Encore’s Birthday Marathon: Day 13

Continuing the 20-day Birthday Marathon...

         

Once upon a meme ago (#4), I made mention of the fact that I was (un?) lucky enough to have parents who were apathetic to my movie watching experiences so I saw my first R movie Dangerous Liaisons when i was about 10. It’s probably an egg and chicken argument because I’m not sure if I was already so adult oriented that the adult themes never managed to bother me or if over time my exposure to those “adult” films eviscerated any sort of reticence. What’s weird, though, is that I’d end up censoring my own self so that I’d seek out adult themed ones like Dangerous Liaisons and Fatal Attraction and avoid ones like The Blair Witch Project or even Robert Wise’s The Haunting (and I love Robert Wise). Notice a trend there, though? I have an appalling blind spot to the horror genre. When I took part in Andy and Heather’s communal blogging event on horror films I ended up choosing What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? which is more distorted camp than pure horror, horror doesn’t work for me. By nature, everything that I like in film is absent in the horror genre. It’s like that quote from Bright Star where Fanny says that she likes witty sayings and John counteracts by saying that she likes things that make her start without making her feel (I do love working Campion into regular conversation). That’s horror, in a nutshell, for me. It’s all about the visceral thrills, but more often than not I tend to feel to feel no lasting impact from the machinations that make up the whole.

       

That’s why I tend to think of horror less as a genre on its own that a subgenre that buttresses others. Like, there are tinges of horror in Sleepy Hollow making for a sort of vaguely satirical horror story, or The Silence of the Lambs which is a drama with horrific undertones. Of course, that’s just evidence of my own blind spot turning into the overriding existence of horror – generally – in my mind. I keep meaning to delve a bit more into the horrific landscape, but I’m awfully disinterested in the whole manifestation of things horrific.

             

Any big love for things horrific? What was your first R film?