I’m especially thinking of some bizzare foreign horror movies that didn’t make sense to me and I figure there’s gotta be some from my own (US) culture that just make 0 sense outside of the context of having been raised in this culture.
I’m especially thinking of some bizzare foreign horror movies that didn’t make sense to me and I figure there’s gotta be some from my own (US) culture that just make 0 sense outside of the context of having been raised in this culture.
Films about exorcism. Even if I have religious family members, my non-religious mind can’t comprehend the point about these films, no matter how hard I try.
I was once at my girlfriend’s parents house over Christmas. We stayed there for a few days. They had their own Christmas traditions, like most families. Some of them, they really thought they were the only family doing it, some of them more out there. One of them is watching that alien movie: encounters of the 3rd kind. At least i think it was that one. I knew what the movie was about, but i have never seen it, or at least not the whole movie.
They were SUPER into it, to me it was just an old movie. After the movie they talked about the movie, like they do every year. At some point i had to take the temperature a bit and was like: “but it’s just a movie… Not a documentary.” That is where i messed up, because they all thought that it’s a “real” movie.
The Exorcist works for me even in spite of my atheism. Ignoring the actual exorcism in it, the film is about a mother whose daughter is unwell, whose condition is truly mysterious, cannot be cured by conventional means, and is destroying the lives of both the mother and the daughter. Knowing your child is ill and not knowing how or if they’ll be cured is a form of horror that resonates with many and I feel so strongly sympathetic for the characters in the film.
I think of it as their version of Cosmic Horror.
The Enlightened Atheist Mind is simply too logical to understand this one specific trope 😔