Our own horror fliek

Hollywood has over the last couple of decades flooded the world with its macabre bloody variety of slasher flicks, haunted houses, psychos, serial killers, ghouls, poltergeists, crazy families, and disastrous camping trips.
We have been swamped by images of creepy creatures, monsters lurking in the closet, vampires, werewolves and never-say-die killing machines who laugh in the face of bullets.
From the imagination of Hitchcock, Edgar Allen Poe, John Carpenter and Wes Craven, just to name a few, the world has been introduced the nightmares lurking in the dark, and then we also have to contend with man-hungry sharks!
But of late, Hollywood’s horror offering has become rather stale and boring – it is the same old story line. People keep on mindlessly running through woods and houses, hoping to escape the nightmare.
I have often wondered in all these slasher movies, why the doomed groups of friends just stand still for a moment, let all the screaming subside, and then collectively jump on the masked man wielding the knife, or is that a chainsaw.
What Hollywood needs is to jump start the horror genre is South Africa. Seriously.
After all, South Africa’s strange and bizarre political history was in some way the inspiration for District 9 – it was a satirical look at the alienation within society.
We indeed have everything in this country to scare the living daylights out of any sane human-being.
We have enough psychos, crazed criminals, and weird families.
Ok, some of them are government agents with murky agendas, but this shouldn’t disqualify them from claiming a star role.
We may not have a Ted Bundy to lead our cast of monstrous murderers, but we don’t need him. We have enough lunatic criminals on the street who shuffle around like zombies as they pillage, rape and kill.
We can even shoot our own X-files (you know, the cases that are classified as mysterious and unexplainable). Because really, there are some very weird and strange things happening in this country that makes no sense!
Who can argue over the e-Toll system? That should go deep into the X-file closet. Even the debacle surrounding the antics of Mandela’s family, while the former president is holding on to survive, baffles any rational mind.
Right here in Boksburg we have the perfect setting for a horror fest – our beloved state hospital.
You don’t even need actors, or a script. You just need someone with a camera and a steady hand, and you will witness enough thrills, screams and blood.
The Advertiser is being inundated with complaints by families of patients, who have endured it seems tales of agony, all the while remaining wide-eyed in the hope to see the dawn of another day.
Scare stuff this country we live in. The first movie that really made you afraid of a hospital was Coma, now our own hospital by some accounts dishes up enough frights to scare anybody out of a coma!
We even have Doom’s Lake – I mean Boksburg Dam – where all strange kinds of objects are still to be uncovered I’m sure at the bottom, in-between all the sludge and mud.
This is our beloved country, and our beloved city.
Walking down our streets at night is worse than walking down a Nightmare on Elm Street – you know, where Freddy with the razor sharp bladed hands, wait to strike.
Fortunately, with Freddy, he goes away when you wake up, but on our darken streets, the nightmare continues.
Years ago John Carpenter shot a movie called Escape from LA. In this sci-fi movie, this American city in the future has become an island where the undesirables are deported.
These days, it feels that we are also living in such a time and place, because our towns are being flooded with the undesirables from all over pour continent!
And yes, many wish to escape our own version of futuristic LA, and some do manage to escape the clutches of doom and gloom, but for many, we still wait to see what other nightmares evolve around us.
Like the petrol pumps that seem to mock you, like a coiled snake, every time you want to fill your vehicle with fuel to take you safely home – which by the way we do as we watch if we are being followed, then we have to hope and pray the gates open quickly before we sigh a relief when we survive the possibility of a boogieman knocking on our door.
We are living in strange days, but daylight is not our friend either, for crime and disaster and corruption strikes any time.
But we can but tremble at fear that soon we might be stuck for longer at a time in the dark once Eskom power finally fails.
So yes Hollywood, come and visit our shores – you will find plenty of “sharks”, money-sucking “vampires” and soul-tearing “werewolves”.