Horror Films and Coping with Death

[MichaelMyers]

Friends,

A serious thought crossed my mind recently when my best friend learned that a parent was diagnosed with cancer: how can I reconcile the sympathy I feel for him/her with my attraction to supernatural/horror films, where death occurs frequently, randomly, and often in mass quantities? For most, death occurs in the cold and sterile confines of the sickroom, not in the elaborate forms that find expression in the films we love.

So I felt a tweak of shame and guilt in the fact that I delight in plots of films and books that involve body counts and the dark side of life when so many are grieving over family members who are suffering. And yet I don't think I could stand watching, say, Hallmark Movie Channel all day!

I apologize if this belongs more on a blog than a forum. But I am quite interested in reading any insights on how you square the sight of friends/family undergoing pain/loss (for example) with a fondness for horror as a genre.

[neverending]

Storytelling, and movies are a form of storytelling, has always been a way to process the world around us. Art elaborates on situations and ideas, things we need to deal with, by teaching lessons. Live and death stories, the struggle between evil and good, it's all part of this process. We experience emotions in storytelling, and we learn how to cope, we think about things.

No matter how outlandish a story is, if it's well told (be it told through words or images), we learn things from it, whether we do so conciously or unconciously. Stories that deal wth death help us deal with death in real life.