It is, I think, a marker of my own white privilege that I’ve not yet posted about recent incidents of racism in America on this blog. The time lapse that it took to reflect and act on my reflections, to realize that I’m not doing enough to count myself among those who are actively advocating for Black lives and situating themselves on the right side of history, amounts to an idle chunk of time that I fear I wouldn’t have wasted if I were Black – if I faced the prospect of being murdered in the streets at random, and especially by officers of the law. This blog is, of course, a horror blog, and a small, personal one at that, but it’s one of the only “platforms” I have, and its articles receive enough hits that I thought it important to join, openly, the voices that condemn the United States’ current violence and injustice toward Black individuals by turning this site’s topic of interest, at times, to real life horrors instead of what Noel Carroll calls “art-horror,” and by stating clearly and explicitly where I stand on many of the “debates” that have arisen because of recent racist events in this country. Continue reading “Just Dread-full believes that Black Lives Matter and Supports the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.”
violence
Don’t Talk to Strangers
While my horror-related haul wasn’t as sprawling this Christmas as it was last Christmas, I still received a few terrifying tokens in my stocking this year. Among them, Michael got me the 2005 movie The Strangers starring Liv Tyler. Michael is a considerable Liv Tyler fan but held off on seeing this particular movie for over a decade because it looked too scary. This gift was thus twofold: he bought me the DVD and, bonus, resolved to watch it with me, despite resisting this action repeatedly over the course of our two plus year relationship. While Michael was terrified throughout the whole film, my feathers remained surprisingly unruffled. I do find the film intriguing, however, for its exploration of senseless human malice.
Problematic Presumptions in The Purge
Ahhhh, election year. This year, Americans get to see an irascible, iridescent orange man with floppy straw hair standing behind a podium spewing vitriol and grandiosity while waving (rumor has it) little sausage fingers. And his harlequin fantasies of “having them” build a wall to “protect” our border (somehow, “we’re not gonna build it, they’re gonna build it,” he asserts) and banning over one billion members of a major, 1,406-year-old religion from entering our country, while punishing women who seek abortions, might make some wonder, what will he think of next? There are myriad possibilities. While I don’t think what I’m about to suggest would actually happen, policy ideas like his make me imagine, wildly, that anything could happen. Perhaps he would legalize one night a year for murder, to let resentful Americans release their stores of seething hatred. And if that were to happen, we’ll have Ethan Hawke and The Purge series to thank, a semi-dystopian horror series about what would happen if all crime was legal for one night of the year, including the big “Red Rum.” Continue reading “Problematic Presumptions in The Purge”
justdreadfull.com 