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My early exposure to cinema was not unlike that of most American children. At the age of eleven, I still watched the movies that premiered on the Disney Channel and still felt slightly rebellious when watching any movie with a PG-13 rating. My parents had, for the most part, done a thorough job in shielding me from all the evils of the world. However, my older siblings were equally determined in their job to corrupt me. When they suggested we watch ‘Hostel: Part III’, a R-rated horror movie, without the supervision of my parents, I admittedly doubted whether or not I was ready for it. I hesitated, but agreed, in a misguided attempt to appear more mature than I was - a desire held by most preteens. I wanted to be cool and ‘grown-up’ like they were; part of me still does. I find that this is often the context in which most young children would tell a similar story. All children want to be seen as mature.
Of all the obscene images in the movie, it is difficult to pick the one that is the most graphic. The one that stuck with me the longest, however, was the first. There is a scene in the movie where a character named Mike has his face violently removed by a doctor as a form of grotesque entertainment for the wealthy and sadistic. Mike is buckled to a chair, and I remember that sense of helplessness resonating with me. The scene draws out the anticipation of the coming violence for a long time while the doctor picks out his preferred tools. I felt fully immersed in the scene. I felt as if I were trapped like Mike in front of the screen, doomed to watch this movie. This depiction of torture was jarring to me, not because I didn’t anticipate the content of the movie would be horrifying, but because I had failed to realize that I was not ready to confront it. Subsequent scenes in the movie could be described as even worse than the face-ectomy (e.g., a woman murdered by suffocating on a swarm of cockroaches), but it became difficult to register them in the same way I had registered the first. I was filled with a fear far deeper and more visceral than I had ever experienced before. It was a fear I had to hide to look cool in front of my brothers, even though I was sweating and shaking underneath my plush throw blanket. It was a fear I couldn’t even share with my parents, for fear of being punished for watching a movie I knew I was not allowed to watch. I was paranoid for weeks following the movie - paranoid that I too could be kidnapped and tortured. The lines between fiction and reality were blurred for me as they often are for children. I assumed that ‘Hostel: Part III’ was the norm and that my inability to handle it was indicative of some immaturity on my part. I was afraid that, by the time I was an adult, I still would be unable to deal with the same content that all adults were expected to consume and enjoy.
Being far enough removed from the incident, I don’t believe it has had any lasting effects on me, but if I could go back in time, I would stop myself from watching it. I did not magically become more mature or enlightened by that potentially traumatizing incident. I do not believe that anyone under the age of eighteen should be exposed to anything that graphic and furthermore I do not believe that anyone of any age should watch movies of this particular sub-genre. The plot of the movie was created to showcase violence, so the violence in the film was not introduced as a means to further the narrative, but rather, the narrative was structured around the violence. That is the primary way in which those graphic images have affected me today. In the terror I felt as a child, paralyzed in front of my television screen, I lost all my appreciation for violence for its own sake. Without reason, violence in film becomes a shallow parody of the grotesque show it portrays. In that same sense, we the viewers become that same sadistic audience, paying for the thrill of watching a man’s face be removed.
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