January 27, 2005

• I was talking with a friend of mine a while back, mentioning that I found a VHS copy of 'Theatre Of Blood' at Half Price Books for something like $3.

  'Theatre Of Blood' is an ultra-campy Hammer-ish Vincent Price flick. Price plays a hammy scenery-chewing actor who is denied a coveted critic's choice award, and subsequently goes on a Shakespeare-themed serial murder spree, killing each critic who voted against him on the award and eluding the bumbling police, all played for creepy laughs. Worth $3, but not as much fun as the two Dr. Phibes movies, 'The Abominable Dr. Phibes' and 'Dr. Phibes Rides Again,' where Price plays a mad genius who takes themed serial murder revenge on the doctors whom he blames for his wife's death, all the while eluding the bumbling police, all played for creepy laughs.

  Anyway. I was talking about this with my friend, who asked me if I had seen it before I bought it, and yes, I had. I had seen it when I was a teenager. Once upon a time, they showed b-movies on TV in the middle of the night, instead of infomercials, and I had seen it there. And his response was something along the lines that my younger, more impressionable mind had been shaped by this movie, to the point that I'd buy a video tape of it decades later. And he was right.

  I used to watch sci-fi and horror movies all the time. I don't have the patience for the crap I used to watch... And the new crop of horror movies are all so nondescript and stupid looking anyway. But the point here is that I'm wondering what I might be like if I had never seen three movies where Vincent Price is a serial killer, or any of the other strange and weird things I saw on TV.

  The only one that ever really disturbed me when I was young was 'Willard.' Not the Crispin Glover remake, but the original one. There's a scene where a rat gets killed horribly, and I happened to be watching. And my mom was, too, and she even called the TV station. I couldn't have been more than 8 or 9, and that movie shouldn't have been on in daytime. Roger Corman's beautifully sublimated Freudian sexuality in Edgar Allen Poe re-hashes I could deal with, but not Ernest Borgnine putting out a cigarette on a rat.

  And really, that's the problem with so many horror movies today. It seems that as a culture, when it comes to horror, we've turned up the contrast and lost the details that were in the shadows. And when it comes to dealing with horror, we're the same way. The tsunami stories have stopped; footage of people rebuilding isn't as dramatic as footage of people being swept away.

  During the 90s (or so) I was on a hunt for religion. Like the man said, there's a seeker born every minute, and I was one of them. I poked around in some nice rhetoric and ended up with one or two genuine insights, but ultimately I decided that Buddhism had the most to say to me. And when I started reading about the Tibetan traditions, merged as they were with the local shamanism, I knew I was sold. And what sold me was this: There are specific meditations which monks are told to go through, in order to remove themselves from importance in their own minds. A number of these have to do with, for instance, imagining yourself to be dead and decaying, and rotting, and turning to goo, and having worms crawl inside you, and so on. Another involves having a certain deity come and lop off your body parts and eat them in front of you.

  Dunno where else to go with this, so I'll stop. I was trying to hook it up to the idea of horror movies as psychological purge, along with some weird notion that watching horror movies leads to a similar self-detachment as those meditations. But I'm really only writing because I want to get one more load of laundry in before bed, and I needed to fill the time.

  • 6:15 am
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