The Village

I liked it.

( Spoilers and Thoughts )

It's not about the "horror", it's about dread.

I've been reading peoples' reactions to The Village, and the ones who don't seem to like it all have the same thing to say. It's all a bunch of bitching and whining about it not being scary or horrifying. They all seem to miss the part of scary that M. Knight is most excellent at creating. And that feeling is dread. I'm reminded of something Orson Scott Card said when describing the various types of scary that exist in writing and in movies. If a monster is involved, until you see it, you're going to be scared because the imagination takes over. Once the monster actually appears, then one is relieved and can honestly say they were always expecting something a little worse. That is anticipation. And there is horror and several other things, but the most intriguing is that of dread.

As he put it, dread is that feeling one gets when returning home to find the window open when you know you shut it and are the only one who has been home. The thing is, that is the scary that M Knight does, and that which people who are looking for a conventional thriller don't seem to get. His movies are always completely drenched in dread. I can still watch movies like Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense and feel the dread, even knowing the twists. It's a kind of scary that doesn't matter over foreknowledge or even something really bad to occur. It's something I usually notice, and quite enjoy, so it rather annoys me when people say that it wasn't scary at all.

It's a representative republic, dammit, not a democracy!

Just something that needs to be said more than it is, as in, some. So many people bandy about the word democracy anymore. It's gotten to the point where it's nothing more than a buzzword used to promote whatever agenda is on the table. People saying that we don't stand for such things in a democracy, or that such things aren't done, or things need to be done if we want to keep our democratic rights. We don't have democratic rights. Democracies, pretty much as a rule, do not work for large populations, and are basically mob vote on whichever demagogue has the best speech. To be fair, that's what a lot of us do, but a representative republic means that we may get to vote on the issues that come up occasionally, but they are only issues that the people we elect deign to bring up. Not a democracy dammit! This concludes tonight's rant. Stay tuned for next weeks episode, when we will discover if the Riddler really does have our caped crusader upon the ropes of villiany, or whether he will be puzzled until his puzzler is sore. Same bat channel, same bat station...or something.

How bizarre, how bizarre.

I've had an odd feeling lately. I think I've had it for a few months, but seeing as how I rarely ever leave the house, I rarely get it. Every time I go somewhere, well, most of the time anyway, I keep expecting to see her, keep expecting for her to show up. I'm not even sure who she is, or whether I've ever even met her, or even if I'm ever likely to, but that's not changing anything. Logically there doesn't seem to be any reason for it, but I can never ease the feeling that one of these days I'm going to walk into a place, and there she'll be. I find myself glancing around at every girl my age wherever I go in the futile hope that this one is her, but they never are. I noticed myself doing it in the near empty theater this afternoon. I just kept glancing around for her. And I don't even know who it is I'm looking for, except that she's never there.