Lions, and tigers, and axe-murders...oh my

Here's my article for this month's issue of Fe Fuerza Vida.

I must confess that I’m not the biggest fan of horror movies and I never was.  Many of my friends have always been fanatics, but it just never appealed to me.  They tend to all seem so cliché and I feel that most of them share the same plot.  There’s an inescapable situation, maniacal murder(s), inevitable sex scene that has nothing to do with the plot, blood, gore, and an ending that is confusing and doesn’t really conclude anything.

I think the last horror movie I saw was “The Purge”, if you didn’t see it, don’t, you didn’t miss much.  The context of the movie is that for one 12-hour period every year, emergency services and law are suspended and people run wild taking revenge or just killing for the sake of killing.  The reason in the movie for this purge was the idea that since people are “violent and evil” by nature (which we’re not), these 12-hours serve as a healthy release for tension allowing for society to flourish for the other 364 days out of the year in a crime free country.  Whatever.

This idea of killing out of boredom as seen in “The Purge” may seem to exist only in Hollywood, at least I thought so, but I was disturbed when I heard a story on the news in late August.  Three black teenagers shot an Australian man who was just jogging on the side of the road in Oklahoma.  Do you remember this?  Look it up.  When one of the teenagers was asked why they shot the man, he responded, “We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.”  I can’t help thinking that movies, TV and video games, which equate the destruction of human life to entertainment, do not in some way contribute to the all too common tragic shootings we see in this country today.  I think not only of this incident in Oklahoma, but especially the Newtown school shooting and the shooting in the movie theater last year in Colorado.

We have to realize as a society that what we feed our minds does affect us, even if only sub-consciously.  Entertainment should try to elevate man’s mind, not bring it down.  We should always try to fill our minds with what is good, true and beautiful.  That is what we are meant for and it is only there that we will find happiness and cultivate a culture of life.