Alana
asked
Alan Moore:
Do you think that psychological horror or blood and guts horror has a greater effect on an audience? Why?
Alan Moore
For my money, psychological horror beats physical gore hands down for its ability to actually disturb us and penetrate us to our very core. After all, teenage boys and young men, a group famously anxious and uncertain of its own masculinity, will not uncommonly attend a slasher film in raucous groups, and relieve their mutual tension by making a lot of noise and laughing rather too hard at the most violent scenes, as if to demonstrate that they’re much too manly to be scared by a mere film, while in fact demonstrating the exact opposite. My point is that you don’t get the same thing happening at a showing of Polanski’s Repulsion, do you? Also, it must be said that almost any halfwit can elicit a visceral reaction from their audience by having a character’s eye gouged out, while it takes considerable skill to get beneath an audience’s skin psychologically. I know which I’d see.
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