Scared Yet?

Courtesy of Lindsey Dawson.

These are dark times we live in, at least if you’re watching popular movies or TV.

The vampires of the Twilight saga saturated modern media for a while, but now they’ve been booted out by the warriors of The Hunger Games, in which young people in an imaginary society not too removed from our own are selected to fight to the death.

Teenagers flocked to Hunger Games and a friend of mine took her daughter to see it – and hated it. She hated what she saw as its glamorisation of death – and feared for how it might affect more sensitive teens.

I doubt you’ll have see any comments like that from professional reviewers though. I figure they’ve mostly become so immune to fictionalised violence that they can’t see any harm in it.

The mood is very dystopian. Dystopia is the opposite of eutopia. If an ideal society is eutopian, then a dystopian one is a place where everyone’s having a miserable time – rather like in Spain at the moment but with murders and monsters added.

There’s plenty of dystopia on TV too, as in the recent Terra Nova series, and let’s not forget UK series Being Human, which features people who have an alarming tendency to turn into ravening beasts.

True Blood is back on our screens too. Shape shifters abound there, with multiple fangs slipping out of the gums of a host of Mississippi vampires, all the better to plunge into tender necks.   

The biggest monster new movie on the block is Prometheus. Its director, Ridley Scott, is the guy who scared the bejesus out of us with Alien, as you may recall. It’s a long time since that ghastly critter gnawed its way out of a crewman’s chest in the first Alien movie.

Want to guess how long? 1979. Can it possibly be 33 years? Sigh.

Have you noticed how very dark these movies are – as in literally dark? All shaded, gloomy and black they sure don’t allow for much sunlight.

My current question is whether, at five, my grand-daughter is too young for the latest iteration of Snow White –  Snow White and the Huntsman.

I just took a look at the trailer on YouTube. And oh yes, she’s way too young. I see it has an M rating – “suitable for mature audiences” but still unrestricted.

I’m mature all right, but I reckon this movie could give me nightmares… or at least leave me wondering why Kristen Steward, last seen as a scrawny girl in Twilight, is imagined to be beauteous enough to knock Charlize Theron off her perch when she asks the mirror-mirror question…  

By Lindsey Dawson