Absolute

Here’s something I know from experience: most people can’t tell really gruesome from fake blood on a Halloween costume. 

Work in an emergency ward or operating room dealing with lots of trauma, and your taste for comic grue and spooky darkness recedes. You learn to place the real deal in perspective. You are much too involved in rectifying your fellow humans’ idiocy, creative violence, and cruelty to play head games with mere blood.

Play acting with the offside of life can be healthy to a point, but I’d suggest that for many, their lives are well insulated from reality. They watch awful stuff on Netflix with a particular fixed stare, then shudder and talk about how frightening it was.

The real fright was happening on their news feed, super storms, massive fires, famine, and whole countries sinking under rising tides.

They’d pay attention if only the music score were playing behind it. It needs eerie strings, swelling wind instruments, and ominous percussion, a harmony warning of the awful things on the other side of the door.

But absolute horror doesn’t come with a scored soundtrack on Video On Demand.