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How Would Katharine Hepburn Handle a Zombie?

A Media Shmedia column

by Scott Patrick Wagner

On this eve of the release of Rob Zombie’s no-doubt lyrical and touching remake of Halloween, I would like to salute the splatter film. I admit that my entire experience with the genre is two and one-eighth movies (I hit critical mass 12 minutes into Halloween II). Y’see, on the subject of today’s topic, I just can’t stomach the research.

Not having seen a single Zombie opus—or any in the mercifully dying “torture porn” subgenre—can I comment eruditely on their virtues and flaws? Nope. Can I rant like a maniac about how they’re destroying society? Well . . . let me just say that only a moron or a splatter producer would try to argue that the intensifying violence in our world has nothing to do with what we’re exposed to in our entertainment. But that’s all I’ll say. Except for the following.

There is only one valid raison d’ètre for splatter/horror movies, and you need to look under your armpits to see if you qualify. If you have been able to grow hair there for no more than seven years, splatter can be your tribal rite of passage. Boys face the terror and go into protect-the-damsel mode; girls shrink from the terror and throw themselves into their hero’s newly hairy arms. Yin meets yang, tough meets tender, outdoor plumbing meets indoor, and voilá—the species has propagated!

And no one under 16 or over 25 should be allowed to enter. (Try coming up with a ratings letter for that, Jackass Valenti.) Why, you may ask, am I upset with Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA—the ratings board that selflessly determines which films have too much sex for children, and which don’t have enough violence for them? The standards set by Jack and his star chamber make me feel like I live in the wrong era. Not about the sex part, of course; the Board has kept a firm Puritan lock on that nasty, icky sex stuff. But films have become so boldly gory that I don’t have the intestinal fortitude for it. And now that the heightened gore has gushed into TV and what we used to consider mainstream movies, I got nowhere to turn my soon-to-explode head.

I don’t mean to say there’s no place for the horror genre; Brian De Palma, for example, brings a stylishness to his macabre narratives that is both beautiful and arch (though Carrie and Dressed to Kill fall into the “beautiful” category much more than Scarface, an exercise in perseverence). But let’s face it: the only depth in most of these movies is in the cleaver trajectory.

I feel sometimes like I’m channeling Katharine Hepburn. I don’t speak with that New England whinny, but I do relate to an insistence on decency, as brayed by that bony Yankee actress. (I am complimenting her, right?) It seems that movies started getting incessantly violent around the time Katharine Hepburn stopped making them; I can’t picture her ever agreeing to do a film with over-the-top gore. Sometimes we just have to ask ourselves: What would Katharine Hepburn do? I think she’d rant. Vent her social-conscience spleen with inexorable cool (something Tipper Gore could never quite master).

One might start feeling a glimmer of perky optimism because Hostel II and Captivity—the two most recent torture porn entries—tanked at the box office. In fact, a particularly lurid billboard campaign for Captivity was yanked off the streets because of public outrage. To tell you the truth, in one of my few actual feats of What-Would-Katharine-Hepburn-Do-ism, I tracked down the billboard company that was responsible for putting up that disturbing mess right across the street from my gym, and I vented my spleen all over the vice president’s voice mail. I like to think that my single voice, along with an apparent collective of other individual spleen-venters, actually made a difference.

I don’t delude myself into thinking that we’ll be going back to pre-splatter levels of violence in mainstream films, or that I won’t have to continue vetting the levels of gore on TV and in film before I let my delicate little self watch. But maybe the crescendo of mind-deadening ultra-gore has peaked, and we’re on the downward slope of the trend. And maybe the MPAA group got the message from the billboard fiasco, and will reevaluate the level of violence we should be subjected to as a society (a world-wide society, since our films are so impactful in so many countries). Yeah . . . maybe all of that will happen. Or maybe donkeys will fly out of my intestinal tract. And it will be filmed in 70-mm Guts-o-Vision. And Rob Zombie will play my colon in the movie. One can only dream.