So one by one, our facile theories have evaporated in the face of unspeakable horror, forcing us to revise the classic nomenclature of terror.
The first is the hilarious Whoopi Goldberg as Deloris Van Cartier, the two-bit night-club singer who, after witnessing a murder, is, to her horror, forced by the police to hide out in a failing inner-city convent; the second is Motown, the music Deloris introduces to the nuns in the convent choir, thus liberating them, and, ultimately, herself.
They wanted to create indignation over the horror — children forced to hunt one another with arrows, swords, lances — while staging the violence in the most anodyne manner possible to achieve a PG-13 rating.
Where Anderson gets inside the minds and passions of both sides and, best of all, inside the agony of those simply caught up in the horror and forced to make appalling choices, Elkins remains rigidly one dimensional in her understanding.
We watch the final playground fight through a chain-link fence that drops down between us and the lethal skirmish — a trope that both magnifies the authenticity of the horror and forces the audience to focus on the story's outcome.
But beneath Garcia's good-natured veneer, something darker lurks: a long-burning passion for horror, supernatural forces, and the macabre.
A "changed from within" narrative is no less insidious than the horrors of forced conversion.
It's easy slippery slope stuff: allow this, and what other horrors – like forcing churches to pay tax – might follow?
And in a world where children face such horrors as forced labour, sex trafficking and military conscription, devoting energy to outlawing parental smacks may strike some people as the wrong emphasis.
More generally, there was the blatant paradox between a rhetoric of freedom and the vice-like grip that central government has increasingly exercised over everything from curriculum content to the horrors of forced academisation.
