Word: sadism
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...much in the midst of war is impressive. But the uprising of the Palestinians and the Israeli response have disturbed Israelis and Jews abroad, and the world in general, in a new way. Some of the televised spectacles from the territories (the beating of demonstrators, some acts of sadism, the burying alive, with bulldozers, of Palestinians) undermine the moral edifice of the Chosen. And efforts to keep such deeds from the sight of the world, to confiscate film, to bar journalists from the territories, as if the trouble were merely a hallucination and intercepting the message would annul the problem...
...whose whims your life hung on. Every night you were shooting at V.C. soldiers, kids your age who were so close you could smell their fear too. Every day you invaded villages, where the frustration of an unseen enemy could drive you to crimes of My Lai sadism. And at the end of a mission, the corpses piled up, Americans and V.C. united at last, locked in charnel embrace...
...that young Hannibal Lecter doesn't have his kinks. That last image of Mischa not only haunts him, it nourishes his derangement, like broth for a sick child. It encourages him to raise sadism to an art, his murders as elegant as Japanese flower arrangements, as dramatic as the flourish of a Z from Zorro's blade. Hannibal the swordsman-calligrapher slashes X's on his first victim. Later he inscribes the letter M, for Mischa, all over one of the men who had killed and consumed...
...care to accept all this as a well-made adventure story, feel free to do so. But taken in Gibsonian context, it is clear that something more than sadism stirs the director's soul. For one thing, he wants us to see that late Maya civilization is analogous in his view to our own. It is given to worshipping false idols and values and, for all its military might, is rotting from within. Even the simple village, before it is destroyed, revels in irrelevant pleasure. What everyone needs is, well, a savior. And that's where Jaguar Paw comes...
...most complex book we have yet seen from Osamu Tezuka, Ode to Kirihito uses the core elements of any good horror story, fear, madness, disease and sadism, to explore morals and the broad consequences of an individual's actions. So whether you like your scary stories to be sophisticated like Kirihito, traditional like Museum of Terror, or rude like Octopus Girl, you won't lack for material this Halloween...