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League of Tana Tea Drinkers

LOTT D Roundtable: The Allure of Evil

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Allure01

Why are we attracted to and mesmerized by evil people in horror cinema and novels? Gloomy Sunday’s Gothic-romantic, Absinthe, kicks off this round of commentary from the League of Tana Tea Drinkers to explore this question. From Bela Lugosi to Freddy Kruger, the league pokes and prods as only it can do, to unearth the answers, the assumptions, and the contradictions.

 

Gloomy Sunday explores the bad boys of screen and novel…

Why are we attracted to villains? Why are we drawn towards characters we really should hate? Why do we sometimes find sex appeal in characters who are hideous or deformed? Is it we can relate better to people who have flaws, people who are more realistically human with their dark sides instead of the cookie cutter heroes and heroines we usually see in movies?  Or does it go deeper, to an instinctual level, left over from a more primitive time, when only the strong thrived and reproduced, drawing us to the powerfully wicked onscreen?

Pinhead from Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart and the later Hellraiser movies–although I only speak for the first two because after that they suck–is one of my favorite villains and one I think has strong sexual appeal despite his skin being the color of a dead fish, with nails protruding from his head, and a strange, but kinky, sadomasochistic leather outfit hinting at damnation. If you wanted to, you could compare the premise Hellraiser is based on to a metaphor for sexual freedom by looking at the puzzle box, which involves a quest for something much desired, yet secret, dark, and forbidden to have. If Pinhead quickly came into scene and dispatched his victims, we would not be so drawn to him. Instead, he shows human characteristics we can relate to. In Hellbound, Hellraiser II he does not kill Tiffany when she opens the box because he knows that “hands did not call us, desire did.” He seems fair even though he is a killer, and he continually lets Kirsty slip through the damning cracks by allowing deals and bargains. Is it his power we are drawn to, the relief provided by his human flaws that we can relate to, or the subtext of sublime sexual naughtiness he is the front man for?

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LOTT D Roundtable:
Torture Porn in Horror Today

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Image from Oteki Sinema

Cinema tends to reflect either the banality, the sanctity, or the immorality of our times, and patrons of movies promote the ones they like most by buying more theater tickets, more DVDs, and more Netflix rentals for them. The popularity of a movie will invariably foster more movies with similar storylines, similar characters and action themes, and as many sequels as an audience’s attention span will allow. In a word, profit drives the creative ups and downs of cinema. From the independent to the mainstream, whether grindhouse or arthouse, the bottom line accounts for most of what we see and hear in the darkened theaters of Cannes, Sheboygan, and points in-between.

With movies affected by the vagaries of social and commercial forces, how do you explain the cross-genre use of torture porn in films like The Passion of the Christ, Saw, Hostel, Wolf Creek, Irreversible? Or even it’s lesser use in television shows like Battlestar Galactica or 24? How do you justify the extended, agonizing, and too-graphic torture of a human being (or human-like being), who is humiliated and vivisected emotionally, spiritually, and physically? Is it a necessary component for high drama, or just a bottom-line feeder? And what does it say about us, the audience, promoting such movies like Saw every Halloween, forcing each sequel to become a more creative evisceration bloodbath?

The horror-blogging members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers give their take on torture porn. One word of advice: this is not a fluff piece of transient newsy gossip, or Twitter-sized comments of self-importance. Brew a nice cup of tana tea and butter your brain on both sides before you begin. Now get nice and comfortable. Ready? Let’s begin.

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LOTT-D: The League of Tana Tea Drinkers

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Blame Brian at The Vault of Horror blog.

When he honored Zombos Closet of Horror with the E for Excellence Award, which is given from one blogger to another in recognition of their undying efforts, it got my little gray cells humming.

Horror bloggers are a unique group of devoted fans and professionals who keep the horror genre, in all its permutations and media outlets, alive and kicking. Often spending long, unpaid hours to keep their blogsites fun and interesting, horror bloggers share their unique mix of personality and knowledge to fans out of passion for a genre difficult to describe, but easy to love.

Horror bloggers hail from all walks of life, but their passionate love for horror movies, terrifying books, scary comics, and unearthly music–you name it–unites them.

I’m proud to be a member of this divers group. In the spirit of the E for Excellence Award, it’s time to honor exemplary horror blogs with our own special
insignia: one that signifies the heights to which we aspire, and the
code of excellence we follow to promote horror in all it’s wonderfully
frightening forms, from classic to contemporary, from philosophical to schlockical.

I present the League of Tana Tea Drinkers insignia, in recognition of horror bloggers who go the extra line, who toil away the extra midnight hour to present the best in horror blogging. This insignia lets readers know you belong to a select group of bloggers that
reach the heights of horrifying excellence, who know what rapture it is to sip Tana Tea by the
full moon, and trod the dark passageways beneath the earth in search of the unusual, the terrifying, and the monstrous.

Keep watching the skies, and reading the horror. LOTT-D is coming for you!