Suspension of disbelief is quite difficult some people. The horror genre requires them to push it to the extreme, I suppose.

Horror and sci-fi are my preferred genres, but I don't feel offended when people call either stupid.
Folks don't have to "respect" my cinematic/reading choices.

(February 28, 2019 at 1:08 pm)Thena323 Wrote: Suspension of disbelief is quite difficult some people. The horror genre requires them to push it to the extreme, I suppose.

Horror and sci-fi are my preferred genres, but I don't feel offended when people call either stupid.
Folks don't have to "respect" my cinematic/reading choices.

 Unfortunately, I'm too good at suspending disbelief.

I had horrible nightmares after I first saw "The Exorcist." I was 25 . 

Recently, I though I was over that, so I watched  "The Ghosts Of Mars". That was a mistake, more nightmares.--over 40 years later.


I guess the ability to suspend disbelief is why I love sci fi so much. Silver lining and all that.

(February 28, 2019 at 5:18 pm)fredd bear Wrote:

(February 28, 2019 at 1:08 pm)Thena323 Wrote: Suspension of disbelief is quite difficult some people. The horror genre requires them to push it to the extreme, I suppose.

Horror and sci-fi are my preferred genres, but I don't feel offended when people call either stupid.
Folks don't have to "respect" my cinematic/reading choices.

 Unfortunately, I'm too good at suspending disbelief.

I had horrible nightmares after I first saw "The Exorcist." I was 25 . 

Recently, I though I was over that, so I watched  "The Ghosts Of Mars". That was a mistake, more nightmares.--over 40 years later.


I guess the ability to suspend disbelief is why I love sci fi so much. Silver lining and all that.

Our suspension of disbelief varies from genre to genre. I love science fiction, and I suspend disbelief in that genre rather easily. But then take a police thriller like the one I watched a couple of nights ago-- Law Abiding Citizen. I had serious trouble with suspension of disbelief. Especially at the end. The warden of a prison allowed a cop to bring a gun into a prison. No way! And then disbelief went eyeball deep when apparently the warden also allowed the cop to bring a bomb into his prison. And allowed it to detonate. You know, as if you can find a bomb in one building, and move it to another building and and let it blow up that building, and not be in trouble or anything. Yet in science fiction I would have no problem with someone doing that.

(February 28, 2019 at 9:43 am)Der/die AtheistIn Wrote: I don't know if you personally met someone who is like that, but I did.
As a horror fan myself I have nothing against people who dislike this genre. I'm not going to show horror to someone who dislikes it.
But why do said persons call it stupid? Do they think that the people who like horror are stupid, because they try to get scared, which is a negative feeling?

I don't know what you mean.  Are you talking about movies, like Friday the 13th?

Some horror is quite badly written, especially screenplays.  You're thinking-- nobody's that damned stupid, this just doesn't feel realistic enough to get into.

Some of it, like Edgar Allen Poe or some of Stephen King's books, are brilliant examples of literature.

But seriously, some folks call comic book movies stupid, some say the same about romcoms. Fuck 'em.

(February 28, 2019 at 12:53 pm)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: 90% of Theodore Sturgeon was crap.

Yeah, and that was kind of the point Theodore Sturgeon was making when he said that. He was at a con and someone said 90% of sci-fi was crap, and he responded 90% of everything is crap.

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(February 28, 2019 at 6:42 pm)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: But seriously, some folks call comic book movies stupid, some say the same about romcoms. Fuck 'em.

Yeah, and it's remarkable how bizarrely arbitrary the standards for willing suspension of disbelief can be. Case in point: as much as I liked Black Panther, I have to say that so much of the basic premise is utterly ridiculous; Wakanda managed to totally escape unscathed in the Scramble For Africa, due to apparently having no resources; despite this, due to its Vibranium reserves, is actually the wealthiest nation on Earth and managed to hide this from the rest of the world until the end of the movie; its ruler, an absolute monarch, mind you, despite having his vibranium reserves alone dwarfing the rest of the world's GDP, and also having to deal with running this country and keeping the masquerade alive (even Bruce Wayne seems to be very hands-off in running Wayne Enterprises), still moonlights as a superhero. Good thing virtually everything else was stellar.

And, of course, somehow, people seem to dismiss the idea of people dancing and bursting into song on camera is far too much to take.



It looks like the decline and fall of the musical in the cinematic imagination seems to correspond with Stonewall and the subsequent visibility of LGBT identity. This may need more research.

I read mostly sci fi for about a decade. This included many back issues of "Astounding Science Fiction"" and "Amazing Stories" from a friend. This stuff was written for young boys and very young men..

