I blame that game where you jump up and down on a pad to control a tattooed, neon-haired raver, and I blame energy-bars and flavored popcorn and the plastic bag ban!

why do people have to blame horror movies on junk like this, what ever happened to being just plain crazy,

horror is the easiest target to blame for these things, right or wrong.

Food for thought: these "crazy people" never seem to go nuts after watching a Reese Witherspoon movie. You never hear anything like that (at least, not reported anyway).

It becomes a question of "Geez, this is happening over and over again. Maybe there COULD be something to it?"

It's a verified fact that movies have an impact on people. It's entirely plausible that the horror genre can impact certain people in the opposite way, say, someone immitates fashion or dialogue in a John Hughes flick.

I'm curious as to why more horror fans don't try to understand that possibility? Instead, the immediate reaction is "It's not the horror films, these people are just nuts!". For me, that's too easy an explanation. There's something more to all of this.

Unless there were a bunch of unreported teenage psychos in the 30's and 40's murdering people after watching Island of Lost Souls that we just don't hear about :)

Sure, I guess you could make the arguement that violent films do inspire people to do violent things... then again, when someone is crazy enough to imitate art they've seen on the big screen, why should that be the fault of the filmmaker or the millions of fans who support that certain film that aren't "nuts"?

I've made this comment a hundred times before and it's no different this time around. No matter what you do - you can heavily censor films, games, music, and even literature... but there will always be monsters out there that will blame their violent behaviors on something other than themselves. "Crazy people" will always find a way to do, well, you get the point.

I don't really think horror films made these kids want to potentially do this, but rather they saw a form of media and thought they could use that as their way out of explaining why they are psycho. I bet if you dig deep enough into any psycho's past you'll find they were kicking cats in the head long before they saw a horror film. Generally, the violent behavior is picked up from one of their useless parents.

And the reason you didn't hear about kids going on murder sprees in the 30's and 40's is quite simple really. Parents actually took an interest in their childs life back then. Now days, kids get dropped off at soccer practice and pottery class or whatever and the parents let those individuals take care of them. Don't be mistaken though, because there still are some good parents out there, great ones. Just not enough of them to keep this kind of sickening crap from happening.

Thank god law enforcement prevented this from actually going down. In such a dark story, at the end of the day, good prevailed over evil in the end.

also, there's one thing to bring up in this debate that hasn't been touched upon,the possibility of a genetic predisposition toward violence. i wrote a book with psychiatrist and profiler Dr. Helen Morrison a while back called My Life Among The Serial Killers (not a plug: the book's hard to get now). but the theory she espouses is pretty dang compelling.

I'm not saying it's the filmmakers fault that these people "imitate" what they see in a movie. I'm just saying, there IS a reality here and that reality, repeatedly, is linking extreme violence in movies with extreme violence in "real life".

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think the filmmakers should be held liable for something a person does. Afterall, it's that person's choice if they want to go kill somebody. But that DOESN'T mean the movies themselves don't have some sort of affective quality that allows a person to do this or that, or pushes them in that general direction.

In my opinion, too many horror fans trade in speculation and not enough real knowledge of the past. It's easy to say that people would always blame something else if horror movies weren't around, but would they? There's no way you can actually prove that, can you? As for the past, horrible things were going on within families just as they are today. You should try looking into the World War's and how that affected parenting of children.

Oftentimes, those same parents were around less than parents today...yet no mass murders when the kids watched horror movies in their spare time?

I'm just saying, the filmmakers are not to be blamed for someone else's actions, but that doesn't mean there isn't a link between movie violence and real life violence.