HALLOWEEN: Must we have the blood?

Your front page picture of Blood Bayou in last Saturday’s Press probably came across to many of your readers as just another ordinary display of Halloween “fun.” What’s not to love about blood, violence, torture and dismembered bodies? Just two pages in from that photo, the same Saturday Press carried a short, almost inconspicuous story about yet another victim who was beheaded by the Islamic State. I’m quite sure that no theme park or haunted house attraction in our area would ever stoop so low as to re-envision that terrible crime, nor for that matter the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition, the Pickton pig farm near Vancouver, BC, or any of the countless other situations where people have been held captive, harmed and killed in the most horrific ways. But for all practical purposes, that scene in last Saturday’s paper imitated human depravity on nearly the same level.

How is it that we as a society can be shocked and appalled by the real life violence and bloodshed that are reported in the daily news, and yet so many head out that evening and pay money to be “entertained” by graphic depictions of same? I guess it just takes a certain frame of mind to take pleasure in movies or exhibits whose main purpose is to glorify imprisonment, torture and death. Even more so to imagine, design and manufacture such things, then advertise them and charge admission.

BRUCE KELLY

Post Falls