This headline was funny 3 years ago.

I, for one, sympathized totally with the Cloverfield monster. Like him/her/it, I wanted every single vacuous, boring, generic, indistinguishable, pointless character in that movie to die a brutal, tortuous death.

Lots of people have talked about how empathizing with the heroes/victims in a horror movie might make the movie scarier, notes Heath Matheson, an experimental psychology PhD candidate at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

Tangentially related, I read this book with my class today. It was pretty enjoyable.

I Need My Monster by Amanda Noll (amazon)
It's about a kid who misses his monster when the monster goes on a fishing trip. He finds all the replacements boring.

I'm pretty sure the story is about Turkey's attempts to get into the EU.

To be specific, the article is not about feeling feeling sorry for monsters in general.
Its about feeling sorry for monsters that the writer of the story wanted you to feel sorry for.

Its simple to hate a bad guy that was pinned up as an easy target for the hero to plug away at. The writers challenge is in making the reader overcome his one dimensional view of the characters involved and realize that every actor makes decisions based on his own perspective.
Through ignorance it is always easy to vilify what you don't understand. By controlling the information and metering out the events, a good author can show you your own bias on a plate.

Heh,
The Bush presidency and the Chaney, Rumsfield, Rice unholy triumvirate was great for my gun collection. The more evil they got the more guns I bought. Hell I even bought a few off the books illegal weapons from some criminal mother farkers. Now I have a biatchin gun collection, plus safe house and a few hidey holes. I'm all set for the zombie uprising or revolution which ever comes first.

nor should you.

way south: To be specific, the article is not about feeling feeling sorry for monsters in general.
Its about feeling sorry for monsters that the writer of the story wanted you to feel sorry for.

Its simple to hate a bad guy that was pinned up as an easy target for the hero to plug away at. The writers challenge is in making the reader overcome his one dimensional view of the characters involved and realize that every actor makes decisions based on his own perspective.
Through ignorance it is always easy to vilify what you don't understand. By controlling the information and metering out the events, a good author can show you your own bias on a plate.

Or make it look like you're biased by giving you a biased view of the conflict in the first place. Some authors are pushing an agenda.

Slaves2Darkness: Heh,
The Bush presidency and the Chaney, Rumsfield, Rice unholy triumvirate was great for my gun collection. The more evil they got the more guns I bought. Hell I even bought a few off the books illegal weapons from some criminal mother farkers. Now I have a biatchin gun collection, plus safe house and a few hidey holes. I'm all set for the zombie uprising or revolution which ever comes first.

IP noted. Move along citizen.

/Should have used that 8th proxy

Scientists claim we want to feel sorry for monsters that scare us. That is ridiculous, subby does not feel sorry for Dick Cheney at all

Nor I subby, Nor I

Anybody know what that first picture is from?

omegazeto: Some authors are pushing an agenda.

Aren't all authors doing that?
I'd say its a matter of how thickly they lay it on, but every one of them is trying to manipulate you into a certain viewpoint.
If they did a bad job of it,that's another matter.

I felt sorry for Grendel in this movie. I credit Crispin Glover's performance.

way south: Its about feeling sorry for monsters that the writer of the story wanted you to feel sorry for.

The freak-from-the-lab monster in Koontz's Watchers. When the main guy finally traps it and confronts it in the barn I just want to give the damn thing a hug. Right after gently and humanely removing it's head with a 12 ga. slug from across the room.

/Safety first, ya know.

Aw, the poor guy's not ALL bad. He shot a lawyer, after all.

This is why Freddy Krueger > Jason/Michael Myers/Etc.
Freddy is not a faceless, silent force of nature, he is a thinking, speaking PERSON. He's not just there to kill you because you're in the wrong place at the wrong time (like a tornado would), but because he has actively decided that he wants to kill you, and is going to take great enjoyment out of doing so.

That is *FAR* scarier than Jason could ever be.