If you want to understand the intellectual fault lines of the 20th century, you don’t need to go to a fancy college. You can just sit down with some old movies. We don’t touch on horror movies often on Geeky Stoics, in fact, this is a first.
I just finished KINGDOM OF CAIN, a fascinating book about how horror and murder point toward evidence of God. It’s a fresh approach to Christian apologetics and on brand for Klavan, a prolific crime and mystery novelist.
The book traces the line between real world murders that inspired art (film and stage plays) which inspire more real world violence, which inspire more art. Man destroys, man creates, round and round we go.
At issue for most of the book is how the Ed Gein murders spurred on Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960), which later warranted a response in the form of HALLOWEEN (1978). What Klavan leaves out is a movie near and dear to me, which builds on both of these films, SCREAM (1996).
A question is posed by these works of art based on real world violence:
Is evil a psychiatric malfunction or a metaphysical reality? Are murderers patients, or vessels……
In the video above, you’ll get some answers to that question and see how philosophy and psychology clash when it comes to the question of evil and violence.
“Darwin told us where we came from. Marx told us where we’re going. Freud told us who we are.”
- Andrew Klavan
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