I've got a confession — all three of my favorite genres of movies are notoriously bad. Stoner comedies. Slasher movies. Anything starring Keanu Reeves — honestly, if "Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure" had been a slasher movie, I would love it even more than I already do. I love bad horror novels, noisy, distorted music, and conspiracy theorist magazines. And that’s OK.
There's an almost requirement to laugh and look at the ground embarrassed when admitting to liking something perceived to be low-quality. Like admitting to loving a popular novel around a literature professor, there's always that expectation that one should be ashamed of their loves if their loves aren't up to standards placed on entertainment by the majority of people. Standards aren't a bad thing when applied to, say, electrical work or graded papers for classes, but the purpose of entertainment is to entertain. And for me, there's nothing more entertaining than seeing dumb teenagers get slaughtered by a masked psychopath that you either figured out the identity of in the first ten minutes or could have never guessed due to their entire lack of involvement until the last ten minutes.
I'm not saying we should do away with standards entirely; there is value in classic literature and thoughtful dramas. That being said, every book you read and every movie you watch doesn't need to make you think. Every song you listen to doesn't need to have clear, clean lyrics and a tight guitar solo.
The beauty of bad entertainment is that it turns you into a child, when you didn't care when you saw the zipper on a costumed character on a TV show or when every book was a fun book. It lets you revel in the glory of who's going to die next, of what crude or funny joke will be made next, of how Keanu Reeves will use his stoic presence in a completely inappropriately now-stoic scene next. Past the simple actual entertainment these types of media bring, they have a finger on the pulse of human nature.
Bad entertainment, low entertainment, crude jokes and bad gore — all of these things appeal to the basest of our natures. Screaming terror and side-splitting laughs do, like it or not, make up our person. High-brow dramas and classic literature aren't bad, but sometimes when everything is literary, bad entertainment is surprisingly honest.
Bad entertainment has nothing to hide — the meaning isn’t going to be hidden underneath 20 metaphors or meaningful shots. With a thoughtful movie the meaning of life is something gained if picking up on hidden meanings is your forte, with a slasher movie the meaning of life is survival. You know what you're going to get with a slasher movie — everyone is going to die except the virginal female main character (and possibly one of the male characters, maybe, if she's lucky, one of her friends) in various ways — usually with some sort of sharp knife or axe or other, non-gun weapon — by a man in a mask, and it will end with a dramatic reveal. A slasher movie will almost always deliver on that — it might pull a "Scream" and make there be two or more killers, it might pull a "Sleepaway Camp" and have the twist not be who the killer is but what their motive was, but there will always be blood and there will always be stupid decisions.
And between blood and a profound take on the meaning of life, I will always take the blood.
