THE ISSUE: It’s October — the spooky month — and the editorial board was feeling the spirit of the season. Horror movies are always divisive, leading to arguments among friends during movie night. To formally address this division, two editorial board members describe their viewpoints on the genre. Read the other viewpoint here.
I hate horror movies. The only one I’ve ever enjoyed is “The Cabin in the Woods,” because, well, Joss Whedon.
My friends love horror movies, so I’ve seen my fair share. These movies generally seem to do a couple of things.
They all star young, attractive actors — mostly white, with maybe one tokenized black person who inevitably dies first. They tend to over-sexualize and then punish women, and they depict victims being brutalized in awful, albeit creative, ways.
Even when horror films pretend to be above these tropes, I still can’t take them seriously.
Take the critically acclaimed film “It Follows.” A young white woman is tricked into having sex and is pursued by a horrific monster she can only get rid of by having sex with another victim.
I heard that this horror movie symbolized a woman’s strength. Instead, I saw a young woman continuously punished for having sex she didn’t fully consent to.
“It Follows” seems to fall into the 1980s silent majority stigma of AIDS and betrays its own moral code when its leads decide to just give the monster to some Detroit sex workers.
