Horror movie fans i need your help!!!!!!

[Sculpt]

Originally Posted by Giganticface

I didn't really understand question 4. Seemed like a loaded question. I enjoyed it though. Good luck!

It's a loaded question. "4. do you feel horror movies have become more realistic as censorship has changed?"

I think it means censorship has changed (more graphic everything allowed, and allows more for G, PG and R); so has this lead to more realistic horror films?

[Giganticface]

Originally Posted by Sculpt

It's a loaded question. "4. do you feel horror movies have become more realistic as censorship has changed?"

I think it means censorship has changed (more graphic everything allowed, and allows more for G, PG and R); so has this lead to more realistic horror films?

I guess I don't understand what the question means by "censorship has changed." I assume the surveyor believes that censorship had loosened, and films are more graphic now than they were in the past? If so, that's a bit oversimplied.

If we're talking about films shown in America, censorship is stricter now than it was during the grindhouse heydey, when films didn't need to be rated to be shown in theaters. For instance, compare the original I Spit on Your Grave to the remake. The original explicitly shows about 45 minutes of gang rape, complete with full frontal nudity and explicit violence. The remake might feel more "realistic," but the rape is short and mostly off-screen, there's little nudity, the violence is milder (it's perhaps more psychologically abusive), even in the unrated version. Of course, it's still a difficult watch due to the subject matter.

There are many films from that era that push boundaries that are not often pushed these days. Cannibal Holocaust, for instance... I can't think of a modern film that shocks the way this one does. Eli Roth has a cannibal film in the works, but reviews say it doesn't come close to the level of violence that the cannibal exploitation films did. Ilsa She Wolf of the SS... besides the non-stop full frontal nudity, can you imagine a film coming out these days that treats the atrocities of the Holocaust so flippantly? Goodbye Uncle Tom... a similar, exploitative, look at American slavery that I just can't imagine would be made today.

Of course, boundaries certainly are pushed today in the direct-to-video category. Stuff like Scrapbook and August Underground. Weird foreign stuff like Visitor Q. But those films, like the exploitation films, circumvent the rating system, and I don't think they are censored any more or less than films have been in the past 40 years.

Clearly, films prior to the late 60s didn't go nearly as far. I credit that more to the Vietnam War, and real, horrifying imagery being broadcast on TV, than I do on any form of censorship. However, prior to the grindhouse era, I do think censorship had an effect on setting acceptable boundaries.

If anything, I think the level of explicitness in film is dictated by societal acceptance. It's probably true that films shown in mainstream theaters now may be more explicit than mainstream films of years past, and that probably has more to so with what people are willing to pay to see, rather than where the MPAA is willing to draw the line.

Of course, this commentary is all pretty left-field, since I don't really know what angle the OP is taking in his/her research. I just thought that question wasn't very clear, and maybe suffered from a false assumption.

[neverending]

Let's not forget the MPAA is a voluntary trade organization. Its ratings hold no legal standing. There is no film censorship outside the censorship of commerce. Most theatres today will not show a film without an MPAA rating, but they are not legally bound by this. It's very likely that any theatre that DID show a film that wasn't rated would find itself blacklisted by the studios and would have a hard time finding films to show.

In the early days of cinema each state had a film board that had to approve every film before it could be shown, but with the creation of the Hayes Office and the Production Code those largely fell by the wayside, and with landmark court decisions that pretty much did away with obscenity laws, filmmakers and governing boards found their roles reversed. They now had to prove that a film or other work of art had no socially redeeming value before it could be banned. Thank you Henry Miller.

The use of the term censorship is a tricky matter. There's only one type of content that is truly censored in the USA, and by that I mean it cannot be sold, shown, distributed, ot even owned, legally. The MPAA doesn't censor movies. They make recommendations. A studio can decide if it wants to comply with the recommendations. If they don't, the MPAA can rate the film X or refuse to give it a rating. Both alternatives are a financial death knell for a major studio release, or even small indie films.

BigHead is correct when he says things were a lot more lenient in the past. I watched Duel on Cable recently. Before the film the was an announcement that the film had been edited for content. Let's get this straight- Duel was originally released as a TV MOVIE ON A BROADCAST NETWORK. Today it has to be edited to be shown on a Cable network. That's some serious social regression.

So, perhaps the question by the original poster is appropriate. Censorship has changed. There are no more state boards of censorship. The Hayes Office is gone. But we have the erconomic stranglehold of the (voluntary) MPAA.