Oh, the horror!
A pair of slasher films with end-of-year holiday settings are just too much for Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo, who dismissed them as signs of “cultural decay” Monday on The Ingraham Angle.
In the Eli Roth-directed Thanksgiving, a killer wearing the mask of Mayflower pilgrim John Carver exacts revenge on citizens in Plymouth, Massachusetts, for a Black Friday sale gone wrong. It’s a Wonderful Knife, meanwhile, depicts a woman who had previously saved her town from a killer now in an alternate universe where she can only observe her surroundings.
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Though both movies are rated R, Arroyo’s gripe wasn’t with the rating system, but that the movies exist at all.
“Even Christmas is being profane. If you’ve been to the movies lately—I made the mistake of going over the weekend—there are two holiday slashers on the big screen,” Arroyo told Laura Ingraham. “I saw these posters at the cineplex. I thought they were a joke. They’re not. They’re real.”
It’s a Wonderful Knife, whose title references the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life, is clearly a horror-comedy. Thanksgiving also includes some humorous elements, as its tagline—”There will be no leftovers”—indicates.
Yet Arroyo, who hosts a news program on the Catholic television network EWTN, didn’t find anything funny about them.
“This is an emblem, Laura, of our cultural decay: when you can’t even make uplifting or joyous movies around the holidays,” he preached, as Fox News shifts into its annual, breathless coverage of the supposed “War on Christmas.” “You have to extend killing, mutilation, maiming and death.”
For her part, Ingraham said that none of what Arroyo had relayed to her about his bad trip to the movies was shocking.
“I’d like to be surprised by this. I’m not surprised at all,” she told him, as a Fox chyron advised viewers to “Keep the holidays happy”—an apparent theme on the network lately.
