Blood and guts

It may still be a week before Halloween proper, but one of the best things about the holiday has already arrived: the proliferation of horror movies on your TV. Every year, for a few choice days, traditional programming is swept aside for a torrent of zombies, serial killers, vampires, werewolves, acid-bleeding space monsters and other awful, wonderful things. From the artsy cult-classics Turner Classic Movies will be offering on the 31st, to the Sci-Fi Channel's marathon of comically bad B-movies, to Bravo showing the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Friday the 13th" franchises, to American Movie Classics' grab-bag of seemingly anything they could afford broadcast rights for, grotesque creatures are splattering hapless teenagers all over the airwaves.\nAnd I do mean "splattering" -- Halloween just isn't the same without heaping helpings of movie gore. After all, it wouldn't be the Halloween that I remember from my childhood in the '80s, if every third boy weren't dressed as Freddie Krueger or Jason Voorhees, wielding plastic weapons and obsessing about blood, guts and slime. Some of us even read Stephen King and played "Doom."\nClearly, our parents must've been raising a generation of bloodthirsty killing machines, right?\nThis was the argument behind last spring's congressional rustling about violent video games, and just such an idea is the gist of a new commercial sponsored by Rep. Mike Sodrel's re-election campaign. The ad features the voices of children as they play a violent video game (the best line being "Hit the hooker with the tire iron!") while white text against a black background criticizes Baron Hill for voting against a 1999 "amendment to a juvenile crime bill that would have prohibited the sale of violent and sexually explicit movies and video games to teenagers" (The Associated Press, Oct. 20). \nHorror movies continue to be tremendously popular. On Oct. 11, CNN reported that "The Grudge" and the "Saw" movie series had made a combined $252 million since their respective releases. Should we be worried?\nLook, I'm no fan of Hill -- but I've also seen the Department of Justice statistics on juvenile violent crime. The fact is that the number of violent crimes committed by juveniles has plummeted over the past decade -- and the number of juvenile violent crimes for 2003 (the most recent year for which data are available) was more than 40 percent below the average for the past 24 years. Murders committed by juveniles have declined 65 percent since 1994 and are now at their lowest level since 1984. Meanwhile, polls of the "millennial generation" (those born between 1977 and 1994) have found that the generation raised under the specter of such violent fare is closer to its parents than the baby boomers were to their own and is more concerned with religion and community.\nThe course is clear: If children really are shaped by watching violent films, we have got to make Halloween a year-round thing.