Horror films that explain evil with dopey explanations.
Oh lordy, how boring can you get?
This is more a problem with new horror films and reboots than it is with classic horror films. And it seems like the new crop of young horror creators are recognizing how stupidly silly (sillily stupid?) this trend is.
The trend really began in the 90s, was carried into the 00s, and is a product of Generation Xers. So you know it can’t be good.
In the good old days, when someone became a werewolf, vampire, or serial killer, there was mystery. Who knew what made these villains do their murderous doings?
Sure, there was always some dumbass scientist or psychologist riffing on the latest theories of the day (or a Gypsy with some chant about an ancient curse), but you always were given to understand that their petty rationalist explanations were mere coping mechanisms, attempts to explain away the inexplicable.
Remember the psychiatrist in The Exorcist, talking all that nonsense about disassociative disorders and psychosomatic illnesses in response to her parents divorce? That was like five minutes before the bitch’s head starts spinning around and pea-green goop is spurting out her mouth like a fire-hose!
The rational explanations were never valid. They were flimsy as a fiddle-stick, and thrice as transparent. They were offered up by the “smart” dude blinded by their own specialization and their own desperate clinging to a rational world. The intellectual shills were nothing but smarty-pants dickheads trying to prove some hare-brained explanation for why some cold-hearted killer likes to dress in a ballerina costume and murder teenagers on Bleeker Street every Arbor Day with a hand-sharpened rake.
They NEVER felt like explanations, only attempts at one.
And you, as the viewer, weren’t guided by the filmmaker into respecting these pat, feeble-minded explanations - you were encouraged to deride and mock them! Simple explanations for evil were regarded as the work of simpletons. Plain and simple.
But today, you have to show how that relentless murderer, mutant, or dream-killer phantasm got to where he is today.
Oh man. Stupid, right? What’s the impetus? Did some screenwriter just read Freud and completely lose his shit? “I have to include the latest from B.F. Skinner in my screenplay! It’ll blow their fragile, eggshell minds!”
No, it won’t. It will just date you and your film. A lot of people have been reading Skinner, or Freud, or whoever else for a long time too. They’re no closer, really, to understanding evil than the rest of us are.
Evil is confusing, and nobody can explain it. We cannot enter into the phenomenology of an evil mind, any more than we can know what it’s like to be a chicken, wolf, bee, bird, or chimpanzee. It’s literally not possible.
There are no explanations for evil!
We can sort of chart it out, and we can draw connections and correlations (a little sexual abuse as a child here, a little organic brain disease there), but we cannot give explanations. So if actual scientists are doubtful, why are fucking filmmakers who dropped out of high school so confident?
You can spend your entire life going through the diaries, Reddit posts, and homemade videos of the Columbine Boys, Adam Lanza, Ted Bundy, or whoever else. You will never understand what their motivations are, because you cannot crawl inside their head. You might feel like you’ve found some answers, but you’ve neglected the bajillion people who have consumed the same media, drawn the same sorts of pictures, and written the same kinds of words. The great majority who just became maladjusted adults like the rest of us, and not killers.
But in movies, evil is no longer an inexplicable force interwoven into the fabric of reality. It’s an easy Psych-101 explanation.
Michael Myers grew up in an abusive family. Freddy is a dream-killer because he was prosecuted in a legally unjust trial (tried and executed by a mob of angry parents instead of a court of law). Jason Voorhees had an overbearing mother. Cannibalistic mutants are resentful over the fact they were sold low-income housing adjacent to a nuclear bomb testing site. Swamp-monsters are the way they are because of altered DNA strands from the local lead pipes. Leatherface caught his dick in his pantaloon zippers. Vampires have daddy issues. Zombies are the natural product of Utilitarianism in the ideology of modern industrial society.
Seriously! Give me a fucking break, already.
Dude, whatever happened to evil being something nobody understood and nobody could explain? Also known as: the truth. Also known as: way scarier and more disturbing.
Evil is scary precisely because it has no explanation (unless you’re a real Bible-thumper and you think Satan is sneaking around making mischief - but if you think that, you’re part of the problem not the solution).
So gimme some goddamn movies that don’t explain evil!
Just let evil exist as a given, and take it from there, ya big, dumb horror moviemakers!