Dana Norris, the founder and host of Story Club, reviewed Silent Hill 3D, Paranormal Activity and Sinister for Halloween. What did she learn? In 2012, America has been the most afraid of moving to a new house or town, carousels and our own children, among other things.
Read an excerpt below, or listen above:
I hate horror movies because I don’t need them. I know that other people get a delicious thrill from being scared but that’s only because they’re not normally scared, but I start out scared. I wake up every morning and walk to the “L” thinking,“Is someone going to hit me in the back of the head with a brick?”
But I think that horror movies are important. Maybe they show us something about ourselves, what we all, as a culture, are most afraid of. I don’t know for sure because I absolutely refuse to watch horror movies. But I wanted to investigate this theory further, so instead of watching the horror movies currently in theaters, I just watched the trailers with the sound off. This is what I found:
Silent Hill 3D
A girl with a mid-'90s Meg Ryan haircut moves to a new town. Now, we all know that we should never, ever move to new towns because new towns are where the Devil lives. This town has an idyllic-looking high school, and then we smash cut to some dude WITHOUT A FACE and then we smash cut to a little girl with black eyes who makes snow tornadoes behind her, which seems to me more like an X-Men thing than a horror movie thing to me, but that’s just me.
So Meg-Ryan-haircut, she’s a teenager and she lives with her Dad who’s played by Sean Bean, the guy who plays both Boromir in
Lord of the Rings and Edward Stark in Game of Thrones so you know he is going to die before the movie ends, so, spoiler, sorry. And then the teenage girl’s boyfriend is the guy who plays Jon Snow in Game of Thronesand I’m like: Did the Khaleesi direct this movie?
Anyway, Meg-Ryan-haircut keeps having dreams that she’s in some sort of devil basement and – oh no, a door handle is jiggling, that is not good. And then Edward Stark is kidnapped cause that’s what he does. And there’s a message on the wall in – blood? It’s too dark to be blood. Tar? Tar’s the worst, it’s so hard to clean up – telling her to go to Silent Hill. And then Jon Snow gets kidnapped too, so Meg-Ryan-haircut has to go to Silent Hill to get the cast of
Game of Thrones back. And then there’s this like, guy crawling towards her who is MADE OF SPIDERS and you guys, I close my eyes and that is all I see now. And then there’s a carnival? And Edward Stark is forced to work there by the Devil? And Meg-Ryan-haircut is on a carousel and it’s on fire? And then it’s over, so maybe it makes more sense in 3D, I don’t know. I’m giving it. . . two stars.The Paper Machete is a weekly live magazine at the Horseshoe in North Center. It’s always at 3 p.m., it’s always on Saturday, and it’s always free. Get all yourThe Paper Machete Radio Magazine needs filled here, or download the podcast from iTunes here.
