Bret Easton Ellis

[About horror movies in the 1970s] We consumed all of this and none of it ever triggered us - we were never wounded because the darkness and the bad mood of the era was everywhere, and when pessimism was the national language, a badge of hipness and cool. Everything was a scam and everybody was corrupt and we were all being raised on a diet of grit. One could argue that this fucked us all up, or maybe, from another angle, it made us stronger. Looking back almost forty years later, it probably made each of us less of a wuss. Yes, we were sixth or seventh graders dealing with a society where no parental filters existed. Tube8.com was not within our reach, fisting videos were not available on our phones, nor were 'Fifty Shades of Grey' or gangster rap or violent video games, and terrorism had not yet reached our shores, but we were children wandering through a world made almost solely for adults. No one cared what we watched or didn't, how we felt or what we wanted, and we hadn't yet become enthralled by the cult of victimization. It was, by comparison to what's now acceptable when children are coddled into helplessness, an age of innocence.