Our discussion in class on Wednesday regarding the postmodern horror film really got me thinking about current aspects of horror that have changed since the classical era of film.\u00a0 One particular feature that I wanted to bring up at the end of class was directly related to the idea of ambiguity.\u00a0 In particular, my focus turned towards the increasing “moral ambiguity” within the postmodern horror genre.\u00a0 What was once a clear dichotomy between a distinct good and evil has since become something much more complex and uncertain.<\/p>\n
To better explain this idea, it is important to understand how it functions within specific films.\u00a0\u00a0Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde<\/em>\u00a0is a perfect example of the distinct\u00a0dichotomy between good and evil.\u00a0 A person is essentially split into two halves, one good, and one evil.\u00a0 Dr. Jekyll fights to keep the evil Mr. Hyde at bay, who keeps coming back to wreak havoc and commit crimes.\u00a0 The tension and divide between the two could not be more clear cut.\u00a0 The\u00a0man has a literal monster inside of him, after all.<\/p>\n Opposingly, an example of a postmodern horror film(s) that stuck out to me for its ‘moral ambiguity’ was the\u00a0Saw\u00a0<\/em>franchise.\u00a0 Under all the grotesque, dramatized\u00a0gore, there really is a good question at hand.\u00a0 It has been a few years since I have watched any of the\u00a0Saw\u00a0<\/em>films, but a recurring theme throughout each is about how Jigsaw only deploys people that he knows have done something bad into his torture chambers.\u00a0 Sure, it is heinous of Jigsaw to invoke such gruesome conditions, but the films do make you think about whether or not some of the characters had it coming.\u00a0 Are they right to kill other characters to save themselves?\u00a0 Do they deserve to be there? Are they are the truly evil characters or is Jigsaw?\u00a0 I recall one of the films contained a lawyer of sorts who denied health insurance to a man with cancer, who ended up dying.\u00a0 At the end of the movie, the same man was killed by the family of the father he denied healthcare to.\u00a0 No one felt bad for his death, which recalls this same moral ambiguity.\u00a0 I am in no way advocating for the\u00a0Saw\u00a0<\/em>films, but the overt sense of ambiguity within these films fit the argument perfectly.\u00a0 My theory is that this growing trend of moral ambiguity stems from our own fear that we ourselves are the ones that are the true evil monsters–an uncomfortably self-aware truth…<\/p>\n Within the first 60 pages of Paul Tremblay’s\u00a0<\/span>A Head Full of Ghosts<\/em>, it is clear the story is structured in a way that imposes a similar ambiguity.\u00a0 The fact that Merry is recounting events from when she was 8, the fact that the people involved are all family members, etc… all suggest that the reader will be forced to make active judgments to fill in the gaps as the narrative progresses.\u00a0 Given the current uncertainty, I’m excited to see where the story ends up going and if it will leave the reader with an ambiguous sense of what exactly happened and what was right or wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our discussion in class on Wednesday regarding the postmodern horror film really got me thinking about current aspects of horror that have changed since the classical era of film.\u00a0 One particular feature that I wanted to bring up at the end of class was directly related to the idea of ambiguity.\u00a0 In particular, my focus …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":224,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-b"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-2Q","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/224"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions\/178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}