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Comment by throw__away7391 | Hacker News Reader

People are exposed to all kinds of things when they are kids and they grow up just fine. I've scarcely met anyone who felt that _they themselves_ were negatively affected by or unable to deal with something in a popular TV show they wanted to see as a child--but then they have kids and go into this weird neurotic state of hyper-vigilance.

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I was thinking about something similar recently: I was raised in a very christian household, and while I've lost faith in divinity, I still look back fondly at being raised that way and believe it did instill valuable life lessons that just don't require the existence of a god to be valuable. Having said all that, I've been finding myself a bit uncomfortable with religious books and stories and such which our families share with our own young children. The kids seem so impressionable and religious stuff seems like such overt brainwashing from my non-believing adult perspective. But these two instincts are in conflict! My children will inevitably be less influenced by this than I was (we aren't going to church and Sunday school every week...), and those years of constant exposure didn't keep me from developing my own views and opinions when I grew up. So my conclusion is that maybe I don't need to worry so much about my kids being impressionable now because they aren't going to get stuck, they're going to keep taking in and incorporating different influences for decades, maybe what I need to do instead is work hard at answering their questions in a way that keeps them curious and gives them room to grow.

It’s profound the amount of effort that goes into influencing and seems as though if the influencers believed what they were saying to be true, that they wouldn’t feel the need to perform so many mental gymnastics. What bothers me about these organizations is the overt levels of monetary greed and psychological abuse they inflict.

I mostly agree with the first part. But the second part is not universally true: my (mainline protestant) church growing up was not at all a vehicle for monetary greed, and like I was pointing out in my comment, I certainly was not psychologically "abused". But some churches are vehicles for the greedy and some people are abused; it's just not universal.

I was pretty scarred by the first Saw movie, even though I only made it about halfway through the first torture scene. I don't understand why people want to subject themselves to that kind of psychological violence.

Probably because different people could process the same thing differently, and derive enjoyment from different feelings.

For example, i like movies with really convoluted/branching multi-timeline stories where you dont really have much of an idea of what's going on, and you have to uncover it as you go (e.g., Inception). It makes my head "hurt" in a good way, and i like it because of that. I know plenty of people who dislike those movies for the exact same reason I like it for. And i hear the same "why would anyone want to subject themselves to this" critique about those movies from them.

I couldn't make it through Saw either, and I am not into those types of movies at all. But i can totally see plenty of valid reasons for why a person would enjoy it. It is essentially a really twisted escape room story with death games. And all that violence and gore just ups the stakes of the death games, thus making it feel more grotesque and intense. They might like how uncomfortable that movie makes them feel, similarly to how I like intensely convoluted multitimeline mystery stories that make my head "hurt" in a good way.

Off topic, but you might enjoy aovie called primer. Super short, low budget film about time travel. It's got a convoluted, but consistent timeline and the fun of the movie is going back and watching it over and over to fully understand what's happening. It's really good

I am not sure that this comparison justifies people being capable of enjoying something like Saw. It's like comparing yoga with, well, actual torture. They both make your body hurt.

It's like saying you don't understand how someone could enjoy playing Call of Duty or any other FPS videogames, because it involves killing people in the game, which is a terrifying and horrible experience that pretty much no one would want to go through irl. So it must be that they enjoy murder irl, right?

They don't enjoy the torture parts of Saw, they enjoy how that movie overall makes them feel (terrified, contemplating certain moral dilemmas, etc.). Like, the point of Saw, from what I gathered, was that it put people who did terrible things to others into those death game circumstances. Which adds a whole other sub-theme of "but does it make it less terrible, if they were a horrible person?" type of a dilemma. And overall, the grotesque nature of the visuals in the movie just serves the purpose of highlighting how horrifying it all is, not to make people enjoy the torture and think "wow, this is kinda fun and lighthearted".

Mind you, I am saying that as someone who cannot really stomach horror movies in general. That doesn't mean that I cannot see plenty of valid reasons for why people might like those movies.

Heh, despite being in the prime market for games like Call of Duty, I am not able to stomach those either, but I take your point. That level of gore just feels like such an indelible blot on the whole rest of the enterprise that I don't see how anyone would be able to taste anything else on the palate, but suppose people do have pretty different palates.

I enjoyed the first Saw, but to me it played out as more of a murder mystery than “torture porn” ala Hostel. It was dark in the same vein as Seven, but what made it interesting was the “whodunnit” aspect, not the horror.

A lot of horror is experienced in a way that's most similar to comedy. That's not to say that it's explicitly supposed to be funny to the viewers (but sometimes it is! A significant portion of horror films include scenes of over-the-top violence that is absolutely intended, at least in part, to get a laugh through sheer shock and "OMG I can't believe they did that" value) but also that the tension-release cycle is pretty similar to comedy (and, sure, also porn, but it's much more similar to comedy for a bunch of reasons that should be pretty obvious, I think).

Horror may also have a larger-than-most-genres share of fans who are watching at a much lesser level of suspension-of-disbelief, remaining very aware most or all of the time that "it's just a movie" and appreciating the craft, daring, and skill of the filmmakers, as much as the experience of the film per se.

There's horror outside the comedy-esque thrill-zone, of course, and it tends to be really damn bleak and scarring, even without much gore (It Comes at Night, for instance). The gorey flicks are usually not among the "worst" the genre has to offer, IMO.

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