I recently tried to do the Substack Chat thing and it didn’t quite work out, despite my best efforts. Honestly, I’ve never really liked Chat that much (except the dms) and think Substack made a mistake abolishing the good old-fashioned discussion thread post.
So, now I want to try to resurrect it. Here is hopefully the first of several posts meant to mostly just generate some discussion via the use of the Comments.
I went to see Weapons last night. I really liked it though I don’t think the movie quite lives up to the hype. It really reminded me of Longlegs, a movie that was marketed as a really dark super-serious horror movie that turned out to be more of a satire/black comedy and somewhat less than the knockout early buzz had proclaimed it to be.
What really struck me was how much difficulty I had watching the scenes of violence and gore. Weapons has relatively little of it compared to other horror movies.* But my capacity to stomach it and not get squeamish is clearly not what it used to be.
*Though admittedly some scenes go really over-the-top, to the point where I wondered if it had to be cut back due to an NC-17 rating.
I’ve been noticing it more and more over the last few years. I simply can’t watch uber-violent sequences like those in Only God Forgives (2013) or super gory splatter ones like in Evil Dead (1981) without at some point averting my eyes anymore.
Stuff that never bothered me 20 years ago now makes me really uncomfortable.
It’s as though I used be desensitized to that stuff. And now I’m not.
Which makes me wonder - do people normally get more sensitive to screen violence over time? Anybody else here find that violent films - especially horror films - you used to watch are no longer tolerable? If so, why do you think this is happening? Could all the real-life violence shown on-screen be impacting our ability to watch fiction? Do we generally get more sensitive to such imagery as we age?
What do you think?
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.