I’ll follow this up with a proper post, but the reasoning in the article is nutty. Correlation doesn’t equal causation.
But it does point to a deeper, more philosophical point: commercial censorship. If companies see creativity and originality as financial risks, what prompts them into that space? Is this a kind of market failure?
Blaming film classification is lazy. Films aren’t less original because protagonists are refraining from slaughtering children.
Only The Sangfroid 
2 responses to “Quick post: Is the lack of creativity in horror films the censors’ fault?”
[…] Only The Sangfroid Your One Stop Shop for Things You Don't Want to Buy HomeDe ScriptoreRevivalist AtheologyThe Optimates Project Twitter RSS Feed ← Quick post: Is the lack of creativity in horror films the censors’ fault? […]
The basic problem with the horror genre is that it’s porn. And the basic problem with porn (setting social justice issues in the conditions of its production aside for the moment) is that it’s *boring*.
There’s only a finite number of ways a human body can be destroyed, just as there’s only a finite number of ways human bodies can be put into contact with one another in a manner productive of sexual stimulation. Marching through the possibilities isn’t creativity, it’s enumeration. Brute cataloging. The horror flick does to the aesthetic and emotional potency of horror what porn does to the aesthetic and emotional potency of the erotic — promises to serve it and just utterly deflates it.
By the way, George Steiner has a nice critical essay on pornography as a literary genre (in Language & Silence) that develops this theme. Now I kind of want to go find my copy and try to transpose the whole argument to horror just to test how closely the analogy actually holds.