tragedy. Clearly, we live in a country that is not seeing the forest for the trees.

This ties in with porn sites that show consensual bdsm, humiliation, and things of that type. In order to try and duck the morality police of that is the US government (local, state, fed) these sites end their movies with smiling faces and statements like “I had fun.” Seriously? I think http://www.kink.com is the most glaring example of this. It also happens to be in what was the alternative mecca of the US, San Francisco, California. Click on the kink.com logo to be taken to it’s “values” page.

Have we moved that far away from being a country of freedom and liberty? Sadly, it appears so. Does that mean we will never again be that nation? My concern would be that those growing up who consider this all to be the norm will not know or care about finding their way back.