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I think It's Alive actually deserves a lot of commendation, for bringing up the question, starting the thread and wanting to examine everything with the forum. One of the arguments people have always had about horror and everybody who watches horror films is that they are desensitized to real violence, real suffering and real situations. I think that the question and the thread and the nature of people's responses on the forum in this particular thread show that people can definitely take in a lot of violence and still have perspective on real violence- physical or psychological. It's really odd that this thread came up, because a couple weeks ago was the anniversary of a friend of mine's death. I definitely know what Maniac felt. The last thing this friend of mine said to me was at the end of a conversation on the neutron bomb a few hours before his death, he said, "what's the big deal? It only destroys people." He was kidding, but those words in that context gave me a really chilling perspective on the whole phenomenon. I had just been on the forums two weeks back, and then I went out and took a walk and sat down in the park. I found myself thinking about isolation and desensitization. I ended up leaving school this year instead of getting a degree in thanatology, the study of death and afterlife beliefs, and I found it odd and sickening that I had nothing good to tell myself to contextualize the grief and how a lot of people have actually been desensitized to tragedy and violence. It's nice to see that right wing idiots are wrong about horror fans being those people. I think actually for people who are often amused by onscreen violence real violence in fact becomes more repugnant and scary.
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