Halloween Is Sex And Violence, But Not On TV

By Dustin Mendus

It’s almost Halloween. Children will be running around wired on all sorts of sugars soon, houses will be toilet paper’d, and Christmas trees will be up in shopping centers across the country. Already? Yep.

Outside of the commercial realm, what better sign of the times is there than what’s on the TV? Horror movies left and right — old and new.

They aren’t bad, but there is something…strange in our society. Horror movies (and in recent years, the really violent ones) are embraced openly by audiences in cinemas as well as in syndication. I can watch Jason Voorhees hack up teenagers on regular television while flipping back-and-forth between “Mythbusters.” After dinner, I can pop in a copy of “Hostel” and watch a woman have her eye pulled out of the socket. Meanwhile, showing a naked body on TV is still considered taboo. Remember when Janet Jackson’s breast made a guest appearance on TV?

Apparently the human body is bad unless it’s getting maimed or tortured.

Which leads me to ask, why? Why are we perfectly fine with grotesque displays of violence and torture in our consumer media, but still can’t tolerate natural parts of the body in daily media. Even news is very conservative in what it shows of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — or anything else going on globally. On the flipside, again, massive bloodbaths in movies? Bring on the blood. As far as what really goes on in the world? You can’t run that kind of stuff during the news.

That all said, I’m not condemning the horror genre itself. I absolutely refuse to watch films saturated in graphic violence, but it’s free speech in it’s gross form. I’m perfectly okay with it’s right to exist. It’s quite baffling, though, that we choose to be more tolerant of media that shows and makes taking people’s lives such a trivial manner.

Dustin Mendus is an undergraduate student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He focuses on cultural geography.