Horror Movies

It's that time of year again, when all the old horror movies make their rounds on the cable stations.

As a teenager I used to LOVE horror movies. I would rent them from the local video store (remember VHS??) and curl up under a blanket which also served as a blind through which you would watch the scariest parts. I got to the point when I could tell when someone was going to be surprised, could tell what was going to happen next, who the next victim would be, because I watched the genre so often.

As I've gotten older I've lost my taste for horror. I thought for a while that perhaps it was because I'm older and thus a little more conservative than I used to be. Or, now as a parent, I want to protect my children from such awful things, so why support them by watching?

But this weekend, as I read the newspaper with the world happenings, I came upon a new reason why I dislike horror movies now: because if someone can think of a new way to debase another human being, that means that somewhere in the world it is happening to real people.

The depravities that occur in Africa, with young children being recruited and drugged to carry out a military regime's hate crimes, has to be some of the saddest events within human history. And I realized as I read of some of the descriptions of the torture that they are eerily similar to the carryings-on's of some of the horror movies, which came decades before these armies were put together.

So when I see new movies like "Saw" and now "Saw IV" inventing new ways to torture and humiliate humans, it makes me sad because I know that somewhere someone will see this and give it a try.