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....but it was actually inspired by a list of favourite bad horror movies.containing the following quote from Homicidal(William Castle, 1961):
DOC: It’s only when hate is dammed-up that it breaks out in murder.
CARL: In other words then, Doc, anybody could kill that didn’t have an outlet for their hate?
Why, I thought, does that line sound so campy now? After a while, it struck me as a very 1950-60s point of view. In a repressed society (especially a post-war one), it must have been comparatively easy to say “well, s/he had trouble we didn’t know about and just snapped one day.”
My own feeling is that in current popular psychology, repressed feelings lead to self-harm, but more rarely to violence against others. The trope of the “mild-mannered guy who just couldn’t take it anymore” seems rarer than that of the perp who kept getting away with stuff, and consequently became increasingly confident and violent – more of an 18th-century idea, in a way.
I don’t know to what extent either of these views match reality. Comments?
DOC: It’s only when hate is dammed-up that it breaks out in murder.
CARL: In other words then, Doc, anybody could kill that didn’t have an outlet for their hate?
Why, I thought, does that line sound so campy now? After a while, it struck me as a very 1950-60s point of view. In a repressed society (especially a post-war one), it must have been comparatively easy to say “well, s/he had trouble we didn’t know about and just snapped one day.”
My own feeling is that in current popular psychology, repressed feelings lead to self-harm, but more rarely to violence against others. The trope of the “mild-mannered guy who just couldn’t take it anymore” seems rarer than that of the perp who kept getting away with stuff, and consequently became increasingly confident and violent – more of an 18th-century idea, in a way.
I don’t know to what extent either of these views match reality. Comments?