I think I started off with the' John Carter Of Mars' series . Loved them. Also actually liked a lot of the recent film "John Carter", even though it had very little to do with the books, which were far more intricate. EG Rice Burroughs wrote some scathing things about organised religion in those books.

Would I say 90% of sci fi is rubbish? Of course not. I think such claims are elitist nonsense. Sci fi has always been written for a specific audience.For people who have a strong imagination, the ability to suspend disbelief and--a sense of humour.

Literature is one of the fine arts. Dismissing most of it as rubbish, is I think, to miss the point. It is what it is, and delights millions; most of it is essentially unpretentious.. I don't allow critics to form my opinions. I am a vulgar man; I really fail to understand many of the claims about 'great art' music and literature, although I have really tried.

A possible exceptions is self help books.

An Aussie wit wrote about critics " There is no need to be nervous about critics; they're just like ordinary people .VERY ordinary people."

My corollary; Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, criticise.

Maybe not 90% of the Sci-Fi you read, but bear in mind that generally, there's a lot of stuff that flies under the radar of a lot of readers, that they'll never hear of, let alone, get around to reading it. Maybe in Sturgeon's time, a lot of it would be relegated to the "slush pile" of stuff that publishers are given that they have to hire people to read and see if they're worth the paper they'll be printed on. Now, well, any bugger can go to sites like CreateSpace and potentially turn that crap into published fiction. And most of them will be lucky to find a readership in the triple digits. And most of them will still forget about it.

For a more concrete example, I'm currently working on something I like to call the Deep Hurting Project. It's basically my quest to watch the worst films ever made, and my source for this was TV Tropes' So Bad It's Horrible/Film page. It's a list of hundreds (possibly over a thousand) of films that are so bad, they fail to appeal even to the niche audiences that they were probably made for, the sort of films that are so bad prisoners of war might actually prefer waterboarding to actually watching them. Of those films, guess how many were available at my local library? 78 (58 standalone films, 4 available only in package deals, 13 sequels to better films, and the 3 films of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy). And an additional four eligible films were added to my list later. I don't know how many films made it on the list, but look at the page to get some idea of the scale of how many of these films there are; I strongly suspect that even of these horrible films, only 10% or less were considered notable enough for my library to stock a DVD copy, and two of those original 78 films ended up removed from circulation anyway. Many of the films on the list are not only so obscure that even my local library doesn't have a copy, some of them were never released in the US (where I live) in any format, DVD, Blu-Ray, VHS, or even Theatrically, streaming, or Laserdisc. A few were never even released on home video formats in their own nations (like, for instance Maradonia and the Shadow Empire, which the filmmakers couldn't even afford to release for longer than a single screening at a single Florida theater), and one film called Game Therapy bombed so hard that it only got a DVD release in its native Italy because the production company got a lot of likes on a Facebook page asking if it would be worth it, and most of the commenters explicitly stated they said yes only because they wanted to see MightyPirate, a popular Italian Youtuber, make fun of it.

Moral of the story: don't assume that the stuff you've read in such a broad genre is representative of the general quality of everything that's out there.

And for the record, of those 78 films, only 7 were filed under Sci-Fi/Fantasy, (Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft (OOC), Catwoman, The Last Airbender, Stranded, Highlander 2 (watched), Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and NeverEnding Story 3.)

Also, this week's entry is what I like to call "Soviet Avengers", a film called Guardians. It's a ripoff of the MCU made in Russia a few years ago where the team is basically like the Avengers if they were made by the Soviet Government. And one of them is a bear. If this was made in English, honestly, my library might count it as sci-fi, but my it has all the MCU films as Action/Adventure.

The fifth John Carter book made me understand what "formulaic" implied.

Horror is, by definition, a genre that really requires you to suspend belief and allow yourself to get "in the moment" of what's happening in a movie. For a lot of people that is really hard to do.

I can remember, when I was younger, seeing movies at the cinema after smoking pot and for whatever reason cannabis always gave me this innate ability to "see through" the movie and I would be totally turned off by everything they were trying to do and would see through the intent and everything - it was weird. But I can remember being high ruined a lot of movies for me. I don't smoke pot anymore but if I did I would never sit down and watch a movie because it would probably ruin the movie for me.

I have to imagine that whatever cannabis did to my brain chemistry to make me think that way, some people must just naturally "see through" special effects and dramatic tension to the point where they can't let go and just enjoy the movie for what it is in the moment. That being said, I think horror movies are kind of cheesy sometimes, but I still enjoy them. I recently saw The Nun in theaters and it was definitely a bit corny but I still loved watching it.