Thought of the Day 06.08.09

I don’t particularly enjoy horror movies, although I’ve seen quite a few. But one thing I like about horror movies is that they depict evil as a real thing, aggressively coming to get you in spite of, and sometimes because of, your virtue. Also, horror movies often show the truth that you are more likely to be destroyed by evil if you behave stupidly, like by opening that door “just to see for yourself.”

But even though they show evil as a real thing, horror movies also can be very misleading about it’s true nature. For example, few of them ever do justice to the supernatural essence of demonic activity. But the real problem with horror movies is the portrayal of evil as spectacular when the truth is that most evil is quite ordinary.

Far more evil has been done by “normal” people than by lunatics and madmen. It’s not the masked man with the chainsaw we need to fear, but the slumlord who bribes the inspector rather than repairing the building. The midnight stalker scares us in a movie, but I’m more disturbed by the medical claims adjuster who denies a needed treatment he could have approved.


As Hannah Arendt put it, evil is banal. Boring. And when we conceive evil through the eyes of Wes Craven or Eli Roth, we both deceive ourselves into a false sense of security and we distract ourselves from the evil all around us…and within us.