Castration is fine. Decapitation with chest of drawers? Hey, it happens.
But in horror movies, murdering children is still one of the very last taboos — with a few notable exceptions.
One example that comes to mind is Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which kill a young child by way of murderous mask filled with snakes and insects:
Jaws makes the audience believe a maniac is sitting in the director’s chair, ramping up the stakes by killing a young lad who had his whole life stretched out before him. Chomp:
How about we take this to the next level?
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One of the earliest child-killing scenes demonstrates that Frankenstein isn’t always deserving of a “Plays Well With Others” badge. Glug:
Stephen King’s Pet Sematary — the book as well as the film — goes there, too. Beep:
But Stephen King’s mammoth horror novel It is a crazed beast of a book that clocks in at over 1,000 pages and involves the exploits of a jovial shapeshifting child-butchering clown. And there are dead kids splattered all over those pages.
It’s also littered with more slaughtered children than the entire Edward Gorey bibliography.
Though it was turned into a comparatively subdued television miniseries in 1990 (starring Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown), it’s now getting the full Hollywood movie treatment, and time will tell how close the end result hews to its unusually brutal source material.
The first full trailer for the film offers a nice, long, coppery taste of the film; a dizzying mosaic of pancake makeup, paper boats, fangs, terrified kids, dead kids, and good-old fashioned mordant terror.
Perfect timing, too. For some reason, a fable about an orange-hued clown thoughtlessly gutting the promise of young lives without pity or remorse strikes us as particularly prescient at the moment.
Watch:
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PRINCE OF SNARKNESS aka DIVKID
Scratching my head for the gay connection. Maybe the author of this post has a John Wayne Gacy fetish…(don’t we all *swoon* <3)
scotshot
It’s simply a movie preview.
You can pull out of it the tale of a old, horrifying clown/queen who feeds on children.
Derek de Koff
Bingo.
MikeE
well, the author of the book is a huge supporter of the LGBT community and has been for a long time.
“IT” is one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read. King certainly knows how to push the right buttons.
ChrisK
@MikeE
Pet Cemetery was the scariest I read and the director turned it into a comedy.
mattachinepodcast
NOPE!
Frank
I guess you all have NEVER read “It” because there are LOTS of gay instances within the book:
Probably the biggest inclusion of queerness into King’s novel is the story’s inciting incident, for lack of a more apt term involve Don and Adrian, a gay couple living in Derry, Maine in 1984
The second-most prominent instance comes in the character of, Patrick Hocksetter, one of the bullies led by Henry Bowers, who terrorize the protagonists throughout their childhood in the late 1950’s….you should probably read about the book
Much of the novel’s other instances of queerness come in the form of thoughts and dialogue by main and side characters, usually while describing other unseen characters.
jkb
This looks promising