1/2/07--Bad parenting in retrospect

So my daughter Kellie is going thru this little phase---she's not alone in this, its something a lot of teenagers do these days--its called "horror movie junkie".  When I say this, I'm not talking about old school Frankenstein or Dracula....I'm talking about stuff like Saw & Wolf Creek.  Now, I watched Saw II a few days ago, and I thought, as an adult that it was a pretty rough movie--but it had an interesting and thought provoking plot involving making people examine their own personal faults and misdeeds.
Today, I got around to watching Wolf Creek.  Kellie had already watched the movie, and I asked her if she liked it, she said she did.  I started watching the movie.....

And about halfway into it....I felt like a bad parent.  I felt that I had done a bad job because I didn't watch this movie first...that I let my daughter watch it without looking at it and seeing if it was inappropriate for her or someone her age.

One of the things that bothers me about this new wave of horror movies is that---knowing that a horror movie is always based on the old "good vs. evil" thing, and the whole purpose is for good to EVENTUALLY conquer evil (unless there is the now inevitable five sequels)....I mean, its what pro wrestling has been based on for the last 50 years---but this latest batch of horror movies has the bad guy getting away with it.
Its sort of a chilling trend.  This movie has a couple scenes of pretty graphic tortue, including one where the bad guy shows a potential victim the skin of a woman he had previously skinned, while telling her "that one lasted about 3 mos before I finally killed her", and another particularly lovely scene where the killer tells a victim that he has to prevent her from running away again, so he wants to "show her a trick that they used to do in Vietnam during the war".  He called it "head on a stick" and then proceeded to "sever her spine"---which, in his words, essentially made her...."a head on a stick".

Yeah....isn't that just lovely?  So tonight.....young Kellie and I will have a little discussion about horror films....and when the next time she'll be allowed to view one.

Which should be......2015 ish.

Later,
Jeff