New horror movies come out all throughout the year, and many of them touch on topics such as religion and spirituality.
One of my favorite horror movies, “The Skeleton Key,” starring Joy Bryant and Kate Hudson, shows great detail of the spiritual values of countries in Africa. It showed traces of the Hoodoo religion and how it is deeply rooted in some cultures.
Movies like this depict the lives of people of African descent as if they have no other belief system than some sort of witchcraft and black magic. To people who don’t know about the background of African-American culture, these type of horror movies can become extremely convincing. They depict a form of the culture that doesn’t exist.
These movies are offensive to me because they are showing information that is fictional. Many of these movies portray a new aspect of something that is based on 90 percent opinion and 10 percent fact. Horror movies show bits and pieces of truth and cover the rest with lies that become so intermingled that it is no longer relevant to everyday life.
The stereotypes are offensive to my culture. I don’t believe the directors think about the way it affects other cultures when a large, diverse audience views them.
Being an avid moviegoer and a horror movie fanatic, the plots seem extremely repetitive and continue to mock the religious beliefs of viewers. The sad part about this is that these are the movies that gain the largest audience. The movies that show the most mockery of spirituality, culture and religion gain the highest praise. These are the movies that become nominated. These are ones that win Oscars.
What people forget about these movies is that they are showing a part of someone’s life and culture in a false light. It shows that since these movies are wholly portrayed as fiction, they are all to be laughed at and brushed off. But at the end of the day, they shouldn’t be.