|
List Price: $27.95
Our Price: $1.00
You Save: 96%
Product Details:
Type: Hardcover
Item#: c5548
ISBN#: 1890626066
Reader Rating:
read the reviews
submit a review
|
|
The sex-lib crowd "tried to drive religious and moral nature out with a pitchfork, but found that nature only returned through the back door, in the form of a monster"
Monsters From the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film
by Michael E. Jones
That's what E. Michael Jones says in his strikingly original and insightful book, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film. Jones demonstrates that the horror flicks that litter the American cultural landscape aren't just market-driven trash. Instead, they express much-denied truths about human nature and morality —- often quite apart from the intentions of their creators.
(continued from above)
It all started, says Jones, with Mary Godwin Shelley's Frankenstein. At first Mary Godwin was an enthusiastic participant in the poet Percy Shelley's sexual libertinism. But even after Shelley became her husband, her horror grew at his unnatural behavior -- until it found unforgettable embodiment as Dr. Frankenstein's monster.
This absorbing book explains how that monster lives on after Frankenstein, and appears everywhere that traditional morality gives way to illusory sexual liberation. Horror, says Jones, comes from a guilty conscience that won't admit that it’s done anything wrong —- and horror stories reveal the true nature of that guilt again and again.
Amid the horror, an encouraging message
Jones's message is encouraging: this book gives you proof after proof that the eternal truths conservatives defend today can never be wholly or successfully discarded. For Jones explains that desire for repentance —- however inchoate —- underlies all horror literature and movies. He shows how in his eye-opening and fascinating analyses of works including:
- Frankenstein: Mary Shelley "was struck," Jones reports, "by the disparity between the light-hearted and irresponsible way people could bring life into the world and the sad consequences that, out of all proportion to the emotion that begot them, flowed from those irresponsible actions." Or -— as Frankenstein's monster himself puts it to the mad doctor -- "How dare you sport thus with life?" In the book: the full details of Shelley's twisted philosophy -— and its tragic results
- Dracula, says Jones, illuminates the darkness of homosexuality. Quoting extensively from interviews with homosexuals in treatment, Jones shows the surprising ways that the psychology of homosexual attraction uncannily resembles vampirism
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers: the inhuman pod people in this chilling story proliferate only after scenes hinting at marital breakdown and sexual immorality. Written in 1954 (just as the American family was beginning to show signs of breaking down) this story prophetically reveals the devastation of divorce -- Jones indicates how in these pages
- Jones on Hitchcock’s Psycho: "What no one seemed to notice at the time is that it took sexual liberation as its starting point as well, and then in the inchoate chain of causality typical of the genre, tried to explain how sexual liberation led, first through sin and then through crime to death." Here, that chain of causality is brought to light
- Ever noticed that a lot of scary space alien movie types look like fetuses? The Seventies movie Alien, says Jones, "is about procreation. It is a treatise on the culture's neurotic reaction to the truth that procreation is a part of sex. . . . Alien is an expression of fear and hatred of offspring —- the fetus is portrayed as a monster. . . . Alien and its sequels become, as a result, a feminist meditation on the technological means needed to destroy fertility and the psychic ambivalence that results from using those means."
Click here to submit a review
 DOUGLAS A BERRYHILL
Being a male born in 1961, it seems like I spent most of my youth in the pursuit of comic books, monster magazines, and parental permission to stay up past midnight each Friday to watch "Shock Theater" on TV.
My enthusiam for those old black and white horror films starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi knew no bounds.
But as I grew older, my Christian values grew and edged out my fascination with horror movies. But the desire to relive my youth through those old films remained as one of my guilty pleasures in life.
Then I read "Monsters From the Id" and my eyes were opened to the truths that had been starring me in the face my whole life. The book explains the psychological basis behind many of the horror films I've watched since I was a child. Now, it's as though I'm seeing them for the first time, from a moral perspective.
This is a scholarly book, which means that it is heavy reading at times, but I highly recommend it to anyone like myself, who is interested in understanding horror/gothic literature from a Christian perspective.
|
|
Continue the review below...
