On a personal note and sort of question to you who reads this!

I´ve said it before, but I´ll say it again. The strange and the bizarre have a certain appeal for a lot of people. It may be car accidents, horror movies, s/m-sex, extreme body modification, real murders on the internet or just the old "stuffing-a-flower-up-the-butt-routine". Why? It has to be something in the human nature that just wants to experience something out of the ordinary. Whatever THAT is?

When I was a kid, we challenged each other with watching the opening to Lucio Fulci´s The Beyond (I went home and never watched it at the time. Chicken, I know…) whereas today it´s chechclear or other brutal beheadings that are being shown around. Am I getting to old for this shit or is it something disturbingly wrong in watching real life murders?

As a freakvent (pun intended) surfer on the electronic highways, I´ve stopped at some brutal forums where there are nothing to burlesque to be shown. Everything is real and presented in flinching detail and for the most of the time in gruesome color. I don´t really know why I look at it, hell, I don´t want to know why either. Most of the time I feel sickened of the images, but before you can spell Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious I´m back and what do you know? I look at them again.

My initial road to the authentic material is crooked. I love special effects. All the old F/X masters like; Dick Smith, Tom Savini, Rob Bottin, Mark Shoestrom, KNB FX group, Gianetto de Rossi, made many films worth seeing. The craftsmanship in the art of making pictures was the thing that spellbinded me. It was the illusion of horror that trapped me. I was insulted the times people asked if a snuffmovie wouldn´t be the greatest thing to watch! Why the hell would I want to see that? Then over the years, when I was studying Film arts I wrote an essay about mondomovies. A long and tedious task of watching hours of real footage mixed with a lot not-so-real footage. I did that because I had a real problem with the subject. Why look at authentic material where people get hurt or killed? Somewhere a along the way I got influenced as well. I guess the researcher in me got bitten by the mondobug real bad.

I live a quite normal life, have a family, have some very good friends and I have my mother stuffed up in the attic (that last thingy was a joke, I don´t have an attic). I´ve always had a certain attraction to the dark and obscure. And I don´t think that I´m special in that sense at all, I think all of you readers feel that strange attraction whisper in your ears sometimes. But all are not made equal in the eyes of the ancient God Yog-Sothoth and therefore a lot of people watch it for all the wrong reasons. Some to impress others, some because they get off on the subject matter, some because they are interested in the morbid and a whole lot of people who watches it just because it is there to be looked at. So, my question to you is: Why do YOU look at pictures and movies of real human suffering?