Richard Ramirez: Polowanie na seryjnego mordercę

Richard Ramirez: Polowanie na seryjnego mordercę (2021) 

Many of my friends and acquaintances don't understand how I can like horror movies. Why I voluntarily expose myself to something that is, in their opinion, negative and makes me anxious and scared. I try in vain to explain to them that horror movies are not negative for me, that they don’t make me feel anxious and that, at most, they put me a little “on edge”, which is even more true of the high-quality dramas that they watch. I try to explain to them that horror is genre entertainment, built on the director’s skill in playing with viewers and their emotions and, at the same time, with a filmmaking form that requires far greater innovation than the highest-quality relationship dramas. I can watch five horror movies in a day and thirty over the course of a film festival. That makes me enjoy them all the more and gives me an even bigger appetite for them. Because I want to dwell in their creators’ fantastical world of limitless imagination that only the sci-fi genre can match in terms of variety. ____ But what is horror to me, in the same sense of the word as it is perceived by those uncomprehending critics of the horror genre, are things like this miniseries. Built not on the imagination of creative and enthusiastic filmmakers, but on the real foundation of documentary filmmaking that uncovers an incomprehensible anomaly, a harmful element of our world personifying the ultimate disgust and evil. It’s enough for me to see things like this series once a year. Before this, it was the Hungarian film Son of Saul, which also reflects that reality, paradoxically without the “horror” label appearing among its official genres. (21.01.2021)