Oldboy is considered an action/revenge movie rather than a horror movie.

Yeah, it's Misery horror to me. Perhaps I mean sickening instead of horror.

Anyone seen Park Chan-Wook's newest, Thirst? You know, the vampire-priest film? I've read vastly mixed reviews.

I've tried and bounced off Park's work in the past. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance tops my list of "films I wish I'd never seen." I acknowledged it was well-acted and well-made, but it sent me to a really bad place emotionally -- sort of like, "life is a neverending pit of despair and we all die horribly and there will never be any joy or happiness for anyone ever again, so HAHAHA SUCKERS." I didn't even get intellectual pleasure one might get from bleak, existential horror, and I got no thrills or catharsis out of it. It was just mean. And ugly and violent. It didn't even have the trappings of the supernatural to soften the blow. After that, I didn't want to touch Oldboy with a ten-foot pole.

At least Thirst has the vampire-factor. And the priest factor (damn my Catholic education for warping me for life!). And Song Kang-Ho, who I loved in Memories of Murder and Host. (Well, he was in Sympathy, too, but I try not to think about it.)

Cereal:

I saw An Education over the weekend and I adored it to bits. Probably the most pleasure I got out of movies in the last few months. Carey Mulligan (Sally Sparrow from the DW episode, "Blink") is fantastic in it, and the Audrey Hepburn comparison I've been hearing about isn't completely absurd (I went more to the Leslie Caron place, although that was probably due to the older man/young girl aspect of it.)

I have the two Vengeance movies on my Netflix streaming queue, Vonnie. Would you recommend against seeing them? The person I saw Oldboy with swears it has a happy ending. I think it's horrible beyond all words, but I don't regret having seen it.

I dunno, ita. Appreciation of horror is such a subjective thing. I think one can appreciate Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance as one might enjoy a Jacobean revenge tragedy, but I found the level of violence -- and the almost aesthetic revelling in the detail of the violence and torture in the film -- very difficult to stomach. I mean, I usually have no trouble with bleakness or unhappy endings and I've known to enjoy psychological horror, but I have to have *something* to balance it with, y'know? Some catharsis or operatic grandeur, or a tiny flicker of hope. I recall the movie looked beautiful, but mostly I remember slooooooow moments depicting unending despair and hopeless of human condition interspersed with bouts of unbearable violence and torture. Gah.

That said, I think you probably have stronger stomach for violence than I do (I am such a wuss, I couldn't even finish watching A Clockwork Orange.)

Yeah, A Clockwork Orange is one of my favourite movies. I'm squeamish in odd places. In the end, it wasn't the violence of Oldboy that did me in, just the...the choices.

Polter-Cow, have you seen the Be Kind Rewind youtube channel? The sweded trailer is... well I'm not quite sure but I love it.

Oh, yeah, I saw the Sweded trailer when it came out. I loved it too.

One of the things about genre studies is the difficulty of defining your less obvious genres because of the degree of subjectivity. I'd say that horror definitely needs a touch of that great German word, "unheimlich", which translates as something like eerie, sinister, uncanny.

To an extent, "The Arrival of the Train..." would have qualified for contemporary audiences, but it's still a smart-alec choice.

People's reaction to the film was already being parodied just a couple of years later, so I guess that makes "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" the 1900s equivalent of "Scary Movie":

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