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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 379222" data-attributes="member: 812">Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: (Long) Evil vs. Vile vs. Mature - are they the same?It really is pure and simple a matter of personal taste. You're right, some of the most effective horror films don't show truly explicit violence -- but any list of the 10 scariest films of all time is going to include both Alien and Night of the Living Dead, and both of those include truly stomach-turning scenes.I suspect the answer really is -- you have to show enough to get the imagination of the audience to the level you want it, and then you have to hide enough so that their imagination takes off far above what you could ever do it by showing. I bet (and I've just had this thought so I can't say for sure) that you could argue virtually every effective scary film does just that -- it sets up the audience by introducing an element so graphic that it takes them beyond what they were expecting (I count the shower scene in Psycho very much in this vein) and then hold back and let suspense build the imaginative fear in the audience's mind.How much is just enough is going to be different for everyone, of course.Agreed. A basic definition of pornography as opposed to art is that pornography literally shows you everything all the time. There's no selection of detail. Art is all about selecting particular details and presenting them. The details themselves may be every bit as graphic as a pornographic image, but the presentation of one detail as opposed to others is what allows the intellectual leap to art.So yeah, of course you can't show every detail and of course hiding details is often the best trick. But not always, not reliably and not in any sort of easily dictated system. So you're always going to be running too far in one direction or another.Does that make sense?</blockquote>

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