Every musician on Earth knows it – being eviscerated is the best song-writing fuel there is. Nothing makes you pour your heart into art like having it ripped out of your body and pureed. Fortunately for all of us not on the receiving end of said pain, we get to enjoy the badass art that’s birthed by human agony. Scottish sorcerer (and occasional writer) Grant Morrison wrote “All Star Superman” because his dad had just died. Edgar Allen Poe’s entire body of work cataloged the agony of losing the one you love at an early age. Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” is essentially a novel-length suicide note.
There’s a catharsis factor to creating art (a book, a movie, or a pornographic comic about Alice in Wonderland coughAlanMoorecough). The world weary artist gets to scream into the void all their fears and frustrations. They get to pour alcohol on their wounds in full view of the public. They get to suck the poison out of the snakebite that is their life. Plus, you know, sometimes they get paid for it and that’s nice.
This list could go on infinitely, but here are four classic movies that we only got to see because someone’s life exploded, and they decided to point a camera at it.
Interview with the Vampire
Anne Rice, famous writer and semi-notorious kook, is basically responsible for the modern resurgence of the vampire craze. Some consider this to be a bad thing, but I don’t – for me, “Vampire Story” is just another genre like “Science Fiction,” “Musical,” or “Madonna Movie.” Her first novel of the “Vampire Chronicles” was “Interview with the Vampire,” a sweeping, romantic, gothic tale of vampire-with-a-soul Louis and his creator, the rock-and-rolling, smooth-as-a-gravy-sandwich Lestat. Themes of innocence lost, homoeroticism, and morality play out against a lush backdrop of pre-Civil War New Orleans. It’s good book, if you can wade through a metric fuck-ton of meandering description, and Hollywood made it into a surprisingly great movie starring angel look-alike Brad Pitt and an almost unrecognizable Tom Cruise. Antonio Banderas also makes an appearance, because apparently the filmmakers decided to break the record for “amount of lady-boners caused by one movie.”
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B.C. Johnson 