The Initiation of Sarah
The Initiation
Pledge Night
Blood Sisters
Final Exam
Rush Week
Hell Night
Through my exploration of the genre, I think I've gathered a couple of important lessons about life and the world around us (or at least about horror movie conventions). Namely:
-Schoolwork is fucking boring. The only time a school based horror film cuts to a scene of people learning is when there is plot info to be articulated, like a teacher writing the definition for "psychopath" on a chalkboard. If learning is so uninteresting and horrible, you'd think someone would make a horror film that directly revolves around schoolwork, like a kid getting burned with a cigarette by his psycho dad every time he doesn't get an A on a math test. Actually, that sounds even more depressing than just a regular math test. Perhaps there's a good reason why this horror movie rule is rarely ever broken.
-Every couple of years, a hazing goes catastrophically sour, and some nerd suffers a horrible fate. He or she will later return, despite being disfigured or even killed, to seek revenge on those responsible (or, in fact, any and all classmates, innocent or otherwise). It's really just the same dynamic that you see in high school horror films, where a nerd is picked on, but without the Greek initiation context. Instead, the character is humiliated and/or disfigured just out of gleeful teenage cruelty (see Carrie).
-I find it pretty ironic that the supposedly manly tradition of fraternity rituals is based upon a vast array of homoerotic hazing activities, all descended from an openly gay society. I'm sure the ancient Greeks would have a hearty chuckle that their big gay fun is living on under the ironic umbrella (an umbrella covered in glitter, natch) of the ultra straight modern male.
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