It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Unless you just hate everything with a vengeance, as this Fox News guest appears to. News contributor Raymond Arroyo took a moment to angrily (isn’t it always with these guys?) lament the “cultural decay” of the holiday season at the movies.
Yes, that’s right, it isn’t the rise in gun violence and the ever-growing political divide in the country (which Fox News insists on digging ever deeper with these asinine topics) that has Arroyo upset, it’s movies. More specifically, it’s holiday-themed slasher movies. Now, according to Arroyo, this is not the time of the year he wants to see these films, not even advertised on the walls of movie theaters.
As reported by The Daily Beast, Arroyo told Laura Ingraham during The Ingraham Angle, “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. I saw these posters at the cineplex. I thought they were a joke. They’re not. They’re real.” Dear lord, calm down, man. No one is forcing you to see them.
The films he is referring to are the Eli Roth-directed Thanksgiving and It’s a Wonderful Knife by Tyler MacIntyre. The former features a killer seeking revenge for a Black Friday sale gone wrong while wearing the mask of Mayflower pilgrim John Carver, while the latter is about a woman who saved her town from a serial killer the year prior, stuck in an alternate universe where she never existed and the murderer is still on a rampage.
Both of these films are horror comedies, but that doesn’t matter. According to Arroyo, they are “an emblem … of our cultural decay.”
These are the same folks who will hold up the Bible as the depiction of how all humans should behave, forgetting that the first half is a real blood fest at times. Didn’t King Herod order all boys two years and younger in Bethlehem murdered so he could wipe out the chance of the Messiah? That doesn’t sound very cheerful to me.
To top it off, last year, Ingraham and Arroyo were criticizing President Biden for being too Christmassy. Seriously, you cannot win with these people.
The rant has since made its way online, where it has been mocked by many as the return of the “Satanic Panic” of the ’80s. Over on Reddit, users are fed up with the fake outrage over things that really don’t matter at all.
Many feel that the news channel has to grasp at straws (couldn’t help myself) as it’s all they have.
Many pointed out the hypocrisy of this type of news coverage. Why focus on mass shootings committed by people who have far too easy access to weapons that slaughter hundreds in seconds, when you can be angry at a movie?
One user responded that, by even bringing it up, Arroyo has unwittingly brought more attention to the very movies he decries.
If you want to watch a schmaltzy, warm, and fuzzy Christmas movie, there are a hundred of them out there to choose from. So many women finding love with a flannel-wearing lumberjack in a snow-covered forest and grumpy men being shown the magic of Christmas by specters (maybe the ghosts could visit Arroyo and get him to lighten up, or maybe that would be too horrific for him).
Some people want out of all that, and they are well within their rights to sit down and enjoy a good horror flick. If you don’t want to watch them, don’t watch them. It is as simple as that.
(featured image: TriStar Pictures)
