Flash forward forty-five years to the present day. Out of curiosity perhaps, or some morbid need to re-visit (and master) terrifying childhood moments, I consented when my son badgered...I mean asked me, to watch Saw (all six installments).  I realize I am a bit behind the curve, because Saw was first released in 2004. All I knew about Saw at the time was that it was a perverse movie about some deranged psychopath forcing people into grizzly situations in which they had to do terrible things to themselves, like hack off limbs or cut out their eyeballs.  What possible redemptive value could inhere in these ghastly films? 

As of this writing, we have watched Saw I and Saw II.  Thus far, a man has cut the back of his neck open to retrieve a secret number; another man has been lured into putting a bullet in his brain; still another man who could not work up the courage to remove his eyeball with a scalpel in order to retrieve a key that would free himself has been violently dispatched; and a women who barely escaped having her head ripped open by a bear-trap wedged in her mouth, was pushed into a pit of used hypodermic needles to find a key to free herself and her fellow captives (see the link at the end of this post, if you dare). 

Whew!!!! I actually enjoyed writing that...sort of got my juices flowing. Ah, maybe that's what draws us to horror films! Perhaps, it is as psychologists Guang-Xin Xie and Moon Lee argue in their article, Anticipated Violence, Arousal and Enjoyment of Movies: Viewers Reactions to Violent Previews Based on Arousal Seeking Tendency, that AST, or arousal seeking tendencies are stronger in some than others, and compels them into the darkness. Or perhaps, it is as researchers Bruce Ballon and Molyn Leszcz argue in their Horror Films:Tales to Master Terror or Shapers of Trauma, that viewing these gruesome films helps us to master the universal primal fears of bodily damage and loss? Or maybe it is as Jeffrey Goldstein asserts in The Attraction of Violent Entertainment, that these horrific, adrenalin-laced thrill rides provide the experience of being fully alive (while at the same time, fully safe), and that we somehow 'get off' seeing justice served to the bad guys.       

Ah, where would we be without psychologists, who offer us such wonderfully comforting and rational explanations for the most uncomfortable and irrational aspects of our experiences.  These all sound quite feasible to me, but a bit too...dare I say it, academic?  I sorta like Stephen King's thoughts on the subject.  In an essay entitled, Why We Crave Horror Movies, the master of the genre suggests that perhaps we are all insane, and through our bloodlust, 'dare the nightmare'. King wonders aloud if we experience some sense of fun in watching others menaced, terrorized and tortured, because this stirs what he calls, 'anticivilization emotions' that lay in wait deep inside our collective (and personal unconscious) to strike and flay the thin veneer of adulthood and maturity from our souls. Sorry, there I go again.  I will try to restrain myself, but I am, afterall, anticipating the third installment of Saw this evening.

On a departing note, I don't think it would be fair to leave you thinking that the Saw movies, and horror films in particular, are bad for us, 'shapers of trauma', as Ballon and Leszcz argue. For, in actuality, the Saw series, or at least the first two installments, are about justice rendered. The twisted protagonist of these tawdry tales, a man dying of cancer, provokes people who abuse themselves and take life for granted, to make unimagineable choices...horror films as tales of morality lost and found...justice served!  That would make us vicarious vigilantes, wouldn't it?!  

Take a look, but please, and very very seriously...this is not for children or the squeamish or the civilized.