Haunted

Some of my university friends and I - two guys and two other girls - really enjoy watching movies together and eating a lot of junk food. So we've developed a holiday ritual of crashing at someone's house, hiring three or four movies and lazing on the couch all day. Now, particularly because of the influence of the boys, we tend to watch a lot of thriller and horror movies.

We had such a movie day last Wednesday, and I have been haunted ever since. The first movie the group decided to watch was Wolf Creek, which is an Australian horror movie. It has an 18 plus rating in most countries and it definitely requires it, because it has haunted me since.

And I only lasted for half the movie.

Most of the first part of the movie is spent setting it up, but when it starts to get gory, it goes all the way and very quickly. After 10 minutes of this, I was crying, shaking and completely nauseated.

One of my male friends, who regularly watches this kind of movie, was surprised by my strong response to what I was watching and hearing. He made a remark that seemed to imply he thought I should be able to seperate reality from the make up, effects and acting that is on the screen. I was unable to answer him at the time, and at that point, the other guy (whose house it was) stopped the movie to escort me to somewhere I could sit and entertain myself for the rest of the movie, as he could see I wasn't enjoying it.

Though he will probably not see it, here is my answer to why I think I responded so strongly to the scenes in Wolf Creek. One is that, in Australia, this story of kidnapped and tortured backpackers is not so far-fetched. We have had two high profile cases in my lifetime of backpackers or stranded tourists picked up off the highway and killed, sometimes in very brutal ways. The second is that this film is really confronting in the fac that it gives no excuses for the cruelty and sadistic inhumanity of the villain. In the other thriller/horror films we watched that day, we saw violence and death blamed on haunted houses, on curses and hoodoo, on alien invaders, and on schizophrenics who believe they're God. The killer in Wolf Creek was none of these things. He simply... killed and raped and tortured because he found pleasure in it. He found pleasure in evil.

I fear this. I fear it, because I know there is a tiny bit of this madness in every soul on this Earth. My own included, for certain. Because when we're left alone, in the wilderness, and all the rules seem to go out the window, this is what can come out. Maybe not to the same degree, in the same gruesome way, but it is there.

I certainly won't be watching horror movies anymore. It scares me too much, but not in the way most people think. I am not afraid of blood; I am afraid of people.