IMJ Capsule Reviews™ – All New Comic Book Reviews for the Week of 10.17.12!.
I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen this movie–less than dozen, more than an handful–but like any good piece of fiction, it is a great experience every time. But I think it also helped me realize why I don’t tend to want to read psycho killer fiction. While not a horror movie, it’s hard not to see the how the killings and their message are connected to Detective Somerset’s internal struggles. Which is the essence of what horror stories should be doing, whether it be supernatural creatures or plain old people doing terrible things. Horror is supposed thrust us into the darkness so that we can see the light more clearly as the character struggles to escape. John Doe’s killings are about the apathy in the world and that is exactly why Somerset is retiring.
But It seems like I only find this thematic balance only in the movies. Se7en and Silence of the Lambs you see why each protagonist was the one that had to be in the book, how they are connected to themes of the book. The only books that has happened with that we read so are The Church of Dead Girls and Misery. Because of that, I would hardly classify many of the books we read as horror, since they focus so much on why the killer does what he does and catching him, that it they barely then take those threads and sewn the protagonist into theme of the novel. Just because horrible things happen in a book doesn’t make it horror. If it does, we might has well just give the genre to people that need to act out murder fantasies on paper so they don’t do it in life and the rest of use just become Dark Fiction writers.
