It happened in California, a small town on the West Coast...the town of Woodsboro. A quiet community, set apart from the larger, more bustling cities like LA and San Francisco.
It was something right out of a horror movie, and it had gone off like a powder keg. It had started with one, tiny spark: a phone call. On a cold, November school night for a young seventeen-year old girl in 1996. It was the start of a series of crimes that served as some of the most brutal series of murders in the annals of American history. Think Bundy, Dahmer, and their ilk. Bodies posed, mutilated, and posed purely for shock value; it was a total bloodbath. It sparked one of the greatest American debates during the oncoming of the twenty-first century: the effects of horror movies on real-life violence. The powder keg had been simmering, bubbling to the surface of the quasi-peaceful, humdrum everyday life of the average American. Tensions were already high with the beating of Rodney King and Jeffrey Dahmer's horrific crimes being unearthed in 1991, and then, the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994 followed by the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and now, bouts of heinous violence were sprouting up all over the nation.
The infamous Woodsboro Murders, as the media had dubbed them, had lit the match underneath the cinema and violence debate because they seemed to be fashioned in the style of your average splatter flick; blood was splattered on walls, victims were disemboweled like freshly killed pigs, and then hung and propped up like macabre pieces of artwork, like something right out of Suspiria or Evil Dead. Except in these murders, there was nothing supernatural.
Just pure human evil.
They had clearly been done by someone; someone who had watched one too many scary movies and had done their best to emulate them, and someone who had been playing by their own set of sick, twisted rules.
Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Who could have done something so heinous? Who in the peaceful town of Woodsboro had been able to do something so horrific to innocent people? What had made them snap? That was the central question of the debate.
Was it the movies that made them snap and turn to violence? Or had they been vicious killers their whole lives, simply a walking time-bomb waiting for something to set them off, something to light the burning rage that they felt inside? Maybe it was the parents who should have taken some responsibility and taken it upon themselves to restrict their child from those sorts of movies, if they had certain psychological issues.
After all, there was something about horror movies that peaked a sense of intrigue and wonder from deep within the human psyche; something very primal and very real. That's how they made so much money.
We all have fear. Fear is what drives some people. Controls others. Shapes you into the kind of person you are. Fear was something ancient humans were too keen on. Back then, fear helped you survive. That pricking on the back of your neck and clammy hands and the stabbing pit in your gut often were red flags that something bad was nearby, like a predator lurking in the bushes, ready to rip you limb from limb and devour you for dinner.
In more recent times, that vivid and salient fear our ancestors felt still lingers around in the form of crippling anxiety, fervent ideologies, and various forms of prejudice and discrimination, albeit often showing up due to relatively mundane reasons like social ostracization, or missing the bus, or losing your job.
Are we getting soft? Some think so; political and social discussions are often rife with the proverbial "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" sentiment. Lots of earlier generations call the later generations weak implying that being vulnerable and afraid and fragile means you are somehow inferior. The little things hurt us way more; perhaps because there aren't any big, scary predators trying to eat us and so to us, our extreme feelings of fear and dread seem unreasonable, or even downright irrational.
