Horror's ultimate quantity

I watched the old-school horror flick The Brain That Wouldn't Die with Laura today, and while it isn't particularly good, and the title is very misleading, there are a few things worth writing about. Chief among them is that the big monster who appears only in the last few minutes of the film is actually a very real person with acromegaly, which causes gigantic, untreatable tumors. I merely assumed that it was a tall man with makeup. His name was Eddie Carmel; apparently he was part of some Palestinian freak show for most of his life but also appeared in a few movies.

I feel sort of weird now because I was so taken aback and almost scared by how grotesque this individual looked at the end of the film, but I didn't know that this was how the actor normally looked (I should have known better: the rest of the movie is as cheap as hell). It got me wondering about my own views regarding exploitation of people's inadequacies in art. Turns out I have no opinion, at least not as much as I used to when reality TV was among the first to make a spectacle out of doing disgusting things or being an idiot. Nowadays my soul is deadened to the point where I see no reason to condemn that sort of thing. I'm sure Carmel was paid well, and while I'm not sure he was happy to do it, it was probably a step up from the freak show. It's just one of the million aspects of being an earthling where you just have to shrug your shoulders and say, "too bad." That is, in itself, too bad.

(For those of you not in the know: a fact well-known among Cornell College students is that this campus will slowly sap away your idealism and your drive to do good deeds. This does, however, allow me to get more work done.)

The movie was part of a 12-DVD, 50-movie collection that Laura has. We've been watching quite a few of them lately. You can buy it at Wal-Mart for something like $5. All of the movies I assume are in the public domain now, and all of them have particularly terrible prints, but there are actually quite a few masterpieces, including Metropolis, Nosferatu, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, alongside some less-regarded but still classic outings from Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi. There are also some really horrible ones too. I suggest you stay away from The Gorilla or anything involving the Ritz Brothers.

Completely random note: The label for this post is going to be "movies" rather than "film," because I believe it's a more inclusive and accurate term. I remember in 11th grade, my AP Western Civilization teacher Kirk Daddow always told us to regard anything we watched in class as a "film" (because of the intrinsic seriousness of whatever we were watching, I guess). Throughout the whole year, I wanted to raise my hand and tell him that technically these weren't "films," since they were being shown on videotape, but I never did.