luminous thesis on genre moviemaking...

Moviemakers have tried to capitalize on the fascination people have with the unknown... The paranormal... The unexplained... And so was born genre cinema, eons ago it seems. One could say that the fascination was born way before cinema itself was and be absolutely right - for the birth of a new medium only brings forth additional venues to vehiculate the same old perennial obsessions...
Everyone has wanted to visit a reputedly haunted house - or wondered about what indeed does happen once death wins the battle and we are forced to cross over... Ghosts, Phantoms or simply the Dead, in various forms indeed, have come back to thrill movie audiences in a most morbid way to be quite frank - and that genre will never go away.

In movies though, rarely do we see "good dead" - the ghost of the grandmother in Poltergeist II comes to mind... And maybe The Others as well... Not to mention the good shrink (is there such a thing - among the living that is) in The Sixth Sense...!

Aside from that, really, rotten celluloid productions have it most of the time that, once one crosses over, one becomes utterly scary and thus automatically evil! Virginia Madsen's character in CANDYMAN... Alice Krige's character in GHOST STORY... Even that BLUE BOY Emma Thompson ran into... All became, literally "overnight", consummated and shameless evil - driving sensible souls as also quite a few purists to proclaim "enough with that tendency already"... But it falls on deaf (and maybe even equally dead) ears...

One who is good all throughout life DOES NOT BECOME EVIL UPON DYING! Even if the crossing over was, shall we say "traumatic"... But, of course, a horror film has little use for a ghost that is not scary... CASPER was not a hit; was it? Even though the CGI really made Casper come alive, ironically, that feat alone did not translate into a massive turnout at the box office, alas! People love their ghosts and ghouls to be "scary", not friendly - such is my conclusion and that of any other fine observer as well.

Vampires and Zombies (aka the Undead and the Living-Dead - heaven forbid such things to ever come close to "reality" in any way...!) do not count, of course - they are but distasteful fantasy oftentimes, for one thing. And, for another thing, even in the context of their fictional reality and rules, these are not "normal dead" - they are much more like the victims of a plague or a contagion. They become infected, contaminated, and hence they change... They are in effect no longer their true selves. Many films have, in their scenario, NO SOLUTION AT ALL for the problem that such creatures would pose - if they ever were to become a reality, of course! The only efficient and adequate solution it appears would be the ultimate one - the ultimate disinfectation through nuking the whole lot of them - and that is quite excessive. Destroying an evil by bringing back the spectre of nuclear devastation - just the kind of happy ending moviegoers crave too, is it not?

Thank heavens all that is but (im-)pure fiction! And nothing more than that...


One day, I should go ahead and make a movie myself; that will be the day when moviegoers will be offered something that packs a wallop, throws everything at them (including the kitchen sink) *and* manages to teach them a valuable life lesson all at the same time! Plus, as a special bonus, at the end of it all, they will see an end to the evil that was fought so valiantly by the hero or heroes - and the futility of it all because, short of God Almighty Himself eradicating ALL EVIL - when mere mortals stop one evil, a thousand others grow in its place to pick up where it left off...