MovieChat Forums > Hellions (2016) Discussion > "Messages" in horror movies

"Messages" in horror movies

posted 8 years ago by lazarillo
2 replies | jump to latest

When "Halloween" came out about forty years ago now, a lot of people at the time actually criticized it for having a puritanical morality where the slutty, promiscuous girls are "punished" while the repressed virgin survives. The director John Carpenter (a well renowned right-winger of course, ha, ha) denied this. The same was true much more recently of "It Follows" which is supposed to be some kind of message about STDs or premarital sex. But trying to stop teenagers from becoming sexually active sooner or later is like trying the rain from falling from the sky sooner or later. And horror movies are not about "messages"--they're about playing on subconscious fears about things like sex, growing up, and in the case of this movie, teen pregnancy.

I suppose you can see a "pro-life" message in this movie if you really want, but given these creepy little kids, I could just as easily see a "pro-abortion" message (not just "pro-choice", I mean actual pro-ABORTION). I suppose, like with "It Follows", you can some muddled "message" against premarital sex, but do the actresses in these two movies really make anyone, let alone horny teenage boys, NOT want to have sex?

I think the folly is looking for "messages" in horror movies. Occasionally, there will be an obvious one like in Carpenter's "Masters of Horror" episodes (far from his best work in my opinion), but a GOOD horror movie knows better than to have some obvious "message" you could basically fit on a placard of someone standing outside an abortion clinic. OK, maybe this isn't a GOOD horror movie , but I give it credit at least for noy having some facile, simplistic "message" to impart.

"Let be be finale of seem/ The only emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream"

[–] LordManhammer 8 years ago

I think you're right that we shouldn't look for "obvious messages" in horror films, as many people on this site confuse topics with messages. Many quick to assume that any movie with an abortion theme, for instance, must be intended as pro-life; or any message involving a mention of God must be pro-religion.

But I question whether there are no messages at all. You say that horror "play[s] on subconscious fears," but perhaps this is another way of saying these movies have a message. Maybe the message of Hellions is that people ought to think more critically about the plight of young women in present-day America, and the contradictions of a society in which fetuses are championed but poor children are allowed to waste away in poverty. Or whatever else--this is just a "what if" example of the sort of subtler message a horror movie might have; it might not expound one position, but shed light on an issue.

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Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"--Pres. Merkin Muffley

[–] brjess38 8 years ago

I look for nothing in a horror movie, just fun.