Why I don't read horror novels or watch horror films.

[vakkotaur]

In no particular order, a non-exhaustive list:

Cocoanut Grove fire
Triangle fire
Chicago, Peshtigo, etc.
Chelyabinsk (Mayak)
Three Mile Island
Chernobyl
Jamestown
Shuttle Challenger
Shuttle Columbia
Windscale
Bhopal
World Trade Center, Sept. 11
Oklahoma City
Minamata
Sultana
Titanic
Edmund Fitzgerald
Texas City ship explosion
Boston molasses flood
Halifax explosion
Port Chicago explosion
Thresher
Aloha flight 243
Pan Am 103 - Lockerbie
Tylenol poisonings
Influenza
Tambora

...and plenty others as well.

And life goes on.

Comments

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's something that's always puzzled me... there's enough real horror to go around, why would anyone want to make up more of it? More importantly, why would I wanna watch it?

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Also, reading about the real thing is more interesting. Not for the horror of it, but finding out what went wrong or could have been done better.

I don't know if you looked at the influenza link, but it's about the 1918 pandemic. Not linked to are stories of the "bird flu" of 1997(?) which has been considered a close call. One health worker described it as "bird ebola." Others were quite convinced that if it jumped to humans (and in a few cases, did) and spread, the results would have been devastating. That has been prevented, fortunately, so far.

[shelbystripes.livejournal.com]

I don't really like horror films, but I like films about tragedies and humanity; about what went wrong, and the effort to overcome.

There's, as a great example, the "heroic tragedy" of Flight 232 (which I'm surprised is not on your list) where the hydraulic systems on a DC-10 failed completely, and through sheer skill and willpower of the flight crew, they managed to get the plane to a major airport and to the ground before it crashed on landing, and it's regarded as a miracle that a majority of the passengers survived. That was actually made into a TV movie which I enjoy, not because it was well-made, but because of the effort it makes to depict something that really happened.

That's what I enjoy much more than horror films. And I think it's why films based on real events can be so popular; "Apollo 13", several iterations of "Titanic", etc. They're films about the human experience that actually happened (at least, if made properly).

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Flight 232 was an oversight, but also as you said, bad as it was it could have been worse and some good has come of it.

I purposely left Apollo 13 off the list. It was a very close call, but everyone survived. It was a disaster, yes, but not the tragedy it could have been.